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From the confidential journals of Aziraphale, volume 578
15th February 1752
Dear Diary,
Obviously, she was not who I’d been looking for. After hours of searching the perfumed streets, sulphur and sweetness rising up above the general miasmatic brine of the canals, surely, I thought, my senses must deceive me, deftly weaving the purity of her scent in amongst the choking fragrance of the city. But there was no mistaking the flash of yellow in the crowd of black and white masks, like gold leaf applied blindingly bright in the early evening composition of charcoal chiaroscuro.
I pushed through the horde, risking several generous splashes of brown and clear liquor to my shoes to do so. She had her head tipped back, the lip of a fat bottle of grappa — a grape and cherry punch of sorts — pressed to her red smile, and so she did not see me coming until I had wound through the colonnade and come up close to seethe sotto voce into her ear. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
Crowley choked a little in surprise, and wiped the excess from her chin with a sloppy, loose brush of her thin hand. “Hel-lo there,” she exclaimed delightedly, which I took to mean she was a touch drunk already. “Pardon me, mysterious stranger, but do I know you?”
“You know very well who I am,” I snapped.
“It’s a masquerade,” she needlessly reminded me, gesturing expansively towards the throng of revellers in the piazza. “Nobody knows who anybody is. You can’t even see my face. Perhaps you’re mistaking me for some other wildly attractive, roguish and charming demon that you know.”
“I’d know you with a bag over your head,” I stated tartly, “and I might prefer you that way. Now would you kindly explain to me what in the blazes it is you’re doing here?”
“What kind of bag?” she asked, cheeks ruddy where they peeked beneath the black silk of her colombina. Honestly, she is useless when she’s been drinking.
“The entire point of the arrangement was so that only one of us would have to go on these assignments,” I pressed on. “You’re meant to be back in London right now, not floating alongside in some gondola monitoring as though I need your supervision!”
“I’m not on assignment,” she clarified, punctuating this with another swig of grappa. “I’m here to get pissed. Love a good party, I do.”
It was certainly that. Around us, carnival-goers of all genders, ranks, and social standings were indulging with communal abandon from behind the safety of their masks. Artists toasted tax-collectors; ladies of high-breeding hiked their skirts to straddle the laps of chambermaids. It was a sort of egalitarian bacchanal. In short, exactly the sort of place a demon might while away their weekend.
And here I was, in the thick of it — not opposed, per se, to the notion of a good time! In fact, when the day had started, and carnival officially commenced with the procession of papier-mache floats along the grand canal, I’d had half a mind to join the merry-making once my work was done. But that had been hours ago now, and since then I’d been groped and jostled, spilled upon and whistled at, on top of which, despite my best efforts, half of my duties still had yet to be accomplished. By late afternoon, I’d rather lost my appetite for having fun.
“Enjoy yourself,” I offered in a clipped tone, already turning away. “I’m sure you will. I’ve no doubt you’ll find all manner of diversions to amuse yourself while I fulfil my God-given obligations. Ta ta.”
“Wait.” Quickly, she clasped her bony fingers around my elbow as though she had the strength to stop me. “Let me help. The sooner you’re done, the sooner we can both enjoy ourselves.”
“The temptation’s already accomplished,” I sniffed, pulling my arm away and making my way towards the campanile. I didn’t have to turn back to know that she would follow. “There isn’t anything for you to do.”
Not that there had been much for me to do either. The temptation had been accomplished by no work at all, except to spend an hour searching for the clergyman I was meant to be luring away from the cloth, only to find him passed out drunk in the doorway of the butcher’s and with a tremendously smug grin on his face, lips stretched broad and smeared with evidence of nearly half a dozen shades of lipstick.
“Could help you with the blessing,” Crowley offered, trotting to keep up.
“No,” I said, my voice tight. “I can handle it.”
She matched my hurried pace, her long, dark, taffeta skirt swishing in time with the wine-stained cream silk of my own. “Nearly didn’t recognize you,” she remarked, ever so casually. “Not the mask — just, you know. The rest of you. Don’t think I’ve seen you like this since we went to that party on Lesbos.”
“Yes, well.” I flushed with embarrassment and was glad my bauta covered the incriminating rosiness rising in my cheeks. “This sort of corporation suits some of us better than others.”
Crowley mumbled something unintelligible, then shoved the bottle between her lips as though stoppering the thought.
“What was that?”
“Nothing, nothing,” she assured me, then finished off the bottle and refilled it with a snap.
Diary, I can admit to you — it would be false to say I never assume this form. You know, for example, that on occasion I will manifest a bosom while I lay in bed reading, should I need a convenient place to balance my biscuits. Outside of the home, though, I find myself ill-suited to femininity. It was a delusion that had overtaken me on this occasion, and I knew — it wasn’t Crowley’s fault I was so short-tempered with her today. It was only my mortification at having been caught in a moment of misguided confidence which would surely come crashing down around me expeditiously, and now in front of an audience.
