The Undrowned Child Read online

  Now fishermen from Burano and Pellestrina had claimed that their boats were jostled by sea serpents in the water during their nights’ trawling. The men had rushed back to shore and positively refused to go out to sea again, not until the matter had been properly investigated by the authorities.

  The mayor had been interviewed, too. A fresh photograph had been issued to the press; a new top hat had evidently been bought for the occasion.

  He scoffed, “It’s not news that the fishermen saw visions—there was a regatta yesterday afternoon, and a great deal of wine was drunk. Sea serpents! More likely terrible headaches. Visitors in Venice should not worry. But they should take a lesson from our fishermen and avoid heavy drinking in the hot sunshine.”

  A shadow fell across Teo’s newspaper. A boy was standing behind her, impertinently reading over her shoulder. With a prickly flush, she realized that this was the fair-haired boy with the linen waistcoat, the one who had witnessed her sniffing the bookshelves at Miracoli and stealing the Venetian dictionary.

  She wondered if he knew what had happened to the poor bookseller.

  This time, the boy condescended to speak to her. “Of course the mayor’s just babbling,” he remarked in a superior tone and in pure Venetian dialect. “All he wants is to keep the tourist dollars, francs and pounds in Venice. As if we wanted any more foreigners here! The place is already groaning with the ignorant rabble. They don’t know the difference between Venice Beach in California, and Venice, Italy. They turn up here just the same. Unfortunately.”

  “Unf-f … fortunately?” stammered Teo. She had almost forgotten how to speak to someone who wasn’t a ghost.

  When he heard her accent, the boy deliberately moved backwards one step. Then he looked her up and down, taking in her lamentably scuffed shoes, her birds’-nest hair and the pinafore on which she had, as it happened, just spilt a new dribble of hot chocolate to join several older ones.

  “You’re from Naples,” he pronounced finally. “How is it you understand our dialect?”

  There was an excluding sort of emphasis on the “our” and a disparaging one on the “Naples.”

  Teo was about to try to explain her appearance, and her reasons for needing the dictionary he’d seen her pocket. But then she understood that none of this would change the boy’s disdainful attitude towards her. In fact, it was nothing personal. From her reading of The Key to the Secret City, Teo knew exactly why this boy felt so superior. Only that morning, The Key had written out a famous Venetian proverb for her:

  Every time a Venetian mother gives birth, a great lord is born in this world.

  In other words, the Venetians thought themselves great lords compared with everyone else in Italy, and perhaps the world. Teo was manifestly from the South, so this boy must assume that her ragamuffin appearance and her apparent criminal tendencies were just part of the misfortune of not being born a Venetian.

  But the boy was no longer looking at Teo. He had already noticed the old book in her lap. His eyes softened and gleamed.

  “Renzo,” he introduced himself curtly. He did not say, “Pleased to meet you.”

  Over the boy’s head, Teo saw his words written out in a tidy script, as in a handwriting manual, with everything carefully perfect. This Renzo’s writing would get ten out of ten in his school report if it had not been just a little too crammed up. Teo’s mind worked rapidly. Perhaps she could make friends with this Renzo and he could talk to her parents for her? He looked a credible kind of boy, well-dressed and well-spoken.

  Renzo was looking at her expectantly, so she responded. “I’m Teodora. Well, Teo to my friends.”

  “May I join you, Teodora?” he asked formally and pointedly. He certainly had the cold manners of a lord. Teo felt a flash of annoyance, but, on the other hand, it was interesting to meet a real Venetian, rather like having a butterfly land on your hand. She’d so longed for living human company and conversation that she could put up with a great deal more absurd snobbery than this.

  He sat down opposite her, and ordered himself a hot chocolate. He didn’t offer her one, which was probably a good thing, as it would have confused the waiter if Renzo had ordered a drink for an apparently empty chair.

  Meanwhile, without so much as a “please,” the boy reached out and lifted the book off her lap. He took it as if it belonged to him, indeed as if all the books in the world belonged to him.

