第3章 Master and Apprentice

Sleep refused to come. Isabella lay in the narrow bed and listened to the water slap against the foundation stones below her window, and the sound would not let her settle, because it was the sound of a city breathing, and the city wanted something from her. On the table beside the bed, the key lay where she had dropped it, catching the lamplight in its worn teeth. It was only brass, only metal, and yet it seemed to hold the whole argument of the evening. Stay, Marco had said—not in those words exactly, but in the way he said everything, without hurry and without pleading, as if the words had been cooling in him for years and he had merely chosen the hour to pour them. She had asked for time, and he had given it freely, and somehow that generosity was harder to refuse than pressure would ever have been. She thought about New York. She thought about the studio on Eleventh Avenue with its radiator that clanked all winter, the canvases stacked three deep against the walls, the reviews folded and refolded until the paper went soft at every crease. Derivative, they had said, and the word had entered her like a splinter and lodged there, and she had worked around it for years the way the body works around pain, until the pain became her posture. She had told herself she was an artist, and the telling had worn thin as an old coat. What if the truth was otherwise? What if she was only someone who had once wanted to be one? The apartment was warm and airless. She rose at last, dressed in the dark, and let herself out into the sleeping city. Venice at midnight was a different creature from Venice by day. The crowds were gone; the boats slept at their moorings; the calli ran narrow and black between tall houses whose shutters were closed like lowered eyes. Her footsteps came back to her off the stone. Somewhere a cat moved along a wall, and somewhere farther a lamp swung in a breeze she could not feel, throwing shadows that climbed and slid across a plastered façade. She walked without deciding to walk, and when she lifted her head and understood where her feet had carried her, she was standing in the lane above the factory, looking down at its dark bulk against the faint silver of the lagoon. The tide was out, and the smell of weed and wet stone rose up from the channels, older than any of the leaning houses above it. There was light in the workshop. Not the bright industrial glare of daytime but a low red breathing glow, the color of a coal that would not die. Through the gap where a shutter had been left ajar, she could see a figure at the bench—Marco, alone at this hour, a blowpipe in his hands, the furnace throwing his shadow enormous up the far wall. She should have gone home. Instead she stood in the cold and watched. He was practicing. That was the thing that undid her. He was a master; his work stood in windows along the Mercerie; men twice his age asked his opinion of their batches. And here he was at midnight, gathering glass the way a beginner gathers—slowly, humbly, rolling the molten ball along the steel until it rode true, a hundred repetitions of the first motion any glassblower ever learns. There was no audience. There was no payment. There was only the motion itself, and the fire, and the man who served them both. She understood, watching him, that she had misread the word master all her life. She had imagined mastery as a summit, a place you arrived and planted a flag. But Marco knelt at his craft nightly the way other men kneel at prayer, and the kneeling was the mastery. The craft had come down to him through his family, he had told her at dinner, handed on like a language learned at the knee—and somewhere behind them all stood a Moretti with soot on his hands, feeding light down the generations like a lamp passed from grip to grip down a long dark corridor. The key in her pocket pressed against her hip, warmer than metal had any right to be. He finished at last. He set the pipe down and stood for a moment with his head bowed, as if listening to the furnace tell him how the work had gone, and then he banked the fire, and the glow sank low, and the workshop dimmed toward darkness. Isabella drew back from the shutter with her heart drumming, absurdly certain that he had felt her watching through glass and brick and night. She did not go down. Not tonight. At the bridge above the channel she stopped, hands on the cold stone balustrade, and looked at the black water and admitted the shape of the thing to herself. She did not know whether she would stay. But she knew, suddenly and completely, that she wanted to learn—that the wanting had been there since the first gather rose out of the fire that afternoon, glowing like something newborn. Learning was not staying. Learning was only putting one foot in front of the other toward a thing to see if it would hold her weight. She could do that much. Even she, who had walked out of studios and cities and the beginnings of everything she touched, could give this place a week. A boat went by beneath her, a lantern at its prow, its wake unrolling in long silent rings that reached the stone steps and expired. She watched until the light rounded the corner and was gone, and the water smoothed itself over the place where it had been. Somewhere across the channel a dog barked twice and fell quiet, and the silence afterward seemed to belong to her alone. She was asleep before she had properly decided to sleep, and she dreamed of fire the color of honey, and of a hand—old, scarred, patient—closing her fingers around a length of iron while a voice she had never heard and recognized instantly said: again. Morning would come, and with it the factory, and the question standing exactly where she had left it. She found that she was no longer afraid of the question. She was afraid only of how badly she wanted the answer to be yes. ---