Squeak, squeak. “I can only tell you what I did. You’re interested in science; call this the exponential program. For you must always press yourself, you see. Always. Dubliners was a book like many another. With the Portrait, however, there is a… strengthening. An increase in density, call it a tenfold increase for simplicity’s sake. Or one magnitude, for you. Ulysses is again another magnitude more dense, more difficult than the Portrait. There aren’t many books like that one; nor many people who can understand it. Then Finnegans Wake… that’s yet another magnitude more difficult…”
“Until even you have trouble understanding that one, hey Mr. Joyce?”
“Smartass.” Always up on the latest in slang, he was, and in five languages too. He put down his book (the Wake? still puzzling over it? I couldn’t tell) and swung his walking stick around, pointed it at me. It really was quite a thorny stick. “The point is, you must press yourself! You must go beyond what you thought yourself capable of…”
“You mean I should push the outside of the envelope, I should seek new worlds, and go boldly where no man has gone before?”
“Smartass.” He poked the stick at me. Shook his head. “Being an American has no doubt destroyed your mind. This book…” he nudged the bronze volume with his foot; was that my book he had been reading? The Planet in the Snow? “All these bizarre distortions from the real… Well, I like that part of it, actually. And you must solve the esthetic problems of your time, it’s not my problem thank God. But listen! You asked me what you should do—do you want to bear what I say?” And he jabbed me a couple of times with the end of the stick.
“Yes.”
He leaned toward me, looked me right in the eye with those circular bronze specs. “Go back down there, and try again.”
After that we only talked about his time, which he was much more comfortable discussing. He told me some hilarious stories about Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach, and tore up Dublin one more time, with a great nostalgic longing in his voice. “But I’d not be buried there, not on your life!” Of course not; The exile still, and always. We laughed over the Zürichers and their great passion for order—the tram conductors we had both seen, sticking their beads out the window, waiting to take off until the plaza clock second hand swept up to the top… And he told me about writing Finnegan’s Wake, drawing on cardboard with colored crayons, so he could see the letters; the pained laughter tore out of him, creak, creak, creak! I questioned the wisdom of that particular project, and, made irritable by all those years sitting out in the snow, he got angry with me. “You haven’t given it enough!” he cried. In his agitation he even stood up, squeak!, and pounded his walking stick over his sitting block, as if to soften it. “That’s the best book I wrote, and you won’t even work at it!” And watching him, I thought that that faith in his work, fierce, unshakeable, was his real lesson to me. Fascinated, I pressed to see more of it; he began reminiscing about the difficulties of getting the book printed properly, and I said, “Typos, in Finnegan’s Wake? How could you tell?”
And with a metallic laughing roar of a shout, he thwacked me. That stick of his had more thorns on it than I cared to face, and I had to beat a retreat: he took off after me. If anybody had been up there that day, they would have seen a strange sight: a figure in a bright green suit and running shoes, chased among tombstones by a little nearsighted bronze man wielding a stick. But the good Swiss know better than to visit a cemetery in a snowstorm, and there were no witnesses. He chased me all the way home.
Venice Drowned
By the time Carlo Tafur struggled out of sleep, the baby was squalling, the teapot whistled, the smell of stove smoke filled the air. Wavelets slapped the walls of the floor below. It was just dawn. Reluctantly he untangled himself from the bedsheets and got up. He padded through the other room of his home, ignoring his wife and child, and walked out the door onto the roof.
Venice looked best at dawn, Carlo thought as he pissed into the canal. In the dim mauve light it was possible to imagine that the city was just as it always had been, that hordes of visitors would come flooding down the Grand Canal on this fine summer morning… Of course, one had to ignore the patchwork constructions built on the roofs of the neighborhood to indulge the fancy. Around the church—San Giacomo du Rialto—all the buildings had even their top floors awash, and so it had been necessary to break up the tile roofs, and erect shacks on the roofbeams made of materials fished up from below: wood, brick, lath, stone, metal, glass. Carlo’s home was one of these shacks, made of a crazy combination of wood beams, stained glass from San Giacometta, and drainpipes beaten flat. He looked back at it and sighed. It was best to look off over the Rialto, where the red sun blazed over the bulbous domes of San Marco.
“You have to meet those Japanese today,” Carlo’s wife, Luisa, said from inside.
“I know.” Visitors still came to Venice, that was certain.
“And don’t go insulting them and rowing off without your pay.” she went on, her voice sounding clearly out of the doorway, “like you did with those Hungarians. It really doesn’t matter what they take from under the water, you know. That’s the past. That old stuff isn’t doing anyone any good under there, anyway.”
‘Shut up,” he said wearily. “I know.”
“I have to buy stovewood and vegetables and toilet paper and socks for the baby,” she said. “The Japanese are the best customers you’ve got; you’d better treat them well.”
Carlo reentered the shack and walked into the bedroom to dress. Between putting on one boot and the next he stopped to smoke a cigarette, the last one in the house. While smoking he stared at his pile of books on the floor, his library as Luisa sardonically called the collection: all books about Venice. They were tattered, dog-eared, mildewed, so warped by the damp that none of them would close properly, and each moldy page was as wavy as the Lagoon on a windy day. They were a miserable sight, and Carlo gave the closest stack a kick with his cold boot as he returned to the other room.
“I’m off,” he said, giving his baby and then Luisa a kiss. “I’ll be back late—they want to go to Torcello.”
“What could they want up there?”
He shrugged. “Maybe just to see it.” He ducked out the door.
Below the roof was a small square where the boats of the neighborhood were moored. Carlo slipped off the tile onto the narrow floating dock he and the neighbors had built, and crossed to his boat, a wide-beamed sailboat with a canvas deck. He stepped in, unmoored it, and rowed out of the square onto the Grand Canal.
Once on the Grand Canal he tipped the oars out of the water and let the boat drift downstream. The big canal had always been the natural course of the channel through the mud flats of the Lagoon; for a white it had been tamed, but now it was a river again, its banks made of tile rooftops and stone palaces, with hundreds of tributaries flowing into it. Men were working on roof-houses in the early morning light.
Those who knew Carlo waved, hammers or rope in hand, and shouted hello. Carlo wiggled an oar perfunctorily before he was swept past. It was foolish to build so close to the Grand Canal, which now had the strength to knock the old structures down, and often did. But that was their business, in Venice they were all fools, if one thought about it.