Chapter 6 The Festival

The city was celebrating when she arrived the next morning—a festival, Beppe said, the feast of the Redeemer, when the whole of Venice gave thanks for the end of a plague four hundred years old and still celebrated as if it had ended yesterday. Beppe. She had learned his name the day before, and now he was the first person she looked for in the workshop. He was old—older than the factory, it seemed, with a face like a walnut and hands like the roots of a tree—and he had worked for her grandfather for forty years. He did not say much, but he watched her the way a man watches a young horse, with judgment and a buried, grudging affection. "Festival day," he said when she came in. "No work. Marco's already at the boat." "The boat?" "Murano." He said it the way other men say "home." "You want to see where the craft comes from, you go to the island. He'll take you, if you ask." Marco was waiting at the landing with a small motorboat, and when he saw her he raised his hand and the morning light caught his face, and Isabella felt the world tilt a little, the way it does when you realize a place has stopped being scenery and become a life. She stepped into the boat and sat in the bow, and they crossed the lagoon with the city falling away behind them and the low shape of Murano rising ahead, its chimneys and workshops silver in the light. Murano was Venice the way Venice used to be—before the tourists, before the hotels, before the glass became a thing you bought in a shop. The island was a workshop, everything in it given over to the craft. They walked through streets lined with furnaces, and the heat came off the buildings in waves, and every doorway smelled of smoke and the sweet burned sugar of hot glass. Marco knew the masters by name. He stopped to talk with old men in aprons, to examine a new batch of color, to barter for a piece of aventurine. Isabella walked behind him, listening, and the day unrolled around her like a piece of glass being born. The festival itself was not what she had expected. It was not a parade or a concert. It was a city doing what it did best: eating, talking, arguing about glass, and lighting candles for the dead. They ate at a table set up in a square, fried fish and polenta and wine the color of the lagoon, and Marco told her the story of the plague year, how the city had promised to build a church if it was spared, and how the Redeemer had kept his side of the bargain. "My grandfather used to say the whole of Venice is a promise that was kept," he said. "Every church, every bridge, every piece of glass. A city built by people who decided to stay." "Even the ones who didn't?" "Especially the ones who didn't." He looked at her across the table. "The ones who left built the roads for the ones who stayed." She thought about that all afternoon, as they wandered through the island, and she felt the shape of it settling into her, the way glass settles into its mold. She had spent her whole life being someone who left—left studios, left cities, left the beginning of things before they could become endings. She had called it freedom. She was beginning to suspect it was fear. It was late afternoon when they returned to the factory, and the workshop was dark and empty, the furnace banked low for the holiday. Marco went ahead to open the windows, and Isabella lingered in the cooling area, and that was when she noticed the door. It was at the back, behind a rack of dusty molds, half hidden by a stack of crates. It was smaller than the others, painted shut, its seams barely visible under decades of white paint. There was no handle, no lock plate, only the memory of where a handle had once been. It had not been opened in a very long time. "Marco," she said. "What's in there?" He came to stand beside her and looked at the door for a long moment. "Nothing," he said. "Storage. It's been sealed since before I came here. I've never known anyone to open it." "Isn't that strange? A door that's just... sealed?" "It's an old building," he said, but his voice had gone careful. "There are rooms in Venice that have been shut for a hundred years. The city is full of doors no one opens." At that moment Beppe came in from the yard, saw where they were standing, and stopped. He looked at the sealed door, and then at Isabella, and something crossed his face—a flicker, quick as a heat shimmer, there and gone. He did not say anything. He turned and walked away, and she heard him mutter something under his breath that might have been a prayer. That night she could not sleep, and she walked the city alone, down to the water where the festival had been, and she stood on the Rialto bridge with the candles from the feast floating on the lagoon like a second sky. She thought about the sealed door. She thought about the grandfather she had never met, the man who had left her a key and no explanation. She thought about the way Beppe had crossed himself at the sight of a door that was only supposed to be storage. Somewhere behind her, she had the sense of being watched. She turned. The bridge was empty except for a man in a dark coat, standing very still at the far end, looking out at the water. When she looked at him, he did not look away. He simply stood there, a shadow in a city of shadows, and after a long moment he turned and walked down the steps and was gone. Isabella stood on the bridge for a long time, her heart loud in her ears. It was probably nothing. A man taking the night air, a tourist who had missed his boat. But as she walked home, she kept the feeling of his eyes on her back, and she thought about the door that had been sealed for so long, and the grandfather who had died with a warning in his mouth and no one to hear it. In the morning she would ask Marco about the man. In the morning she would ask about the door. In the morning, she knew, something would be different. ---