The blessing I was meant to be completing was the entire reason I had snatched up this assignment. Oh, I’d pitched a fit and told Crowley that he owed me one — more than one, in fact, one or two plus dinner on top. As it so often is, though, my protestation was a guise for eagerness. This mission was a totally different type of blessing to any I’d been tasked with before, the sort of thing which seemed intoxicatingly romantic and exciting to my mind. There was a gifted artist in Venice, Heaven had informed me, a Mr. Pagliacci, and he had lost his motivation entirely; it was to be my task to bless him with a holy helping of inspiration.
I am a lover of the arts, of course. And without knowing whether Pagliacci was a painter or a sculptor or a poet, still, a plan began to form in my mind. What did all great artists have in common, I pondered, flipping through sonnets and songs, considering frescos and oil-rendered odalisques. Then, somewhere between Dante’s Beatrice and Rembrandt’s Hendrickje, it hit me: every great artist must have a muse. And so it was that I had come to Venice with a plan. I had filled out the curves which rested above my fluttering heart, and pinned my long white curls up in a way I thought, while amateur, was perhaps still becoming, in its own sort of way. Pagliacci needed a creative spark, and I thought my beauty might serve to strike the match.
Ha. Ha! Next to Crowley, well — let us simply say that the only sort of art I’d be inspiring was a French panto, because my whole plan now seemed a crude joke. I looked a mockery of beauty, my fleshy décolletage spilling over a comically tight bodice and my rouge applied haphazardly, garish like a clown. Crowley, on the other hand, had never needed to resort to such measures. She needn’t overcompensate with the crass voluptuousness that my corporation naturally gravitated towards; as man or woman, neither or both, Crowley’s lithe form exuded grace and sensuality with ease. In this presentation especially, that infernal twitch of her hips seemed to make sense, to accentuate a coy knowingness and confidence that I could never possess, no matter what alterations I made to my appearance. Her mask was well-suited — the role of the colombina, in comedia dell’arte, requires a player who is at once saucy, sweet, and shrewd. Crowley is all that and more.
Precisely the reason I needed her gone. Not that I resented her on any given Tuesday, but for once — for once, I will admit! I thought it might be nice to be the one who was admired! In every time and every place our paths have crossed, Crowley has been desirable. (Not desirable to me, obviously — I don’t desire Crowley, that would be ridiculous. I mean this, you understand, in an objective and strictly platonic way.) She has been painted, sculpted, etched, sketched, sung about, put to verse, and even inspired a particularly moving routine of rhythmic gymnastics. Only once have I been painted, and the likeness was unflattering. This, finally, was my opportunity, and it would not do to have Crowley draw the attention I’d sought for myself, something I knew she’d do even without trying.
“I said I think you look nice,” Crowley finally grunted, perhaps to break the tense silence which had enveloped us within the raucous crowd. That was not what she had said, I was sure of it, yet she seemed sincere. “Like those piles of profiteroles you like. Whatsit.”
“Croquembouche.”
“That’s the one,” she nodded. “You’re all cream puffs and spun sugar.”
“Flattering,” I said dryly. If this was the most panegyric metaphor I was capable of inspiring, this Pagliacci would do better to start painting pictures of horses.
“Pardon me — you there, young fellows!” I produced a handkerchief and waved it as I had seen other women do when seeking the attention of a gentleman. A group of posh or posh-adjacent men up on a balcony at once took notice of me. “Ah, yes, hello! I don’t suppose you’ve seen an artist — dreadfully despondent fellow, from what I understand, and in need of some—”
Like foetid hail or reeking, vengeful thunderbolts from metaphoric gods, large white stones came raining down upon me, crashing to my feet and against my very person, splitting wide as they landed to emit sickly-sweetness from their wicked bowels.
“I say!” I cried, indignant. “Is that any way to treat your fellow man? Er — your fellow woman, I mean? You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!”
“Lookit that Horatio!” shouted one of the men gleefully; he wore a Zanni mask, and the cheeks which peeked out from beneath bore the pock-marks of an adolescence several decades past. “You’ve got one right between her tits!”
Indeed, as if it wasn’t humiliating enough merely to have been pelted and pummelled by the perfumed projectiles, I looked down towards my chest to find that he was right. The dozen other missiles — they were eggs, I realised now, which had been drained of yolk and phlegmy white and refilled with a fragrant floral water — had shattered easily on impact with the ground. All but for one, which, granted sanctuary in the plush valley of my bosom, sat cradled, safe and intact.
“Oi, you fuckers!” Crowley’s ears were vaguely steaming, and a bit of neglected yolk clinging to an errant curl threatened to fry up most unappetisingly. “You watch the way you talk to my friend! I’ll skin your scrotum with a fingernail faster than you can call out for your mummy and I’ll batter up the innards to serve for Sunday dinner!”
She would do all that and worse, I knew, but they dismissed her wrath with only the most cursory of sniggers. “Pass us the basket, Carlo,” Horatio instructed, winding up a pitch with his aim fixed on me. “Double points if I can land another bird in the nest.”
