by Eugene Mirabelli

Eugene Mirabelli writes novels, short stories, journalistic pieces and book reviews. He tells us he’s an old writer, but new to science fiction. Eugene has been a Nebula Award nominee, and his fiction has been published in Czech, French, Hebrew, Russian, Sicilian, and Turkish. The author’s most recent work is the novel, The Goddess in Love with a Horse. Eugene’s lyrical first story for Asimov’s flies us to the enigmatic site of . . .

* * * *

The story of how the city of Venice was built upon the waters of the Adriatic sounds like a fantasy, a pure romance. Nonetheless, it’s true. As the Roman Empire collapsed, as Roman armies withdrew and abandoned their outposts, barbarians swarmed in from the North to loot and set fire to the cities of the Italian coast, raping and butchering anyone they caught. Those who escaped the smoking ruins were pursued to the sea, driven into the marshes, the swamps, and lagoons.

After the invaders left, the survivors waded back to the mainland to rebuild their homes, but soon fresh hordes swept down on them. Looting and slaughter happened again and again. Historians believe that Attila the Hun’s merciless invasion in 452 was what finally caused refugees to abandon any hope of returning to the mainland. Instead, they chose to build their lives afresh in the lagoons.

The first lagoon dwellers lived like sea birds on mats of woven reeds. Men with swords who pursued them sank knee deep and deeper in the ooze and drowned when the tide crept in. Meanwhile, the residents learned to navigate the devious maze of safe, shallow canals that flowed through the marsh; they learned to fish and to catch birds. They designed slender boats that could be pushed with a pole while floating in water no deeper than your ankle. They prospered and made settlements on nearby islands, some of them barely more than sandbars. In 466 a dozen of these island and sandbar villages banded together, and that’s as good a date as any for the founding of Venice.

The great seaborn city of Venice—the Venice where opulent palaces, bordellos, and jeweled churches rise from a placid sea, the Venice of murals and painted ceilings that glow in sunlight reflected from the water—that vibrant Venice of famous merchants, courtesans, poets, and painters, grew from those lagoon settlements. The Venetians sailed ever farther down the Adriatic and into the Mediterranean; they became great merchants, sea-going traders, and explorers. Indeed, one of their sons, Marco Polo, traveled the Silk Road to the Eastern end of the earth, Cathay. Another son of Venice, Casanova, bragged of his travels from boudoir to boudoir across Western Europe. Of all the states and principalities that composed Italy, none was so rich or so proud and independent as Venice.

* * * *

When I was just a kid my uncle Vincenzo took me for a ride in his open-cockpit two-seater biplane, a beautiful old-fashioned aircraft made of wood and wire and brightly painted yellow canvas. The Second World War had ended only months before and I would have preferred to be in a fighter plane—a P-40 with shark’s teeth painted on the air scoop, like the Flying Tigers—but flying risky, old-fashioned aircraft delighted my uncle. As for me, just to be aloft in a plane was wonderful.

We took off from a grassy field in Massachusetts and circled upward into a placid blue sky. Everything enchanted me that day—the miniature houses far beneath us, the clouds that turned to cool mist as we flew through them, the blue mountains on the horizon. We were headed for a sparkling white cloud, a gorgeous heap of puffy white terraces. Uncle Vincenzo steered us to an opening between two great cloud walls and then—while still in the cloud, but with no obscuring mist—we slowed and bumped gently to a landing. The engine coughed a few times, then there was silence. “Hey! We landed on a mountain!” I said.

My uncle had been a racing car driver (badly smashed nose, mangled left hand) and he did everything fast. Now he had hopped from his cockpit and come forward to me. “Let’s go,” he said, unbuckling the strap across my knees. “Presto!” he said, swinging me up from the cockpit to set me on my feet. “You can take off those goggles now,” he added.

“But I like the goggles,” I said. Wearing the leather helmet and goggles helped me pretend I was an aviator.

“Okay, keep them on. Let’s go.” He tucked a notebook inside his flight jacket, grabbed my hand with his good hand and began a quick walk.

We seemed to be on a starched tablecloth between walls made of white silk. “This isn’t a mountain,” I announced. “This isn’t a mountain at all!”

“Right, it’s not a mountain,” he said briskly. He bounded up a short stairway, pulling me along behind him.

