Frail Barrier Read Online Free

wide brim, he was reclining on a bench, looking intelligent and meditative. The antique, ivy-adorned ruins around him contributed to his noble air. In the distance the hills of the Campania unrolled beneath a cloud-filled sky.
    Urbino was struggling through Goethe’s Italian Journey in the original German. His German was far from as free and as fluent as his Italian and French.
    At the beginning of the summer he had embarked on a new writing project. It was an addition to his ‘Venetian Lives’, a series that combined his interest in biography and his love for his adopted city. Goethe and Venice would focus on the role that the city had played in the writer’s life and art, concentrating on his visit to the lagoon city in the autumn of 1786. It would have reproductions of paintings and photographs of Venetian scenes that had been important to Goethe during his stay.
    Goethe’s sentiments about Venice struck strong responsive chords in Urbino. He had been reading his Goethe for the past weeks with almost as much interest in finding parallels to his own experience as in gathering material. When Goethe had come to the crowded city, he had observed that he could now enjoy his cherished solitude even more since nowhere was more conducive to being alone than a large crowd. This was exactly how Urbino had felt when he had made Venice his home. It also gratified him that Goethe could be as contradictory as he was, and praise the city’s incomparable light and gleaming palaces one moment, and the next moment recoil from the refuse dumped in its canals and the sludge underfoot after rainstorms. Goethe seemed to be the kind of person, like Urbino himself, who could appreciate beauty even more by acknowledging all the faults not only surrounding it but also, in some strange way, contributing to it.
    But Urbino warned himself now, as he did so often, about the dangers of identifying too closely with his subject. He preferred to think that his tastes and temperament, his likes and dislikes, seldom complicated his biographical portraits or his sleuthing, one of his other passions. In truth, they very often did. In the pages of one of his books, the potential damage was only professional. But in the conduct of one of his cases it could be a matter of life and death – his own or someone else’s.
    For the moment no case occupied his attention. They were not something he sought out, but something that, for reasons different with each one, he could not ignore with a clear conscience.
    It was much better to devote his time these days to Goethe, who after a long and productive life, had died, quite naturally and peacefully, in a corner of his big armchair in Weimar.
    With this consoling thought, Urbino lost all sense of time and exterior scene, except when he became momentarily distracted whenever Gildo cried out a warning ‘Hoi!’ as he turned from one canal in to another.
    He buried himself in the volume for the rest of the ride home, carried on the wings of Goethe’s words back to the days of a former century when the city had been, nonetheless, very much the same as it was now. Whenever he looked out of the felze at the canals and the buildings and the bright blue sky, appreciation and satisfaction surged through him, made more intense by the fact that Goethe, centuries ago, had felt the same things Urbino was feeling today.
    When the gondola came to a gentle bump at the water entrance of the Palazzo Uccello, Urbino closed the book and refreshed his eyes with the sight of the worn stones of his Venetian home, his only home.
    He would often remember this feeling of contentment as, in the coming weeks of high season, death entered his perfect little world again and asked him to make some sense of it.
    Everything, in fact, was set in motion a few minutes later when the contessa called from Asolo.
    â€˜I have distressing news, caro.’
    The contessa must have been out in the gardens of the Villa