In short, a time for self-oblivion, induced by a city that has ceased to be seen. Unwittingly, you take your cue from it, especially if, like it, you've got no company. Having failed to be born here, you at least can take some pride in sharing its invisibility.
n the whole, however, I've always been as keen on the contents of this city's average brick affairs as on those of the marbled and unique. There is nothing populist, let alone anti-aristocratic, to this preference; nor is there anything of the novelist. It's just the echo of the sort of houses I've lived or worked in for most of my life. Failing to have been born here, I've failed, I suppose, a bit further by picking up a line of work which normally doesn't land one on a piano nobile. On the other hand, there is perhaps some perverse snobbery in the sentiment for brick here, for its rank red akin to inflamed niuscle bared bythe scabs of peeled-otf stucco. Like eggs, \vhich often—especially \vhile I'm fixing myself breakfast—make me imagine the unknown civilization that came up with the idea of producing canned food in an organic fashion, brick and bricklaying somehow ring of an alternative order of flesh, not raw of course, but scarlet enough, and made up of small, identical cells. Yet another ofthe species' self-portraits at the elemental level, be it a \vall or a chimney. In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model; our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.
t any rate, I seldom got myself across the thresholds of ordinary dwellings in this city. No tribe likes strangers, and Venetians are very tribal, in addition to being islanders. My Italian, \vildly oscillating around its firm zero, also remained a deterrent. It always got better after a month or so, but then I'd be boarding the plane that would remove me from the opportunity to use it for another year. Therefore, the company I kept was that of English-speaking natives and expatriate Americans whose houses shared a familiar version—if not degree—of affluence. As for those who spoke Russian, the characters from the local U, their sentiments toward the country of my birth and their politics used to bring me to the brink of nausea. The result would be nearly the same with the two or three local authors and academics: too many abstract lithographs on the walls, too many tidy bookshelves and African trinkets, silent wives, sallow daughters, conversations running their moribund course through current events, someone else's fame, psychotherapy, surrealism, down to the description of a shortcut to my hotel. Disparity of pursuits compromised by tautology of net results, if one needs a formula, that is. I aspired to wasting my afternoons in the empty office of some local solicitoror pharmacist, eyeing his secretary as she brought in coffee from a bar nearby, chatting idly away about the prices of motorboats or the redeeming features of Diocletian's character, since practically everyone here has a reasonably sound education as well as a yen for things streamlined. I'd be unable to lift myself from the chair, his clients would be few; in the end, he'd lock up the premises and we'd stroll to the Gritti or Danieli, where I'd buy him drinks; if I was lucky, his secretary would join us. We'd sink in deep armchairs, exchanging malicious remarks about the new German battalions or the ubiquitous Japanese peeping through their cameras, like new elders , at the pallid naked marble thighs of this Susannahlike city wading cold, sunset-tinged, lapping waters. Later he might invite me over to his place for supper, and his pregnant wife, rising above the steaming pasta , would berate me volubly for my protracted bachelorhood . . . Too many neorealist movies, I suppose, too much Svevo-reading. For this sort of fantasyto come true, the requirements are the same as for inhabiting a piano nobile. I don't meet them, nor have I ever stayed here long enough to abandon this pipe dream entirely. To have another life, one ought to be able to wrap up the first one, and the job should be done neatly. No one pulls this sort of thing off convincingly, though, at times, good services are rendered to one either by absconding spouses or by political systems . . . It's the other houses, strange staircases, odd smells, unfamiliar furniture and topography that the proverbial old dogs dream about in their senility and decrepitude, not new masters. And the trick is not to disturb them.
o I never slept, let alone sinned, in a cast-iron family bed with pristine, crisp linen, embroidered and richly fringed bedspread, cloudlike pillows, and small pearl-encrusted crucifix above the headboard.
I never trained my vacant stare on an oleograph of the Madonna, or faded pictures of a father/ brother/uncle/son in a bersagliere helmet, \vith its black feathers, or chintz curtains on the window, or porcelain or majolica jug atop a dark wood chest of drawers filled with local lace, sheets, towels, pillowcases, and underclothes washed and ironed on the kitchen table by a young, strong, tanned, almost swarthy arm, as a shoulder strap slips off it and silver beads of sweat sparkle on the forehead. (Speaking of silver, it \vould in all likelihood be tucked away under a pile of sheets in one of those drawers.) All this, of course, is from a movie in which I was neither a star nor even an extra, from a movie \vhich for all I know they are not ever going to shoot again, or, if they do, the props will look different. In my mind, it is called Nozze di Seppia, and it's got no plot to it, save a scene with me walking along the Fondamente Nuove with the greatest watercolor in the world on the left and a red-brick infinity on the right. I should be wearing a cloth cap, dark serge jacket, and a white shirt with an open collar, washed and ironed by the same strong, tanned hand. Approaching the Arsenale, I'd turn right, cross twelve bridges, and take via Garibaldi to the Giardini, where, on an iron chair in the Caffe Paradiso, would be sitting she who washed and ironed this shirt six years ago. She'd have before her a glass of chinotto and a panino, a frayed little volume of Proper- tius' Monobiblos or Pushkin's Captain's Daughter; she'd be wearing a knee-length taffeta dress bought once in Rome on the eve of our trip to Ischia. She would lift her eyes, the color of mustard and honey, fix them on the figure in the heavy sergejacket, and say, "What a belly!" If anything is to save this picture from being a flop, it will be the winter light.
while ago I saw somewhere a photograph of a wartime execution. Three pale, skinny men of medium height and no specific facial features (they were seen by the camera in profile) stood on the edge ofa freshly dug ditch. They had a Northern appearance— in fact, I think the photograph was taken in Lithuania. Close behind each one of them stood a German soldier holding a pistol. In the distance you could make out a bunch of other soldiers: the onlookers. It looked like early winter or late autumn, as the soldiers were in their winter overcoats. The condemned men, all three ofthem, were also dressed identically. They wore cloth caps, heavy blackjackets over white undershirts without collars: victims' uniform. On top of everything, they were cold. Partly because of that they drew their heads into their shoulders. In a second they will die: the photographer pushed his button an instant before the soldiers pulled their triggers. Thethree village lads drew their heads into their shoulders and \vere squinting the \vay a child does anticipating pain. They expected to be hurt, perhaps badly hurt; they expected the deafening—so close to their ears!—sound of a shot. And they squinted. Because the human repertoire of responses is so limited! What \vas coming to them \vas death, not pain; yet their bodies couldn't distinguish one from the other.