“Better yet,” crowed a third of their group, “see if you can bounce it off the paving stones and lodge it in her clunge!”
It is a good thing I am stronger than Crowley even with our bodies in these forms, or else it may have proved difficult to pull her away; already she was scaling up the side of the palazzo, hissing and spitting and snarling curses I dare not reprint here.
But I was on a mission, and the idle party games of lusty boors could not distract me. “Keep up, Crowley, if you’re coming.”
She tripped a bit and steadied herself, insofar as Crowley ever stood straight, least of all at this level of burgeoning intoxication, and scurried after me. “Who are we looking for?” she asked, brushing eggshell from the crimson ruffles of her topmost skirt. “How can I help?”
“You can’t,” I said. “You’re welcome to go back to St. Mark’s Square, if you’re bored. Back to London, in fact.”
Her tongue was tangling over some retort (it always was) when we passed a flower seller offering festive sparklers for only a penny each. I pulled up short and proffered a coin, but waved away the sparkler.
“I only wondered if you might help me locate someone. I’m looking for a one ‘Pagliacci’ — I’m told he resides in this area?”
“Si, pagliaccio,” she replied, gesturing with a sparkler more emphatically than I thought was wise. “He is there. There, yes, you go.”
It was possible she had mistaken me honestly; more likely, she had no honest answer to my question, but fabricated one to ensure I would not request a refund of my coin. In either case, the man she pointed out was certainly no tortured genius. He was a humble player, the circussy comic type often hired for such events, and he sat where she had indicated. Slouching on the low wall of a fountain in the small square, mask pushed up like a headband, smoking a rolled cigarette like a weary worker five minutes past the end of his lunch break.
“Excuse me, I do hate to be a bother…” There was nothing for it but to keep looking, was there? And though this performer was not my quarry, perhaps he could help me find the man who was. “I don’t suppose you know any Pagliacci?”
“Si,” he mumbled ‘round his cigarette, not bothering to look up. “Io sono.”
I glanced back to Crowley, who shrugged and shook her head. Some help she was. I turned back to the man. “I think you’ve misunderstood me. I’m sure I’ve not explained myself — the man I’m looking for, he’s supposed to be quite a renowned artist. Pahg-lee-ah-chee,” I pronounced. “I believe I’m saying that correctly.”
“Si,” he repeated, nodding with a heavy head. “Sono un pagliaccio.”
“Oh dear,” I said. Oh fuck, was more like it.
“A pagliacci,” repeated Crowley slowly, dazed with dawning delight, clutching at her side as though anticipating a stitch which might soon appear from laughter. “He’s — your artist, angel. He’s a clown.”
“Yes, I’ve gathered that,” I snapped. As if it wasn’t bad enough that all my silly fantasies had come crashing down around me now like ovi odoriferi, I had to suffer the indignities while Crowley bore witness.
The only thing for it was to scuttle off with hat in hand, and pray that perhaps some intercontinental skirmish or mucocutaneous plague broke out soon so as to totally eclipse the memory of my gaffe. My talents as a muse — or, rather, the talents I had hoped to discover within myself — were wasted here.
“Well, yes, thank you for your time.” I smiled apologetically and hooked my elbow under Crowley’s, towing her away. “We really must be going now. I’m sure you’re busy too, with the festival and whatnot—”
“I am a clown,” the man before us sighed, and flicked his cigarette butt towards the fountain’s spigot, “and I am a failure.” Presently, he began to cry.
His tears fell in fat globules, sorrowful shining orbs which reminded me of something I don’t often forget, and somehow had: I am an angel. I am an emissary of the Lord, an enactor of the great, ineffable plan, and a warden to mankind. My responsibility is not to myself or to my pride. I am the sturdy stick a shepherd uses to tend his flock. I am a tool to do good. There was a man before me beaten down and broken, an artist who had lost his inspiration, and by God’s will, I would be his muse.
“There, there. It can’t be as bad as all that,” I cooed, alighting on the fountain’s ledge beside him. “Why don’t you start from the beginning and tell me everything.”
“Satan’s sake, I’ll need a refill,” Crowley muttered, and I shot daggers to the side as she dipped her empty bottle beneath the water fountain’s spigot and brought it up renewed with wine.
The clown, who had been slumped under the heavy burden of his melancholy, straightened slightly, and I was able to get a better look at him. The ruff of his collar was ale-stained and askew, and the greasepaint which had been carefully applied to his visage that morn was now a grotesque abstraction, black rivulets smeared down white cheeks, tears which had soaked his face like acid rain against a bright sky. From his sleeve, he produced a handkerchief (and another, and another, and another, all knotted together and brightly coloured). He blew his nose into an orange one and then the clown began his tale.
“My name is Paolo,” he said gravely. “Paolo the pagliaccio. Years ago, I was born in a small town in Emilia-Romagna, poor and dirty.”
“You were born dirty?” Crowley asked unhelpfully.
