The Glassmaker

by Tracy Chevalier

Two months of being shut away during the quarantine—and the long time before that of keeping a respectful distance from each other—made them explode once they were together. Orsola had not thought it possible that someone’s touch could affect her so much, or that her touching someone could excite them both. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. She stroked every part of him, exploring his broad shoulders, the rolling hills and valleys along his arms, his muscly calves and taut backside she could finally cup, feeling the dense, satisfying weight of him. Antonio ran his hands all over her, into her, every surface, every crevice; in doing so he gave her new knowledge of herself. Orsola had never paid much attention to her body, but now that someone else was, she became more aware of herself—her full breasts, her smooth back and soft inner thighs that he ran up and down with his fingers and tongue.

What they did not talk about: marriage for themselves, though what they were doing in the boat and on the islands was its preamble.

What she held on to now were the concrete moments: Antonio’s touch. A laugh with Monica. A rare hug from Stella. Raffaele’s grin when his teeth came in. Maybe now she also needed the concrete feel of glass between her fingers to anchor her.

There was little affection between husband and wife; Giacomo refused to argue with Isabella whenever she sharpened her words. Only Monica was able to silence her cousin with a look.

Later Orsola felt the brief moment on the Riva di San Matteo when they had their hands entangled in each other’s hair was the point that everything in her life had led up to and then moved away from, like the tide rising and falling. Except that the tide always returned, and he was not going to return, for he had turned traitor to Murano glass and to her and was going to Berlin or Munich or Amsterdam, and she might never be able to forgive him.

Antonio not rowing yet but turned toward her in the dusk. His face was the size of a plate, then a saucer, then a dot as he moved farther and farther away until at last he and Domenego and the gondola winked out of sight.

She could do nothing to stop that moment and that man from flow...

Lying in the darkness, she let tears cut hot grooves down the sides of her face.

Fueled by anger and a hurt sense of betrayal, her decision had seemed to make sense at the time, but now just a few hours later Orsola would have given anything to be in that boat with him, heading to a new, uncertain life.

She went over the scene of his leaving, recalling every detail, unable to think about anything else while she was sweeping or scrubbing sheets or making pasta or taking the children out or sitting at Mass.

Very slowly the details of that farewell faded, steadily shifting from a rich midnight blue to a pale morning sky. One day she realized she had spent only half of every minute thinking of Antonio and of that moment and what he had said and how he had touched her face. Another day it was every third minute, then every quarter hour, then every hour when the bells of Santi Maria e Donato rang. The measuring of time like this made her wonder if the bells wherever he was rang in the same way. The thought of its being different hurt.

Remembering most of all and in vivid detail the moment she first walked into his arms after the quarantine and the moment he walked out of hers at San Matteo.

After a time, the memory of Antonio was smoothed into a story in her head, like a bead with its rough edges rubbed down so it can be worn. Doing so deadened the feeling, but it made it bearable.

She began pumping the bellows with her foot. When she picked up a cane at random and thrust it into the brightening flame, she felt something click inside her: the familiar flow of melting, turning, shaping. Whatever else was going wrong in her life, this process of creation was still in her hands and her eyes, still satisfying, still comforting.

mar rosso

“Ah, Romeo e Giulietta!” “Who?” “ ‘Star-crossed lovers.’

But once children outnumbered adults, it was impossible to control them.

Instead he was able to refurbish the furnace so that it burned more efficiently—not that he thanked her for it, or even acknowledged it was the escrementi di coniglio—the rabbit turds—that paid for it. Now her beads bought shoes for the children and better wine for the adults.

and a heavy brow almost permanently furrowed into a frown—not from anger, but from concentrating hard so that she could understand the world around her.

Muranese often feuded and hated one another, but they stuck together.

“Do you think, signora, that being paid for work makes such a difference? Sometimes you can feel like a slave even with coins in your pocket.”

It sat in an imposing and picturesque position at the entrance to the Grand Canal, and its generous curves were a balm to the eye after the narrow verticality of many of the houses and campaniles.

Stop raking over memories, she thought now. Of course, that was one of the reasons why she was looking for Domenego: he was her one connection to Antonio. She never asked him, but at some point when they were together, the gondolier would either hand her a packet or, more often, shake his head.

She was still wearing Maria Barovier’s tawny dress, though it was worn and patched in places and she’d had to let it out in the bust and hips as a baby and age changed her.

