Seventeen years ago, wading aimlessly through one campo after another, a pair ofgreen rubber boots brought nie to the threshold of a smallish pink edifice. On its wall I saw a plaque saying that Antonio Vivaldi, prematurely born, was baptized in this church. In those days I was still reasonably red-haired; I felt sentimental about bumping into the place of baptism of that "red cleric" who has given me so muchjoy on so many occasions and in so many godforsaken parts of the world. And I seemedto recall that it was Olga Rudge who had organized the first-ever Vivaldi settimana in this city—as it happened, just a few days before World War II broke out. It took place, sonie- body told me, in the palazzo of the Countess Polignac, and Miss Rudge was playing the violin. As she proceeded with the piece, she noticed out of the corner of her eye that a gentleman had entered the salone and stood by the door, since all the seats were taken. The piece was long, and now she felt somewhat worried, because she was approaching a passage where she had to turn the page without interrupting her play. The man in the corner of her eye started to move and soon disappeared from her field of vision. The passage grew closer, and her nervousness grew, too. Then, at exactly the point where she had to turn the page, a hand emerged from the left, stretched to the niusic stand, and slowly turned the sheet. She kept playing and, when the difficult passage was over, lifted her eyes to theleft to acknowledge her gratitude. "And that," Olga Rudge told a friend of niine, "is how I first met Stravinsky."
o you may enter and stand through the service. The singing will be a bit subdued, presumably on account of the weather. If you can excuse it in this way, so, no doubt, will its Addressee. Besides, you can't follow it that well, whether it's in Italian or Latin. So you just stand or take a pew in the rear and listen. "The best way to hear Mass," Wystan Auden used to say, "is when you don't know the language." True, ignorance helps concentration on such occasions no less than the poor lighting from which the pilgrim suffers in every Italian church, especially in winter. Dropping coins into an illumination box while the service is in progress is not nice. What's more, you often don't have enough of them in your pocket to appreciate the picture fully. In days ofyore I carried with me a powerful, New-York-City-Police-Department- issue flashlight. One way to get rich, I thought, would be to start manufacturing miniature flashbulbs like those they mount on cameras, but of great duration. I'd call it "Lasting Flash," or, better yet, "Fiat Lux," and in a couple of years I'd buy an apartment somewhere in San Lio or Salute. I'd even marry my partner's secretary, which he doesn't have since he doesn't exist . . . The music subsides; its twin, however, has risen, you discover upon stepping outside—not significantly, but enough for you to feel reimbursed for the faded chorale. For water, too, is choral, in more ways than one. It is the same water that carried the Crusaders, the merchants, St. Mark's relics, Turks, every kind of cargo, military, or pleasure vessel; above all, it reflected everybody who ever lived, not to mention stayed, in this city, everybody who ever strolled or waded its streets in the way you do now. Small wonder that it looks muddy green in the daytime and pitch black at night, rivaling the firmament. A miracle that, rubbed the right and the wrong \vay for over a millennium, it doesn't have holes in it, that it is still H2O, though you would never drink it; that it still rises. It really does look like musical sheets, frayed at the edges, constantly played, coming to you in tidal scores, in bars of canals with innumerable obbligati of bridges, mullioned windows, or curved crownings of Coducci cathedrals, not to mention the violin necks of gondolas. In fact, the whole city, especially at night, resembles a gigantic orchestra, with dimly lit music stands of palazzi, with a restless chorus of waves, with the falsetto of a star in the winter sky. The music is, of course, greater than the band, and no hand can turn the page.
hat's what worries the band, or more exactly, its conductors, the city fathers. According to their calculations, this city, during this century alone, has sagged twenty-three centimeters. So what appears spectacular to the tourist is a full-scale headache for the native. And if it were only a headache, that would be fine. But the headache is crowned with an increasing apprehension, not to say fear, that what lies in store for the city is the fate of Atlantis. The fear is not without foundation, and not only because the city's uniqueness does amount to a civilization of its own. The main danger is perceived to be high winter tides; the rest is done by the mainland's industry and agriculture silting the laguna with their chemical wastes, and by the deterioration of the city's own clogged canals. In my line of work, though, ever since the Romantics, human fault has appeared to be a likelier culprit when it comes to disaster than any forza deldestino. (That an insurance man can tell these two a part is indeed a feat of imagination.) So, prey to tyrannical impulses, I would install some sort of flap gate to stem the sea of humanity, which has swelled in the last two decades by two billion and whose crest is its refuse. I'd freeze the industry and the residence in the twenty-mile zone along the northern shore of the drag and dredge the city's canals
(I'd either use the military to carry out this operation or pay local companies double time) and seed them with fish and the right kind of bacteria to keep them clean.
I have no idea what kind of fish or bacteria these are, but I'm pretty sure they exist: tyranny is seldom synonymous with expertise. At any rate, I'd call Sweden andask the Stockholm municipality for advice: in that city, with all its industry and population, the moment you step out of your hotel, the salmon leap out of the water to greet you. If it is the difference in temperature that does it, then one could try dumping blocks ofice into the canals or, failing that, routinely void the natives' freezers of ice cubes, since whiskey is not very much in vogue here, not even in winter.
"Why, then, do you go there at such a season?" my editor asked me once, sitting in a Chinese restaurant in New York with his gay English charges. "Yes, why do you?" they echoed their prospective benefactor. "What is it like there in winter?" I thought of telling them about acqua alta; about the various shades of gray in the window as one sits at breakfast in one's hotel, enveloped by silence and the mealy morning pall ofnewlyweds' faces; about pigeons accentuating every curve and cornice of the local Baroque in their dormant affinity for architecture; about a lonely monument to Francesco Querini and his two huskies carved out of Istrian stone similar, I think, in its hue, to what he saw last, dying, on his ill-fated journey to the North Pole, now listening to the Giardini's rustle of evergreens in the company of Wagner and Carducci; about a brave sparrow perching on the bobbing blade of a gondola against the backdrop of a sirocco- roiled damp infinity. No, I thought, looking at their effete but eager faces; no, that won't do. "Well," I said, "it's like Greta Garbo swimming. "