“Filthy,” Paolo nodded. “My mother, she was unwed, and she delivered me in a sty. The local farmers raised me as a baby piggie until I was four years old.”
“That can’t possibly be true,” whispered Crowley, and I shushed her.
“And then, one day, a storm came. I was out in the yard, snuffling in the muck with all the other piggies, and suddenly a rain came down and washed me clean. Imagine my surprise to find myself a little boy, without a tail or hoof or snout in sight! After the farmers found me out, they sent me off into the woods. I ran away, more like. You see, it was a parma farma, and I knew I had to save my rump before I wound up on the butcher’s block. The woods weren’t so bad. For the next years, I was raised by wolves — oh, this is common down in Roma, of course, but never in Emilia-Romagna. Still, it wasn’t the end of the world — nothing ever was, back then. I was a happy child.”
“Perhaps we should skip further ahead,” I suggested. “Tell me when the trouble started.”
“Si, si.” Paolo sighed, and gazed off to the past. “One winter’s morning, I was separated from my pack. The other pups had engaged in a game of hide and seek, but alas — I always was a clever hider. Too clever. They never found me, and I wandered, cold and frightened, half freezing off my poor salami. And then I came upon a beautiful stone palace with a tower and a big bell on it. There were other animals there, all of them alike and walking on their hind legs — panda bears, I thought, judging on their colouring. But no! These weren’t animals at all. They were nuns.”
“Lovely bunch,” Crowley slurred. “Love the lovely nuns!” I elbowed her to shut up.
“They took me in and raised me, and in their care I learned to love God and to love laughter. You see, this was no ordinary abbey. It was a clown convent. Here, the sisters were taught to spread the good news of the gospel through joy and japery, and to bring holy mirth wherever their service should take them.”
“Lovely, lovely, lovely nuns,” Crowley sighed, and I trod on her foot.
“In their care, under their tutelage, I grew from a feral boy who spoke in oinks and howls into a man. Not only a man, but one who’d found his calling. I had become a skilled clown — not a basic buffoon, but a true artist devoted to my craft. No clown could bandy about like I could, contort his face like me, stand on his head for longer times or pelt himself with water balloons while riding a unicycle backwards and singing Rigoletto like me. And yet, just as my time there was salvation, it was damnation. I had come to love two things in life: I loved comedy, and I loved nuns.”
“Lovely, lovely nuns!” Crowley howled, and I snatched her bottle from her and threatened to smash it on the pavement if she didn’t shut herself up promptly.
“It’s hell to love a nun,” Paolo confided. “Do you know what it’s like to want someone — to really pine and ache and lust and burn and yearn for someone right beside you? And to never act upon it? To know that if you should give into that temptation, should take them into your arms — it doesn’t seem so sinful, does it, to hold the one you love and feel their heart beat next to yours — to know that if you should ever tell them how you feel, even if you’re nearly certain that they feel the same, that this very admission would be an affront to the Lord? Their body, heart and soul has been prepared for another purpose, as has yours, and this love that keeps you up at night and feels as though it’s larger than anything you’ve ever felt before, always it will be dwarfed by the will of God? Can you even imagine what it’s like, to suffer such a thing?”
“Hmm,” I contemplated. “No, I’m sure I can’t imagine it.” Crowley’s bottle shattered on the ground behind me, and when I turned to chastise her, she was already repairing it with a snap of her fingers.
“Mamma mia, and I pray you never have to.” Paolo crossed himself, and then again, then spit on the ground emphatically. “It is too late for me. Her name was Giulietta. She came to the convent perhaps 5 years after I had arrived; I was 14 or 15, and she was 16. She had a round face, always smiling, made all the rounder by the framing of her novice’s habit. To me, she was the moon — shining round with light, so beautiful, and always out of reach. From the beginning, she took to clownery like a rat takes to water. She had a natural aptitude for physical comedy; always, she was somersaulting, rolling and contorting this way and that, leaping forth with a Ta da!, her limbs exploding into the air like some firework. We worked together as a team, sometimes. We had an act: I would stand on one side of a wide stage, and I would roll her, and she would somersault and somersault while I ran to the other side of the stage to catch her. Audiences went wild. For years, we were partners on the stage. But never as I wanted — I wanted her totally.”
“Yeah, well, good bloody luck with that,” Crowley mumbled, throwing back a generous measure of red.
I glowered at her, and searched to find some more helpful comment for Paolo. “Perhaps if you tried talking to her—”
“Oh, but I did try! My advances frightened her. She admitted that she wanted me too, wanted to draw me close and kiss me until the impression of my painted lips should forever imprint itself onto her made-up face. But her vows were sacred, both as a nun and as a clown, and she told me it was never to be. And so I packed my juggler’s clubs and jaunty hat, painted this single tear upon my cheek, and left the abbey to go see the world. If my heart could never know joy, perhaps I could spread some to others.”
