to me then. She will belong to me now. If you do not believe it, ask her!”
He had no mask, no tabarro. He pushed his way through the wet and screaming crowd, the rain sometimes cutting his face as it came in fierce gusts, until he was inside the café, and the hot sticky air was all around him. “Bettina!” he whispered. It seemed for the moment she was uncertain, and then pushing her way through shoulders and wet capes, and horrific bauta faces, and clowns and monsters, she came forward, her little black hood standing in a peak over her head, her hands out to clutch him quickly. “This way, Excellency,” she said, leading him out into the calle towards the nearby landing.
As soon as the gondola had left the dock, she was in his arms on the floor of the felze, pulling at his vest and his shirt, pushing up her skirts as her legs wrapped around him.
There was the sound of the rain teeming on the water around them; now and then it struck the hollow wooden bridge overhead, now and then it ran streaming fast, with a purpose, through invisible gutters. The boat rocked dangerously, it seemed, under his awkward weight; the felze smelt of dust, of warm flesh, of the smoky perfume between her naked legs where the hair was hot and wet. It made him grit his teeth as he nuzzled his head into it. He felt the silk skin of her thighs against his cheeks, and then her eager little hands tugging at him. That irrepressible giggle in his ears, her breasts so big they seemed to spill into his hands. She tore open his breeches; it seemed she flowed out of her blouse and skirt, white and sweet, her fingers stroking him, hardening him and guiding him.
He was afraid she’d laugh when she saw he was a boy and it was dry, but she only urged him again to cover her. He tumbled into her, inside of her again, that explosion in his brain wiping out all time, all loss, all horror.
Even a moment’s thought would destroy him.
So his hands sought the hot flesh behind her knees, the wet warmth under her breasts, her rounded calves, and her mouth, her open craving mouth full of boldness and sucking breath and those tiny impetuous giggles. A multitude of tiny crevices, creases, secrets. The water lapped at the sides of the boat, music came and went, thin sounds, heavy sounds. He lay under her at times, feeling her delicious weight, then laid her back down, his hand lifting her by the hot fold of her sex, his tongue on her smooth little belly.
And when he lay finally spent even the sea-green smell of the water was bound up in it, the dank smell of the moss-covered foundations plunging down and down into the canal and the soft earth beneath it that was Venice. It was all bound up with the sweetness and the salt, and her precious laughter, and the slanting silver rain coming through the tiny windows, falling on his face as he clung to her.
Would that it could last forever, would that it could blot out all thought and all pain and all tragedy, would that he could take her again and again, and the world would not come back, and he was not in that house, in those rooms, and listening to that voice; he snuggled down in the dark, covering the back of his head with his hands so she wouldn’t hear his crying.
Voices tugged at him.
It seemed they were floating in those tiny, crowded waterways with small windows above, where the laundry sagged from the lines by day, and the garbage lay piled against the quais, and if you looked up, you could see the rats racing along the walls, squat, agile, as if they were actually flying. Cats whined and bawled in the dark. He heard the slosh and the gurgle of the water. And he felt weightless and deliciously quiet, even as she still teased him.
“Love you, love you, love you, love you…”
But those voices again. He lifted his head. The tenor, he would have known it anywhere, and yes, the basso, and the flute and the violin. He rose on his elbow, feeling the boat heave and shift. They were his singers!
“What is it, Excellency?” she whispered. She was naked beside him, her clothes a shapeless mass of darkness in her lap, her shoulders so exquisitely