“This is Lucia,” he told me, making a grand gesture toward a young woman with red-gold hair. “Lucia, this is my nephew, Jason.”

She extended her hand to me, saying, “Hello, Jason.”

I said hello. Her hand was nice and warm.

Lucia turned to my uncle. “I’m delighted to see you. Even two days late,” she told him. “But are you out of your mind?”

“I can explain everything,” my uncle told her.

“Yes, Vincenzo, you always do. Now, can I get you an aperitif ?—What about you, Jason? Can I get you a glass of ginger ale? You can take off those goggles, there’s no wind up here, you know. The cloud is like a sailboat.”

“This isn’t a cloud,” I informed her. “Clouds are made of fog. This is a balloon or a parachute or something.”

She looked at me and smiled and said nothing.

“He’s a bright kid,” my uncle told her cheerfully.

“He’s bright,” Lucia agreed. “And you’re out of your mind to bring him up here.”

“Where is everybody?”

Lucia shrugged and waved her hand dismissively. “Zio Domenico’s in the wheelhouse watching the dials. Everyone else has gone down. Carlo and Guido went down to work, so of course Miranda and Azzura went down with them. Antonio comes back on weekends but stays down during the week. Which is fine by me. He can have it.—They all love flatland,” she added.

“Being on the ground, you mean.”

“In the dirt, yes,” she said. “It affects their minds, you know. After a few years working down there, Antonio’s decided that everything he was taught about us is lies. All that history—just lies. The story of the propellers, the building of the new wheelhouse—not true, he says. He even claims the logbooks are fakes.”

Uncle Vincenzo took a deep breath, but didn’t say anything.

“They think I’m crazy, I think they’re crazy,” Lucia said. “So the feeling is mutual.—I’m staying here, no matter what,” she added.

“How many times have we been over this?”

“Too many.”

“You can’t manage this alone,” my uncle told her.

“You don’t think so?” Lucia seemed to be daring him to answer.

My uncle started to say something, but I guess he changed his mind. “Well,” he said.

“Let’s not talk about it,” she said.

Uncle Vincenzo reached inside his leather jacket and pulled out what I had thought was a book—a big flat square package like a notebook but much thinner. “For you,” he said, handing it to Lucia.

Lucia’s face lit up. She bit the ribbon in two—Wow! I had never seen a grownup do that!—and already she’d ripped off the wrapping. It was two records in brown paper jackets. “Bessie Smith!” Lucia cried. “And—and Ma Rainey! Where did you find this? This is wonderful!”

“It took a while,” he said, clearly pleased about something.

“Your uncle’s a nice man,” she said, turning to me. “A very nice man.”

Later, my uncle and Lucia sat together at the corner of a very long table, drinking Cinzano while I took a look at some of the pictures and the ratty old furniture. Mostly I looked out the window—my uncle wouldn’t let me go onto the balcony—at the land that spread beneath us like a pastel-colored map. Their voices were low and for the first time I became aware of a slow gentle thumping sound, rhythmic and soft, an engine of some sort, barely moving us along. I watched a tiny pickup truck on a meandering country road; the truck was moving faster than we were and gradually slipped out of sight. My uncle explained to Lucia that he had to bring me along because he was taking care of me this week. My sister had appendicitis and had been whisked off in an ambulance with my mother, and my father—rushing to the hospital—had given me into the care of Uncle Vincenzo, simply because he lived closest to our house.

“I can’t find my house from here,” I complained.

“Keep looking,” Vincenzo said. “It’s down there someplace.”

I gave up looking at the landscape and began to steal glances at the murals which showed rosy, opulent women, many of them in rumpled nightgowns that had slipped from their shoulders and down their arms. All were dining and drinking with darkly tanned men, mostly naked, though some wore grape leaves to hide their privates. The room’s ceiling, which sagged like an old tent, displayed a faded scene of angels gliding up to the clouds. Two large wedge-shaped areas had been replaced with blank white silk, or some such material. One of the women portrayed on the wall had the same red-gold hair as Lucia. Lucia was beautiful and wore sparkling bracelets that jingled whenever she moved her arm, and when she looked at me she smiled as if we shared a special secret. I had never seen anyone like her; she was fascinating.

