Chapter 1
Today I had the evening off. These days I spent most of my time at the hotel and would rarely take a holiday or even a day off. The hotel was my cocoon. It was a perfect answer to my extroverted self, who couldn't live without people even in the darkest hour of his life.
We made a fine team. I liked my colleagues. I enjoyed joking with Marianne, the breakfast girl. Her face would always beam with a smile, and the unruly locks of hair over her forehead were the cutest thing around. My fellow porter Dominique was hot, with that overwhelming glow in his eyes. He positively enjoyed my advances, although until now we had not consummated this mutual interest. I’d say with guests it was less complicated. They were in and out, and occasional flings would always be inconsequential and leave only a pleasant aftertaste. Not to mention that I was spoiled with gifts and lavish dinners, which I did my best not to grow accustomed to.
A lot of guests would comment looking at me and Dominique that there was no doubt what the recruitment criteria were at this place. We were both fit and turned heads of both sexes. The uniform was also a factor. These smart, dark burgundy suits with gold stripes. And, of course, the caps. White gloves, not the least thing too… That music promoter, Emily (I could never remember their surnames), couldn’t take her eyes off my hands until she finally squeezed them. And I didn’t mind. She was elegant and smart, and in the end I was lucky that I didn’t have to chase women. Not even women with money. I had no problems with men either, and I never bothered to sit down and think about my sexual orientation. Call it the bellboy syndrome.
But I knew I wasn’t hired for my looks and I doubt Dominique was either. When I knocked on this door for the first time they had no vacancies, but I was pretty desperate and, in no uncertain terms, I pleaded with them to save a human soul, which they did. For that I was grateful.
The hotel provided for most of my basic needs, and even with my meagre salary I managed to save. I ate here and slept in the loft room upstairs. The room was tiny and had enough space only for a single bed, but the skylight would open to the tiled roofs of Venice and provided an unhindered view right to the horizon. It reminded me of a gingerbread village, and I could look at it for hours with my eyes skimming over rustic surfaces and faltering somewhere in the pale blue skies.
So, I didn’t really need to go anywhere, but I would take my time off sometimes so as not to look weird. It was a good idea to slip out of the uniform once in a while.
I took the evening off and met a friend. We went to a few places and had some drinks. He invited me over and I thought we would have a bit of fun, but somehow I lost him. I was probably too drunk. I think I called him, but he didn’t answer and I let it go.
I was going back home through the dark, narrow streets of Venice very late. They were mostly deserted. I love this city in the dark hours. It’s nice and cosy. You feel at home in these narrow streets, perhaps because they are so narrow and you are effectively walled off from the elements. Sometimes I sit down by the canal, enjoying this living-room feel to it. Gondolas sail past so quietly, like ghosts, as though they don’t have a material existence and come entirely from a world beyond understanding. One poet compared them with thoughts passing through the subconscious. This is exactly how I feel when I look at them - alone with my thoughts, staring into my subconscious - the world where life goes on even when it no longer makes any sense to you.
I leaned over the canal and made an effort to catch any sounds from the passing gondola. No, I lost again. It won. The ghost once again evaporated in the dark before my eyes, leaving no trace. I suddenly felt unsettled and I didn’t know why. I thought I was alright. These were my moments of happiness. I really wanted to enjoy them. I didn’t like how my mind played with me sometimes - all these flashbacks and the bitter aftertaste of your old life when all you were trying to do was to move on.
The next moment I realised that it wasn’t my mind that was playing with my senses. I was not on my own here. I looked into the darkness again and, to my utmost discomfort, I distinguished a human silhouette. It wasn’t completely dark, of course, and some dispersed light shimmered from distant shop widows. In a few more moments, when my eyes had got used to looking through the night, I could see this human being clearly. It was a man, a young man as far as I could judge. He was standing on the landing by the bridge further down the canal. There was nothing special about it, apart from the fact that he was doing something strange and unsettling.
It seemed to me he was playing with a cord. It was perhaps a wire of a sort and he was trying to tie it… to itself, it appeared. I continued to follow the movements of his hands until he did something even stranger. He came closer to the bridge and tiptoed to reach for the railings on it. He couldn’t reach straight away and had to climb. It still didn’t occur to me what he was up to and I continued to watch him in amazement.
But then I could see him trying to tie one end of the cord to the railings and the pieces suddenly fell into place. I could also now see a loop at its other end.
‘Wait! What are you doing???’ I exclaimed.
He turned around and looked at me in horror. I could see his face clearly now, and his rounded eyes were staring at me with incinerating intensity. In a split second I realised what the message was. He was not afraid to die. He was afraid that I would stop him.
‘No!’ I wailed, consciously, to startle him, to immobilise him, and dashed into the narrow passage of the street to my left.