  But as soon as he touched the soft leather, Renzo lost his cool demeanor, stroking it with a reverent hand. Jealousy darted through Teo like an arrow when the girl on the cover flashed a satisfied smile up at him. That smile was wasted on Renzo; he already had his nose buried deep inside the book.

  “Remarkable!” he exclaimed in undisguised delight. The pictures showed themselves moving and changing just as they did for Teo.

  Meanwhile it was clear that he had forgotten her existence, pawing greedily through The Key to the Secret City. He murmured certain dates under his breath, whispering authoritatively, “Oh, of course! Marin Falier!” and “So that’s how the church looked before Napoleon knocked it down!” and “Well, of course, 1571! Poor Marcantonio Bragadin.”

  This Renzo was clearly a library-rat like herself. He was taking far too long with the book. She itched to demand it back, but she didn’t want to seem too unfriendly.

  Abruptly Teo said, “You must be wondering about this hideous bruise on my head.” She blushed.

  Renzo tore his eyes from the book with obvious reluctance. “I hadn’t noticed it at all. Your eyes are so green. I thought all you people from Naples had brown eyes.” It was Renzo’s turn to be embarrassed and he buried his eyes back in the book, carefully raising his elbows like a fortress around it.

  It wasn’t nice to feel excluded from The Key to the Secret City. Leaning over the table, Teo used her library trick of reading upside-down, this time aloud. She read out the history of the courtyard where they were sitting.

  “How did you do that?” Renzo was impressed, in spite of himself.

  “That’s how we read in Naples, didn’t you know?” teased Teo, and she was gratified to see that Renzo took her point. He had the grace to blush. Perhaps he’d think twice about insulting her origins again.

  Renzo edged The Key a little closer to himself.

  “As if he deserved it more than me,” Teo mused resentfully, “young Lord Renzo, or whoever he thinks he is.”

  “You can’t take it away,” she insisted, tugging the book back out of his hands. “You can look at it with me, if you want.”

  Renzo’s eyes traveled over Teo’s dilapidated appearance once more with loud but silent disapproval.

  a fiery-hot morning, June 6, 1899

  The clock struck ten. “Don’t you have to go to school?” Teo asked the boy. Renzo waved his hand in an airy fashion. “I have an understanding with my teacher,” he said loftily. “When the other children catch up with me, that’s when I’ll need to make an appearance.”

  “I’m sure the other children love you,” thought Teo.

  “Anyway,” continued Renzo, “I’ve told him I am working on a special history project.” He glanced at The Key to the Secret City with a greedy eye. “And I suppose I am now.” Once Teo started to share the book with Renzo, things began to move in a new direction. The Key seemed to be working twice as hard, perhaps because Renzo was such a mine of history and so could ask much more interesting questions. And real objects appeared between its pages or dropped out of somewhere in the binding. By the end of the first day, Teo had in her pocket an ivory token dated 1785 for leaving her coat in the cloakroom at the Fenice opera house, a tiny golden mosaic tile from the Basilica of San Marco, and a long white whisker from a Syrian cat. These ferocious striped cats, Renzo told her, had been imported into Venice centuries ago to help destroy a plague of rats.

  “Where are they now?” she asked longingly. Teo adored cats but her protective parents had never allowed her one on the grounds that they were “unhygienic” and “uncontrollable.�
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  “Over the centuries the Syrian cats interbred with the local cats and became domesticated; that is, spoiled, lazy and overfed. These days, if a Venetian cat passed a pantegana in the street it’d just flick up its tail.”

  An image of a fierce Venetian rat scuttled across the page of the book.

  Everywhere they went, people waved and chatted to Renzo. Everyone had a kind word for him, a message for his mother or a warm cake to put into his hand. Renzo did not condescend to introduce her.

  The adults, of course, could not see Teo. But the Venetian children saw her only too well. What they saw was a Napoletana. They looked at Teo out of the corners of their eyes, barely acknowledging her.

  Renzo could have said to the children, “This is Teo, my friend,” or even, “I know she’s not from round here, but she has more about her than you would suppose.” It clearly didn’t occur to him. That hurt a little every time it happened. But Teo had been sneered at and snubbed by experts—that is, schoolgirls—back in Naples. She could deal with that. What hurt Teo more now was discovering something she had been missing all her life.