“It’s not polite to stare, Jason,” my uncle said, interrupting my reverie. “It’s time you and I flew back to earth. Right?” And with that he threw a kiss to Lucia and pulled me off my feet as he strode to the airplane.

* * * *

Now back to the unlikely history of Venice. In 1797, Napoleon Bonaparte swept across Northern Italy at the head of a fast-moving victorious army and prepared to march on Venice. Lagoons and marshes had protected Venice for over a thousand years, but they couldn’t shield the city from Napoleon’s famous artillery. Venetian villas housed a treasure in paintings, books, gold, jewels, ornate mirrors, tapestries, and murals, but no cannon. On Friday, May 12, 1797, 537 members of the Great Council of Venice met to consider Napoleon’s ultimatum. Frankly, there was no place for the Venetians to go.

Among the handful who were prepared to vote against surrender was Giovanni Anafesto Pauli, called Nino Pauli. His proposal was simple. He began by saying, “Our ancestors took to the sea to escape barbarians and to build in water this Venice, our Venice, the most beautiful city on earth.” His speech lasted only five minutes and concluded with lines which have since become famous: Nostra volta é arrivata. Dobbiamo andare al cielo per costruire altra Venezia, una citta ancor piu bella in mezzo delle nubi. “Our time has come. We must take to the sky to build a second Venice, an even more beautiful city amid the clouds.” The proposal was listened to in melancholy silence, after which some councilors sighed and others merely looked glum. Then they voted. The Council accepted the terms of surrender by a vote of 512 to 20, with five abstentions, and thereby dissolved the glorious and independent Republic of Venice which had lasted one thousand and seventy years.

Nino Pauli was not discouraged. The Pauli family were merchants with offices throughout the Mediterranean littoral and Europe, and as part of his business Nino had kept himself informed of the latest political, social and scientific news. Years ago he had heard of the Montgolfiers and their remarkable balloon, and the Venetian merchant was one of the thousands who had journeyed to Paris to watch its ascent. On September 19, 1783, at Versailles, surrounded by 130,000 spectators, the Montgolfier brothers, simply using hot air, sent their first passengers aloft—a duck, a rooster, and a sheep—and all three landed intact two miles away. Nino Pauli had been delighted and fascinated. He lingered in Paris two more months in order to see another hot-air balloon rise from the Bois de Boulogne.

By the end of 1783 Jacques Charles and Nicolas Robert overcame the limitations of hot air and ascended in a balloon filled with hydrogen gas. Ballooning became popular throughout Europe—became a kind of craze, in fact—and by June of the following year the new entertainment, or science, or whatever it was, claimed its first fatalities. Pilatre de Rozier and Pierre Romain crashed to earth beneath a balloon which they had ridden aloft on a risky combination of hydrogen and heated air. Nino Pauli had returned to Venice early in December, 1783, bringing with him visions of a future in which the skies had become a global sea where great balloons lofted ships laden with goods for trade. Fourteen years later, when he made his speech at the final gathering of the Great Council, he had those balloons in mind.

* * * *

Vincenzo had met Lucia by accident years earlier when he briefly escaped Boston to visit Montreal. He had come from Europe to Boston because Boston was where all of us—my mother and father, my grandfather and all my uncles and aunts—lived. But he was never completely at ease here. “Boston was made by Puritans and everyone who lives here is turned into a Puritan. I’m going to Montreal,” he announced.

“This is the wrong season for Montreal,” my father told him.

“What difference does the season make? They speak French in Montreal and I’m sure they’re not Puritans. It’s a romantic city, Montreal. Even the name is romantic.”

Montreal in November turned out to be small, cold, and damp. The houses were made of gray stone, the sky was gray, and the air itself was gray. Vincenzo spent three days trudging around the city and three nights meeting the non-Puritan women who frequented Montreal’s bars and brasseries. He was walking back to his hotel in the freezing fog, so discouraged that his chin was sunk to his chest, and—wham!—a girl had come running around the corner and smacked into him.

“Pardon!” she said politely, slipping past him with a brief scent of perfume and cigarette smoke. Vincenzo unhooked her earring from his lapel, but by then she was already fading into the fog. “Your earring!” he cried in French, running after her. She was silhouetted in a lighted doorway just as he caught up to her and at the same moment the girl and the rosy illuminated room behind her lifted up into the mist. And so did Vincenzo, who had lunged in behind her.

