With two or three exceptions, due to heart attacks and related emergencies, niine or someone else's, every Christmas or shortly before I'd emerge from a train/plane/boat/bus and drag my bags heavy with books and typewriters to the threshold of this or that hotel, of this or that apartment. The latter would normally be courtesy of the one or two friends I'd managed to develop here in the wake ofthe sight's dimming. Later, I'll try to account for my timing (though such a project is tautological to the point of reversal). For the moment, I'd like to assert that, Northerner though I am, my notion of Eden hinges on neither weather nor temperature. For that matter, I'd just as soon discard its dwellers, and eternity as well. At the risk of being charged with depravity, I confess that this notion is purely visual, has more to do with Claude than the creed, and exists only in approximations. As these go, this city is the closest. Since I'm not entitled to make a true comparison, I can permit myself to be restrictive.
I say this here and now to save the reader disillusionment. I am not a moral man (though I try to keep my conscience in balance) or a sage; I am neither an aesthete nor a philosopher. I am but a nervous man, by circumstance and by my own deeds; but I am observant. As my beloved Akutagawa Ryunosuke once said, I have no principles; all I've got is nerves. What follows, therefore, has to do with the eye rather than with convictions, including those as to how to run a narrative. One's eye precedes one's pen, and I resolve not to let my pen lie about its position. Having risked the charge of depravity, I won't wince at that of superficiality either. Surfaces—which is what the eye registers first—are often more telling than their contents, which are provisional by definition, except, of course, in the afterlife. Scanning this city's face for seventeen winters, I should by now be capable of pulling a credible Poussin- like job: of painting this place's likeness, if not at four seasons, then at four times of day.
That's niy ambition. If I get sidetracked, it is because being sidetracked is literally a matter of course here and echoes water. What lies ahead, in other words, may amount not to a story but to the flow of muddy water "at the wrong time of year." At times it looks blue, at times gray or brown; invariably it is cold and not potable. The reason I am engaged in straining it is that it contains reflections, among them my own.
nanimate by nature, hotel room mirrors are even further dulled by having seen so many. What they return to you is not your identity but your anonymity, especially in this city. For here yourself is the last thing you care to see. On my first sojourns I often felt surprised, catching my own frame, dressed or naked, in the open wardrobe; after a while I began to wonder about this place's edenic or afterlife-like effects upon one's self- awareness. Somewhere along the line, I even developed a theory of excessive redundancy , of the mirror absorbing the body absorbing the city. The net result is, obviously, mutual negation. A reflection cannot possibly care for a reflection. The city is narcissistic enough to turn your mind into an amalgam, unburdening it ofits depths. With their similar effect on your purse, hotels and pensioties therefore feel very congenial. After a two-week stay—even at offseason rates—you become both broke and selfless, like a Buddhist monk. At a certain age and in a certain line of work, selflessness is welcome, not to say imperative.
Nowadays all of this is, of course, out of the question, since the clever devils shut down two-thirds of the small places in winter; the remaining third keep year round those summer rates that make you wince. Ifyou're lucky, you may find an apartment, which, naturally, comes with the owner's personal taste in paintings, chairs, curtains, with a vague sense of illegality to your face in his bathroom mirror —in short, with precisely what you wanted to shed: yourself. Still, winter is an abstract season: it is low on colors, even in Italy, and big on the imperatives of cold and brief daylight. These things train your eye on the outside with an intensity greater than that ofthe electric bulb availing you of your own features in the evening. If this season doesn't necessarily quell your nerves, it still subordinates them to your instincts; beauty at low temperatures is beauty.
nyhow, I would never come here in summer, not even at gunpoint. I take heat very poorly; the unmitigated emissions of hydrocarbons and armpits still worse. The shorts-clad herds, especially those neighing in German, also get on my nerves, because ofthe inferiority oftheir—anyone's—anatomy against that of the columns, pilasters, and statues; because of what their mobility—and all that fuels it—projects versus marble stasis. I guess I ani one of those who prefer choice to flux, and stone is always a choice. No matter how well endowed, in this city one's body, in my view, should be obscured by cloth, if only because it moves. Clothes are perhaps our only approximation of the choice made by marble.
This is, I suppose, an extreme view, but I ani a Northerner. In the abstract season life seems more real than at any other, even in the Adriatic, because in winter everything is harder, niore stark. Or else take this as propaganda for Venetian boutiques, which do extremely brisk business in low temperatures. In part, of course, this is so because in winter one needs more clothes just to stay warm, not to mention the atavistic urge to shed one's pelt. Yet no traveler comes here without a spare sweater, jacket, skirt, shirt, slacks, or blouse, since Venice is the sort of city where both the stranger and the native know in advance that one will be on display.
No, bipeds go ape about shopping and dressing up in Venice for reasons not exactly practical; they do so because the city, as it were, challenges them. We all harbor all sorts of misgivings about the flaws in our appearance, anatomy, about the imperfection of our very features. What one sees in this city at every step, turn, perspective, and dead end worsens one's complexes and insecurities. That's why one—a woman especially, but a man also— hits the stores as soon as one arrives here, and with a vengeance. The surrounding beauty issuch that one instantly conceives of an incoherent animal desire to match it, to be on a par. This has nothing to do with vanity or with the natural surplus of mirrors here, the main one being the very water. It is simply that the city offers bipeds a notion of visual superiority absent in their natural lairs, in their habitual surroundings. That's why furs fly here, as do suede, silk, linen, wool, and every other kind of fabric. Upon returning home, folks stare in wonderment at what they've acquired, knowing full well that there is no place in their native realm to flaunt these acquisitions without scandalizing the natives. You must keep those things fading and withering in your wardrobe, or else give them to your younger relations. Or else, there are friends. I, for one, remember buying several items here—on credit, obviously—that I had no stomach or nerve to utilize later. Among them were two raincoats, one mustard green and the other a gentle shade ofkhaki. Later they were to grace the shouldersof the world's best ballet dancer and the best poet of the language I write this in—distinct though both these gentlemen are from me in size and age. It's the local vistas and perspectives that do it, for in this city a man is more a silhouette than his unique features, and a silhouette can be improved. It's also the marble lace, inlays, capitals, cornices, reliefs, and moldings, inhabited and uninhabited niches, saints, ain'ts, maidens, angels, cherubs, caryatids, pediments, balconies with their ample kicked-up calves, and windows themselves, Gothic or Moorish, that turn you vain. For this is the city of the eye; your other faculties play a faint second fiddle. The way the hues and rhythms of the local fa\ades try to smooth the waves' ever-changing colors and patterns alone may send you to grab a fancy scarf, tie, or whatnot; it glues even an inveterate bachelor to a window flooded with its motley flaunted dresses, not to mention patent-leather shoes and suede boots scattered like all sorts ofboatsupon the laguna. Somehow your eye suspects that all these things are cut from the same cloth as the vistas outside and ignores the evidence of labels. And in the final analysis, the eye is not so wrong, if only because the common purpose of everything here is to be seen. In an analysis even more final, this city is a real triumph of the chordate, because the eye, our only raw, fishlike internal organ, indeed swims here: it darts, flaps, oscillates, dives, rolls up. Its exposed jelly dwells with atavistic joy on reflected palazzi, spiky heels, gondolas, etc., recognizing in the agency that brought them to the existential surface none other than itself.