The Planet on the Table Read Online Free PDF Page B

last one of them,” the woman said. “The waters rise, the heavens howl, love’s pledges crack and lead to misery. I—I live to show what a person can bear and not die. I’ll live till the deluge drowns the world as Venice is drowned; I’ll live till all else living is dead; I’ll live…“ Her voice trailed off; she looked up at Carlo curiously. “Who are you, really? Oh. I know. I know. A sailor.”
    “Are there floors above?” he asked, to change the subject.
    She squinted at him. Finally she spoke. “Words are vain, I thought I’d never speak again, not even to my own heart, and here I am, doing it again. Yes, there’s a floor above intact; but above that, ruins. Lightning blasted the bell chamber apart, while I lay in that very bed.” She stood up. “Come on, I’ll show you.” Under her cape she was tiny.
    She picked up the candle lantern beside her, and Carlo followed her up the stairs, stepping carefully in the shifting shadows.
    On the floor above, the wind swirled, and through the stairway to the floor above that, he could distinguish black clouds. The woman put the lantern on the floor, started up the stairs. “Come.”
    Once through the hole they were in the wind, out under the sky. The rain had stopped. Great blocks of stone lay about the floor, and the walls broke off unevenly.
    “I thought the whole campanile would fall,” she shouted at him over the whistle of the wind. He nodded, and walked over to the west wall, which stood chest high. Looking over it, he could see the waves approaching, rising up, smashing against the stone below, spraying back and up at him. He could feel the blows in his feet. Their force frightened him; it was hard to believe he had survived them and was now out of danger. He shook his head violently. To his right and left the white lines of crumbled waves marked the Lido, a broad swath of them against the black. The old woman was speaking, he saw; he walked back to her side and listened.
    “The waters yet rise,” she shouted. “See? And the lightning… you can see the lightning breaking the Alps to dust. It’s the end, child. Every island fled away, and the mountains were not found… the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea, and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living thing died in the sea.” On and on she spoke, her voice mingling with the sound of the gale and the boom of the waves, just carrying over it all… until Carlo, cold and tired, filled with pity and a black anguish like the clouds rolling over them, put his arm around her thin shoulders and turned her around. They descended to the floor below, picked up the extinguished lantern, and descended to her chamber, which was still lit. It seemed warm, a refuge. He could hear her still speaking. He was shivering without pause.
    “You must be cold,” she said in a practical tone. She pulled a few blankets from her bed. “Here, take these.” He sat down in the big heavy chair, put the blankets around his legs, put his head back. He was tired. The old woman sat in her chair and wound thread onto a spool. After a few minutes of silence she began talking again, and as Carlo dozed and shifted position and nodded off again, she talked and talked, of storms, and drownings, and the world’s end, and lost love…
    In the morning when he woke up, she was gone. Her room stood revealed in the dim morning light: shabby, the furniture battered, the blankets worn, the knickknacks of Venetian glass ugly, as Venetian glass always was… but it was clean. Carlo got up and stretched his stiff muscles. He went up to the roof; she wasn’t there. It was a sunny morning. Over the east wait he saw that his boat was still there, still floating. He grinned—the first one in a few days; he could feel that in his face.
    The woman was not on the floors below, either. The lowest one served as her boathouse, he could see. In it were a pair of decrepit rowboats and some lobster pots. The biggest