“I’m sure this is yours,” he said, holding out the earring. It looked like a miniature chandelier made of pearls. The girl glanced around in panic—she was seventeen, maybe nineteen, Vincenzo couldn’t tell—then she whirled around, flung open a door and dashed into the next room. Vincenzo took after her, but stumbled to a halt as two rows of startled faces stared at him from the sides of a long table. The men and women had begun to get to their feet, but slowly and with care because (Vincenzo took it in now) they were so old, most of them.

“Excuse me,” Vincenzo announced. “All I wanted to do was—”

The stooped elder at the head of the table had sheltered the girl behind him, and now was pointing an antique pistol at Vincenzo.

“What’s that?” Vincenzo said. He laughed. “Please, sir, put that thing away before it explodes and blows off your hand.”

“This is crazy,” one of the younger men said in Italian. “This is exactly why we have to quit this insanity, this, this—” He waved his hand in the air.

“This farce,” an elderly woman murmured in Italian, finishing his sentence. “That one’s clearly a gentleman,” she said, referring to Vincenzo. “Too bad about his crooked nose,” she added.

“I apologize for interrupting your—” Vincenzo hesitated as he looked around. Some of the women were dressed all right but others were clothed in what looked to be museum pieces, and the same was true of the men. “I apologize for interrupting your costume party,” Vincenzo concluded. “Sorry.” He smiled.

The room swayed ever so slightly, then settled firmly in place. “Go!” the old man croaked, his hand trembling as he kept the antique firearm on Vincenzo.

“I take it we’re back on solid ground,” Vincenzo said. He tossed the earring to the girl, who snatched it out of the air, then he stepped out to Montreal and walked the deserted streets to his hotel, half singing and half humming an aria from Gianni Schicchi. He was happier than he’d been all year, simply because he’d seen such a pretty girl.

When he arrived back in Boston, Vincenzo, who loved to tell stories about his adventures, entertained my father and mother with the tale of Montreal. “And the next morning I went back there and walked up and down the street five times,” he said. “But the girl never appeared. All I have is the memory of the French cigarette smoke in her hair. And the street—well, by day you could see the street ended in a trail of broken asphalt and stones just at the place where the lighted doorway had been.”

“You still think Montreal is a romantic city?” my father asked.

Vincenzo laughed. “As you said, it was the wrong season.”

“I think it’s a romantic story,” my mother said. “A girl who lives in a dirigible.”

“I suspect it was just a big gondola attached to a balloon,” Vincenzo told her. “I think they were a circus troop. You should have seen the way they were dressed—very odd, rather gaudy, exaggerated.”

“Maybe they were gypsies,” my mother suggested.

“Or pickpockets from some fly-by-night carnival,” my father murmured.

* * * *

Between 1797 and 1814 Venice was controlled first by Napoleon, then by Austria, then again by Napoleon, and once more by Austria. None of this made any difference to Nino Pauli, who continued to experiment with different designs for a framework of balloons and suspended chambers. What we know about the structures Pauli built, or attempted to build, comes from three account books in which he recorded the purchases he made to advance his plan.

The old ledgers were discovered during cleanup work after a flood. In recent years Venice has had several episodes of “aqua alta,” or high water, when tides and winds have pushed the Adriatic into the squares and piazzas of the city. The floods of 1966 were particularly destructive, and a group of graduate students from Ca’ Foscari University helped to drain and clean the flooded dwellings, during which they came upon Pauli’s waterlogged ledgers.

The books were dried and eventually identified as belonging to the merchant Giovanni Anafesto Pauli whose business and family line had petered out late in the nineteenth century. They contained lists of different woods, cloths, various tars and paints, and so forth—the amount of each, the cost, and the date when purchased—and an occasional page of geometric doodles. In other words, they appeared to have little or no historical value.

Nonetheless, one of the graduate students who had found the books, Salvatore Bruni, was drawn back to the accounts again and again, intrigued by the large quantities of silk and by the curious varieties of wood, some from as far away as Indonesia, that Pauli had acquired, for it appeared that the merchant had never re-sold the material. Young Bruni saw what none of the investigators from Ca’ Foscari University had even guessed at—Nino Pauli had amassed the materials “to build a second Venice, an even more beautiful city amid the clouds.” Furthermore, it became clear to Bruni that what had been regarded as meaningless geometrical doodles on some of the ledger pages were actually airship designs, not complete designs but sketches of what might later be elaborated and engineered to a final structure.

