The room was still veiled in semi-darkness, but a rod of light fell through the crack between the heavy green shutters and onto the faux satin of her bedspread, a messenger of the heat already pressing in at the tall windows even at this early hour. The air conditioner began to hum. Suddenly Claire couldn’t get to the window fast enough, turn the latch on the tall casement window, throw open the shutters. Together with the heat, already intense despite the earliness of the hour, the sounds poured in: the small fountain directly in front of her, just a spigot, really, for tourists and neighborhood people to refresh themselves as they trudged through the stony streets; their steps reverberating off the walls of the palazzi all around the square, their voices a gentle murmur, sometimes punctuated by a child’s higher pitch, a laugh, in counterpoint with the continuo of the fountain, not disturbed by any car or zippy Vespa buzz. The unique, carless soundtrack of Venice washed over her.
Barely half an hour later, stepping out from the hotel lobby onto the square was like walking directly from the shores of an Alpine lake into a pizza oven. Claire went over to the little spigot right under their window, where the old man from the produce stand was rinsing the dust off some enormous, purple-black grapes. “Caldo, eh?” he said, holding the bunch toward her and nodding as she hesitated before reaching out to pluck one. Yes, it certainly was hot—“Caldissimo!” she agreed, enjoying the old familiar feel of the pure vowels and the consonants pearling off her tongue. As she thanked him, the bells in the nearby church tower launched into their glorious cacophony and some of the older women standing near the fountain started moving toward the church.
She turned left and headed toward the little bridge to the left of the church, pulling out her wallet to find the little slip of paper: “4929 Sestiere Castello.”
Venice had street names, of course, and what wonderful ones: Calle del Paradiso, Ponte dell’Assassino, Campo dei Miracoli—Alley of Paradise, Bridge of the Assassin, Square of Miracles. For the official postal addresses, however, the houses in each of the six sestieri or districts of Venice retained their medieval numbering system, running consecutively down one street, then up the other side and around the corner and down the next, and so on, throughout all the streets of the particular district. So if, for whatever reason, you were looking for a particular number, you would have to keep walking and looking at the number over the door of each shop, palazzo, restaurant or bar, probably winding up and down sidestreets and backtracking several times until you found it.
She ran up the steps of the bridge and down the other side into the straight, narrow calle beyond. It was darker and quieter there, compared to the brightness and bustle of the square. This part of Venice seemed reserved for the Venetians, who walked along these backstreets at a fast clip, purposeful, muscular, taking the stairs almost at a run, loaded with shopping bags and briefcases. So different here from the tourist thoroughfares between San Marco and Rialto only a few minutes away. There you could hardly get through the throng of people eyeing the shop windows bursting with souvenirs, purses and wallets, and cheap Murano glass. Here, as she walked along the narrow calle, her eyes glued to the house numbers along one side of it—4734, 4735, 4736—she saw a dusty showcase filled with inexpensive reproductions of eighteenth-century paintings of Venice, a tiny shop window displaying marked-down sneakers, a modern-looking grocery store crammed into the ground floor of one of the ancient, peeling palazzi, and several nondescript espresso bars.
Now Claire was at 4789, 4790, and then she came to a small side alley that opened off to the left. She turned down it and the numbers continued in order, 4791, 4792, and so on around what had turned out to be a small courtyard, not even a campo, but with the securely covered pozzo, or neighborhood, well that once had been the sole source of water for the dwellings in these courtyards. There had been one just like this hidden behind the Hotel Marco Polo, where Claire had met Massimo so many years ago. A mere heartbeat, in Venetian time: Marco Polo was supposedly born there, in one of those crumbling palazzi, more than a thousand years ago. Like that hidden place, this quiet courtyard also felt lost in time. Claire kept following the numbers, which led her right back out onto the narrow little calle. 4875, 4876, 4877.
After passing a marble-walled shop where women in white aprons and hairnets were solemnly slicing prosciutto and cheese, and a landromat that looked much the same as any in San Francisco, but shrunk to a quarter of the size, she turned down another short alleyway, with a small, shaded restaurant on one side and a coffee bar on the other, and emerged into a slightly larger courtyard, or campo, this one clearly populated by modern-day Venetians, who had flapping sheets and dishtowels strung up right across the square, where the smell of fish and the sizzling of oil pervaded the air, and the clink of cutlery against china drifted through the open balcony doors. 4907, 4908, 4909: Claire’s pulse quickened. She continued her circumambulation of the campo, the house numbers increasing as she stalked around the curve: 4921, 4922, 4923, and her heart began to race. And suddenly there it was: by the arched gate of a villa with a patio enclosed by a low wall, the number 4929, and next to it a brass nameplate: Serafin.
