And so it was, of course, with Venice. Her sky was alive with gold and rose. Her olive cupolas were half immersed in a ruby-coloured aura. Smouldering bronze, silver stone, emerald tiles, a thousand shades of terracotta, canals like mercury, woven into one great carpet of colour whose tones faded or deepened with the setting of the sun. With her vast variety of domes and towers, curves and angles, she surely existed in more than a mere four dimensions.
Da Bazzanno chuckled at my astonishment. Venice’s confident beauty contradicted any conventional understanding of space, just as she revealed whole varieties of tints and washes which, I could swear, I have never seen since. As her colours darkened, her lights made little pools of shivering copper and warm saffron refracted in water that diffused and enriched her so that the outlines of her buildings merged with sky and water and made it impossible to know where the reality ended and the mirage began. I could easily believe the whole vast scene to be illusion. I understood how she had resisted her would-be conquerors for so many centuries.
Again La Farfalla Nera banked steeply, lending that fabulous city a further crazy unreality. We swept towards the vivid tapestry as if to be absorbed by it. We banked again, making a pass at the water as we prepared to put down. I heard a sudden loud bang, felt a series of sharp shudders, then a sense of bouncing gently forward until at last we settled. Da Bazzanno’s next remark was lost under a massive roar from the engines steadying the ship as she came about. She prepared to taxi towards the dark outlines of churches, storehouses, palaces, merchants’ mansions, banks and museums built with that same enchanting combination of knowing magnificence and unrivalled, artless beauty. Even Odessa in her Golden Age could not begin to match the brutal and subtle glamour of that ethereal Queen of Ports whose influence once stretched across the globe, whose style has so frequently been imitated and never successfully equalled, even by Hollywood. Venice’s beauty set the standard by which all watery cities, be they Stockholm, Rovaniemi, Amsterdam or Bangkok, measure themselves.
‘I’ll send my orderly to the harbourmaster with a note,’ Fiorello told me. ‘They’ll come and collect us in a decent boat. We shall be staying at my family home near La Fenice. I apologise in advance for the building’s condition. I was only recently able to reclaim it from the people who had occupied it since we lost it in 1797. Their taste was typically bourgeois. I’m having the whole place redecorated.’
I remarked that he had reached quite a height. Ten years ago, as an impoverished artist, he had only dreamed of the world he was now helping to create.
‘It’s crazy, isn’t it?’ My observation seemed to sober him. ‘Yet isn’t there an emptiness about it? Doesn’t it feel to you, my dear Max, as if it could fade away tomorrow, like fairy gold? This is our time, Max. I doubt we’ll have another. We must enjoy it to the full. When we wake up, we could be rotting in some prison or, worse, discover our real selves to be nothing but bank clerks and minor civil servants with cheap ambitions!’
I was a little surprised by his change of mood. Only a day or so earlier he had been describing the triumph of a New Rome which would rule the world for millennia. I said that I thought he was being both too self-deprecating and too pessimistic. He received only what he had honestly earned. ‘What you starved for. What you worked for. These are the rewards of the hard, dangerous, hungry years. Your Duce knows what you are worth.’
He leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. ‘Well, let us hope you are right. Meanwhile, I suggest you take my advice anyway. After all, what can you lose if I’m wrong? Life should always be relished by the moment. Death takes everything but that moment from us. Everything.’
Miranda Butter was much impressed by this profoundly Latin attitude which to me seemed to carry a certain cargo of self-pity, so unlike our own Slavic soul-searching. Slavic angst contains an intellectual element lacking in the Italian’s fiery despair.
‘But death,’ I said, ‘also presents us with that moment.’
My lovely companion gasped and placed her hand on mine. Her eyes were hot with tears. ‘That’s so true.’
Da Bazzanno shrugged and called for more cognac. His normally droll face was suffused with emotion. He now resembled a pantomime horse playing Ibsen. In silence he grew absorbed in the scene beyond the window.
‘What does Venice mean to you, Prince Max?’ Maddy still habitually used my formal title in public. ‘Do you, too, have family here?’
I shook my head. ‘Venice means betrayal. Had she not withdrawn her fleet in 1453, Constantinople would not have fallen to the Turk. Yet now she redeems herself. Now she remains one of the few unfallen bastions of Christendom.’ I looked across the black, jewelled waters to where the lights of gondolas and fishing boats came and went against the misty outlines of the quayside buildings, the queerly angled mooring posts. ‘She is a marriage of Western and Eastern civilisation. I long to know her better.’
Miss Butter spoke softly. ‘We’ll explore her together, shall we? But you must remain my spiritual guide and my teacher. I’m so ignorant of European history.’
‘Unfortunately for my family,’ I told her, ‘we are almost nothing but history.’ My smile was self-mocking. ‘And we are not known for our lack of spirituality, either. We are Russians.’
Da Bazzanno, pulling himself out of his mood, laughed suddenly, displaying his huge, yellow teeth. ‘We want as little history in Italy as possible. Until now Italy too has been nothing but history. Picturesque ruins, memories of former glory. We have lived off tourism and tagliatelle for centuries. The new Italy has a place only for the future — the history we are making today!’
We drank to the future in champagne. We drank to the city, to the nation, to the leader. We drank to the fulfilment of our dreams. Our faith was in a fascism as yet untarnished by the actions of its less disciplined adherents. Real, idealistic Fascists, like da Bazzanno, loathed everything that their movement became; a party divided by crude rivalries and guided by orthodoxy which Mussolini himself always sought to discourage.
But then, in our happy innocence, we drank to our Golden Age.
A little later a motor launch, carrying a small blackshirt guard of honour and the deputy mayor, drew alongside. Signora Sarfatti had joined us. She sat across from me. From time to time she offered me a friendly wink. She was completely at ease and exuded authority. We climbed into the launch. I felt uncomfortable, sitting, with my precious luggage, between two stern foot soldiers of the new Italy, but they were eager to oblige us in every way. Within minutes we reached the quay and the blackshirts helped us disembark, carrying our bags to a waiting cart which they proceeded to steer at a trot, with loud whistles of warning, through San Marco’s gathering crowds.
To my still befuddled mind we were shadows, insubstantial and colourful, perhaps, but nonetheless still merely actors in some extravagant movie. My sense of unreality was increased by the expressions on various faces around me. The vibrant Venetian air heightened the contrasts. Grotesque, immobile, animated or familiar, every face bore a certain theatrical cast. People’s clothes, though frequently of modish design, had the quality of stage costumes. The buildings, canals and alleys continued my impression of an enduring artificiality. Even the voices of organ-grinders, fiddlers, jumping-jack sellers, the hawkers of tin toys, cheap scarves and whole ensembles of masks, felt as if they were orchestrated for the stage. We crossed a couple of small, dramatically arching bridges, passed down a zigzag of twittens, stumbled for a while on a cobbled path running beside a narrow canal over which gaudy washing hung like welcoming flags. At last we entered a small dead-end square smelling strongly of cat urine. Here the cart was brought to an abrupt stop and the fascisti saluted. Da Bazzanno returned their salute, took a ring of rattling metal from his pocket and inserted a large brass key into the lock of a rather scruffy-looking door made from ancient, iron-bound wood. Light spilled suddenly into the little square and a shrill voice cackled in happy surprise from within. ‘Fiorello! Fiorello! Mio figlio!’