According to a recent monograph (S. Bruni, 2001. Evoluzione degli desegni strutturale per dirigibile di Giovanni Anafesto Pauli. [Evolution of the designs for airship structures of Giovanni Anafesto Pauli. ] Serie di Storia Venezia Pub. 7 Universita Ca’ Foscari di Venezia), Nino Pauli’s early plans consisted of a balloon or set of balloons from which was suspended a rectangular construction fabricated of light wood, wickerwork, and cloth. Later designs incorporated balloons of different sizes gathered inside huge white silken bags (“sacchi di seta”) in order to more closely resemble clouds, and the final designs employed great swaths of white gauze to camouflage the structure, the “villa,” which housed the living quarters.

* * * *

A few days after that first airplane ride, my uncle drove us again to the grassy airfield, speeding all the way, as if in a race against an invisible competitor, but when we arrived we could do nothing more than stand inside the old hangar and look out glumly at the rain which had begun to fall. “We can’t go up in this soup,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. He stood with his arms folded across his chest, he paced back and forth, he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, he sighed, and always he watched the gray drizzle. At length he said, “We’re stuck, Jason. We’ll have to do it tomorrow.” He muttered a few swear words in Italian, went off to speak to one of the mechanics, then we sped back through the rain.

“Why didn’t you ever get married?” I asked.

He laughed. “What a question! I don’t know why I never got married. It just never happened.”

We drove for a while in silence, just the rumble of the motor and the beat of the windshield wipers.

“Lucia is a nice person,” I announced.

“Yes, she’s that,” he said agreeably. “And she has a remarkable singing voice, too.”

“Why don’t you marry her?”

He glanced at me, then turned back to the road. “You ask all sorts of questions, you do. I’m too old, Jason. And she’s young. Young women like young men, especially young men who have two good hands and don’t have a big crooked nose in the middle of their face.”

I felt momentarily sorry for Uncle Vincenzo. He had trained as a meteorologist in Italy, but had earned his living as a fencing master, then an Alpine mountain guide and downhill skier, and later as a race car driver for a French automobile company. Photos showed he had been handsome until another racing car smashed into him. Shortly before immigrating to the States he had learned to fly, and flying had been his love ever since. When World War II broke out he volunteered for the US Army Air Force, as it was called back then, and he was accepted, not as a fighter pilot, but as a meteorologist, forecasting weather for the Northeastern seaboard.

“Anyway, you’ve had adventures,” I told him. “That’s important. Women like that, I think.”

He smiled and said, “If you grow up fast enough maybe you can catch her.”

The next day was gray with sprinkles of rain and the day after it rained even more. It was a classic northeaster, my uncle said, and he went on to explain why New England weather was the way it was. Next morning the air was crisp, the sky blue and cloudless, just as my uncle had predicted. The meadow was soggy from all the rain and the ground seemed to cling to our wheels, letting go just before we reached the scrub brush at the edge of the field. We skimmed over the tree tops, sailed up and up, then leveled into a straight flight toward the faded hills and low mountains on the horizon. Eventually we passed over the hills and approached the gently rounded blue mountains. We went up one lonely valley and then another and another and at last I spied the solitary cloud lingering against a green mountain wall. We flew over the cloud, then turned in a wide arc and came back to glide slower and slower, following the slope of the falling land and, at the last moment, slipping into the cloud and a bumpy halt.

Uncle Vincenzo unbuckled me from my cockpit and hurried me along the white hallway to the room where we had visited Lucia, but she wasn’t there. He strode into the next room, pulling me along with his good hand while cursing softly to himself, then boosted me onto something like a stepladder, shoving me up through an open hatch and, hauling himself up, hustled me down another white hallway and into a room with windows on three sides, and there was Lucia with her hand on the ship’s wheel, a wheel so big it came up to her chest. “I heard you come on board,” she said, rising from a big wicker chair that was bolted to the floor. “Sorry I couldn’t greet you.”

“Where is everybody?” Vincenzo’s voice was tense.

