Deadly to the Sight Read Online Free Page B

the more happy to be footing the bill.
    Habib began to diligently examine doilies, antimacassars, handkerchiefs, napkins, curtains, bedcovers, blouses, vests, shawls, scarves, umbrellas, and designs of cats, gondolas, and flowers in thin wooden frames. He passed from stall to stall and shop to shop, holding items up to the light, turning them over, feeling and even sniffing them, as if he were looking for an immediate position as a quality inspector. The more things he looked at and the more time he spent, the more difficulty he had in deciding.
    Every suggestion Urbino made was rejected, albeit pleasantly, because of some personal or maternal or cultural or religious inappropriateness that Urbino didn’t understand. After a while, Urbino left him to his own devices, stepping in only when the women’s English or Habib’s Italian was inadequate.
    Finally, to Urbino’s relief, Habib settled on a particular tablecloth because the shop owner with her head scarf, he whispered to Urbino, reminded him “too much” of his mother. But when Urbino translated the amount into dollars, Habib reached out to hold back his hand.
    â€œIt is a fortune! I will choose something else.”
    He began to search through some smaller items.
    The price was indeed high. Urbino, not a good judge of the quality of lacework, found the tablecloth attractive and without any obvious flaws. He wished the Contessa was with them, but knowing her, she would have scorned all these shops and insisted on going to Jesurum behind the Basilica, which was much more expensive. And then Habib would have missed the pleasure of buying something on “the island made of lace,” as he kept calling Burano, and from this particular woman with whom, despite the language barrier, he had developed a rapport.
    â€œWe’ll buy it,” Urbino insisted, and handed the woman the money. He also asked her to wrap up six butterfly adornments that Habib had been admiring. He could give one to each of his sisters.
    They wandered over the island for half an hour, down narrow quaysides beneath wrought-iron balconies, over a wooden bridge, and past row after row of the painted houses, some with geometrical designs. Even the boats were brightly painted.
    Urbino conducted Habib to one of the more whimsical houses. It was decorated in a kaleidoscope of different-colored squares, rectangles, circles, diamonds, and stripes. Every year or two the owner arranged the shapes in entirely different combinations as if in harmony with some ever shifting, mysterious celestial pattern.
    â€œMaybe it is to push away the evil spirits,” Habib suggested.
    â€œPossibly.”
    â€œYou should have warned me!”
    â€œOf what?”
    â€œOf all these colors. I should have brought my paints!”
    â€œSome other time. Look at the doors along here. Each is a different color from the house, and from each other.”
    â€œAnd all of them are framed in white! The windows too! You like doors, I know,” Habib said with a smile. “You always looked at them in the medina.”
    Urbino then brought Habib to the quarter where the Contessa owned two adjoining buildings. One was bright green, the other a deep purple. The German writer who had been staying at the Palazzo Uccello now occupied the green house. But it wasn’t to pay her a visit that they had come. At any rate, they’d be going to a reception at Frieda Hensel’s in a few days. But because the reception would be in the evening, Habib wouldn’t be able to appreciate the color of her house.
    As usual, Habib was full of questions. He wanted to know whether neighbors agreed on what colors they would paint their houses, and why some of the houses had different colors for different stories, and what the geometrical designs meant. And did the women who made lace also make the fishnets, which were drying in the sun? Why were all the lace curtains in the windows white? And why