Hell is the Arctic." She meant it, too. With the scarf around her neck and head she looked like Francesco Querini on that statue in the Giar- dini, or like the famous bust of Petrarch (who, in turn, to me is the very image of Montale—or, rather, vice versa). There was no telephone in that place; a jumble of tubalike chimneys loomed in the dark sky. The whole thing felt like the Flight to Egypt, with her playing both the woman and the child, and me my namesake and the donkey; after all, it was January. "Between Herod of the past and Pharaoh of the future," I kept telling myself. "Between Herod and Pharaoh, that's where we are." In the end I fell ill. Cold and dampness got me—or rather my chest muscles and nerves, messed up by surgeries. The cardiac cripple in me panicked and she somehow shoved me onto the train for Paris, as we both were unsure of the local hospitals, much though I adore the faqade of Giovanni e Paolo. The carriage was warm, my head was splitting from nitro pills, a bunch of bersaglieri in the compartment were celebrating their home leave with Chianti and a ghetto blaster. I wasn't sure whether I would make it to Paris; but what was interfering with my fear was the clear sense that, should I manage, in no time at all—well, in a year—I'd be back to the cold place between Herod and Pharaoh. Even then, huddling on the wooden bench of my compartment, I was fully aware of this feeling's absurdity; yet as long as it could help me to sec through my fear, absurdity was welcome. The trundling of the carriage and the effect of its constant vibration on one's frame did, I suppose, the rest, rearranging or messing up my muscles, etc., even further. Or maybe it was just that the heating in the carriage worked. At any rate, I made Paris, had a passable EKG, and boarded my plane for the States. In other words, lived to tell the story, and the story itself to repeat.
taly," Anna Akhmatova used to say, "is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life." It niust be noted, though, that the arrival of dreams is irregular and their interpretation is ya\vn-inspiring. Furthermore, should dreams ever be designated a genre, their main stylistic device would doubtless be the non sequitur. That at least could be a justification for \vhat has transpired thus far in these pages. Also, that could explain my attempts over all these years to secure that dream's recurrence, manhandling my superego in the process no less savagely than my unconscious. To put it bluntly, I kept returning myself to the dream, rather than the other \vay around. Sure enough, somewhere along the line I had to pay for this sort of violence, either by eroding \vhat constituted my reality or by forcing the dream to acquire mortal features, the way the soul does in the course of one's lifetime. I guess I paid in both \vays; and I didn't mindit either, especially the latter, which would take the form ofa Cartavcnezia (exp. date, Jan. 1988) in my wallet, anger in those eyes of a particular variety (trained, and as of the same date, on better sights), or something equally finite. The reality suffered niorc, and often I would be crossing the Atlantic on my way home with a distinct feeling of traveling from history into anthropology. For all the time, blood, ink, money, and the rest that I shed or shelled out here, I never could convincingly claim, even to myself, that I'd acquired any local traits, that I'd become, in however minuscule a manner, a Venetian. A vague smile of recognition on the face of a hotelier or a trattoria proprietor didn't count; nor could anyone be deceived by the clothes I'd purchased locally. Gradually, I've become a transient in either realm, with the failure ofconvincing the dream ofmy presence in it being somewhat more disheartening. That, of course, was familiar. Yet I suppose a case could be made for fidelity when one returns to the place of one's love, year after year, in the wrong season, with no guarantee of being loved back. For, like every virtue, fidelity is of value only so long as it is instinctive or idiosyncratic, rather than rational. Besides, at a certain age, and in a certain line of work at that, to be loved back is not exactly imperative. Love is a selfless sentiment, a one-way street. That's why it is possible to love cities, architecture per se, music, dead poets, or, given a particular temperament, a deity. For love is an affair between a reflection and its object. This is in the end what brings one back to this city—the way the tide brings the Adriatic and, by extension, the Atlantic and the Baltic. At any rate, objects don't ask questions: as long as the element exists , their reflection is guaranteed—in the form ofa returning traveler or in the form of a dream, for a dream is the fidelity of the shut eye. That's the sort of confidence our own kind is lacking, although we are part water.
hould the world be designated a genre, its main stylistic device would no doubt be water. If that doesn't happen, it is either because the Almighty, too, doesn't seem to have much in the way of alternatives, or because a thought itself possesses a water pattern. So does one's handwriting; so do one's emotions; so does blood. Reflection is the property of liquid substances, and even on a rainy day one can always prove the superiority of one's fidelity to that of glass by positioning oneself behind it. This city takes one's breath away in every weather, the variety of \vhich, at any rate, is somewhat limited. And if we are indeed partly synonymous with water, which is fully synonymous with time, then one's sentiment toward this place improves the future, contributes to that Adriatic or Atlantic of time which stores our reflections for when we are long gone. Out of them, as out of frayed sepia pictures, time will perhaps be able to fashion, in a collage-like manner, a version ofthe future better than it would be without them. This way one is a Venetian by definition, because out there, in its equivalent of the Adriatic or Atlantic or Baltic, time-alias-water crochets or weaves our reflections—alias love for this place—into unrepeatable patterns, much like the withered old \vomen dressed in black all over this littoral's islands, forever absorbed in their eye-wrecking lacework. Admittedly, they go blind or mad before they reach the age of fifty, but then they get replaced by their daughters and nieces. Among fishermen's wives, the Parcae never have to advertise for an opening.
he one thing the locals never do is ride gondolas. To begin with, a gondola ride is pricey. Only foreign tourists, and well-off ones at that, can afford it. That's what explains the median age ofgondola passengers: a septuagenarian can shell out one-tenth of a schoolteacher's salary without wincing. The sight of these decrepit Romeos and their rickety Juliets is invariably sad and embarrassing, not to say ghastly. For the young, i.e., for those for whom this sort of thing would be appropriate, a gondola is as far out of reach as a five-star hotel. Economy, of course, reflects demography; yet that is doubly sad, because beauty, instead of promising the world, gets reduced to being its reward. That, in parenthesis, is what drives the young to nature, whose free, or, more exactly, cheap delights are free—i.e., devoid—of the meaning and invention present in art or in artifice. A landscape can be thrilling, but a fa\ade by Lombardini tells you what you can do. And one way—the original way—of looking at such fa\ades is from a gondola: this way you can see what the water sees. Of course, nothing could be further from the locals' agendas as they scurry and bustle about on their daily rounds, properly oblivious or even allergic to the surrounding splendor. The closest they come to using a gondola is when they're ferried across the Grand Canal or carrying home some unwieldy purchase—a washing machine, say, or a sofa. But neither a ferryman nor a boat owner would on such occasions break into "0 sole mio" Perhaps the indifference of a native takes its cue from artifice's own indifference to its own reflection. That could be the locals' final argument against the gondola, except that it could be countered by the offer ofa ride at nighttime, to which I once succuni bed.