“Well, Paolo, that’s wonderful!” I cried encouragingly. “Look at you now, a master of your craft. You’ve made something of yourself, and I’m sure your Giulietta’s made something of herself in your absence too—”
“Si!” It was an anguished, yowling sob. “I receive a letter today. Giulietta will make something of herself alright; she will be made a wife!”
Crowley leaned in close to whisper warm and wet into my ear, the words fermented and aromatic. “You’ve certainly got your work cut out for you, angel.”
“There is another man, Giuseppe. He is a mozzarella stretcher with big, strong arms, not like my silly, skinny arms only good for shoving pies in faces—”
“Enough of that!” I stood at once, brushing dirt from the seat of my gown as officiously as I could. “Giulietta may have no regard for her vows, but you certainly hold some stock in yours. Isn’t that right? There are thousands of people in the square today — don’t you have a duty to put some smiles on their faces? If there is love inside you, as you claim there is, why then, my dear boy, you must spread it!”
He mostly looked pathetic, if I’m honest. Slouched and defeated, soggy still with tears, he shrugged. “Eh.”
“You know.” I tried a different tack. “They say that laughter is the best medicine.”
Crowley frowned at me. “Who says that?”
“People say that,” I lied. “Philosophers.” I added this to lend a bit of authority to my statement, though Crowley certainly knew I’d made it up.
Paolo eyed me sceptically; behind my white bauta, I attempted to school my expression into one of confidence. “I used to think my life was a comedy,” he sighed, forlorn. “But now I see — it is a tragedy.”
“Looks like a farce from where I’m sitting,” Crowley offered, and I nodded most enthusiastically.
“Precisely! All you need is a bit of inspiration!” Suddenly, the task seemed simple. I could serve easily as a comic muse — I’m funny! I can be funny. I certainly make Crowley laugh enough! “Let’s see — a joke, I should think, is always a strong start. Why did the chicken cross the road?”
Paolo shrugged. “Perché?”
“Because the Lord willed it so!” I answered proudly, and waited for a laugh.
“Bollocks,” Crowley interjected. “Chickens have free will, don’t they?”
“They don’t,” I snapped, then paused. “Do they? You know, I’m not sure I recall.”
“That sixth day of creation’s a bit of a blur,” Crowley admitted. “You remember the fuck-up with the skunks?”
“They’re supposed to smell like that, as is Her design—”
“Like Heaven they are, bloody foul, and for what reason? Don’t get me started on flesh-eating bacteria — why did She even make those, what exactly—”
“Ah — scusi.” Paolo cleared his throat.
“Right! The jokes!” I refocused. “Knock knock.”
Paolo sat impassive for a minute, gnashing on the end of a fresh cigarette in contemplation. “It’s not very funny, is it?”
“No, no,” I explained. “It’s a sort of call and response. I say knock knock and you say— Crowley, come on, you do it with me. Knock knock!”
“’S’at you at the door, angel? Come in, it’s unlocked!”
“You know, I have had just about enough of your quote-unquote assistance, so if you don’t mind—”
“What, you’d rather I leave you on my porch knocking all night? When you’ve come all this way to visit me at my gaff? You’re mad.”
Paolo coughed again, this time as though suppressing a laugh.
“My apologies, Paolo. Forget the knock knock joke — ahead of its time, perhaps.” I was making little headway, outside of bickering with Crowley. It occurred to me, then, I ought to play to my strengths, if only to bolster my confidence. Something literary might do the trick! “Signore, are you well-versed at all in poetry? There is an interesting rhyme form often paired with comic verse known where I come from as the limerick. Let’s see — I’m sure I can recall one. Ah, yes! ‘There once was a girl from Greenock, who under her skirt had a—’ Hang on, what was it she had? Crowley?”
“A petticoat.”
“No she didn’t, don’t be ridiculous. The rhyme scheme is AABBA, so it’ll be something that rhymes with Greenock. ‘Who under her skirt had a…’ — oh, my memory’s failing me.”
“It was a petticoat, angel, and lots and lots of layers of underthings, and certainly nothing lewd or out of the ordinary. Who have you been hanging around, is my question, that’s teaching you this sort of smut?!”
“You’re the one who taught it to me, which is why I’m asking you to finish it!”
“Is that so?” The ruffles on her dress fluttered proudly; she looked pleased with herself. “Well, I must have been drunk then.”
“You’re drunk now, and of no use to me at all.” My ruffles, in response, bristled in annoyance. “Paolo, my sincerest apologies.”
His hand was clasped across his face in something like anguish, and at once he peeled it away to reassure me. “Not necessary.”
“I think we’ve gone a bit too highbrow,” I said as much to myself as to him. “What we need — what we need is a crowd-pleaser. I say!” I snapped my fingers suddenly as the joy of revelation dawned, and a few errant sparks seemed to emit from betwixt my manicured nails. “Have you any background in the art of juggling?”
“Clubs,” he replied. “Vegetables. Chairs. Knives, si. Axes. Eggs, chickens. Goats I juggle only sometimes. Weather must be right for it.”
“Well, certainly,” I said, a tad flustered. “Of course, anyone can toss a barnyard animal or two.”
