The night was cold, moonlit, and quiet. There were five ofus in the gondola, including its owner, a local engineer who, together with his girlfriend, did all the paddling. We moseyed and zigzagged like an eel through the silent town hanging over our heads, cavernous and empty, resembling at this late hour a vast, largely rectangular coral reef or a succession of uninhabited grottoes. It was a peculiar sensation: to find yourself moving within what you're used to glancing across—canals; it felt like acquiring an extra dimension. Presently we glided into the laguna and headed toward the island of the dead, toward San Michele. The moon, pitched extraordinarily high, like some niind-bogglingly sharp ti crossed by a cloud's ledger sign, was barely available to the sheet of water, and the gondola's gliding too was absolutely noiseless. In fact, there was something distinctly erotic in the noiseless and trace- less passage of its lithe body upon the water— much like sliding your palm down the smooth skin of your beloved. Erotic, because there were no consequences, because the skin was infinite and almost immobile, because the caress was abstract. With us inside, the gondola was perhaps slightly heavy, and the water momentarily yielded underneath, only to close the gap the very next second. Also, powered by a man and a woman, the gondola wasn't even masculine. In fact, it was an eroticism not of genders but of elements, a perfect match of their equally lacquered surfaces. The sensation was neutral, almost incestuous, as though you \vere present as a brother caressed his sister, or vice versa. In this manner \ve circled the island of the dead and headed back to Cana- reggio . . . Churches, I always thought, should stay open all night; at least the Madonna dell' Orto should—not so much because of the likely timing of the soul's agony as because of the wonderful Bellini Madonna with Child in it. I wanted to disembark there and steal a glance at the painting, at the inch-wide interval that separates her left palm from the Child's sole. That inch—ah, much less!—is what separates love from eroticism. Or perhaps that's the ultimate in eroticism. But the cathedral was closed and we proceeded through the tunnel of grottoes, through this abandoned, fiat, moonlit Piranesian mine with its few sparkles
of electric ore, to the heart of the citv. Still,
7 .I 1
now I knew what water feels like being caressed by water.
e diseni barked near the concrete crate of the Bauer Grun- wald Hotel, rebuilt after the \var, toward the end of which it was blown up by the local partisans because it housed the German command. As an eyesore, it keeps good company with the church of San Moisc—the busiest fa<;ade in town. Together, they look like Albert Speer having a pizza capricciosa. I've never been inside either, but I knew a German gentleman who stayed in this crate-like structure and found it very comfortable. His mother was dying while he was on vacation here and he spoke to her daily over the telephone. When she expired he convinced the management to sell hini the telephone's receiver. The management understood, and the receiver was included in the bill. But then he was most likely a Protestant, while San Moise is a Catholic church, not to mention its being closed at night.
quidistant from our respective abodes, this was as good a place to disembark as any. It takes about an hour to cross this city by foot in any direction. Provided, of course, that you know your way, which by the time I stepped out of that gondola I did. We bade each other farewell and dispersed. I walked toward my hotel, tired, not even trying to look around, mumbling to myself some odd, God-kno\vs-from-where-dredged- up lines, like "Pillage this village," or "This city deserves no pity." That sounded like early Audcn, but it wasn't. Suddenly I wanted a drink. I swerved into San Marco in the hope that Florian's \vas still open. It was closing; they were removing the chairs from the arcade and mounting \vooden boards on the windows. A short negotiation with the waiter, who had already changed to go home but whom I knew slightly, had the desired result; and with that result in hand I stepped out fromunder the arcade and scanned the piazza. It was absolutely empty, not a soul. Its four hundred rounded windows were running in their usual maddening order, like idealized waves. This sight always reminded me of the Roman Colosseum, where, in the words of a friend of mine, somebody invented the arch and couldn't stop. "Pillage this village," I was still muttering to myself. "This city deserves . . ." Fog began to engulf the piazza. It was a quiet invasion, but an invasion nonetheless. I saw its spears and lances moving silently but very fast, from the direction of the laguna, like foot soldiers preceding their heavy cavalry. "Silently, and very fast," I said to myself Any time now you could anticipate their king, King Fog, appearing from around the corner in all his cumulus glory. "Silently, and very fast," I repeated to myself. No\v, that was Auden's last line from his "Fall of Rome," and it was this place that was "altogether elsewhere." All of a sudden I felt he was behind me, and Iturned as fast as I could. A tall, smooth window of Florian's that was reasonably well lit and not covered with a board gleamed through the patches of fog. I walked toward it and looked inside. Inside, it was I 9 5?. On the red plush divans, around a small marbled table with a kremlin of drinks and teapots on it, sat Wystan Auden, with his great love, Chester Kallman, Cecil Day Lewis and his wife, Stephen Spender and his. Wystan was telling some funny story and everybody was laughing. In the middle of the story, a well-built sailor passed by the window; Chester got up and, without so much as a "See you later," went in hot pursuit. "I looked at Wystan," Stephen told me years later. "He kept laughing, but a tear ran down his cheek." At this point, for me, the window had gone dark. King Fog rode into the piazza, reined in his stallion, and started to unfurl his white turban. His buskins were wet, so was his charivari; his cloak was studded with the dim, myopic jewels of burning lamps. He was dressed that way because he hadn't any idea what century it was, let alone which year. But then, being fog, how could he?