II
I let myself fall under the spell of the flat cadence of the suburbs of that city with the name of the predatory Spanish soldier, outskirts of a Northern city like so many others, buildings to cram the proletariat in, immigrants from the 1960s, vertical concentration camps, to the paradoxical rhythm of the cross-ties — I am in Venice in that tiny damp apartment where the only light was in the kitchen the floor was sloping, you slept with your feet in the air which apparently is good for the circulation, it was at the entrance to the Ghetto opposite the bakery in front of the big synagogue where I sometimes heard psalms and songs, sometimes the name of the neighborhood made me afraid, the Old Ghetto, especially at night when everything was deserted and silent, when the bora blew the icy wind that seemed to come straight from the Ukraine after freezing the Czechs the Hungarians and the Austrians, in my Old Ghetto it was impossible not to think of Łódź of Cracow of Salonika and of other ghettos of which nothing remains, impossible not to be pursued by the winter of 1942, the trains to Treblinka, Bełżec, and Sobibor, in 1993 a few months after my own war and exactly fifty years after the extermination, in the Venetian Ghetto shrouded in fog and cold I imagined the German death machine not realizing that one of its last cogs had turned right nearby, a few kilometers away, but if I am thinking now again of Venice in a railway torpor it’s mostly because of the one who had joined me there, the body she so often refused me forced me into long nocturnal walks sometimes until dawn, with my black cap, I passed the Square of the Two Moors, I greeted Saint Christopher on top of the Madonna dell’Orto, I got lost among the few modern buildings that they have over there as if they had been purposefully hidden in secret recesses, as if they weren’t hidden enough by the lagoon, and how many times have I found myself back again having a coffee at daybreak with the pilots and skippers of the vaporetti I didn’t exist for them, Venetians have that atavistic ability to ignore anything that isn’t them, not to see, to make the foreigner disappear, and this sovereign scorn, this bizarre superannuated grandeur of a recipient that lets him completely ignore the hand that feeds him was not unpleasant, on the contrary, it was a great frankness and a great freedom, far from the commercial chumminess that has invaded the whole world, the whole world except Venice where they keep ignoring you and scorning you as if they didn’t need you at all, as if the restaurant owner had no need of customers, rich as he is with his whole city and sure, certain, that other more easily pleased guests will soon come to fill his tables, whatever happens, and that gives him a formidable superiority over the visitor, the superiority of the vulture over its carrion, the tourist will always end up fleeced, dismembered with or without a smile, what’s the use of lying to him, even the baker across from my apartment admitted, without blinking an eye, that his bread wasn’t very good and his pastries overpriced, this baker saw me every day every day for months without ever smiling at me his strength was his certainty of my disappearance, one day I would leave Venice and the lagoon, whether it was after one, two, three, or ten years he belonged to the island and not me, and he reminded me of this every morning, which was salutary, no delusions to maintain, I associated only with foreigners, Slavs, Palestinians, Lebanese, Ghassan, Nayef, Khalil, and even a Syrian from Damascus who ran a bar where students and exiles gathered, he was a former sailor who had jumped ship during a stopover, a rough guy you’d never associate with any sea or any boat, he had a sturdy landlubber’s head with very big ears that I remember as being on the hairy side, he was very pious, he prayed, fasted, and never drank the alcohol he served to his customers, his weakness was girls, whores especially, which he justified by saying that the Prophet had had a hundred wives, that he loved women, and that in short fornication was a fine sin, in Venice I didn’t fornicate much, the winter was endless, damp and cold, hardly favorable to fornication in fact, I remember that the first night in the Ghetto I had no blankets and I was so frozen I rolled myself up in a dusty oriental rug, fully dressed, with my shoes on because the rigid carpet was like a tube and didn’t cover my feet, I read some stories about phantom boats by William Hope Hodgson before falling asleep like a failed fakir or a dead sailor ready to be returned to the sea sewn up in his hammock, far from the eroticism that some attribute to Venice, a guy rolled up like a dusty threadbare cigar, on his own bed, with his shoes and a hat, why wasn’t the heat working, I am incapable of remembering in any case in this train now it must be about 75 degrees, I took my sweater off at the same moment as my neighbor opposite, he looks like a white New York rapper, he is reading