Beach Music by Pat Conroy Page B

promised me a gondola ride,” Ledare said, changing the subject as we began walking back toward the Grand Canal.
    “We’re near Gino’s spot. The handsomest of the gondoliers.”
    “Does he prey on pretty American girls?”
    “You’re doomed, kid,” I said, winking at her.
    As we walked through streets that seemed too narrow for breathing, we smelled onions frying in olive oil and heard the sound of voices carrying, airborne and mysterious, along the canals. We passed houses where canaries sang to each other from brightly lit windows, and inhaled the aroma of fried liver and heard the slapping of water against the dark, carved hulls of the gondolas and the scream of male cats. Ledare paused at a mask shop where grotesque, quasi-human faces stared back at us in all the mute terror of their eyelessness. We continued on, listening to the church bells and squabbles among children, pigeons calling to each other from rooftops, and the sound of our own footsteps along the canal.
    Gino was waiting at his post near the Accademia and smiled when he saw us. He bowed deeply when I introduced him to Ledare. Gino was short and blond, and had a gondolier’s deeply sculpted body. I noticed that Gino took Ledare in all at once in a long appreciative gaze.
    The gondola rode high in the Grand Canal, swan-necked and proud as a horse as Ledare sat by me with her arm through mine. Gino moved with strong, perfect motions behind us, a sweet action of wrists and forearms.
    Ledare let her hand drift down the side of the gondola as a wave from a vaporetto washed over it while Gino maneuvered the craft expertly through the choppy waters of the canal.
    Ledare said, “This city does something to reality. I’ve felt like a contessa since I arrived. Floating through here, I feel like I’m made of silk.”
    “You’ll wish you were made of money before you leave,” I promised. “It’s cheaper to live in heaven.”
    “You think heaven’s prettier than Venice?” she asked, looking around us.
    “Too much to ask,” I said.
    I remembered my stay in Venice during Carnevale, after Shyla died, when I had been covering the revelry of Venetians before the long fastings and privations of Lent. During the wildest part of that first night, I had marveled that these people who were celebratingthe pleasures of the flesh with such open-ended immoderation could turn so quickly to the darker joys of self-denial.
    It had snowed that February, deep drifting snow born in the high passes of the Alps, and I had felt like a child throwing snowballs with other tourists in St. Mark’s Square. I had forgotten that Southerners are always made happy by the sight of snow. It always surprises us.
    I bought a mask and a costume to blend in with the Venetians in their suddenly disguised city. Running through the streets following various bands of revelers, I joined parties I was not invited to as I let the crowds steer me past the entryways of snow-dusted, candle-lit palazzos. In silence and in costume, I drifted through that white, starry world as strange as those attendant angels who filled up the wall space in unpraised chapels. By not speaking, I lost myself in the lawlessness of Carnevale and felt the power of masks to disfigure the shape of my own superego for the lurid rites of celebration. I thought that Shyla’s leap had unmasked me in some profound, unknowable way. But on that night, the mask returned me to myself as I rushed through the city with a sense of rising joy. In the cold of Venice, I felt time burn off me as I danced with anonymous women and drank wine that flowed easily in this greenhouse of pleasure where I felt myself recovering something lost in a playing field of masks. I watched a young priest scurry into a safe passageway, as though the air itself was contaminated. He looked around once, taking it all in, and we bowed to each other before he disappeared. He was right to flee this unloosened night, religious only at the fringes, and he