on ours. The piano nobile was mainly bedrooms and studies. Hafeza was the only person not a member of the Maleovelli family to be given a bedroom – that is, if you didn’t count me. In an oily voice, Jacopo reassured me – at the same time pointing out my marginal position – that I was most certainly part of the family. Across the front of the casa was the portego, the main salon in which I’d met everyone yesterday. There was also a small dining room that ran off the portego and beyond that a reading room. At the other end of the corridor were two sets of stairs: one led to the ground floor, but if you stepped through a door, the other went down into the central courtyard. We didn’t use the external stairs that day.
Descending to the lower floor, the pianterreno, I was shown what was effectively the business part of the house. Like most nobiles’ casas, the Maleovellis’ was a combination of private and professional interests, the ground floor functioning like a warehouse and shop all rolled into one. Products were received and sold and transactions carried out. I could tell from the many rooms allocated to receiving goods that once the Maleovellis must have been very astute merchants. With one exception, the rooms were all empty, and our voices echoed into the cavernousness. This room still held some sorry-looking barrels stacked in a corner. The wood was split and the coarse grey contents had spilled on the floor. I recognised the smell of rats.
There was also a tidy office that faced onto the rear canal, from which Jacopo did his accounting and met with any visitors. As I stood in the doorway and peered in, careful to avoid Jacopo’s lumbering frame, I rested my fingers against the wood and learnt that, for all Jacopo’s bluster, it had been a long time since a stranger had crossed this threshold.
I followed him around as we slowly went from room to room and he told me of the Maleovellis’ history and the connections and influence they once wielded. Despite the evidence before us, Jacopo spoke as if they were still a force to be reckoned with. His voice became a monotonous drone to which I barely listened. Instead, when I thought he wasn’t looking, I allowed my hands to rest on the cool stone of the walls, brush the scratched wood of the banisters and even the creaking door that led out into an internal courtyard. Jacopo may have spoken of the casa as if it were bustling with servants and turning away visitors, but the elements around me told a completely different story.
Hafeza, Salzi and one cleaning woman were all the Maleovellis housed within their walls. A cook would come to the casa each day and prepare meals, but Hafeza or Salzi would often serve the family. They barely had any visitors. Nobiles had not been here for a long, long time – only debt collectors and merchants seeking recompense for their credit. The casa itself supplied me with the counter-narrative my instincts had already told me was fact. No wonder they wanted my help, they had so little to lose.
We left the cold, damp interior and wandered into what once would have been a lovely walled garden. I could see from the stained, lifting stones, the rusting bucket hanging over the well in the centre, the dead creepers that tangled over the walls and the vacant eyes of the filthy statues standing at intervals, that this was a neglected space. Even the gates that, Jacopo told me, led onto the calle that ran along the rear had once been grand. Now they resembled something I would have expected to see on a poor casa in the Candlemakers Quartiere, not gracing the entrance, or exit, to a nobile’s.
After lunch, to my eyes a veritable repast, which I shared with Signor Maleovelli, Giaconda and Jacopo, I was left to my own devices. My lessons with Baroque, I was told, would not begin for a few days. He was currently away on family business. I didn’t give him another thought. I was glad of the reprieve.
Instead of engaging in the siesta I knew was expected, I waited till the casa fell silent and continued my journey on my own. No-one had forbidden me, but all the same, I had the sense my solitary exploration would not be approved. So I hadn’t asked. I wandered around the portego cautiously,