I have heard two Venetian housewives on the steps of a green canal discuss the qualities of various makes of electric food blenders for twenty minutes straight, in detail and with enormous vigor. The conversation was not notable for hectic and death-haunted ecstasy. Indeed, one reason why life is so strong there is that you can hear it. In other cities it is drowned out by the sound of motors. What you hear in the other cities is the noise engines make. What you hear in Venice, mostly, is the noise people make. The birds, too; the cats when they are in love; the lions make no noise worth mentioning, though the book they hold says softly, Pax tibi, Maree, evangelista meus. And thus the silence of Venice is the noisiest silence imaginable.
When I have been out in the vacuum between the stars, and have listened to it and been terrified, I have found a way to pull free from that absorbing terror (which Pascal mentioned, although he had never flown in a space ship) and rejoin myself: I pretend that I am waking up rather early in the morning in a hotel room in Venice. At first it is still, deeply still, the stillness of the level, misty, bluish-green lagoon, the stillness of the small canal between stone house walls around the corner. I know that the bridge near the hotel entrance is reflected, its arch making a perfect circle, in that stillness. Beyond that bridge is another bridge, and another beyond that, each borne up entire by its reflection: air, water, stone, glass, one. A pigeon up on the tiles outside the dormer window goes oocooloo roo. That is the first sound; that, and the faint whicker of wind in the pigeon’s wings, alighting. Footsteps come down the street past the hotel entrance, across the arched bridge, die away: the second sound, or pattern of sounds and silences. Somebody breaks some glass down in the courtyard of the hotel. They always break glass in Venetian hotel courtyards in the morning; it may be a ritual observance of the dawn, or a way of getting rid of the baubles unsold to tourists in the gewgaw shops yesterday, I do not know. Maybe it is how they wash dishes in Venice. A startling sound, but not unmusical, followed by loud swearing and a laugh. By now I am almost safe from the terrors of the hygienic void. Down in the courtyard a radio is playing while they sweep up the glass. Somebody on one of the bridges shouts something I cannot quite understand in the Venetian dialect to someone on another bridge; and then the great bells of the Campanile and the small bells of three neighborhood churches all undertake more or less simultaneously to invite parishioners to early Mass. It is all music, and I am home safe, listening to the profound, extraordinary silence of the city of life.
I was not born there and have never lived there. When I say “home safe” I am using a metaphor from the game of baseball.
I have visited Venice four times, each time for four days only. Each time it was a little lower in the water.
If you were to ask me pointblank (as you have asked me to describe the Earth) whether I want to go back to Earth and why, I might well answer, “Yes: to see Venice in the winter.” I have seen it only in late spring and summer. In winter, they tell me, it is terribly cold, and the museums are closed even more often than in summer, so that you cannot go warm yourself at the red and golden fires of Titian and Veronese. The white fog seeps among the stones. In the storms of winter St. Mark’s Square, that loveliest living room ever built, whose ceiling is the opalescent sky, has often been flooded. The cathedral itself has been invaded by the sea, waves and mosaics interchanging their netted and glittering reflections, the five gold domes floating like balloons above the breakers, the four bronze horses of Neptune snorting and trembling as they scent their native element. No doubt the lions continued to gaze downward with detached and frowning approbation, scarcely troubling to stir their folded wings. The gondolas, I suppose, floated tied to the very tops of their striped mooring poles, or else were put away, knocking on the ceilings of flooded boathouses; or did they drift across the great square beneath the horses and the gold balloons, the procession of the Angel and the Three Kings, the bell tower which fell down in 1903 but got right up again, the agitated pigeons searching for their daily handout on the shallow, cold, grey waves? Beneath the waves at evening did the electric yo-yos flicker up and down their strings, attracting the ghosts of long-drowned Langobards?
Winter and summer, the gondolas were black. They were painted black a long time ago in mourning for something—the loss of a battle, the fall of the Republic, the death of a baby—I cannot remember why gondolas went into mourning. They were the most elegant boats people have ever made, more elegant even than the boat that brought me here. The warning cry of the gondolier, as heguided his craft towards the sunlight at the end of a narrow side canal under balconies and arched bridges, through a trembling of shadows, was soft and yet carried clearly along the ways of stone and water: “Hoy-y-y,” he called, and the cats and lions on the sun-warmed angles of the bridges listened and said nothing, as you, my lord, do now.
East
The Diary of the Rose
30 AUGUST
Dr. Nades recommends that I keep a diary of my work. She says that if you keep it carefully, when you reread it you can remind yourself of observations you made, notice errors and learn from them, and observe progress in or deviations from positive thinking, and so keep correcting the course of your work by a feedback process.
I promise to write in this notebook every night, and reread it at the end of each week.
I wish I had done it while I was an assistant, but it is even more important now that I have patients of my own.
As of yesterday I have six patients, a full load for a scopist, but four of them are the autistic children I have been working with all year for Dr. Nades’s study for the Nat’l Psych. Bureau (my notes on them are in the cli psy files). The other two are new admissions:
Ana Jest, 46, bakery packager, md., no children, diag. depression, referral from city police (suicide attempt).
Flores Sorde, 36, engineer, unmd., no diag., referral from TRTU (Psychopathic behavior—Violent).
Dr. Nades says it is important that I write things down each night just as they occurred to me at work: it is the spontaneity that is most informative in self-examination (just as in autopsychoscopy). She says it is better to write it, not dictate onto tape, and keep it quite private, so that I won’t be self-conscious. It is hard. I never wrote anything that was private before. I keep feeling as if I was really writing it for Dr. Nades! Perhaps if the diary is useful I can show her some of it, later, and get her advice.
My guess is that Ana Jest is in menopausal depression and hormone therapy will be sufficient There! Now let’s see how bad a prognostician I am.