Those Who Walk Away Read Free

disliked awakening the porter. He pushed the bell.
    After two minutes or so, an old man in a red jacket that he had not taken time to fasten opened the door and greeted him courteously and rode up with him in a small lift to the third floor.
    His room was simple and clean and had a view through its tall windows of Giudecca across the water and, directly below, of the small canal that went along one side of the pensione. Ray put on his pyjamas and washed at the basin—there hadn’t been a room with bath free, the porter said—and fell into bed. He had thought he was very tired, but after a few minutes he was sure he would not be able to get to sleep. He was familiar with the sensation from the Mallorca days, a tremulous exhaustion that put a faint shakiness in his penline or his handwriting. The only thing to do was walk it off. He got up and dressed in comfortable clothes, and let himself quietly out of the hotel.
    Dawn was rising now. A gondolier swathed in navy blue propelled a cargo of Coca-Cola crates into the canal beside the pensione. A motor-boat dashed in a straight line up the Giudecca Canal, as if scurrying home guiltily after a late party.
    Ray ran up the arched steps of the Accademia bridge and headed inland for San Marco. He walked through narrow grey streets whose shop-fronts were tight closed, through small squares—Campo Morosini, Campo Manin, familiar, unchanged, yet Ray did not know them well enough to remember every detail of them. He passed only one person, an old woman with a large flat basket of Brussels sprouts. Then the American Express’s tiles appeared under his feet, directing him with an arrow to their office, and he saw the lower part of the Piazza San Marco’s columns in front of him.
    He walked into the giant rectangle of the Piazza. The space seemed to make a sound like ‘Ah-h’ on his ears, like an unending exhalation of a spirit. To right and left, the arches of two arcades diminished in regular progression. Out of a strange self-consciousness at standing still, Ray began to walk, shy now of the humble brushing sound of his desert boot soles on the cement. A few awakening pigeons fluttered around their nests in the arcades, and two or three came down to peck for food on the Piazza. They paid no more attention to Ray, who walked very near them, than if he had not existed. Then Ray took to the shelter of the arcade. Jewellers’ shops were curtained and barred by folding grillwork. Near the end of the arcade, he went out into the Piazza again and looked at the cathedral as he walked by it, blinked as he always had at its complexity, its variety of styles all crammed together. An artistic mess, he supposed, yet it had been erected to amaze and impress, and in that it succeeded.
    Ray had been to Venice five or six times before, beginning when he had come with his parents at the age of fourteen. His mother had known Europe far better than his father, but his father had been stricter about making him study it, making him listen to his teaching records in Italian and French. The summer he was seventeen, his father had presented him with a crash course in French at the Berlitz School in St Louis. Ray had always liked Italy and Italian cities better than Paris, better than the chateau district which his father so admired and whose scenery had seemed to Ray as a boy like calendar pictures.
    It was six-forty-five. Ray found a bar-caffé that was opening, went in and stood at the counter. A healthy-looking blonde girl with large blue-grey eyes and cheeks like peaches took his order for a cappuccino, and made it herself at the machine. A boy assistant was busy filling glass containers with buns. The girl wore a fresh, pale blue smock uniform. She looked into his eyes as she set the cup before him, not in a flirtatious or even personal way, but in the way Ray felt all Italians of whatever age or sex looked at people—as if they actually saw them. Did she live with her parents, Ray wondered, or was