There was no shortcut from me to him and I had to make a detour, under the arches, through the narrow passages, around a million corners. When I finally reached his bridge, the loop was around his neck and I saw his hand parting from the railing. I registered the tips of his fingers in the air, somewhat statically, as though they were not moving, but were a permanent fixture.
I lunged forward. My front foot didn’t find steady ground and the next moment I slipped. I praised myself for my quick thinking, when, in a split second, I decided not to grab him straight away, but first steady myself on my feet. Otherwise I would have decapitated him. I reached for him as soon as I straightened up, which meant the noose had tightened about his throat and he was suspended for a moment before I lifted him. I pressed him to the bridge with my torso and managed to loosen the noose. He was gasping and coughing. So, I knew from the outset he would most certainly live. I pulled the noose off his head, squeezed his trunk and finally the weight of his body forced me to the ground. We slumped on the wet stones of the landing.
I may have passed out for a moment, not so much from the impact as from the emotional upheaval. It had probably affected me more than I realised. When I came around, he was next to me, shaking and breathing laboriously. He was still lying on my arm and it was beginning to hurt. I felt sorry for him, probably for the first time. What I had felt towards him until now was something entirely different and more difficult to describe. But lying here, on the wet pavement, next to the human being so totally in pieces, so vulnerable and so completely dependent on me, was an epiphany.
I forgot about my aching arm. I cuddled him and squeezed him. Gradually his shaking calmed down and he began to breathe normally. Now I was beginning to shake. It was December, warm as Decembers go, but the humid air combined with occasional gusts of chilly wind made the whole lying-on-wet-stones experience extremely unpleasant. Of course, what I couldn’t do was stand up and go, leaving him here.
‘How do you feel?’ I asked him.
He nodded.
‘Perhaps, we’d better stand up before we catch pneumonia.’
He propped himself up on his elbow. I rolled over and stood up. I leaned over him and helped him to his feet. I was still supporting him, unaware of what state he was in. I took a proper look at him now that his face was so close to mine. He had fine facial features, proportionate almost to the point of perfection. That wouldn’t make him half as attractive as he was, if not for his fringe, which was disobediently falling over his forehead in asymmetrical locks. His eyes still bore the unhealthy glow of a person who had just been to hell and back. He was gorgeous, but it was the passion burning within, rather than his physical representation, that was making him what he was.
I sensed trouble. This man had barged into my life so unceremoniously and now, only moments into our acquaintance, he was already laying claim to my soul without making the slightest effort. After a whole second of hesitation I asked him:
‘Would you like to come to my place? I don’t know who you are, but I’m pretty sure tonight you mustn’t go back where you belong.’
‘I no longer belong anywhere. You are all I have.’
‘I will do all in my power to change it.’
‘You will have to work hard,’ he chuckled, evidently appreciating my cheek, and the irony.
‘Is this yours?’ I asked, looking at a laptop case on the ground.
‘Oh, yeah,’ he looked down absent-mindedly. ‘Thank you. I’d forgotten all about it. You don’t get packed for the other world without leaving everything behind.’
‘Since you’ve missed your train, you might as well pick it up where you left it.’
He took his bag and was about to climb the steps when he sighed a short ‘ah’ and looked up at the bridge. He put his bag on the ground and climbed again to reach for the railings of the bridge. I was gaping at him, not knowing what to think. His cord was still there. He untied it and jumped down.
He smiled at me, holding out his cord. I now saw that it was made of two, tied in a knot.
‘My USB cables,’ he said.
‘Ah…’ I opened my mouth.
‘From my chargers,’ he explained.
‘What phone do you have?’ I asked, making silly conversation. Puzzling rather than silly, given the circumstances, when you thought about it.
‘I have an iPhone and a Samsung.’
‘I have an iPhone, but you know, I want to sell it. I can’t transfer pictures from it to my PC.’
‘I know, they expect you to buy an Apple computer if you have an iPhone.’
‘I’ll buy a Samsung phone instead, I think,’ I said.
‘I can give you mine.’
I don’t know. Maybe I’d make an excellent psychotherapist, but by the time we reached my hotel I thought I had him. He was pliant and talkative, and it was hard to imagine he had just been through such a horrific ordeal. It had been just the right conversation, I realised.
‘Are you staying in this hotel?’ my companion asked as we were entering.
‘No, no. I work here. I’m a porter. And I also have a room here, really just a corner, no more than a roof over my head. You’ll see.’
I greeted Fabio at the reception desk, since we came through the main entrance. We used the service lift, as I usually did, because the guest lift simply didn’t go high enough, all the way up to the Venetian roofs. The loft space didn’t have particularly high ceilings and I even had to ask my guest to mind his head. My door was never locked, so I only pushed it theatrically and waved him in.