  Until she met Renzo, Teo hadn’t even known what it was to belong to a place. But Renzo, in contrast, clearly felt as if this city was his mother, or something very like her. He was somehow related in spirit to every other Venetian. They were a tribe, not merely a group of people who happened to live in the same place. For the first time in her life, Teo started to seriously wonder about where she had come from. She had never truly hungered to know about it before. Her adoptive father had offered to tell her, “It is your right, Teodora, and intellectual curiosity is nothing to be ashamed of.” But Teo knew he was being noble, and that it would hurt him and her mother deeply if she asked about her past. “You are my parents,” she’d declared. “I don’t need anyone else.”

  Anyway, she loved them, and was proud of them. And Naples was the only town she’d ever known.

  But knowing isn’t the same as belonging. Renzo belonged, not just to his parents, but to his city. It made him a different kind of person from herself.

  “Quite apart from the fact that’s he’s clearly alive,” Teo pointed out to herself, “and I may well be dead. At least he doesn’t seem to feel cold around me, though.”

  She knew it was ridiculous, but she felt the prickling of tears at the back of her nose after she had said goodbye to Renzo and was picking her way back to the hotel at the end of the day. Nothing could be cozier than Venice in the evenings, the deep blue sky arching over the enclosed island, with the lights of the shops all aglow, and the endless affectionate greetings of one Venetian to another, people lingering on doorsteps to exchange one last word, rocking comfortably back and forward on the long vowels of their dialect, raising their hands above their heads in a special salute they made to one another.

  Teo prowled around the town like a love-starved stray cat, pressing her nose against windows, as if looking for someone to take her in and make her their own.

  All over Venice Teo roamed, hour by hour. For supper, she helped herself to strings of spaghetti and fingerfuls of ice-cream from people’s dishes. She gnawed on scraps in hotel kitchens. There was only one place she gave a wide berth: Campo San Zan Degolà, home of the Butcher Biasio.

  an awkward breakfast, June 7, 1899

  “Same time tomorrow?” Renzo had suggested.

  Teo took her place at the café with mixed feelings. Part of her looked forward to seeing Renzo again. Yesterday had whetted her appetite for company and conversation. The other part dreaded his sneers about Naples. But what she feared most of all was that Renzo had decided that putting up with a shabby Napoletana was too high a price to pay for spending time with The Key to the Secret City. And if he did not turn up, then she’d have no chance to ask him to talk to her parents for her.

  Renzo strolled in ten minutes later, and sat down at the table without greeting her. He pulled the book towards him. Teo fought a desire to grab it back.

  When he opened the book, all the pages stayed obstinately blank.

  “S-strange,” stammered Teo. “It’s never done that before.”

  Renzo regarded her cynically, as if she had made the whole thing about the book up, even though he’d been a part of it for hours on end the day before. His expression said, very clearly, “Well, what can you expect from a Napoletana?” He rose gracefully from his seat and turned to leave.

  From the open book on the table there came a soft scratchy noise. Renzo leant back over the table eagerly.

  Words appeared on the blank page: From now on, your journeys shall be by night.

  “When?” asked Renzo.

  “Why?” asked Teo.

  And together, if you please.

  With that last emphatic comment, the book flipped itself shut.

  “I daresay it’s not up to us to ask.” Renzo adopted an ironic tone. He waggled his head at Teo, in a movement that she now understood as a Venetian way of saying goodbye. He scribbled down something on the napkin. When he handed it to her, Teo saw that it was his address.

  “Bring candles,” he ordered. She realized that he was anxious not to be left out, and that he did not want to have to ask her where she lived.

  “See you later, I suppose,” murmured Teo uncertainly. She was not at all sure how she was going to manage nighttime excursions with a boy who despised her in a shark-infested city where the wells gushed poisoned water and the lights didn’t work.