“Or three or four,” Crowley supplied. “I say go for half a dozen.”
I ignored her. “It need not be as complicated as all that, though. Why, you’d be amazed at the spectacle one can create by juggling a simple bottle of wine. Isn’t that right, Crowley?”
“Nooo,” she drawled protectively, “no, I don’t think—”
A wave of my fingers and a minor miracle alleviated Crowley of the jug she was frantically attempting to secret up her skirt. I doubled it with a flash of my hands — two bottles would produce a more impressive effect than one, surely. And while they orbited above my head as gracefully as astral bodies, a third might join them, then a fourth — oh, I could see it now, the effortlessly balletic choreography of the street juggler. This, this would inspire him. How could it not?
After all, how difficult could it be? I had plenty of understanding of the theories of gravity, and approximately 5500 years experience at its command. What goes up must come down, et cetera, et cetera. I would send the bottle upwards some appropriately impressive distance, and, on its return to earth, merely extend my hand and catch it where it fell.
“Hup, hup!” I shouted, and, with conviction, tossed each bottle skyward. They lingered briefly several feet above our heads, and we all gazed, hypnotised, as they danced against the sky. No sooner had their corks brushed heaven than—
A crash upon the cobblestones, and in a flash, the hem of my gown was sprayed and stained again with something as wet and claret as fresh blood, only it was worse. It was wine.
“A perfectly good waste of wine,” Crowley moaned, dropping down onto the stones and waving her hand over the piazza, dizzily attempting to rejoin the glass jugs which had shattered into shimmering dust. “Poor, innocent wine, never hurt anyone, has it, and here you go tossing it around willy-nilly!”
“Willy-nilly!” That really was the limit! “I have never done anything willily or nillily in all my years on Earth, Crowley, and you more than anyone should know that! In fact—”
“Oh, you’re willy alright! The nilly’s new, I’ll grant you.” She was shuffling on her knees, bustling towards me in a huff and waggling her finger; her dress would have been more stained than mine were it not already sewn of a cabernet taffeta. “This represents a spiral of destruction, Aziraphale. You’re out of control. First willy, then nilly — by morning, I reckon — angel, you may find yourself plain silly.”
I pinched my lips together, dug my nails into my palms. “Crowley.” The words came out as clipped as wings. “You came to carnival to socialise and… and to… to frivolise, did you not? Perhaps it’s best you wait for me in the Ridotto. Find a game of dice or a hand of basetta to entertain yourself. Even a companion, should you and I elect to part ways for the evening.”
The latter statement she ignored. She was on her knees before me still, and at my instruction, her neck had lolled back, long and lanky, and her eyes behind her colombina had widened in amber awe. “Has the principality Aziraphale, an envoy of the Lord Herself, really suggested I go fritter away my time in a casino? That I gamble? Oh, that’s sinful, no two ways about it.”
I kicked out from under my skirts, nudging her away with the point of a satin shoe. “It’s not gambling if you fix the games, is it?”
The white crescent slivers of her eyes flooded yellow, and she clutched her chest where a heart would be if her corporation had one. I wasn’t sure it did. “Angel,” she whispered. “I think you may be perfect.”
I kicked her now in earnest, which I know was childish; she grabbed my foot as I did so and held it fast, so I began hopping angrily on the other, lashing out with fists while she batted them away easily. Oh, her and her long limbs. We’ve wrestled before; I have the advantage of strength, but Crowley is ever so squirmy. Before I knew it, we were scrapping in a most unladylike manner. Completely inappropriate for our stations and our circumstance! Namely, that we were in public and that, by no fault of my own, I had now become completely distracted from the task which brought me here.
“Paolo!” I panted, yanking a hank of Crowley’s hair as I did so, “sincere apologies for the delay! With you in two shakes of a lamb’s tail!”
“Oi,” Crowley pinched me on the back of the arm, and “Oi!” when I swatted her (hard) in return. “Look.”
Paolo was shaking, head in hands. Sobbing, I feared, much like when we’d found him. Shoulders heaving, breath coming in gasps and wheezes. And then I realised — he was laughing.
“You two!” He wiped away tears of mirth rolling down his cheeks. “This, this is comedy. This I missed.”
“Oh, I’m not sure—”
“Thank you, signora. And you, signora. I see it now — laughter is — how do you call it? The best philosophers.” He doffed his pom-pommed hat to Crowley and me in turn, then stood and dusted the grime from his diamond patterned costume. “Mio Dio, did I need this.”
“She’s a Dia, actually,” Crowley corrected in a daze. No bother. As we stared, slack-jawed and frozen in our fisticuffs, Paolo the Pagliacci cartwheeled away down la strada. It seemed the Lord’s work had been done.
An anti-climax if there’d ever been one. I had succeeded, I suppose, in the most technical of terms. My objective had been met. And now I was in Venice, here at the Carnival, with nothing left to do but return to Crowley the hairpin I’d been poking her with, straighten the brooch sagging on my bodice, and sigh.
