WATERMARK
by joseph brodsky
Elegy for John Donne and Other Poems Selected Poems A Part of Speech Less Than One To Urania
Marbles Watermark
WATERMARK
JOSEPH BRODSKY Farrar, Straus & Giroux
New York
Copyright© 1992 by Joseph Brodsky All rights reserved Published simultaneously in Canada by HarperCollinsCanadaLtd Printed in the United States of America Designed by Cynthia Krupat First edition, 1992
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brodsky, Joseph Watermark / Joseph Brodsky. — 1st ed. 1. Venice (Italy)—Description—1981- 2. Brodsky,Joseph. 1940- —-Journeys—Italy— Venice. I. Title. PG3479.4R64 W3 1992 818' ·54Q3—dc2o [B] 91-45351 CIP
To Robert Morgan
WATERMARK
any moons ago the dollar was 870 lire and I was thirty-two. The globe, too, was lighter by two billion souls, and the bar at the stazione where I'd arrived on that cold December night was empty. I was standing there waiting for the only person I knew in that city to meet me. She was quite late.
Every traveler knows this fix: this mixture of fatigue and apprehension. It's the time of staring down clock faces and timetables, of scrutinizing varicose marble under your feet, ofinhaling ammonia and that dull smell elicitedon cold winter nights by locomotives' cast iron. I did all this.
Save for the yawning bartender and immobile Buddha-like matrona at the cash register, there was no one in sight. However, we were of no use to each other: my sole currency in their language, the term "espresso," was already spent; I'd used it twice. I'd also bought from them my first pack ever of what in years to come was to stand for "Merde Statale," "Movimento Sociale," and "Morte Sicura": my first pack of MS. So I lifted my bags and stepped outside.
In the unlikely event that someone's eye followed my white London Fog and dark brown Borsalino, they should have cut a familiar silhouette. The night itself, to be sure, would have had no difficulty absorbing it. Mimicry, I believe, is high on the list of every traveler, and the Italy I had in mind at the moment was a fusion of black-and-white movies of the fifties and the equally monochrome medium of my metier. Winter thus was my season; theonly thing I lacked, I thought, to look like a local rake or carbonaro was a scarf. Other than that, I felt inconspicuous and fit to merge into the background or fill the frame of a low- budget whodunit or, more likely, melodrama.
t was a windy night, and before my retina registered anything, I was smitten by a feeling of utter happiness: my nostrils were hit by what to me has always been its synonym, the smell of freezing seaweed. For some people, it's freshly cut grass or hay; for others, Christmas scents of conifer needles and tangerines. For me, it's freezing seaweed—partly because of onomatopoeic aspects of the very conjunction (in Russian, seaweed is a wonderful vodorosli), partly due to a slight incongruity and a hidden underwater drania in this notion. One recognizes oneself in certain elements; by the time I was taking this smell in on the steps ofthe stazione, hiddendramas and incongruities long since had become my forte.
No doubt the attraction toward that smell should have been attributed to a childhood spent by the Baltic, the home of that meandering siren from the Montale poem. And yet I had my doubts about this attribution. For one thing, that childhood wasn't all that happy (a childhood seldom is, being, rather, a school of self-disgust and insecurity); and as for the Baltic, you had indeed to be an eel to escape my part of it. At any rate, as a subject for nostalgia this childhood hardly qualified. The source of that attraction, I'd always felt, lay elsewhere, beyond the confines of biography, beyond one's genetic makeup—somewhere in one's hypothalamus, which stores our chordate ancestors' impressions of their native realm of— for example—the very ichthus that caused this civilization. Whether that ichthus was a happy one is another matter.
smell is, after all, a violation ofoxygen balance, an invasion into it of other elements— methane? carbon? sulphur? nitrogen? Depending on that invasion's intensity, you get a scent, a smell, a stench. It is a molecular affair, and happiness, I suppose, is the moment of spotting the elements of your own composition being free. There were quite a number of them out there, in a state of total freedom, and I felt I'd stepped into my own self-portrait in the cold air.
The backdrop was all in dark silhouettes of church cupolas and rooftops; a bridge arching over a body of water's black curve, both ends of which were clipped off by infinity. At night, infinity in foreign realms arrives with the last lamppost, and here it was twenty meters away. It was very quiet. A few dimly lit boats now and then prowled about, disturbing with their propellers the reflection of a large neon Cinzano trying to settle on the black oilcloth ofthe water's surface. Long before it succeeded, the silence would be restored.
t all felt like arriving in the provinces, in some unknown, insignificant spot—possibly one's own birthplace—after years of absence. In no small degree did this sensation owe to my own anonymity, to the incongruity of a lone figure on the steps of the stazione: an easy target for oblivion. Also, it was a winter night. And I remembered the opening line of one of Uniberto Saba's poems that I'd translated long before, in a previous incarnation, into Russian: "In the depths ofthe wild Adriatic . . . "In the depths, I thought, in the boondocks, in a lost corner of the wild Adriatic . . . Had I simply turned around, I'd have seen the stazione in all its rectangular splendor of neon and urbanity, seen block letters saying venezia. Yet I didn't. The sky was full of winter stars, the way it often is in theprovinces. At any point, it seemed, a dog could bark in the distance, or else you might hear a rooster. With niy eyes shut I beheld a tuft of freezing seaweed splayed against a wet, perhaps ice-glazed rock somewhere in the universe, oblivious to its location. I was that rock, and niy left palm was that splayed tuft of seaweed. Presently ?. large, flat boat, something of a cross between a sardine can and a sandwich, emerged out of nowhere and with a thud nudged the sfaziane's landing. A handful of people pushed ashore and raced past me up the stairs into the terminal. Then I saw the only person I knew in that city; the sight was fabulous.
had seen it for the first time several years before, in that same previous incarnation: in Russia. The sight had come there in the guise ofa Slavicist, a Mayakovsky scholar, to be precise. That nearly disqualifiedthe sight as a subject of interest in the eyes of the coterie to which i belonged. That it didn't was the measure of her visual properties. Five foot ten, fine-boned, long-legged, narrow- faced, with chestnut hair and hazel, almond- shaped eyes, with passable Russian on those wonderfully shaped lips and a blinding smile on the same, superbly dressed in paper-light suede and matching silks, redolent of mesmerizing, unknown to us, perfume, the sight was easily the most elegant female ever to set a mind-boggling foot in our midst. She was the kind that keeps married men's dreams wet. Besides, she was a Veneziana.