The Foot of Saint Catherine

Reynaldo descended from the train at Stazzioni S. Luccia and stood on the platform for a moment, lifted a handkerchief folded into a white square from his pocket and coughed quietly into it. He was a tall, slender man, clad in a white linen suit and silk necktie of a nougat hue. As he meticulously blotted his forehead, the light of the north Italian morning glinted off the lenses of his spectacles. He returned the handkerchief to his pocket and stepped out onto the riva, past the statue of the virgin offering its stone embrace to the stale air of the ferrovia.
       His eye swept along the graceful lines of a gondola, its silver prow brilliant in the sunlight, which dappled the green water. The gondolier pushed off through a mooring gate of striped barber poles. The smell of sulphur and sewage lifted from the water. Reynaldo coughed into his handkerchief and wiped his lips, held the linen to his nostrils.
       He followed the Grand Canal nearly to the Rialto, walking slowly, gazing abstractly about. At the vaporetto station, he paused and looked at a tall, slender woman who stood at the rail of the boat as it backed away into the canal. Her face was long and thin, her lower lip full, her teeth large and white. She wore a dark, tight dress, and her dark gaze lifted frankly to Reynaldo's eyes as the vaporetto moved away from him. His eyes dropped to her fingers, long and delicate as porcelain, white as marble, on the railing.
       His heart labored as he climbed the stairway away from the canal and made his way through the narrow streets toward the Church of St. John and St. Paul. By the time he reached the church, he was perspiring, and he stopped on the stone steps to blot his forehead and cheeks and coughed into his handkerchief.
       Inside, monks in white robes swept the aisles silently with great dust mops. The beads that hung from the waist of one tall, slender, young monk clicked with the movement of his hips. He cast his gaze back over his shoulder at Reynaldo, peering up beneath his lowered brow with its curls of black hair flattened by perspiration.
       Reynaldo hurried past him to the altar of St. Catherine of Sienna, where he blessed himself and knelt before the vigil tray. The bouquet of melting wax lifted to his nose as he gazed upon the Saint's piede enshrined in a cylinder of brass and glass at the center of the altar. The flesh of the foot was white as fine marble but for the third toe, which had blackened at the second knuckle and across the nail. The big toe, however, was perfect, its nail finely shaped and of handsome length. The foot was not larger than that of a child's.
       He lowered his face and endeavored to pray, heard the clicking of beads and sweep of mop behind him, saw in his mind's eye the monk's gaze, the gaze of the dark woman from the vaporetto. He coughed into his handkerchief, rose abruptly from the kneeler. His heels sounded slowly along the marble floor as he passed the equestrian statuary, the Virgin with the electric halo, the figure of a Venetian orator, an early Bellini. He could sense the white monk's sweeping mop at his heels, heard the click of hip beads, heard or thought he heard a voice whisper, "Contanti per favore, signore." He stepped quickly into the souvenir alcove and concealed himself behind a rack of postcard reproductions of religious scenes. A woman sat at a desk muttering and squealing quietly, her face a rash of tiny beige tubular warts. He found an exit past the desk and then he was out on the campo, beneath the lofty figure of the mercenary captain Bartolomeo on his bronze steed.
       The sun had mounted the arch of the sky. Reynaldo loosened the knot of his tie and opened the button of his collar and started walking again. Just before he reached San Marco's Piazza, in the corridor of a narrow damp stone walkway, he had to stop to catch his breath and lean on the wall. A fit of coughing wracked his lungs, and he muffled it in his handkerchief, peering at the red stain he left there. A long procession of Japanese tourists filed past him, following a woman who held aloft a large slice of artificial watermelon on a stick. One of the men, dressed in a dark suit and wearing many leather cases on straps slung round his neck and shoulders, smiled and bowed and took Reynaldo's picture from three angles. The man then motioned to two women, an older and younger one, and uttered a guttural command. The women put their small hands over their mouths and tittered, then posed on either side of Reynaldo as the Japanese gentleman smiled and bowed and took more photos.
       He handed Reynaldo a printed card, bowed again and smiled, spat another command at the two women, and rejoined the procession following the watermelon slice.
       Reynaldo looked at the card. Printed in Gothic script was the legend "Foto Joe Yamagoochi. Preserve moments of big importance in commemorative fotos to survive the many years."
       Beneath the legend were a phone number and a Tokyo address.
       Reynaldo slipped the card into his pocket and continued down the alley to the square. On San Marco, he sat at one of the outdoor tables. A waiter, immaculate in gold-brocaded white, approached and bowed crisply. "Prego, signore."
       "Water, please. A glass of plain water."
       The waiter shot his cuffs, retreated, returned bearing a glass that he set down with a sharp report before Reynaldo. "Fongula," he muttered quietly and presented a check for three thousand lire. Reynaldo paid and sat drinking his water in small sips as the afternoon sun bore down on his bare scalp.
       A human fly was scaling the wall of the high red brick campanile while atop the opposite tower two green bronze figures of Moors struck bells with bronze hammers. All across the plaza, tourists sucked ices, fed pigeons, snapped photographs of one another, strolled. A sign on the steps of the San Marco church said, "See the Golden Altar Screen--Lire 1,000." On a raised platform at the center of the cafe tables, a string quartet began to play. Suddenly, Reynaldo was hungry, very hungry. He gestured furiously to the waiter. "Una fugassa, per favore."
       "Prego, signore."