“Where are you staying?”
She was seated on the ground still, legs akimbo like a child. “Rented some palazzo somewhere.” An insouciant strand of hair had fallen in her face, and in her wine-soaked stupor, she could do little more than blow it heaven-ward with warm breath, then watch as gravity returned it to her line of vision.
“Well, come along,” I sighed again, and then again, louder, until she looked up and took notice. “You’ll need help getting home.”
A dusky haze had fallen over the city, rosy fog rolling in off the sea and lavender sky twinkling, growing ever indigo as we strolled. Damp air turned paving stones slippery, and the winding paths and marble bridges were slick in places where the tides had risen up to heckle dry land. Tottering in our heels — me unpracticed, Crowley inebriated — we were forced to clutch each other’s arms for purchase and stability, even knowing as we did so that it was a false security which only ensured that, should one of us fall, we would take the other down too. An apt metaphor, I should think, though not a very subtle one.
Crowley was slippery too, evading the confines of our linked arms at the slightest distraction while I fussed and fretted she’d pitch herself off the ponte.
“Let’s steal that gondola.” She tripped down steps towards it, closer to the water, startling a rat mid-munch upon a crust of bread. “We’ll go for a ride, come on. I’ll row, you navigate.”
“Absolutely not.” The key was walking purposefully — Crowley would not lose herself if she had me to follow. “I’ve seen the way you steer, and I haven’t forgotten the chariot races. You’ll find a way to drown me, I’m sure.”
“Not with those floatation devices you won’t,” she muttered, clacking on the wet cobblestones as she hurried to keep up.
Here is the thing about Crowley, though. The thing is, I indulge her. And she’d never know it, and to hear her grouse, you’d never know it either, but the thing is, I am quite often creating opportunities for her to have fun. She claims just the opposite: that she is full of brilliant and exhilarating ideas for hijinks and hooliganism, and that my censorious attitudes towards her plans (multi-course meals notwithstanding) are impediments to her good time.
Objectively false. Laughably so. If Crowley knew herself half as well as I know her, she’d know that nothing is so exhilarating, amusing, or downright fun to her as complaining. It is her joie de vivre, her raison d'etre. Each time I deprive her of participation in some harebrained scheme, I am creating an opportunity for some inspired rant she’ll find so much more fulfilling to deliver than she would have had we done the damned thing in the first place.
We’d stopped on a bridge, a narrow and untrafficked one. Normally I’d bicker back when Crowley grew heated like this, as a treat for her, but I’d caught sight of the sunset through the skinny strip of an alley, a clementine slice of sky split open and spilling its juices into the canal. The city all around us was as vibrant as the firmament, dozens of hundreds of revellers glittering like fresh awakened stars blinking into consciousness to sparkle across the stratosphere. And yet, in our cramped corner of the city, there was a stillness and tranquillity. That’s Venice, isn’t it? Crowded and private and bustling and intimate. One of the most famous cities in the world, and somehow when you’re there, you’re certain any spot you’ve stumbled on is your little secret.
Boys and men in balconies had spent the day tossing ovi odoriferi; now, even after they’d retired to more indoor pursuits, the rose water perfumed the dank around us, transforming the brackish air into something near romantic. “You know—” I interrupted Crowley, who’d been whinging with such enthusiasm you’d think this corporation of hers didn’t need air. “It’s rather nice here.”
“Nice,” she snarled from the step below me, “nice, nice, that’s all you care about, isn’t it. Meanwhile, all I ask is a day or two at the Vatican — three, tops! But as soon as I even mention a schism, it’s Oh no Crowley we can’t be getting up to your shenanigans again and your naughty-naughties even though that is your job after all and I have nothing better to be doing in London except tinkering with old pocket watches or pretending poetry makes sense—”
I let her go on, nodding or frowning on occasion. It was a pleasant enough evening for monologuing.
While she continued on in this manner, ranting and raving and rambling, I entertained myself in contemplation of Crowley’s mode of aesthetic expression. She was always doing something interesting with her appearance, something fashionable, and took even more stylistic liberties when in this form — a frill or two extra, a bodice cut to razor thin proportions to accentuate her form, inches of copper hair added should her coiffure necessitate additional braids woven or curls balanced carefully atop themselves.
It was in this hair that a flash of something caught my eye, a bright white something amongst the violent red; a snowflake in a wildfire, or a dove’s feather tucked into a cardinal’s wing. Instinctually, I reached towards her to retrieve it. Though it may now seem illogical, in the moment, the colour and the contrast had automatically led me to assume that it was something of mine.
“What are you doing?” she asked, voice tight where it had constricted and cut off the air supply of her long winded diatribe about me.
“Hold still,” I chided. She didn’t, and tried to pull away in fact, but I held her fast with a hand cupped around the back of her head, thumb firm around her jaw, as my free handed rooted through the tangled carmine tresses. With careful fingertips, I retrieved the anomaly. “Aha!”
Her cheeks were raging, blood-boiled rouge. “Aziraphale.”
