Your memory will accord this place a history whose particulars you probably won't recall but whose main fruit will most likely be a democracy. The same source will endow it with a temperate climate adhering to the four-seasons routine and segregating palm trees to railway stations' grillrooms. It will also give your city Reykjavi'k-on-Sunday-type traffic; people will be few if any; beggars and children, however, will speak the foreign tongue fluently. The currency will carry images ofRenaissance scholars, the coins feminine profiles of the republic, but the numbers will still be recognizable, and your main problem—not of paying, but of tipping—can, in the end, be solved. In other words, regardless of what it says on your ticket, of whether you'll be staying at the Savoy or the Danieli, the moment you open your shutters, you'll see at once Notre-Dame, St. James's, San Giorgio, and Hagia Sophia.
For the aforesaid submerged monster digests legends as eagerly as reality. Add to that the latter's aspiration for the glory of the former (or the former's claim to enjoying, at least onee upon a time, the status of the latter). Small wonder, then, that your city should, as though it's been painted by Claude or Corot, have some water: a harbor, a lake, a lagoon. Smaller wonder still that the medieval ramparts or molars of its Roman wall should look like an intended background for some steel-cum-glass-cum-concrete structures: a university, say, or more likely an insurance company headquarters. These are usually erected on the site of some monastery or ghetto bombed out of existence in the course of the last war. Small wonder, too, that a traveler reveres ancient ruins many times over the modern ones left in the center of your city by its fathers for didactic purposes: a traveler, by definition, is a product of hierarchic thinking.
In the final analysis, however, there is no hierarchy between the legendary and the real, in the context of your city at least, since the present engenders the past far more energetically than the other way around. Every car passing through an intersection makes its equestrian monument more obsolete, more ancient, telescoping its great local eighteenth-century military or civic genius into some skin- clad William Tell or other. With all four hooves firmly on the plinth (which, in the parlance of sculpture, means that the rider has died not on the battlefield but in his own, presumably four-poster bed), this monument's horse would stand in your city more as an homage to an extinct means of transportation than to anyone's particular valor. The birds' ca-ca on the bronze tricorn is all the more deserved, for history long since exited your city, yielding the stage to the more elementary forces of geography and commerce. Therefore, your city will have not only a cross between a bazaar in Istanbul and Macy's; no, a traveler in this city, should he turn right, is bound to hit the silks, furs, and leather of via Condotti and, if he turns left, to find himself buying either fresh or canned pheasant at Fauchon (and the canned one is preferable).
For buy you must. As the philosopher would have put it, I purchase, therefore I am. And who knows that better than a man in passage? In fact, every well-mapped trip is in the end a shopping expedition: indeed, one's whole passage through the world is. In fact, next to taking pictures, shopping comes in second at sparing one's subconscious an alien reality. In fact, that's what we call a bargain, and with a credit card you can go on infinitely. In fact, why don't you simply call your whole city—it surely ought to have a name—American Express? This will make it as legal as being included in the atlas: no one will dare to challenge your description. On the contrary, many would claim they've been there, too, a year or so ago. To prove this, they'll produce a bunch of snapshots or, if you are staying for a meal, even a slide show. Some of them have known Karl Malden, that city's dapper old mayor, personally for years and years.
III
It is an early evening in the town of your memory; you are sitting in a sidewalk cafe under drooping chestnuts. A traffic light idly flashes its red-amber-green eye above the empty intersection; higher up, swallows crisscross a platinum, cloudless sky. The way your coffee or your white wine tastes tells you that you are neither in Italy nor in Germany; the bill tells you that you are not in Switzerland, either. All the same, you are in Common Market territory.
On the left, there is the Concert Hall, and on the right there is the Parliament. Or it is the other way around: with architecture like this, it's hard to tell the difference. Chopin came through this town, so did Liszt, and so did Paganini. As for Wagner, the book says he went through this place three times. So did, it seems, the Pied Piper. Or maybe it's just Sunday, vacation time, midsummer. "In summer," the poet said, "capitals grow empty." An ideal season for a coup d'etat, then, for introducing tanks into these narrow cobblestone streets—almost no traffic whatsoever. Of course, if this place is indeed a capital . . .
You have a couple of phone numbers here, but you've tried them already twice. As for the goal of your pilgrimage, the National Museum, justly famous for its Italian Masters, you went there straight from the train, and it closes at five. And anyhow, what's wrong with great art—with Italian Masters in particular—is that it makes you resent reality. If, of course, this is a reality . . .
So you open the local Time Out and consider theater. It's Ibsen and Chekhov all over the place, the usual Continental fare. Luckily, you don't know the language. The National Ballet appears to be touring Japan, and you won't sit through Madama Butterfly for the sixth time even if the set was designed by Hockney. That leaves movies and pop groups, yet the small print of these pages, not to mention the bands' names, makes you briefly nauseous. On the horizon looms further expansion of your waistline in some Lu- tece or Golden Horseshoe. It is actually your widening diameter that narrows your options.
The more one travels, though, the better one knows that curling up in a hotel room with Flaubert won't do either. The sounder solution is a stroll in an amusement park, half an hour in a shooting gallery, or a video game—something that boosts the ego and doesn't require knowledge of the local tongue. Or else take a taxi to the top of the hill that dominates the view and offers a terrific panorama of your composite city and its environs: the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, Westminster Abbey, St. Basil—the whole thing. This is yet another nonverbal experience; a "wow" will suffice. That's, of course, if there is a hill, or if there is a taxi . . .
Return to your hotel on foot: it's downhill all the way. Admire shrubs and hedges shielding the stylish mansions; admire the rustling acacias and somber monoliths of the business center. Linger by well-lit shop windows, especially those selling watches. Such a variety, almost like in Switzerland! It's not that you need a new watch; it's just a nice way of killing time—looking at the watches. Admire toys and admire lingerie: these appeal to the family man in you. Admire the clean-swept pavement and perfect infinity of avenues: you always had a soft spot for geometry, which, as you know, means "no people."