  As if that wasn’t bad enough, Signor Rioba’s latest missive, nailed to a tree, now caught her eye. She pointed, and Renzo’s smile disappeared into a tightly folded mouth. For Signor Rioba’s warning seemed specifically and personally directed at them.

  Teo read it aloud: “Venetians, keep your children in by night if ye love them. The Butcher is abroad and he would find them most delicate eating.”

  All afternoon and evening, Teo dozed fitfully in the sweltering air, trying to save up energy. She left her hotel room only once, to help herself to some cheap candles and a box of matches from the manager’s storeroom.

  As soon as it grew dark, which took, agonizingly, until ten p.m., Teo quietly let herself out of her room and down the stairs. She paused in an archway and opened The Key to the Secret City. The full moon illuminated the page that swiftly showed her the way to Renzo’s house, a small, neat place in the back streets of San Stae.

  Renzo was waiting at his window. He climbed out onto the sill and deftly slid down a thick old wisteria vine in the courtyard. It was clearly not the first time he’d used that vine instead of the stairs.

  “Ciao, Napoletana,” he murmured casually, as if late-night rambling was something he did all the time. He carried a pair of small lanterns, into which the children slotted the candles that Teo had pocketed.

  They swung their lanterns as they walked down the empty streets, making swollen shadows on the crumbling walls. They tried to laugh, pretending to see bears and wolves in those shadows. The one thing they never mentioned was the Butcher Biasio, though their darting eyes made it obvious that they were thinking about him.

  Renzo lamented, “Look at this place—deserted! Everyone’s afraid and shut up in their houses. Venice is dying.”

  Teo wanted to cheer him up. “But Renzo, Venice is still famous. Everyone loves her.”

  Renzo had bristled up like an angry cat. “Forget it,” he snapped rudely. “You wouldn’t understand, Napoletana. What this city once was—your Naples didn’t even have it to lose.”

  Then he turned on her, pointing with a shaking finger. “You should not have that book. You don’t have a drop of Venetian blood inside you. What makes you think you’re entitled to it?”

  “So that’s what is bothering you, is it?” Teo’s own voice was suddenly sharp. Renzo dropped his eyes, embarrassed at last.

  Teo was too stung to tell him the truth, that she had been adopted, and that she could be from anywhere, not necessarily the Naples he despised. He probably assumed she lived on pizza! (Naples was the
birthplace and headquarters of pizza. Yet Teo was that rarity—a girl from Naples who hated pizza.) Having seen her steal the dictionary, Renzo probably assumed that she was just some Naples guttersnipe who had pilfered The Key to the Secret City too.

  Now the book itself rustled and fell open in her hands. Teo directed the light of her lantern onto the page that was offered, which showed a sepia photograph of a pair of children standing solemnly side by side for the camera. The boy had his arm around the girl’s shoulder in a comradely, protective sort of way.

  “How extraordinary!” she exclaimed. The children’s faces were just like hers and Renzo’s, even though the photograph was old and grainy, and the fashions were from fifty years before, from the very dawn of photography. Behind the sepia children were the Campanile and the Basilica of San Marco.

  “The book’s trying to tell us to be kind to one another.…” She hardly dared say the words aloud.

  “How peculiar,” declared Renzo. “The book makes it look as if you were in Venice before.” He laughed uncertainly. “Not very likely, is it?”

  He did not, of course, deign to apologize. But he gave her a lordly smile, and Teo had to make do with that.

  They walked gingerly, feeling their way along the railings of bridges. After a while, it became clear, to their relief, that they could trust The Key to steer them safely away from the dangerous gushing wells. But there was no way of avoiding the canals, except by extreme caution.

  They paused from time to time to relight the candles in their own lanterns. Like the town’s gas-lamps, the candles guttered frequently for no apparent reason. Outside their uncertain circles of light, the blackness was solid, except when they passed Ca’ Dario. The haunted palace was as ever bathed in a harsh white luminosity, which made it appear as a vast frame of stone with a cage of cold glass hanging inside it. As they watched, a gondola arrived stacked with elephant tusks. Silent black figures opened the water gates and dragged the tusks indoors.