“They’ve gone,” she said simply, as if it were a matter of indifference to her. “Gone forever. They’re somewhere in flatland. And they’ve got all the certificates and documents to prove they’ve always been down there.”

Lucia was as beautiful as a princess in a fairy tale and I wanted to keep looking at her, but at the same time I was enchanted by the multitude of dazzling gauges and dials, some as big around as a schoolroom clock, and all ringed with gleaming brass.

“You’re a reckless fool,” Uncle Vincenzo told her.

“Blame it on the company I keep.” She laughed, but it was a short laugh. “I’ve spent too much time with you.”

“Be serious, Lucia! You can’t control this thing by yourself. No one can do it alone. And the ridiculous windmills you call propellers are falling apart. You’ll get yourself killed in this thing.”

“This thing, as you call it, is the last hectare of the independent republic of Venice. I was born here. It’s my home. It’s where I want to be.”

“You want to be here? You want to be in this wrinkled balloon, hugging the side of some god-forsaken valley until a breeze blows the contraption to pieces? Is that what you want?”

“Not at all. I plan to take it up to where it belongs.”

“Oh? And where, oh where, might that be?”

“Four thousand meters. And don’t bore me with stories about radar. It’s all Antonio could talk about.”

“Radar is going to be everywhere. You can stay in these valleys and get swatted against a mountain like a fly, or you can go up to four thousand meters and be seen on radar.”

“That’s more than thirteen thousand feet,” I announced.

They looked at me as if I had materialized out of thin air.

“Four thousand meters, that’s more than thirteen thousand feet,” I repeated. “I can convert meters to feet.”

“This pack of balloons will be torn apart at thirteen thousand feet,” Vincenzo said, turning back to Lucia.

They went on arguing. I counted fifteen dials and one clock, a big mariner’s compass (with a winged lion in the middle and fancy curlicues painted around the letters N, E, S, W), five pressure gauges, three temperature gauges, and—overhead—two curved brass things that looked like sextants with pendulums. In the middle of the room there was a table with a big map under a thick sheet of glass; it showed New England and part of New York, and when you looked closely you could read little notes in tiny handwriting all up and down the Connecticut River and the Hudson River, and even along part of the St. Lawrence. I sat in one of the big wicker chairs. I don’t know how much time passed, but it passed slowly.

“What’s this?” I asked them. I had just then found a brass funnel attached to a hose.

“That’s a speaking tube,” my uncle said. “Lucia can use it to give orders to a non-existent crew.”

Lucia turned to me and said, “Your old uncle is a cruel man. He’s never believed me, he’s only pretended.”

“I believe you’ll die if you stay here.”

“You’ve never seen this villa high among the cumulus, drifting with the clouds,” she said. “You’ve never seen this the way it was, the outside dazzling white with pale blue shadows in the silk, the rooms inside like jewel boxes, all floating. You don’t know what it was like when I was a little girl and saw the city all together—oh, yes, it was only splendid remnants, but all those clouds drifting together, sometimes so close we could carry on conversations from one ship to another, some of them with grand terraces and ramparts and cloud towers, all white, all floating. You don’t know what it’s like to be free. You just don’t know.”

For a long moment my uncle didn’t say anything. “I know you’re in some Jules Verne dream and I can’t wake you up,”he told her. “Come on, Jason. It’s time for us to go.” And that’s what we did.

* * * *

By the end of the week my sister was recovering so well from her appendectomy that my parents came to Vincenzo’s and collected me and my dirty clothes. On the drive home I told them how Uncle Vincenzo had taken me up in his airplane twice and both times we had visited Lucia who lived in a cloud. My parents, side by side in the front seat of the automobile, remained silent for a long moment after I had finished my story, so I knew there was something wrong. “He took you up in that yellow box kite?” my father asked. I said yes. “Good God!” he muttered. Then he sighed and added, “At least you’re here in one piece.”

“I don’t remember any Lucia,” my mother said.

“Vincenzo doesn’t report everything in his love life. It only seems that way,” my father told her. “The important thing is we have Jason back.”

“The cloud wasn’t really a cloud,” I explained. “It’s really made of balloons.”

“It’s really just a foggy field in the Berkshires,” my father informed me. “He’s flown there before.”

“I don’t think he should introduce Jason to his women,” my mother said.

“No, Dad, it wasn’t a field. It was like a sailing ship. I was in the control room.”

