Liquid Desires by Edward Sklepowich

looking at Urbino sideways with pale blue, bloodshot eyes. The sweet odor of anisette wafted behind her.
    In the campo Urbino stopped an elderly man letting himself into his apartment.
    â€œThe padrone ? Ladislao Mirko—a strange name, yes? He and his family came here from Trieste years ago. He’s on his own now. He’s going to lose that place one of these days. Money problems—always looking for la grana !”
    The man rubbed his thumb and first finger together.
    â€œHave you noticed a very attractive young woman with auburn hair coming and going to the Casa Trieste?”
    The man broke into a big smile.
    â€œHave I! She’s a beauty! Mirko is always sniffing after her like a dog. Half the boys and men in the neighborhood would like to get at her.”
    Urbino thanked him and started off in the direction of the Danieli to have lunch with Eugene.

14
    But eugene had left a message saying that he had gone to Murano with Zuin to visit the glass showrooms.
    Outside the Danieli, Urbino joined the press surging along the sun-beaten Riva degli Schiavoni toward the Piazza. An occasional breeze from the lagoon blew hot and humid against Urbino’s sweating face, and he felt assaulted by the smell and the noise of the crowd. Urbino always warned friends and relatives against coming to Venice during the summer. It was impossible. Tourists, ravenous for their promised portion of Venice, overran the city like an invading army, pointing cameras like guns and mounting attacks on the sights with a ferocity that had little to do with genuine interest and appreciation.
    As Urbino inched his way past a group shoving each other for a glimpse of the Bridge of Sighs, he remembered what Madge Lennox had said about these tourists being like the dead on holiday. She was right. Delirium and desperation were adding their burden to the already thick, almost unbreathable air.
    A group of street musicians were performing under the pillar of St. Mark. Their folk song, vaguely familiar to Urbino, emanated in a melancholy stream from a wooden flute, bagpipes, and a drum and cymbals worked with a foot pedal. Letting the swarm of people pass around him, Urbino stopped to listen and then dropped a ten-thousand-lira note into the proffered hat of one of the performers.
    The man, unshaven and snaggly-toothed, smiled at him and said in a thick Neapolitan accent, “May you be as far from death as you are from poverty, signore.”
    In Piazza San Marco long queues inched toward the Basilica and the Campanile. Hundreds of weary heads were craned toward the Torre dell’Orologio—the clock tower—waiting for the bronze Moors to strike the hour. On the Lido last week Urbino had fantasized about the clock tower melting down into the Piazza like a Dalí painting, but now its brick and blue tile were hard-edged in the glare of the sunshine.
    People crowded under the arcades, sat and sprawled on the steps and against the columns, and danced and milled in the large open space of the Piazza as the orchestras outside Florian’s and Quadri’s played Broadway show tunes. This was not for him, Urbino decided. Turning his back on the Piazza, he made his slow way through the clogged arteries surrounding the historic heart of the city until he reached the quieter alleys and squares and could breathe a sigh of relief. Soon he would be back at the Palazzo Uccello, which even in high season was blessedly remote from all the hubbub, a comfortable ark within the greater ark that was Venice. Behind its walls he could remain apart from what the Contessa called the “faceless hordes of high season,” yet close enough to the flow of life not to feel isolated. The result was that he felt snug, if also a little selfsatisfied, in his solitude.
    A long time ago he had read a French novel about a neurotic fin de siècle aristocrat who retired to his mansion outside Paris to lead a self-contained, eccentric life of the mind and