Justifiably affronted, I said stiffly, “You never made complaint.”
“No,” she said, looking pensive. “And that was part of the seeming wrongness: that I did enjoy it—always—and somehow felt I should not. I cannot explain it to you, any more than I could explain it to myself. All I ever could think was: it must be that I am enjoying what should rightly have been my mother’s.”
“How ridiculous. Whatever in your mother I was fond of, I have found also in you. And more. You have been much more to me, Donata —and much more dear to me—than she ever was.”
Donata moved her hand across her face, as if brushing away a cobweb that had fallen there. “If it was not she, if it was not some other woman, then it must have been the sheer distance that I felt always between us.”
“Come, my dear! I have scarcely been out of your sight since our wedding day, and never out of your reach.”
“Not in your physical person, no. But yes, in the parts of you I could not see or reach. You have been ever in love with distance. You never really came home at all. It was unfair of you, to ask a woman to vie for your love with a rival she never could best. The distance. The far horizons.”
“You exacted a promise about those far horizons. I made the promise. I kept to it.”
“Yes. In your physical person, you kept to it. You never went away again. But did you ever once talk or think of anything but journeying?”
“Gèsu! Who is being unfair now, Donata? For nearly twenty years I have been as passive and compliant as that zerbino by the door yonder. I gave you possession of me, and the saying of where I should be and what I should do. Are you now complaining that I gave you no authority over my memory, my thoughts, my sleeping or waking dreams?”
“No, I am not complaining.”
“That does not exactly answer the question I asked.”
“You have left a few unanswered yourself, Marco, but I shall not pursue them.” She finally took her mourning eyes off me, and picked up her needlework again. “After all, what are we arguing about? None of it matters anymore.”
Again I was stopped with my mouth open and words unsaid—words unsaid by both of us, I imagine. I took another ruminative turn or two about the room.
“You are right,” I said at last, and sighed. “We are old. We are past passion. Past striving and past strife. Past the beauties of danger and the dangers of beauty. Whatever we did right, whatever we did wrong, none of it matters any more.”
She sighed also, and bent again to her sewing. I stood for a while in thought, watching her across the room. She sat in a shaft of September afternoon sunlight, where she could see best to work. The sun did not much enliven her sober attire, and her face was downcast, but the light did play in her hair. There was a time when that sunshine would have made her tresses gleam as golden bright as summer grain. Now her bowed head had more the sweetly melancholy glow of grain in the sheaf, a quiet, drowsy dun color, rimed with the first frost of autumn.
“September,” I mused, not realizing that I said it aloud.
“What?”
“Nothing, my dear.” I crossed the room to her and bent and, not amorously but only in a fond fatherly sort of way, kissed the top of her dear head. “What are you working on?”
“Parechio. Trifles of apparel for the wedding, for the luna di miele. No harm in getting started on them well ahead of time.”
“Fantina is a fortunate girl, to have such a thoughtful mother.”
Donata looked up and gave me a wan, shy smile. “You know, Marco … I was just thinking. That promise you made—it has been well kept, but it is near its expiration. I mean—Fantina about to be married and gone, Bellela betrothed, Morata nearly full grown. If you did still yearn to begone somewhere …”
“You are right again. I had not been counting, but I am very nearly at liberty again, am I not?”
“I freely give you leave. But I would miss you. Whatever I said before, I would miss you dreadfully. Still, I keep my promises, too.”
“You do, yes. And now you mention it, I might just give the matter some thought. After Fantina’s wedding, I could go abroad for—oh, no more than a short journey, to be back in time for Bellela’s wedding. Maybe go only as far as Constantinople, see old Cuzìn Nico. Yes, I might do that. As soon as my back is better, anyway.”
“Your back is ailing you again? Oh, my dear.”
“Niente, niente. A twinge now and then, no more. Nothing to fret about. Why, my dear girl, one time in Persia, and again in Kurdistan, I had to get on a horse—no, the first time it was a camel—and ride despite having had my head near broken by the cudgels of brigands. I may have told you of those occurrences, and the—”
“Yes.”
“Yes. Well. I do thank you for the suggestion, Donata. Journeying again. I will indeed give it some thought.”
I went into the next room, which was my working chamber for when I brought home work to do, and she must have heard me rummaging about, for she called through the door:
“If you are looking for any of your maps, Marco, I think you have them all stored at the Compagnia fondaco.”
“No, no. Merely getting some paper and a quill. I thought I would finish this latest letter to Rustichello.”
“Why do you not do it in the garden? It is a tranquil and pleasant afternoon. You should be outside enjoying it. There will not be many more such days before winter.”
As I started downstairs, she said, “The young men are coming to dinner tonight. Zanino and Marco. That is why Nata was so busy in the kitchen, and probably why she spoke rudely to you. Since we will be having guests, can we make a small pact? Not to bring any of our quarreling to the table?”
“No more quarreling, Donata, not tonight or ever. I am heartily sorry for whatever cause for quarrel I ever gave. As you say, let us tranquilly enjoy the remaining days. All that went before—none of it matters any more.”
So I brought my writing materials out here to the little canalside courtyard we call our garden. It is planted now with chrysanthemums, the flower of Manzi, from seeds I brought from there, and the gold and fire and bronze colors make a gallant show in the mellow September sun. The occasional gòndola going by on the canal steers close here, so its occupants can admire my exotic blossoms, for most of the other gardens and window boxes in Venice contain summer flowers that have gone brown and limp and sad by this time of year. I sat myself down on this bench—slowly and carefully, not to rouse the twinge in my lower back—and I wrote down the conversation just concluded, and now for some time I have only sat here, thinking.
There is a word, asolare, that was first minted here in Venice but has now, I believe, been appropriated into every language of the Italian peninsula. It is a good and useful word, asolare—it means to sit in the sun and do absolutely nothing—all that in one word. I would not have thought it could ever in my whole life apply to me. For most of my life, God knows, it did not. But now, as I think back—over those busy years, the ceaseless journeying, the eventful miles and li and farsakhs, the friends and enemies and loved ones who journeyed too for a while and then were lost along the way—of all those things, I remember now a rule my father taught me long ago, when I first strode out as a journeyer. He said, “If ever you are lost in a wilderness, Marco, go always downhill. Always downhill, and eventually you will come to water, and where there is water there will also be provender and shelter and companionship. It may be a long way, but go always downhill and you will come at last to some place safe and warm and secure.”