“Especially the kind of women he doesn’t tell us about,” she added.

I learned that talking about those flights made my mother and father angry at my uncle, so I stopped. Besides, the whole story was too fantastic to be believed and I had other things to keep me busy.

* * * *

The three account books preserved at Ca’ Foscari University extend the story of Giovanni Anafesto Pauli’s proposal “to build a second Venice, an even more beautiful city amid the clouds.” The ledger pages demonstrate, as well as any document can, that Nino Pauli actually constructed lighter-than-air vessels, the airborne villas of legend. According to the so-called Montreal affidavit, sworn to by Santalucia Dolfino, Pauli designed and tested lighter-than-air ships starting in 1797. In 1810, seventeen “cloud-ships” bearing a total of six hundred souls gathered over the Adriatic and—like the men in the year 466 on those shallow islands off the Italian coast—they declared themselves the Republic of Venice. The airborne Republic was presided over by Nino Pauli until his death in 1837; he was succeeded by his nephew, Cosimo Grimani, who retired from leadership in 1879 and was followed first by Alessandro Dolfino and later by Cosimo Dolfino. The community dwindled over the years; there were few births and many people simply left. Cosimo died in 1940, at which time the vessels had become scattered and, in fact, most of the Venetians had abandoned the drifting and increasingly decrepit Republic and had slipped quietly into other communities on solid ground.

Unfortunately, beyond these meager documents there is little but speculation and myth. Legends have Pauli building only five balloon-borne ships or maybe a hundred. A flaming cloud-ship is said to have fallen like a meteor into the waters off the Dalmatian cost, drowning everyone on board, and another is supposed to have crashed in the Italian Alps, burying a treasure of art and gold under falling snow. The most frivolous fable has a cloud-villa coming to rest in Paris where it’s somehow transformed into a maisonclose, an elegant brothel, complete with nude paintings by Titian, as well as the big mirrors and exquisite baubles produced by the Venetian glassworks at Murano.

Of course, there are the two artifacts collected by my Uncle Vincenzo—an old painting, and a seaman’s brass telescope, or spyglass. Vincenzo found these pieces of evidence, if that’s what they are, after Lucia disappeared.

About three years after we left the cloud-villa for the last time, my uncle made an automobile trip up along the Connecticut River. He was working as a weather forecaster for a radio station and he was convinced the Venetian airship had been torn apart in a storm. He believed Lucia had continued the usual flight pattern—northward up the Hudson River, then east along the Saint Lawrence, southward down the Connecticut River and west to the Hudson again. Sometimes the ship had gone around the other way, but no matter which way Lucia had gone my uncle was certain that sooner or later high winds would have smashed her against the mountains that frame those rivers.

Powerful love can turn a man’s life into a desperate romantic fantasy, especially an adventurous man. Vincenzo filled his silver hip flask with brandy and set off in the crazy hope he’d find his Lucia walking down the street in some little town on the Connecticut or, he said in his saner moments, at least he’d find evidence showing where the balloon had crashed. He didn’t find anything along the Connecticut. So he drove across Vermont to the Hudson, parked in Burlington for lunch and, as he got out of his car, he saw the spyglass shining like gold in the window of an antique shop. The shop owner said she had bought the telescope about a year ago from a man who had ridden off on a motorcycle.

It’s a simple brass telescope without an inscription or mark of any kind to show it was used in the Venetian airship. The tube has a few dents here and there, but most important to Vincenzo was the eyepiece. The original eyepiece of the telescope he had used on the airship had been damaged in the nineteenth century and a new eyepiece had replaced it. On the spyglass he brought back from the antique shop, he was able to point to little mismatches between the eyepiece and the telescope tube. Those minor imperfections were enough to convince my uncle that the spyglass had come from the airship which, he was now certain, had been ripped to shreds by winds somewhere along the Hudson.

The next summer Vincenzo made a desperate trip up the Hudson, scouring every antique shop along the way. He didn’t find anything from the airship and he ended up at the source of the Hudson, a little lake called Tear of the Clouds, where he wept and drank the last of his brandy. The next day he drove north along Lake Champlain, following as closely as he could the route Lucia’s airship used to take. Before getting to the Saint Lawrence he stopped at a tavern in Plattsburgh to refill his hip flask and saw above the bar a darkish banner, a painting of a bearded man with grape leaves in his hair, stretching out his arm to offer a crystal goblet of wine to a receptive woman with dusky rose breasts. Vincenzo was sure he had seen that painting aboard the Venetian villa.

