• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“I trust you are well,” he said, stepping close to me. He smelled of fresh pine needles.

“I am. And you?”

“I am very well. And very happy to see you.”

We took a water taxi from the airport to Venice. In the small speedboat we sat side by side, our bodies touching. When finally the city of Venice began to take shape on the horizon, Naohiro put his arm around my shoulder. He had never done this before. It was such an American gesture and so foreign to Naohiro’s usual public demeanor that it caught me off guard. I found it endearing. And exciting, too.

It confirmed my belief that restraint is often more exciting than unbridled emotion. Up to a point, anyway.

The small boat entered the Grand Canal, moving past the glorious white-domed church of Santa Maria della Salute to Ponte dell’ Accademia, the bridge connecting the San Marco section of the city to Dorsoduro. After getting off on the Dorsoduro side, we walked to the pensione where I was staying. This was my favorite part of Venice.

To get to the pensione we had to cross a small wooden bridge over a narrow canal. The water beneath the bridge shimmered in the sunlight. Halfway over we stopped to admire the dappled patterns moving across the water.

“This reminds me of the bridge over the water gardens at Giverny,” I said. “Only there, we watched water lilies floating by. Do you remember?”

Naohiro took my hand. “I remember.”

“And what else do you remember?” I asked.

“That you wore a black dress to dinner that night.” He stopped and smiled. “And that I learned Laredo is not concrete but a city in Texas.”

Why this moment should make me as happy as it did was a mystery to me. But I accepted it as one accepts the arrival of an unexpected windfall: with complete pleasure and no questions as to its origins.

Over the next two days, Naohiro and I rose early and retired late. After all, there weren’t that many hours in a weekend; we didn’t want to waste too many of them sleeping.

Our favorite time was early morning, when Venice was just waking. On the first morning, with no map or destination, we walked holding hands through the quiet streets, changing direction if a certain square or canal path attracted us. Gradually, as we walked, the city came to life. Men and women appeared on their way to work. Smells of breakfast cooking, of bacon and coffee, floated from windows into the narrow streets. Dogs pranced along the sides of narrow small canals, their noses to the ground, sniffing. Sleepy-eyed children, carrying books, entered the church school on the Campo San Agnese. Shopkeepers could be seen moving around inside their still-closed establishments.

We stopped at a caffè bar to have espresso. We sat there for an hour, exchanging news of our children and detailed information about what we’d been doing since our meeting in London. Once again, I was struck by the immediacy of our relationship, by how much it was set in the present. I felt no need to retrace in detail Naohiro’s life before he met me, and Naohiro, it seemed, shared this feeling. It was as though we recognized that the past—and the roles we had played with others in that past—had no dominion over who we were to each other.

By the time we crossed the bridge to have a proper breakfast near the Piazza San Marco, we were both quite hungry. It was while walking through one of the narrow, mazelike streets leading into the piazza that Naohiro and I were met by Death. He approached us slowly, a tall, gaunt figure dressed in a voluminous black cape and three-cornered hat, his face covered by a skeletal white mask. In one gloved hand he carried a scythe; in the other a cardboard tombstone.

He drew close, close enough for us to read what was written on the tombstone: Fugit hora, memento mori.

“What does it mean, I wonder, the words on the tombstone?” Naohiro said.

“You’ve come to the right person,” I said, thinking about all the days I had spent studying tombstones with my grandmother. “It’s a Latin phrase often inscribed