Iain Pears - Stone's Fall

A sudden sharpness in her tone, all the more strange for being so unexpected. I looked at her curiously, but could see nothing in her face. She had said it as a matter of fact, an observation only, perhaps.

'Not in my case, madam,' I replied. 'I am perfectly unencumbered.' If she desired to make me ill at ease and put me on the defensive, then she was succeeding. I was not used to such conversations. She saw that and was enjoying my discomfort, which made me fight back.

'Then you are here to have your heart broken. You will become like the others.'

'What others?'

'Those who cannot leave. There are many here. The city traps the weak and never lets them go. Be careful if you stay here for long.'

I shook my head. I had no idea what she was talking about.

'Foreigners, especially from northern countries, make a mistake when they come here. They do not take Venice seriously. They come from their lands full of machinery and money, and feel pity for it. They think it is a harmless relic of the past, once glorious, now beyond hope. They walk and admire, but never rid themselves of a feeling of contempt and superiority. You are the masters now, no?'

Again, I said nothing.

'And Venice waits, bides its time. Most come, and see, and go away again. But the weak are its prey. It sucks the life out of them, bit by bit. Robs them of their will, their autonomy. They stay, they stay a little longer and then they cannot even imagine leaving. Their life has had its purpose removed, they become mere shadows, walking the streets, eating at the same place every day, walking the same routes every day, for what reason they cannot recall. This is a dangerous place, Mr Stone; it is cursed. Beware of it. It is alive, and its spirit feeds on the weak and unwary.'

'I think it unlikely that this is to be my fate.'

She laughed softly. A beguiling laugh, but disturbing in the context of her words, which had nothing humorous about them. 'Perhaps not. But you came for a few days, and now you are taking an apartment for a longer stay. I sense you are searching for something, Mr Stone, although I do not know what it is. Nor do you, I think. But be careful: you will only find sadness here. I feel that in you; you thrive in adversity. You think yourself strong, but your weakest place is your heart. One day it will destroy you. You know that, do you not?'

This melodrama completely reduced me to silence. Obviously she was trying to fascinate me, put me off-balance, and, if you wish, dominate the conversation by the bizarre nature of her words. And, equally obviously, she was succeeding. I felt an air of foreboding descend over me, and realised it was the same feeling I had experienced the day before. The feeling of sadness as I walked the streets, the sense of the inexplicable I had had that first night watching the palazzo, these were all part of the same sentiment that she had expressed in words. The desire to taste the recklessness of extreme emotions, throw off the usual cautious, careful way of life I had developed for myself. That was why I had left England, was it not? Why I had roamed Italy for three months, in search of precisely that? But had not yet found it. I caught myself, at that very moment, thinking of my brief introduction to Mrs Cort, the way her eyes had met mine.

It was mere absurdity, a combination of the light and the tiredness, the strangeness of the surroundings, the water. Quite soothing and relaxing in its way, all the more so because it was so foreign to my normal life. I looked up at the Marchesa and smiled. Almost grinned. It was a challenge to her. Silently countering that I was not to be fooled by her words, try as she might. I was a tougher nut than a man like Cort.

She smiled back, accepting the challenge, and clapped her hands.

'Maria!' she called out. 'Please show Mr Stone the apartment.'

'So you can bear to have me in your house? I am flattered,' I said.

'You should be. But you have the aura of an honest man, a good man,' she replied seriously.

'I beg your pardon?'

'Your aura. It radiates around you, revealing the nature of the spirit which animates the machinery of your body. Yours is gentle, blue and yellow. You are divided in spirit, between the desire for peace and for adventure. For power and for tranquillity. You desire much, but I feel that you have a sense of fairness. You are divided between the masculine, and the feminine, but in you the attributes are wrongly apportioned. It is your feminine which is adventurous, the masculine which desires peace. You will have trouble reconciling these, Mr Stone, but they make you interesting.'

She gave the distinct impression that she wanted me in her house so she could study me, like some grotesque entomologist, but she nonetheless had described the battle between my fiery mother and my peaceable father remarkably well. Disconcertingly so, and she saw that I was impressed despite the fact that she was talking nonsense.

The business of packing was delayed by an encounter I had in the hotel on my return. As I walked into the lobby and asked for my key, I noticed a small man get up from his chair, and come towards me.

'My dear Stone!' this person said in a thick Italian accent as he grabbed me by the hand and pulled me round to face him. 'I hardly expected it to be true! Remarkable! I'm so pleased to see you!'

I looked at him blankly for a moment, then it dawned on me who he was. I believe I mentioned that, several years previously, I had tried my hand at dissipation. I am not ashamed of this period of my life, I believe it is inevitable in young men whose energies are not wasted by manual labour, and, as I say, I found that the pleasures of such a life faded quickly and have never returned. I have not spent my older years wondering what it would have been like to have done certain things, nor did I have any temptation in middle age to try and recapture my youth and thus make myself into a laughing stock.

During that period, I made the acquaintance of a group of young men: some were the useless sprigs of nobility well on their way to illness and early death from excess (thus weakening a class of society and fending off the likelihood of revolution, for why trouble to overthrow people who are doing such a good job of rendering themselves powerless?); some were simple idlers spending an inheritance pretending to be poets or painters; and a couple were medical students, who had a wildness of such severity that I would hesitate ever to place myself under their care. One of these, however, is now a personal physician to His Majesty, which goes to show that even the greatest sinners are capable of redemption. Of the others, one became a high court judge and one shot himself in the aftermath of the Dunbury scandal, a foolishly conceived scheme to dun the public by proposing vast profits from a railway built across a two-hundred-mile swamp in Russia. My friend, a man for whom I continued to have affection to the end, went vastly into debt to buy shares in the hope of recovering a dire financial situation, and was ruined.

The man who now greeted me was one of the medical students. I never paid him much attention and never even knew his name – something foreign, I knew, but everyone always called him Joe, a nickname more insulting than friendly, for it assumed an informality more suited to a pet or native bearer than an equal.

Joe – or Dottore Giuseppe Marangoni, as he was now called – had changed over the past few years, that was clear. Previously he had had the sort of personality that could lead you to overlook him entirely; one of those who waited to be spoken to, and appeared grateful to be included in any conversation. Only his eyes suggested there might be something more to him, for he was always watching, always interested. For what purpose never seemed clear.