The Bellini Card by Jason Goodwin Read Free Book Online

and idlers hung about the bridges, and in the dankest, dirtiest dark bends of a canal the inevitable old crone was forever craning her neck from some upstairs room for a better view. You took a gondola only if you wanted to be noticed—visiting a rich American art collector, for instance. Otherwise you used the pavement and walked the long way around.
    In the Ghetto he found firmer footing, where the Jews had been crowded up behind their gates. The air was filled with floating goose down, like a gentle snow, for the people here used goose fat where other Venetians used pork, and it reeked of more than the sewage that offended visitors to Venice elsewhere in the city. It stank of old fish and rags, and the sourness of confined spaces. Napoleon had had the gates demolished, but everyone knew that they still existed in the Venetian mind. A few rich Jews had moved away, and a few—a very few—impoverished gentiles had taken rooms in the Ghetto, but otherwise little had changed in forty years.
    Popi stumped along, looking neither left nor right. Something in his manner made the women working in their doorways draw in their feet as he approached; the men shrank to the wall as he passed. It was not that Popi looked official: when the Austrians sent patrols through the streets the people just watched them go, sullen and unmoving. It was, perhaps, that he came from the other Venice, a Venice that festered beneath the golden afternoon light and the fine tracery of a Byzantine façade, a Venice unimaginative visitors would never penetrate, no matter how much poverty or wretchedness they passed by, trailing their fingertips in the water until their solicitous gondolier hinted that it would be better, perhaps, to keep their hands folded on their laps. How could they, when even the more engaged, more lively minded visitors to the city allowed themselves to be seduced so readily by the prettiness of its whores and the cheapness of its
appartamenti
?
    The people of the Ghetto shrank from Popi as a man of thalers and kreuzers, and of little accounts kept rigorously in black books that had the power to ruin lives.
    Popi stopped to stick a cigar in his mouth and lit it with a match, thencarried on up the narrow
calle
like a steam tug. After several turns that he executed without stopping, he ducked into a low doorway, crossed a small dark hallway, and found the stairs. He began to climb, slowly, to the top.
    The stairs were dark. At each landing, narrow passages radiated into a deeper blackness relieved occasionally by a tiny opening, without glass, which gave onto a narrow well of light. On the lower floors the light was blocked by the accumulated rubbish of many centuries—moldering feathers, desiccated rats, pigeon droppings. Reaching the fifth floor, Popi ignored the stairs and pressed on down a corridor barely wide enough to let him pass. Stooping, he fumbled his way until his outstretched hands encountered another set of stairs, running up and back the way he had come. He took the cigar from his mouth and stood leaning against the wall, waiting for breath. Then he began to climb again.
    Pressed into their narrow space, the Jews had built their houses higher than anyone else in the world.
    Now, when he leaned against the wall for breath, Popi could feel it flex against his weight; another piece of plaster crumbled and fell to the floor.
    At last, holding the stub of cigar at eye level, he perceived a door. He hit it with the heel of his hand, and it swung open, drenching him in sunlight.
    Popi blinked, tears starting to his eyes. The cold reek of cabbage and drains that had followed him up through the warren of stairs and passages was swept aside by an overpowering sweet smell of alcohol and decay, wafted out on a raft of summer heat.
    He coughed and stepped through the narrow doorway.
    The first thing Popi noticed were the flies. They crowded the skylights and crawled across the sloping ceiling, buzzing and falling, swirling in the