Fiorello was familiar with her arguments. He dismissed them with good humour. ‘My darling Margherita, the only art Venetians have learned is the art of good living. Everything else is imported. They will trade with anyone. I offer you the real secret of their enduring supremacy. They honestly believe that making money is a moral pursuit, that gold has an ethical and spiritual value, that a man without profit is a man without honour. These aren’t the survivors of Atlantis, dear friends, but of Ur! They are the ancestors of all usurers and merchants. And good luck to them.’ He signed for her glass to be replenished.
‘Fiorello,’ she crooned, ’you tolerate everything and everyone.’ Her brunette waves tumbled fetchingly across her face.
‘That’s our great Italian virtue, my dear.’
‘The disease for which Fascism is the remedy.’ She was sardonic. Her lips pretended sternness she could not feel towards her lover. ‘At least, that’s what I hear you saying in public.’
‘One has to employ stronger, simpler language in public than one favours in private, Margherita. Fascism balances and moderates our natural tolerance. It binds all our qualities of manliness and femininity together in one strong bundle.’ I heard an equally obvious note of self-mockery in his voice when he made such pronouncements.
‘There does not,’ observed Signora Sarfatti drily, ‘appear to be a very strong element of femininity bound into our Duce’s bundle of faggots.’
‘You’d be surprised.’ That was all da Bazzanno would give us.
‘These things surely are all a matter of interpretation.’ Miss Butter’s Italian was not as good as her French but it was better than mine. We had agreed to use French as our common tongue. ‘What, after all, do the words “masculine” and “feminine” mean?’
Such abstractions were too much for us, so we changed to a different subject. We had Miss Butter inform us of her native Texas, its cowboys and wild Kiowa. She had little direct experience of either, she said, having been educated in Atlanta and raised in Galveston, on the coast. ‘Which has rather more to do with commerce and shipping.’
I thought it inappropriate to mention my old political connections in Houston. Miss Butter was at a naive stage in her own political development, full of generalised sentimentality towards lame ducks. Sometimes in private I laughed at her, telling her she could not nurse the whole world’s walking wounded. But I had no wish to revive arguments on subjects which still aroused my own passions. I wanted to put all my conflicts behind me and begin my career where the Bolshevists had cut it off some ten years earlier.
I reminded myself that I was not a politician but a scientist. Not an actor, but an inventor. In future my contribution to the human race would be thoroughly practical. I would no longer talk of ‘lifting the masses’ — I would lift them through my deeds, by example. I understood where my own idealism belonged. I think Miss Butter recognised this. Indeed, it was these qualities in me rather than my political opinions which she found attractive. Aside from my admiration of Mussolini, my fear that civil war must soon break out in France and Germany, a sense of the general causes of our European malaise and a notion of who the chief villains were, I expressed few opinions. What my friends wanted to hear from me was not what they already knew. They wanted my vision of tomorrow where flying cities and vast engineering works brought peace and prosperity to all. I described my notion of a huge airliner which was entirely comprised of wing — a massive flying wing, some thousand yards wide! My steam-car, I told Fiorello, on his enquiring, was now a reality in California. My light aircraft were flying in the air force of Marrakech’s Caïd. In France, at a secret hangar near St-Denis, my airship strained to be airborne but was grounded by the squabbling greed of her investors. I had built flying infantry for the Turks and designed a secret weapon for Petlyura in Ukraine. Other ideas of mine, such as the autogyro and ocean-based aeroplane staging platforms, were realities. My intention was never to get rich from these ideas.. My first goal was to ease the human burden. Any profit I made was incidental. Again and again Fiorello and Margherita assured me that I was just the type Mussolini wished to recruit for his great army of scholars, scientists, soldiers and engineers. His willingness to give such men as myself a chance was what made him so great.
My earlier sense of urgency, which had enabled me to sustain myself in Morocco and given me a persuasive motive for returning to Europe, had been replaced by a quieter and, I believe, stronger emotion. I wished to take stock of myself as well as the country before I presented myself to Il Duce. What was more, I had fallen in love a little with the delicious Miss Butter. Soon I would be infatuated, head over heels, with the City of St Mark!
Together Miss Butter and I visited Venice’s museums and magnificent public buildings, gasping at her astonishing wonders and riches which we came upon often unexpectedly when rounding a corner of an alley and finding, for instance, the white marble church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. We entered her relatively austere portals to discover a wealth of gold, a feast of murals and pictures and a towering altar which seemed to draw you directly up to heaven. Every square had a character of its own, every bridge opened on to a picture, every garden displayed the orderly beauty of centuries of cultivation, nurtured and shaped to gladden the eye and the heart.
Da Bazzanno had been right. In the daylight, with her bustling business life, her babble of voices, her washing lines and murmuring touts, Venice was nothing but reality. Along the Grand Canal, where building after building spoke of a magnificent history, where Baroque and Gothic and Romanesque, Moorish and Byzantine styles stood shoulder to shoulder against any easy definition, there was a domestic ordinariness to the city. People came and went on a thousand different missions, crossing the bridges, taking the gondolas as others might take buses and taxis, striking bargains, chatting, quarrelling. Few bothered to sit in the little boats which plied constantly between the quays. To stand marked you as a Venetian. In my bones, I knew how at night these people transformed themselves into creatures resembling their inhuman ancestors. These same buildings and canals would be touched by Titania’s wand to become scenes from fairyland where sorcery and magic were concrete realities.
Sometimes I felt I crossed from one version of our world into another. I was discovering myself at the nativity of a modern Renaissance. I was privileged to live in the first years of a Golden Age. Then something went wrong. I could not in those days have predicted how the envious, venal and most banal forces of our century would force the world into a prolonged nightmare, a nightmare from which there now seems no chance of awakening. Perhaps Venice was actually a gateway from one potential reality to another? Perhaps unconsciously I stepped through that gateway and became a prisoner, longing for the just, safe and orderly world I had lost? But in those early weeks I had no such gloomy ideas. My infatuation with Miss Butter and with Venice remains among my happiest memories.
A city heavy with such unique history is arrogant but far too well bred to show it. She is narcissistic — infinitely reflected in her own waters - and she is vain. Venice is interested only in herself. She possesses the haughty charm of antique tradition and ancient wealth. Her condescending tolerance is based on the sublime understanding that she has no natural enemies and that the rest of the world shares an instinctive desire to serve and to please her. Venice owns an elusive heart, a mysterious soul. Even in her silences or in the gay music of her many masques and concerts, in her theatrical performances, you can sometimes hear the beating of a powerful prehistoric organ, the whisper of ancient arteries, the pulsing of forgotten veins. Sometimes a faint drift of unnameable colour undulates across a square or passes you on one of the narrow canals. Shadows appear which owe nothing to the position of the sun or the moon.