       The waiter brought a slice of the gaudy cake and Reynaldo ate it quickly, licking his lips and fingers and fork and swallowing his water greedily. At once, he was filled with remorse, called for his check and was required to pay an extra five thousand lire for the music.
       He rose and began walking again.
       He climbed slowly up over a bridge to the mainland and continued through the narrow street toward the sea. On the Calle S. Gregorio, he watched one of the ancient line of Venetian glassblowers ply his art, holding a glass in the flame, shaping slowly and meticulously a figure of Mickey Mouse, which he placed alongside a row of similar figures while a crowd of tourists spoke hushed exclamations of praise. Outside the glass blower's shop, he paused to watch a small cloud of flies struggling for a place on a fallen ice cream cone that was slowly melting into a sewer grating. The song of a gondolier drew his attention. The gondola drifted past in the water with the dark-clad woman seated across its bench in the position of the naked maja, one hand over her sex, flowers framed round her head, lips open to show her smile of long teeth. Reynaldo felt nothing. The woman's gaze was piercing, mocking. She folded her hands across her breast, lowered her eyelids.
       He stood on the Fundamente Novo Ponte and stared across the water to the Isola di S. Michele and the trees and stones of the cemetery. The shadows lengthened along the narrow streets as he made his way to the tip of the lagoon and stood in a knot of tourists looking at the water. As he walked back toward the Rialto, a gondola slid past in which an aging Italian tenor in a silver suit, shirt opened at the breast, bald pate, hands spread expressively, stood singing O Solo Mio to a group of Japanese tourists. Reynaldo recognized in the boat the man named Foto Joe Yamagoochi. The Japanese man waved at him and smiled and his two women tittered behind their fingers.
       A mosquito stung Reynaldo's earlobe. He slapped furiously at it. Suddenly, he felt very tired.
       Many elbows jostled him as he climbed the steps of the Rialto and descended the opposite side again. The waters of the canal were dark as oil now, the winding passage through the building fronts quiet and mysterious except for the song of aging gondolier tenors and the occasional smatter of applause.
       As Reynaldo stood peering up at the Bridge of Sighs, he felt a hand slip into his pocket and remove his billfold. He turned to see a dark head disappearing into the flow of the crowd, opened his mouth to call out, but coughed instead and groped into his pocket for his handkerchief. His back, beneath his shirt and jacket, was clammy with perspiration. His temples ached. His heart was beating too quickly. He closed his eyes and called forth the image of the foot of St. Catherine in its sleeve of glass and yellow metal. Quickly, he made his way down the bridge, across the plaza, through the narrow damp streetway. Presently he came upon the plaza of the church of St. John and St. Paul. The sun was gone behind the bricks around him now, and the plaza was empty of tourists.
       In the church, the white-robed monks all sat in a phalanx before the Madonna with electric halo, muttering prayers. Their backs were to him as he stepped quietly along the marble floor to the opposite side of the church and knelt before the altar of St. Catherine. His heart stopped beating as he reached to the centerpiece on the altar, felt with his fingers around to the back of the glass, located the catch and hinge and opened the cylinder. The flesh of the dead foot was strange against his palm as he lifted it from the altar and deposited it, still in his grasp, into the inner pocket of his jacket.
       The monks were still muttering their prayers as Reynaldo hastened on the balls of his feet to the doors of the church, let himself out and crossed the campo again, hurrying toward San Marco. At the mouth of the long narrow streetway, he saw a figure, haloed in the light from behind. He approached slowly. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he recognized the long, thin face, the teeth, the smile. Her eyes were closed as she reached toward him. He pressed his back to the wall to slip past her, but her hand touched his sleeve, and he had no strength to go further. She moved close to him, placed her lips against his ear and whispered a single word, his name, the last syllables of it. "Naldo," she whispered. "Naldo."
       "Yes," he whispered back.
       Then her face was before him, moving closer, her mouth before his, so close that his own was drawn to it as to a magnet. From the end of the walkway, anyone looking in would have seen the double-backed figure of young lovers in embrace, a common sight in the city of lovers.
       He was cold as he left her. His lips were cold, his cheeks, as he limped toward the mouth of the narrow streetway to San Marcos, as he left the quiet and dark to emerge onto the crowded plaza. His hand was still inside his jacket, still grasping the remains of the Saint. He threaded through the crowd to the clock tower, entered the door and began to climb. The ascent was difficult. His power was fading. He paused many times to cough into his handkerchief, to wait for his lungs to subside, to sigh and wait for strength. At length, he emerged atop the tower, stepped out beside the green bronze figures of the Moors with their long hammers, standing mutely beside the green bronze bell casings. He stepped to the edge of the tower and looked across to the campanile. It was sinking, ever so slowly sliding downwards through the island into the marshy depths. His toes overlapped the edge of the tower. He peered down at the masses of people in gaudy clothing thronging to purchase ices, drinks, shiny mementoes of a place that no longer existed; tiny as pigeons, they strutted and clucked.
       He drew the foot from within his jacket, shuddered lightly as he gazed upon it in the pale evening light. Across the plaza he saw a whole block of buildings tremble. He heard a siren wail out across the water, heard voices in sudden confusion and fear rising up through the narrow alleys. He heard a wall crumble, screaming, heard the echo of a tenor in a gondola.
       He put the arch of the foot to his lips and took another step, then another, and the floor of the plaza exploded into his face.