Cantwell and Renata’s farewell as he leaves Venice

Cantwell and Renata’s farewell as he leaves Venice is a scene of separation made harder by the small distances Renata refuses to let stand between them. What begins as a carefully managed departure—hotel bill settled, luggage and Renata’s portrait transferred to a motor boat—becomes a last stretch of shared time, until Cantwell and Renata hold each other and say goodbye beside the water. The scene’s restraint gives its gestures their weight: she asks to accompany him, he warns that each extension will hurt more, and neither can make the ending easy by naming it.

The Departure Begins

The hotel’s hall porter has telephoned at the concierge’s direction, and the boat is the same one Cantwell and Renata rode in before. T5 Jackson is aboard with the luggage and the securely wrapped portrait. The hotel staff have loaded the belongings, made sure Jackson is seated properly, and withdrawn; Cantwell has paid the bill and left the customary tips. The departure has been arranged with the orderly completeness of a task finished correctly, but that efficiency leaves the emotional question untouched.

Cantwell calls Renata “Daughter,” and she asks, “Can't I ride with you to the garage?” He says it would be just as bad there. When she asks again, he lets her come: “It's your show, really. Get in.” The concession gives Renata some choice over how the parting happens, even as both understand that changing the location will not change the outcome. They travel without talking. A strong stern wind seems almost absent because the old motor boat makes so little speed: the physical slowness of the crossing stretches the silence rather than relieving it.

Refusing the First Goodbye

At the landing, Jackson is handing the luggage to a porter and looking after Renata’s portrait himself. Cantwell asks Renata whether she wants to say goodbye there. She asks whether she has to; he answers, “No.” Her next request is to come up to the bar in the garage while the car is being brought down. Cantwell says that will be worse, but she answers that she does not care. The exchange makes the scene’s central conflict plain: Cantwell recognizes that another interval will intensify the pain, while Renata prefers that pain to being sent away before she is ready.

When Cantwell tells her she was not invited, she asks him not to be bad. He replies that it is easy to be bad, and that he is trying hard not to be; then he proposes that they pay the boat owner and sit on a bench under a tree. The proposal postpones the departure without pretending to cancel it. Even in the middle of the goodbye, Cantwell attends to the boat owner’s practical concern: he says he has not forgotten the promised jeep engine, warns him not to count on it, but offers a good chance of obtaining one. It will be used, he adds, but better than the owner’s present “coffee pot.” The moment preserves the Colonel’s familiar command-and-provisioning manner at the very edge of an intimate loss: a promise is remembered, though its fulfillment remains uncertain.

The Bench and the Unsaid

The trees are black and leafless in the wind; their leaves had fallen early and had long since been swept away. Against this bare setting, a man’s offer to sell postcards briefly interrupts the two of them. Cantwell sends him away, saying, “We don't need you now.” The exchange does not turn the scene into spectacle. Rather, it marks how little room there is for anything beyond the parting. Renata, who had resolved not to cry, is finally crying. Cantwell tries to address the emotion through the vehicle they are about to ride in: “There isn't anything to say. They didn't instal shock–absorbers in this vehicle we ride in now.” The metaphor acknowledges that the journey ahead offers no cushioning against what is coming.

Renata says she has stopped and is not hysterical. Cantwell concedes that she has him there, but insists that what he said is true. Her response, “So now what?” asks for a next step when words and practical arrangements have run out. Cantwell proposes that they stand, kiss, and say goodbye. When she asks what that means, he admits he does not know; it is one of the things people must figure out for themselves. The scene does not supply a formula for parting. Its movement is instead from an attempt to find something to say toward an action both can share.

The Final Kiss and Departure

Renata asks Cantwell to keep trying, calling that “all the hope we have.” He promises that he will. They hold each other close and kiss “hard and true”; then Cantwell takes her across the gravel and down the stone steps. The physical sequence completes what the earlier requests had deferred. Their embrace is mutual, but it does not reverse the departure: he still guides her toward the boat, and the goodbye remains necessary.

Cantwell tells her she ought to take a good boat, not the old one with the displaced engine. Renata says she would rather take that boat if he does not mind. Her choice brings the earlier journey back into the ending: the flawed motor boat is not merely a conveyance but the one they have already shared, and she chooses it again at the moment they separate. Cantwell answers with a line that joins his public manner to his private feeling: “I only give orders and obey orders. I don't mind.” He then calls her “my dear, lovely, beautiful.” She says goodbye. The exchange closes the scene without promising a reunion or offering a comforting resolution. Cantwell’s language of orders gives way, at the last, to direct tenderness; Renata’s final choice preserves a link to their shared passage even as she leaves him to go on.