Deadly to the Sight Read Online Free Page A

but I have something different in mind. But not here. On Burano.”

4
    The Contessa’s motoscafo cut across the shallow waters to Burano. As the sun broke momentarily through the layer of clouds, the lagoon, with its marshes and mud banks, shimmered ahead of them.
    Giorgio commanded the craft lightly and with a touch of elegance, as if in compensation for the limp that hampered him on land. He answered Habib’s questions about the sunken islands with their ruined buildings along their route. Although his information wasn’t always accurate, it was given in good spirit. It wasn’t difficult to see how the handsome man had captured Oriana’s perpetually straying eye.
    Burano, with its campanile leaning at a precarious and picturesque angle, soon came into view. Urbino gave a little shiver as they approached the quay. He attributed it to the characteristically damp chill of the island, which he always felt more keenly here than in Venice. It seemed to penetrate the closed, heated cabin, and made him feel vaguely unwell.
    The last time he had been to Burano had been in summer several years before, when its notoriously filthy canals were being drained. The odor had been terrible, but then—as now—with a chill spreading over his skin, the sight of the improbably bright colors of the small houses had almost made up for the unpleasant assault on the other senses.
    Gallons and gallons of red, purple, blue, green, and yellow had been mercilessly spilled to adorn the huddled buildings with an abandon that was both crazed and childlike. The stunning effect was itself responsible for the squeezing and mixing of further gallons of oils and watercolors by artists, and the scrolling of innumerable miles of film by photographers.
    Yet, charming though it could be, Burano wasn’t a place where Urbino would have been happy to live. It was too relentlessly cheerful in its brightness and with its jaunty strings of washing hung between the houses and across the squares. Its bridges, canals, and houses were too small to suit him. And worst of all, life here was almost a blueprint of conventionality, with the women at their lace and the men at their nets. Or so it had always seemed to Urbino, who during his visits had frequently screamed silently for something more subversive.
    Surely Burano must have its dark secrets, now as it had in the past. And perhaps the primary colors of its houses were a trap of delight for the eye, distracting it from contemplating the inevitable cost of the island’s perpetual performance of normality. Yet even the colors couldn’t deceive the eye for long, at least not an eye like Urbino’s, which inevitably—and almost gratefully—noted the way these colors spilled and bled into the invasive waters of the lagoon.
    He didn’t give Habib the benefit of these impressions, however, for he knew too well the melancholy burden of never seeing things as they actually appeared, a burden all the more melancholy when the appearances were as lovely as those of Burano.
    â€œIt’s beautiful,” cried Habib.
    â€œYes, it is,” Urbino responded.
    Stretching ahead of them when they got out of the motorboat was a gauntlet of stalls and shops, presided over by what seemed to be interchangeable, middle-aged women. Urbino would soon have negotiated the danger with barely a slackened pace. He hadn’t counted on Habib, however.
    â€œI must buy something for my mother on this beautiful island!” he cried out when he saw the first stall dripping with lace. “We can send it to her. Yes?”
    â€œA marvelous idea. I should have thought of it myself.”
    Habib had already collected enough gloves, perfume, shoes, belts, towels, and other items to furnish not just his mother but their whole extended family. He had bought hardly anything for himself, however, which to Urbino indicated an innate generosity that made him, in his own turn, generous and all