I let her go and, between thumb and forefinger, displayed the offending fragment: a cracked bit of eggshell. She stared, slack-jawed, probably too drunk to comprehend, so I explained. “It was in your hair. Egg. There’s probably some yolk in there too.”
“You,” she said, voice low and seething, “are impossible. I hope you know that.” From her position on the step below me, our usual dynamic had been reversed; usually, she had the advantage of two inches over me, but in my heels and a stair above her, her eyes were fixed straight-on, staring unblinkingly at my lips as though just waiting for me to argue back. “It’s torture being around you.”
“Mmm. How kind of you to say.” I tossed the eggshell into the water. “As I recall, it was you who imposed your company upon me today without reason. Have you come all this way from England just to bully me, then?”
One note, now, about the colombina. It is a style of mask which rests upon the wearer’s upper face, covering their brows and nose and cheekbones. Not their eyes. Their eyes are unobstructed — highlighted, even, by the framing of the accessory. I clarify for the obvious reason that, in Crowley’s company, it has become rarer and rarer these past centuries that I should ever glimpse her eyes without obstruction or impediment, let alone have full, unfettered access to her gaze as I did now when she responded.
“Yes,” she said. And her eyes, I saw, were not as muddled as I thought they’d be by drink. They were sober, shockingly so. Wide, so I could see the whole golden expanse of them. Earnest in expression. Above all: helpless. “Of course I have.”
But then I remembered thumbing through a volume in Aramaic last week after a few hundred years of reading mostly in the Romance languages. The characters were still familiar, yes, and the words were ones I knew, but it was easy to make mistakes when one was out of practice. I’d gotten 80 pages into the work thinking that the antagonist wore a bumblebee on his head when really it was a bowler hat. Crowley’s eyes presented the same difficulty — they hissed in whispers of a language I’d not heard in years and years. It was only natural I should mistake one message for another. Translation error.
“Crowley?” I asked, and did so plainly. Rarely do I speak to Crowley plainly, but I thought — if God should be looking down at Venice, right at this very moment, surely other things would catch Her eye. Bigger fish to fry, as they say. “What are you doing here? I mean, why have you come, really, honestly?”
She blinked and it was like the tide went out again, and I saw white rims in her eyes. She spun on one heel, twirling down the steps and whirling away in a swirl of skirts, tipping and toeing, topsy turvy. It was my turn to follow her, now. Topsy turvy.
“I’ve come for the party, angel.” She called this out to me above the rising din; we’d rounded a corner, slunk through a narrow tract, and suddenly found ourselves back in the thick of it. “Love a good party, me. Fantastic party.”
I’ve never seen the point in these mass festivities myself. I much prefer small gatherings, or the close company of like-minded individuals. Besides which, any time Crowley and I had found ourselves at the same party, we seemed to end up in a corner together all night anyway.
The piazza was rollicking and rowdy; I caught Crowley’s wrist and held tightly as we weaved through the crowd. She stiffened slightly at the contact, as though mistaking me for a stranger at first, but led me forward until we found a spot to pause and spectate. A bawdy puppet show was mounted on a makeshift stage. By turns, the marionettes would beat each other with miniature axes and truncheons, then make operatic love to each other from various angles which must have required a most complex bit of dexterity and coordination for the puppeteer.
Crowley’s mood, so pendulous these last few decades, had swung back to something much more pleasantly comprehensible once ensconced in this throng of merrymakers. Cheery and aloof — a more familiar iteration of Crowley. At an intermezzo, she mouthed “Stay here” and vanished from my side; moments later, she returned with a flaky, sugar powdered sfogliatella in each hand. I nibbled happily as we watched the show (some lusty stablehand had been introduced, as well as a voluptuous milkmaid whose buckets dangled on strings) and as I licked the last bits of custard from my fingertips, Crowley wordlessly passed me hers.
“Oh, are you sure? Really Crowley, the things they manage with ricotta — I can’t deprive you.” I protested as only a formality, of course, while simultaneously alleviating her of it.
“Not hungry,” she said, as she always did. “You’ll enjoy it more than I will.”
The puppet of the stablehand had been replaced by that of a well-endowed donkey, and the crowd roared with laughter.
“Heading back to London tonight?” Crowley asked, not really sounding as though she cared one way or the other.
It hadn’t occurred to me until then that, my obligations fulfilled, I had no reason to tarry in Venice. Then again, I had no special reason to hurry back to London either.
“I’ll leave in the morning, I think. I’d hate to make the trip at this late hour.”
She nodded, eyes still on the puppet show. A sort of pornographic recitative had commenced.
“That palazzo of yours,” I wondered aloud, “I don’t suppose they’ve any wine there? For the guests?”
She turned and looked at me, colombina twitching like an eyebrow had raised underneath. “You know, the owner did mention a cask of amontillado in the cellar. Valuable, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind a few drops missing.”
I brushed the powdered sugar from my hands and gestured west of the piazza. “By all means, lead the way.”