Chapter 16 Acqua Alta

The storm came up the Adriatic on a Tuesday, and Venice began to drown. Isabella woke to water in the street, gray and glossy, creeping over the stone like something alive. She had read about acqua alta in guidebooks, had imagined it as a charming inconvenience, postcards of flooded piazzas and tourists laughing in rubber boots. It was not charming. The water came without drama, steadily, a slow siege, and by mid-morning it was inside the ground floors of half the city. Marco was already at the factory when she arrived, soaked to the knees, moving the finished pieces up to the second floor with Beppe and Filippo in a chain that never stopped. The water was rising through the workshop, swirling around the legs of the racks, and the smell of the lagoon filled the building, brackish and wrong. "The furnace," she said. "If it floods the burners, the gas could..." "Beppe's watching it," Marco said. "If the water gets to the controls, we shut it down slow. You can't quench a hot furnace. It will crack like an egg." They worked for hours, and the water kept coming, faster than they could carry. Once, a tall vase slipped from Filippo's hands and spun in the air, and she caught it against her chest, the impact driving the breath out of her, the glass cold and whole in her arms. They stood there for a moment, both of them shaking, and then Filippo laughed, a wild, watery laugh, and they kept going. Isabella's arms ached and her lungs burned and her boots were full of the cold of the lagoon, and still she carried glass. Vases and bowls and the delicate chandeliers of past seasons, everything the workshop had made in a year, up the stairs into the dry dark above. The moment came at dusk, when the water was past her knees and the last of the racks stood empty. Beppe's voice rang out from the furnace room, sharp with alarm, and she and Marco ran. The old furnace was hissing. Water had found the burner housing, and the flame guttered blue and wrong, and Beppe was trying to reach the shutoff through the steam. Marco pushed past her and waded in, and she watched him work the valves with hands that did not tremble, counting, waiting, letting the gas die the way Emilio had taught him, slowly, so that the firebox would not shatter in the cold. The furnace died with a long sigh, and the workshop went dark, and the only sound was the water lapping against the walls. The workshop was dark and the water was up to their hips and the cold had begun to climb her legs, but the glass was safe, and the furnace had died without cracking, and she stood in the dark and felt the strange exaltation of having fought a thing and won. This was what Marco felt, she realized. This was why he did it, why any of them did it. Not for the finished piece, but for the moment when the fire and the water and the fear all bowed to something a person had chosen to do. "Everyone upstairs," Marco said. "Now." They sat in the upper room, wrapped in whatever dry things they could find, and watched the flood through the windows. The street was a river. A gondola drifted past, unmanned, carrying a stack of empty crates. Somewhere a siren wailed and then faded. Beppe fell asleep against the wall, his breathing deep and regular, and Filippo curled up under a table like a dog. Isabella and Marco sat with their backs to the cold chimney, a blanket over both of them, and the night stretched on. "I could lose everything tonight," she said quietly. "The glass is safe. The notebook is at my apartment. But the furnace. If it's cracked, the workshop is finished." "It isn't cracked. I've done this before, when I was young, in a storm just like this one. Your grandfather stood where I stood and told me the same thing I'm going to tell you." He turned to look at her, his face half in shadow. "A furnace can be rebuilt. Glass can be melted again. But the person who walks through the door at the end of the night, the one who stayed, that's the thing you can't replace. That's the whole reason you rebuild at all." She looked at him for a long moment. "Marco." "I love you," he said. It came out simple and unguarded, like he had been holding it for so long it had worn smooth. "I have loved you since the moment you stood at that gate with the key in your hand and looked at this old ruin like it was something worth saving. I loved you before I knew your name, before I knew anything about you except that you had come. And I will love you if the furnace cracks and the factory falls and every piece we ever make turns to sand." She did not answer with words. She had spent her whole life making things, and she had learned that the truest things are never said, they are held. She took his face in her hands, the way he had taken hers in the ashes of other, smaller fires, and she looked at him until the whole of the flood was a rumor and the only real thing in the world was the shape of him against the dark. The water rose outside, and the city drowned on, and Isabella kissed him in the dark with the storm pressing at the windows, and it was the truest thing she had ever done. They made love with the flood below them and the cold above them, slowly, in the way of two people who have stopped being afraid of the ending. And afterward she lay against his chest and listened to his heart, which was steady and sure, and she thought that this, this was what the critics had never understood. She had spent her whole life trying to make things that would last. It had never occurred to her that the thing she was making might be herself. By morning the water had begun to recede, leaving the stone gleaming and the streets streaked with mud. The furnace was intact, warm through the walls, still holding its heart. They went down through the workshop together, ankle-deep in the last of the flood, and Isabella stood in front of the old furnace and laid her hand on the brick. "We're going to make it," she said. "We're going to light this furnace and make the ruby and pay the debt and build something that will outlast all of us." "Together," he said. "Together." The city shook itself like a wet dog, and by afternoon the canals were back in their beds, and the glass factory stood whole on the edge of the island, waiting. ---