At the far end of the gallery our host flitted to the right, and we followed him into a room which appeared to be a cross between the library and the study of a seventeenth-century gentleman. Judging by the books behind the criss-crossed wire in the red, wardrobe-size wooden cabinet, the gentleman's century could even have been the sixteenth. There were about sixty fat, white, vellum-bound volumes, from Aesop to Zeno; just enough for a gentleman; more would turn him into a penseur, with disastrous consequences either for his manners or for his estate. Other than that, the room was quite bare. The light in it wasn't much better than in the gallery; I'd made out a desk and a large faded globe. Then our host turned a knob and I saw his silhouette framed by a door leading into an enfilade. I glanced at that enfilade and I shuddered: it looked like a vicious, viscous infinity. I swallowed air and stepped into it.
It was a long succession of empty rooms. Rationally I knew that it couldn't be longer than the gallery parallel to which it ran. Yet it was. I had the sense of walking not so much in standard perspective as in a horizontal spiral where the laws ofoptics were suspended. Each room meant your further disappearance, the next degree of your nonexistence. This had to do with three things: drapery, mirrors, and dust. Although in some cases you could tell a room's designation—dining room, salon, possibly a nursery—most were similar in their lack of apparent function. They were about the same in size, or at any rate, they didn 't seem to differ much in that way from one another. And in each one ofthem windows were draped and two or three mirrors adorned the walls.
Whatever the original color and pattern of the drapes had been, they now looked pale yellow and very brittle. A touch ofyour finger, let alone a breeze, would mean sheer destruction to them, as the shards of fabric scattered nearby on the parquet suggested. They were shedding, those curtains, and some of their folds exposed broad, bald, threadbare patches, as though the fabric felt it had come full circle and was now reverting to its pre-loom state. Our breath was perhaps too great an intimacy also; still, it was better than fresh oxygen, which, like history, the drapes didn't need. This was neither decay nor decomposition; this was dissipation back into time, where color and texture don't matter, where perhaps having learned what may happen to them, they will regroup and return, here or elsewhere, in a different guise. "Sorry," they seemed to say, "next time around we'll be more durable."
Then there were those mirrors, two or three in each room, of various sizes, but mostly rectangular. They all had delicate golden frames, with well-wrought floral garlands or idyllic scenes which called more attention to themselves than to their surface, since the amalgam was invariably in poor shape. In a sense, the frames were more coherent than their contents, straining, as it were, to keep them from spreading over the wall. Having grown unaccustomed over the centuries to reflecting anything but the wall opposite, the mirrors were quite reluctant to return one's visage, out of either greed or impotence, and when they tried, one's features would come back incomplete. I thought, I begin to understand Regnier. From room to room, as we proceeded through the enfilade, I saw myself in those frames less and less, getting back more and more darkness. Gradual subtraction, I thought to myself; how is this going to end? And it ended in the tenth or eleventh room. I stood by the door leading into the next chamber, staring at a largish, three-by-four-foot gilded rectangle, and instead of myself I saw pitch-black nothing. Deep and inviting, it seemed to contain a perspective of its own—perhaps another enfilade. For a moment I felt dizzy; but as I was no novelist, I skipped the option and took a doorway.
All along it had been reasonably ghostly;
now it became unreasonably so. The host and my companions lagged somewhere behind; I was on my own. There was a great deal of dust everywhere; the hues and shapes of everything in sight were mitigated by its gray. Marble inlaid tables, porcelain figurines, sofas, chairs, the very parquet. Everything was powdered with it, and sometimes, as with figurines and busts, the effect was oddly beneficial, accentuating their features, their folds, the vivacity of a group. But usually its layer was thick and solid; what's more, it had an air of finality, as though no new dust could be added to it. Every surface craves dust, for dust is the flesh oftime, as a poet said, time's very flesh and blood; but here the craving seemed to be over. Now it will seep into the objects themselves, I thought, fuse with them, and in the end replace them. It depends of course on the material; some of it quite durable. They may not even disintegrate; they'll simply become grayer, as time would have nothing against assuming their shapes, the way it already had in this succession ofvacuum chambers in which it was overtaking matter.
The last of them was the master bedroom. A gigantic yet uncovered four-poster bed dominated its space: the admiral's revenge for the narrow cot aboard his ship, or perhaps his homage to the sea itself. The latter was more probable, given the monstrous stucco cloud of putti descending on the bed and playing the role ofbaldachin. In fact, it was more sculpture than putti. The cherubs' faces were terribly grotesque: they all had these corrupt, lecherous grins as they stared—very keenly—downward upon the bed. They reminded me of that stable of giggling youths downstairs; and then I noticed a portable TV set in the corner of this otherwise absolutely bare room. I pictured the major domo entertaining his choice in this chamber: a writhing island ofnaked flesh amid a sea of linen, under the scrutiny of the dust- covered gypsum masterpiece. Oddly enough, I felt no repulsion. On the contrary, I felt that from time's point of view such entertainmenthere could only seem appropriate, as it generated nothing. After all, for three centuries, nothing here reigned supreme. Wars, revolutions, great discoveries, geniuses, plagues never entered here due to a legal problem. Causality was canceled, since its human carriers strolled in this perspective only in a caretaker capacity, once in a few years, if that. So the little wriggling shoal in the linen sea was, in fact, in tune with the premises, since it couldn't in nature give birth to anything. At best, the major domo's island—or should I say volcano?—existed only in the eyes ofthe putti. On the mirror's map it didn't. Neither did I.
hat happened only once, although I've been told there are scores of places like this in Venice. But once is enough, especially in winter, when the local fog, the famous nebbia, renders this place more extern-poral than any palace's inner sanctum, by obliterating not only reflections but everything that has a shape: buildings, people, colonnades, bridges, statues. Boat services are canceled, airplanes neither arrive nor take off for weeks, stores are closed, and mail ceases to litter one's threshold. The effect is as though some raw hand had turned all those enfilades inside out and wrapped the lining around the city. Left, right, up, and down swap places, and you can find your way around only if you are a native or were given a cicerone. The fog is thick, blinding, and immobile. The latter aspect, however, is of advantage to you if you go out on a short errand, say, to get a pack of cigarettes, for you can find your way back via the tunnel your body has burrowed in the fog; the tunnel is likely to stay open for half an hour. This is a time for reading, for burning electricity all day long, for going easy on self- deprecating thoughts or coffee, for listening to the BBC World Service, for going to bed early.