The owner said the banner had been hanging over the bar when he bought the tavern six months ago from the previous owner’s daughter; she had flown in from California to sell the place soon after her father died. Vincenzo drove back to Boston with the seven-foot-long painting draped over the front passenger seat and into the back of the car. According to a conservator at the Worcester museum, the paint and cloth suggested that it survived from the late eighteenth century; the torn edges indicated that the painting had been scissored from a larger work. The cloth was silk, a rarity. The figures may have been copied, the conservator suggested, from a Giorgione or Titian or Bellini or, more likely, from one of their inferior imitators. Vincenzo was convinced that the airship had been torn apart by winds over Plattsburgh and the pieces had gone down, most of them, in the deep waters of Lake Champlain.

* * * *

In fact, the airship went down over Lake Champlain, not at Plattsburgh, New York, but on the other side, close by Burlington, Vermont. And it didn’t get torn apart. It was a calm night in late March with a soft wet heavy snowfall, so soft that Lucia didn’t wake up until the ship was collapsing with great groans onto the jumbled jigsaw of ice on Champlain. It was the drifting ice that did it—ground everything to bits—and by morning there wasn’t a stick or a shred of cloth left to see.

A year after finding the painting in the tavern, Vincenzo drove back to Plattsburgh and followed Lake Champlain into Canada. Champlain flows north and empties into the Richelieu River, which continues northward to join the St. Lawrence below Montreal. Lucia was singing at the Blue Angel, a cramped and smoky downstairs blues club in Montreal, and that’s where he found her. He stumbled against a chair at one of the small tables at the back of the room and sat down to watch Lucia sing, hoping that his thumping old heart would not explode in his chest. When she finished the set he abruptly stood up, accidently knocking over the table. Lucia looked at him. She quickly shook off what she saw as a trick of her eyes, but then she began to walk slowly toward him just to make sure. She saw it was her Vincenzo, broken nose and all, but at the same time she didn’t believe it.

“What are you doing here?” she whispered, much as she might question a ghost.

“I came looking for you,” he said. “What are you doing here, underground?”

“I belong here.”

“No,” he said. “You belong in the sky. And I can make that happen.”

She half smiled. “Ah, Vincenzo, who’s the dreamer now?”

“Come on,” he said. He was already heading for the door as he threw his arm around her. “Let’s get out of here.”

They did get out of there. They left the Blue Angel, ducked into his car and drove from Montreal south out of Canada through the night, not stopping until they reached St. Albans, Vermont.

Vincenzo and Lucia lived happily—not forever after, it’s true, but for a good long time. They had a house on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain, a rural area, where Vincenzo built her a balloon airship they called The Winged Lion, an emblem of Venice. The craft was a single airy room, surrounded and supported by puffy white silk clouds.

Lucia survived Vincenzo by some fifteen years. She was never able to say for sure whether the old brass spyglass that he had found in an antique shop came from her airship. But she was certain the seven-foot-long scrap of painted silk had been torn from the ceiling of one of the larger rooms. Furthermore, she insisted that the painting was by Titian. “Who else could have painted it?” she’d say, as if daring anyone to dispute her. “He was the greatest of all the Venetian painters. Of course it’s by Titian.”

And if I dared to say, “Titian died in 1576. The experts say the cloth it’s painted on was woven around 1750 at the earliest.”

She’d reply, “Clearly the experts are wrong!” Then she’d laugh and open her arms, all her bracelets jingling. “Now, who are you going to believe? Me or the experts who don’t know a Titian when they see it? You’ve got to have faith.—Now cast off the hawser and we’ll go up. Vincenzo always loved going up at this time of day.”

So I’d unhook the hawser or tether and we’d float up into the twilight sky, dark blue to the east, pale blue overhead, and red gold to the west. “Your uncle was a great man,” she’d say. Then we’d drift over the darkling expanse of the lake, its margin defined by the twinkling of hundreds and hundreds of house lights on the shore, while she told me about her escapades with Vincenzo or about the great fleet of air castles riding high and white in the sky when she was a girl.