Love and death

Love and death are joined throughout Richard Cantwell’s final days: one draws him toward Renata and the nearness of life, while the other presses in through his damaged heart, his memories of war, and his awareness that his profession has been the dispensing of death. The novel makes this connection bodily and practical rather than merely philosophical. Affection cannot cancel mortality, and Cantwell’s desire to give Renata a future cannot make that future secure; still, their intimacy gives him a reason to speak, remember, and imagine what he might leave her.

A Body Already Under Strain

Cantwell’s struggle with death begins before the Venetian shooting trip. At fifty, a Colonel of Infantry in the United States Army, reduced from general rank, he has taken mannitol hexanitrate before a physical examination so that he can pass. The surgeon remains skeptical and checks the readings twice, warning that the drug is contraindicated in conditions involving increased intraocular and intracranial pressure. Cantwell admits to himself that he does not quite know what the drug will do; outwardly, he answers the surgeon as though the technical explanation is beyond him. The episode establishes a pattern in which medical danger is real but managed through evasion, calculation, and an effort to keep functioning.

The limits of that effort become more personal when Cantwell asks Renata about her health. She says that she is wonderful apart from ulcers and a small cardiac condition. His reaction—his heart rising and seeming to choke him—registers not simply concern for her, but the shock of discovering that she has not told him about this condition. He had known of the ulcers, not of the heart problem. Love here means attention to another person’s vulnerability, but it also makes withheld knowledge newly painful: the danger is no longer only his own.

Ecstasy Beside Mortality

During a desperate, tender kiss, Cantwell cannot think about battles or the picturesque incidents that usually organize his memories. His attention narrows to Renata’s closeness, the feel of her black sweater, and the intensity of being with her. The moment joins ecstasy to the awareness that life stands close to death. Physical intimacy does not overcome that proximity; it makes it more perceptible. The question of what ecstasy is, and how it might be ranked or named, gives way to the simpler fact of feeling Renata near him.

That contrast sharpens his reflection on death as something that may arrive in fragments, by ordinary accident, or in sudden violence. He recalls unboiled water, an unpulled mosquito boot, the roar of explosions, the whispers before automatic fire, a grenade’s smoke-emitting arc, and the fall of a mortar. Death can also come through a bomb falling from its rack, a vehicle’s metallic crash, or a loss of traction on a slippery road. The list refuses a single grand image of dying: catastrophe and minute hazards belong to the same inventory. Cantwell has lived with death for nearly all his life and identifies its distribution as his trade, yet that knowledge does not equip him with a comforting explanation for Renata. In the cold, windy morning at the Gritti Palace Hotel, he has to answer her desire to know everything from within the very uncertainty he describes.

Love Without a Guarantee

The couple’s conversation makes the cost of attachment explicit. Renata wants Cantwell to tell her things, even bitter things, and speaks of wanting him to die with the grace of a happy death, while admitting that she is getting mixed up. The exchange brings care and helplessness together: she wants to receive his account of the past and to accompany him toward an ending, but speech itself cannot make the ending easier or more orderly. Cantwell promises not to let her become too confused, accepting a role as the one who tells and steadies even when he cannot remove what she must face.

Later, with the Gran Maestro gone and the Grand Canal visible beyond the window, Cantwell asks what happens to people who love one another. Renata’s answer holds both the gift and its cost: they have whatever they have and are more fortunate than others, but one of them eventually gets emptiness forever. Cantwell asks her not to have that emptiness and says he will not answer roughly, although he could have done so. Renata says she will try, and that she has been trying since she woke and since they first knew each other. Their words do not resolve the asymmetry of loss. Instead, they show love as a shared effort to live with its inevitability without pretending that the survivor will be untouched.

What Can Be Given

Cantwell’s thoughts about a gift turn the emotional problem into a concrete reckoning with what he possesses. He wants to give Renata security, but judges that security no longer exists. He considers giving her all his love, though he calls it worthless, and inventories worldly goods that amount to two good shotguns, soldier suits, medals and citations, books, and a retired Colonel’s pay. The objects are specific, but none answers the need he has identified. Military distinctions, including decorations from his own country, France, and Belgium, would be morbid gifts; the small moor’s head was selected by Renata and bought by him, so he does not regard it as a true present.

The image of endowing her with all his worldly goods meets a practical impossibility: he cannot work out how to send love or keep it fresh, joking inwardly about packing it in dry ice. The joke does not dissolve the seriousness of the wish. It makes visible the gap between feeling and transfer: Cantwell can name what he wants Renata to have, but cannot turn love into durable protection or a parcel that will survive separation. His inventory also leaves him thinking about a condemned jeep engine meant for an old man, another concrete responsibility he believes he ought to figure out. The habits that served him under fire—working out what to do while others were shooting—continue to organize his mind, even where no calculation can solve the central problem.

The Final Blow

At the close, the language of luck and the body’s recurrent failure converge. After the flight of the pin-tailed ducks, Cantwell tells himself that he has always been lucky, recalling the thought that three strikes should have meant an end but that he was given four. Then the blow he has anticipated since the decoys were picked up hits again, badly. The passage does not turn this recurrence into a victory over death: luck has postponed or complicated the count, not abolished it. The ending’s force lies in that collision between a practiced, wry account of survival and the body’s insistence on its limit.

Across these episodes, love does not function as a cure for Cantwell’s heart or as a promise that Renata will be spared grief. Its meaning is more difficult and more immediate: attention to a concealed illness, the bodily closeness of a kiss, the exchange of bitter truths, and the wish to leave something valuable behind. Death, in turn, is not confined to combat scenes. It is an occupational knowledge, an ordinary possibility, a pressure within intimacy, and finally a renewed bodily blow. Their conjunction gives the relationship its tenderness and its severity: Cantwell can offer love, but cannot make it into security, and Renata can accept his account without making the coming emptiness disappear.