The Thief of Venice(39)

She had begun to recover from the fearful shock of learning from newspaper headlines that her poor unhappy husband had been killed and that she herself was under suspicion. At first she couldn't believe it. Leaving Lorenzo Costanza had been such an ordinary thing, painful but ordinary, the long-overdue act of a perfectly ordinary aggrieved wife. And it hadn't been easy. It had taken courage to abandon her home and begin a new life. It had been like amputating a diseased part of her body in order to save the rest. She had felt lopped and chopped.

That had been bad enough, but the rest was a nightmare. Poor Lorenzo was dead! Of course she had long since lost all respect for her husband, but she would not have wished his life to be so violently cut short. And she couldn't get used to the fact that she was now the object of una caccia all' uomo, a manhunt. It sickened Lucia to read the details of the lurid case against her. "The old, old story! SHE was ambitious, HE was a man with a poetic nature." If the revelations in the paper hadn't been so persuasive and threatening, she would have laughed.

She was grateful that the only picture they had found was a snapshot of a solemn thirteen-year-old with braces on her teeth, taken long ago at the school of the Suore Canossiane in Murano. It had been taken under duress—

"Ma, cam Lucia, tutti devono avere una fotografia!"

"O, Suora, non to, perfavore!"



But of course they had insisted. After that, she had always resisted and refused and ducked her head and turned her back, and destroyed any pictures that turned up, because in photographs she always looked so ugly. Her nose looked even bigger than it was, and her neck too long and thin. So the image of the gawky pigtailed kid with braces on her teeth was the only one left. It looked ridiculous next to the story about some terrible woman who had killed her husband and run away. But it wasn't funny, not really. The hideously incriminating account had appeared not only in the local papers but in the national dailies, Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica. It meant walking away from her splendid new position as a procurator of San Marco, it meant unpinning her thick, too-curly hair and letting it fall around her face, it meant hiding herself away in this small square and becoming a person known as Signora Sofia Alberti.





But it was all right. Lucia liked the neighbors and she liked the square. Every day she shopped in the alimentari of young Stefano, who teased her—"Signora Sofia Alberti? No, no! Sofia Loren!" For fresh fruits and vegetables there was a little negozio presided over by a kindly old woman. "Questa, cara mia?" she would say, picking out the finest head of lettuce, chattering about her grandchildren as she twisted the corners of the wrapping paper. In the square Lucia admired the fat babies and chatted with their mothers. She knew the names of all the little boys riding tricycles and bouncing footballs against the trees in the middle of the square.

Sometimes she held one end of a skipping rope while a grandmother held the other for two little girls who jumped and tangled their feet and hopped happily up and down. She showed them how to skip in a dancing step, right foot forward, left foot back.

She taught them to make paper boats like cocked hats, and drop them from one side of the bridge over the Rio de la Misericordia. "You see? It's like a race. They float under the bridge and come out on the other side, so if every boat has a name, you'll know who wins."

They were overjoyed. They scribbled their names with crayon. "Yes, yes," cried Guido, "look at mine!"

"Anna, mine's Anna!"

"Look, look, mine's Regina!"

"Oh, signora, write your name too! Your boat will be Sofia!"

But it wasn't. When she wrote LUCIA on the side of her paper boat, they were puzzled for a minute, but then at once they began fighting over Guido's boat, which had won unfairly because he sank Regina's with a stone.

She would be patient. Lucia was an optimist. The world had not come to an end. Eventually things would straighten themselves out.

In the meantime, while she waited for something to happen, there was nothing to do. There was a tedious sameness to every day. With her wraparound dark glasses and loose hair, she felt disguised enough to walk as far as the Strada Nuova for a newspaper, careful to choose times of day when the rising water was not a problem. She didn't dare go farther. She didn't dare show herself in public places where she might run into people she knew.

Longingly Lucia read the notice in Il Gazzettino about a concert in the great monastic Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. A chorus and soloists from the Conservatory of Padua were to be accompanied by the local Orchestra di Venezia, musicians decked out in eighteenth-century costume.

She wished she could go. She wanted to hear arias and choruses from one of Monteverdi's Venetian operas and from oratorios by Handel and Hayden. There would even be a sumptuous chorus from Bach's Saint Matthew Passion.