o be sure, everybody has designs on her, on this city. Politicians and big businesses .especially, for nothing has a greater future than money. It is so much so that money feels synonymous with the futureand tries to order it. Hence the wealth of frothy outpourings about revamping the city, about turning the entire province of Veneto into a gateway to Central Europe, about boosting the region's industry, expanding the harbor complex at Marghera, increasing the oil-tanker traffic in the laguna and deepening the laguna for the same purposes, about converting the Venetian Arsenale, immortalized by Dante, into the Beaubourg's spitting—literally—image for storing the most recently discharged phlegm, about housing an Expo here in the year 2000, etc. All this drivel normally gushes out of the same mouth, and often on the same breath, that blabbers about ecology, protection, restoration , cultural patrimony, and whatnot. The goal of all that is one: rape. No rapist, though, wants to regard himselfas such, let alone get caught. Hence the mixture of objectives and metaphors, high rhetoric and lyrical fervor swelling the barrel chests of parliamentary deputies and commendatore alike.
Yet while these characters are far more dangerous—indeed more harmful—than the Turks, the Austrians, and Napoleon all lumped together, since money has more battalions than generals, in the seventeen years that I've frequented this city very little has changed here. What saves Venice, like Penelope, from her suitors is their rivalry, the competitive nature of capitalism boiled down to fat cats' blood relations to different political parties. Lobbing spanners into each other's machinery is something democracy is awfully good at, and the leapfrogging of Italian cabinets has proved to be the city's best insurance. So has the mosaic ofthe city's own political jigsaw. There are no doges anymore, and the So,ooo dwellers of these I I 8 islands are guided not by the grandeur of some particular vision but by their immediate, often nearsighted concerns, by their desire to make ends meet.
Farsightedness here, however, would be counterproductive. In a place this size, twenty or thirty people out of work are the city council's instant headache, which, apart from islands' innate mistrust of the mainland, makes for a poor reception of the latter's blueprints, however breathtaking. Appealing as they may be elsewhere, promises of universal employment and growth make little sense in a city barely eight miles in circumference, which even at the apogee of its maritime fortunes never exceeded 200,000 souls. Such prospects may thrill a shopkeeper or perhaps a doctor; a mortician, though, would object, since the local cemeteries are jammed as it is and the dead now should be buried on the mainland. In the final analysis, that's what the mainland is good for.
Still, had the mortician and the doctor belonged to different political parties, that would be fine, some progress could be made. In this city, they often belong to the same, and things get stalled rather early, even if the party is the PCI. In short, underneath all these squabbles, unwitting ones or otherwise, lies the simple truth that islands don't grow. That's what money, a.k.a. the future, a.k.a. voluble poli- ticos and fat cats, can't take, fails to grasp. What's worse, it feels defied by this place, since beauty, a fait accompli by definition, always defies the future, regarding it as nothing so much as an overblown, impotent present, or as its fading ground. If this place is reality (or, as some claim, the past), then the future with all its aliases is excluded from it. At best, it amounts to the present. And perhaps nothing proves this better than modern art, whose poverty alone makes it prophetic. A poor man always speaks for the present, and perhaps the sole function of collections like Peggy Guggenheim's and the similar accretions of this century's stuff habitually mounted here is to show what a cheap, self-assertive, ungenerous, one-dimensional lot we have become, to instill humility in us: there is no other outcome thinkable against the background of this Penelope of a city, weaving her patterns by day and undoing them by night, with no Ulysses in sight. Only the sea.
think it was Hazlitt who said that the only thing that could beat this city of water would be a city built in the air. That was a Calvinoesque idea, and who knows, as an upshot of space travel, that may yet come to pass. As it is, apart from the moon . landing, this century may be best remembered by leaving this place intact, by just letting it be. I, for one, would advise even against gentle interference. Ofcourse, film festivals and book fairs arc in tune with the flickering of the canals' surface, with their curlicue, sirocco-perused scribblings. And of course, turning this place into a capital of scientific research would be a palatable option, especially taking into account the likely advantages of the local phosphorus- rich diet for any mental endeavor. The same bait could be used for moving the EEC headquarters here from Brussels and the European parliament from Strasbourg. And of course, a better solution would be to give this city and some of its environs the status of a nationalpark. Yet I would argue that the idea of turning Venice into a museum is as absurd as the urge to revitalize it with new blood. For one thing, what passes for new blood is always in the end plain old urine. And secondly, this city doesn't qualify to be a museum, being itself a work of art, the greatest masterpiece our species produced. You don't revive a painting, let alone a statue. You leave them alone, you guard them against vandals—whose hordes may include yourself.
easons are metaphors for available continents, and winter is always somewhat antarctic, even here. The city doesn't rely on coal as much as it used to; now it's gas. The magnificent, trumpetlike chimneys resembling medieval turrets in the backdrop of every Madonna and Crucifixion idle and gradually crumble away from the localskyline. As a result you shiver and go to bed with your woolen socks on, because radiators keep their erratic cycles here even in hotels. Only alcohol can absorb the polar lightning shooting through your body as you set your foot on the marble floor, slippers or no slippers, shoes or no shoes. If you work in the evening you burn parthenons of candles—not for ambience or better light, but for their illusory warmth; or else you move to the kitchen, light the gas stove, and shut the door. Everything emanates cold, the walls especially. Windows you don't mind because you know what to expect from them. In fact, they only pass the cold through, whereas walls store it. I remember once spending the month ofJan- uary in an apartment on the fifth floor of a house near the church of Fava. The place belonged to a descendant ofnone other than U go Foscolo. The owner was a forest engineer or some such thing, and was, naturally, away on business. The apartment wasn't that big: tworooms, sparsely furnished. The ceiling, though, \vas extraordinarily high and the windows were correspondingly tall. There were six or seven of them, as the apartment was a corner one. In the middle of the second week the heating went off. This time I was not alone, and my comrade-in-arms and I drew lots as to who would have to sleep by the wall. "Why should I always go to the wall?" she'd ask beforehand. "Because I'm a victim?" And her mustard-and-honey eyes would darken with incredulity upon losing. She would bundle up for the night—pink woolen jersey, scarf, stockings, long socks—and, having counted una, due, tre! jump into the bed as though it were a dark river. To her, an Italian, a Roman, with a dash of Greek blood in her veins, it probably \vas. "The only thing I disagree with in Dante," she used to remark, "is the way he describes Hell. To me, Hell is cold, very cold. I'd keep the circles but make them of ice, with the temperature dropping with every spiral.