The rio ran directly alongside it. The building was hemmed in on all sides by houses and water; indeed, it seemed a miracle it was there at all, as if God had dropped it from above into this cramped space. Nonetheless, its proportions and marble gave it a surprising elegance.

She was striking, almost beautiful, but her eyes were marked by the tension of a recently wed woman discovering what marriage was.

It seemed that whenever she was beginning to forget Antonio, or the idea of him—when that idea was losing its potency and fading like an old piece of cloth—a dolphin would arrive to brighten the color and strengthen the fabric once more. She was amazed and confused that they arrived, but also pleased. The dolphins were more than an amusement, they were a reminder: oh yes, there you are.

“That must change how you feel about these dolphins, does it not?” “I didn’t marry for love, signora, but for business.” “As did I.”

They were likely to find out anyway, but it was easier to cope with their complaining afterward than to fight with them beforehand.

“Then why do you want to go to terraferma?” To stand on ground that connected in some way—through millions of footsteps and rocks and fields and snow and mountains—to where he was, or had been, making dolphins in a workshop up north. But she wouldn’t say that to Domenego, because it was ridiculous.

She didn’t like what she saw and heard and felt. The Mestrini seemed to be staring at her, and laughing, and using words she didn’t understand. Orsola had heard many languages in Venice, seen many foreigners, even dealt with them in the Rosso shop. It wasn’t that she couldn’t cope with strangeness. But these were her own—people from the Veneto region—and they were treating her as if she were a stranger.

It was a feeling she wasn’t used to, and she didn’t like it.

can handle men.” “Mi dispiace, Orsola, but you cannot. Not these men. Murano men all know you and your husband. They would never touch you. Venetians like him, though”—he jerked his head back toward shore—“they have no limits.”

It was a fantasy, but she held on to it because it pushed her to work harder and create better.

She couldn’t even remember how he had made her feel. He was like the faded scars on her arms from accidents when glass dropped or exploded: they hurt at the time, but after a while she couldn’t recall either the incident or the pain.

Time might race and freeze, expand and contract, but the continuity of Antonio’s dolphins, the knowledge that she was still remembered after so long, was the solid foundation upon which her life was built, like one of the millions of trees pounded into the bed of the lagoon to create the base that held up Venice. She didn’t understand it, but she was not sure she could remain standing and steady without it.

They took away Venice’s free-port status and charged high tariffs for any exports going to terraferma—effectively wrecking its already precarious trade and undermining its manufacturing.

when Venice went into decline, Murano glass did too. It was a time that lasted much longer than the plague, though not so many died. It was grimmer, in a way, because it came to seem this grinding poverty would always exist, rather than burn out rapidly as the disease had. It was a constant throb rather than a sharp pain, a low-grade fever rather than a spike overnight where the sheets are soaked with sweat. The long, dull ache of missing a lover over the years rather than the shock of seeing him row away from you across the lagoon.

It was a time to be skipped over, condensed as much as possible.

building with no air circulating through it soon lost its life, as did a glass workshop.

To her there was nothing romantic about living among rotting shutters and flaking masonry and piles of rubble, with your stomach never entirely full.

The dull roar of the furnace was missing, and its heat. The furnace was a hungry mouth that must be fed for eleven months of the year. Now it was cold, and the studio dead, as if its blood had stopped circulating.

the Austrians didn’t like water, and had filled in canals, widened calles and built bridges so that they could get around the city more easily on foot. Venetians bitterly complained: Why rule a city built on water if you didn’t know how to get around on it?

For some time now Venetians as well as Muranese glassmakers had been producing seed beads: beads the size of sesame seeds or even smaller, made from pulled glass cane that had been cut into fragments, and used to fashion necklaces and earrings and brooches, or to decorate everything from handbags and belts to dresses and shoes. Though technically they were beads, the process was so different from Orsola’s lampwork that she never gave seed beads much thought. “What do these beads have to do with us?” she asked. “I am looking for beadmakers to sell into North America,” Jonas replied. “That could be you.”

Orsola could not connect herself with these impiraresse, for she was a maker rather than a stringer, a creator rather than a packager.

It is possible to make a living from making beads on a large scale. Perhaps not fancy lampwork beads, but glasswork nonetheless.”

“Seed beads?” Orsola snorted. “Mio Dio.” Their making was not artistry, but mechanics.

“We’ve always managed before. Something will turn up.” “Something has turned up, but it won’t happen unless we make it.”

The important thing is that there is an order to fill, not what the order is for.”

“You and Marco, it’s impossible for you two to agree on anything. Whatever you say, he’ll do the opposite.