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The rain started to fall just as we began the drive back to Asolo. Jack and Mrs. Spenser were eager to exchange views of the villa.

“Well, I’ve not seen its likes before,” Mrs. Spenser said. “It certainly was a treat, wasn’t it?”

“You really have to return again and again to a place like this to fully appreciate it,” Jack said. “What did you think of the Veronese?”

“Splendid, simply splendid,” Mrs. Spenser said.

It seemed to be my turn, so I said, “I was surprised to see how witty Veronese was. His work seemed more contemporary than I expected.”

“Well, yes, in a way, I suppose you could say that,” Jack said. I could see that Jack didn’t agree but was too gallant to say so.

I changed the subject, asking them where they were off to next.

“To Montreux. To a spa near there to rest and relax,” Mrs. Spenser said. “And you? Are you off to someplace interesting?”

“Yes. I’m going home.”

When I arrived at the Venice airport the next day I learned my flight was delayed by two hours. It annoyed me, this glitch in the schedule. But it annoyed me more that such a minor event had the ability to annoy me. Where was all that laid-back mellow outlook I thought I’d cultivated during my travels?

I bought a newspaper, thinking it would take my mind off the delayed plane. Instead I found myself wondering what was going to happen when I returned to my job at the newspaper. Did I still have the skills to report a story or write a column? Or had I lost my edge, maybe even my drive, when it came to newspaper work?

Don’t do this to yourself, I thought. Don’t spend your last minutes in Italy worrying about the future.

So I did what I’d done so many times while traveling: I spent a few minutes with Freya. I leafed to a passage that had to do with reaching one’s destination. She wrote it from Persia:

“This is a great moment, when you see, however distant, the goal of your wandering. The thing which has been living in your imagination suddenly becomes a part of the tangible world. It matters not how many ranges, rivers or parching dusty ways may lie between you; it is yours now for ever.”

It occurred to me that nowadays there was no such place as Persia; it had become a country named Iran. But whatever its name, Freya at least had a moment in which she reached a tangible destination and made it hers. Forever.

I had no such tangible destination. There was no goal to my wandering and nothing that I could claim as mine forever. But Freya’s words still spoke to me.

There was an hour left before departure. I stepped outside, onto the pier where travelers to and from Venice catch water taxis to the city. I walked to the spot where Naohiro and I had last stood together. As I watched the boats arrive and depart with their cargo of passengers and luggage, rain began to fall. The raindrops bounced lightly off the water between the boats.

In the distance a mist was gathering. Slowly the white vapor moved like a ghostly presence toward the pier, enveloping everything but the tethered boats bobbing up and down. I stood at the pier and watched a departing vaporetto penetrate the misty curtain and then disappear.

This is mine, I thought suddenly. This is what I will have forever. The memory of this moment, of rain falling on Venice.

I began to imagine other rains that would be mine forever. I saw the rain streaming down the Spanish Steps. Blowing beneath the awning of a café in Paris. Sweeping through the piazza in Siena. Splashing against the shop windows along Sloane Street.

I glanced at my watch. It was time to go. I took one last look in the direction of fog-shrouded Venice and then hurried inside to catch my plane.

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

The photographs in the book are reproduced courtesy of those listed below.

Le petit déjeuner devant Nôtre Dame de Paris

R. Deschayes, Éditions du Pontcarré, France

Colette et son chat

Roger-Viollet

Propriétaire

Magnolia, Délphine de Largentaye

Les Escaliers de Montmartre

H. Veiller (Explorer)

Île Saint-Louis, Paris, 1975