Lidia Tempesta (1889–1932)
“If there is an infinite aspect to space,” writes Joseph Brodsky, “it is not its expansion but its reduction. If only because the reduction of space, oddly enough, is always more coherent. It’s better structured and has more names: a cell, a closet, a grave.” Brodsky recounts that the established norm for communal housing in the former Soviet Union was nine square meters per person. In the allocation of meters, he and his parents were lucky since, in St. Petersburg, they shared forty square meters: 13.3 apiece: 26.6 for his parents, 13.3 for him: a room and a half for the three of them.
One day in 1972, Joseph Brodsky, then age thirty-two, left his parents’ home in 24 Liteiny Prospekt for the last time. He was exiled to the United States and never returned to St. Petersburg, because every attempt to visit his parents had to pass through the hands of a bureaucrat who considered the visit of a Jewish dissenter from the Communist Party unjustified. Brodsky was unable to attend his mother’s funeral, or his father’s — a “pointless” visit, said the official letter written by the gentleman behind the glass. His parents died about a year apart, sitting in the same old chair, in front of the only television in that apartment in which the three had lived.
Between that room and a half in St. Petersburg and his tomb in Venice, Brodsky occupied many other temporary spaces: other people’s bedrooms, hotel rooms, apartments, prison cells, wards of mental hospitals. But perhaps a person only has two real residences: the childhood home and the grave. All the other spaces we inhabit are a mere gray spectrum of that first dwelling, a blurred succession of walls that finally resolve themselves into the crypt or the urn — the tiniest of the infinite divisions of space into which a human body can fit.
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)
The graves of the famous foreigners in the cemetery are not only in a separate section from those of the ordinary Venetians — heaven forbid that a gondolier should lie next to Stravinsky’s wife — but there are also divisions among the foreigners. The Russian intellectuals who used to haunt Venice are on one side; everyone else on the other. The strange and ironic thing is that Joseph Brodsky is not to be found among either the Moscow or the Leningrad intelligentsia, but in a different section, next to his great enemy, Ezra Pound. And, in contrast to the others, Brodsky’s grave isn’t indicated by an official sign at the entrance to the section: instead, some benevolent soul has written his name in correction fluid between that of the writer of The Cantos and the arrow showing the direction of the two tombs:
Protestant Section: Ezra Pound (+ Iosif Brodsky) →
I imagined that I’d find at least a handful of groupies eager to leave an amulet or a kiss on Brodsky’s grave. But there was no one in the Protestant section. No one except an elderly woman, laden with every imaginable type of shopping bag filled with her belongings, standing by Ezra Pound’s grave. I walked directly toward Brodsky without even nodding, as if marking out my territory: you with Pound, me with Brodsky.
Giuseppina Gavagnin (1824–1911)
On Brodsky’s grave, inscribed with the dates 1940–1996 and his name in Cyrillic letters, were chocolates, pens, and flowers. But mostly chocolates. There was not, as is so often the case with graves in Italian cemeteries, a portrait of the deceased set into the stone.
In Watermark, his book on Venice, Brodsky writes: “Inanimate 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.” In a loosely paradoxical way, anonymity is a characteristic of absence: it is the absence of characteristics. A newborn face is almost devoid of singular expressions, and it gradually gains the features that identify it. But as that countenance ages and acquires greater definition, it simultaneously exposes itself to more and more looks from strangers — or, to follow Brodsky’s image, to more hotel room mirrors, in which so many reflections have appeared that they all throw back the same visage, rumpled, like an unmade bed — so it also gradually loses the definition it has gained over the years, as if, being seen so often through strange eyes, it tends to return to its unformed original. This is a good thing, because the excess of definition that a face acquires with time, and which would perhaps otherwise culminate in a monstrous excess of identity — in a pained grimace, an unfriendly scowl, a worried frown — is balanced by the simultaneous loss of identity. In the very beginning and the final stretch, while a person is alive, a face moves asymptotically toward anonymity. It is natural, then, that a dead person should no longer have any face at all. The countenance of the dead must be, in any case, like those white, anonymous petals scattered on a bough to which Pound compares strangers’ faces in his poem “In the Station of the Metro.”
There was no portrait on Brodsky’s gravestone. It seemed appropriate that that definitive stamp of identity was not there; the smooth, opaque gray of the stone was more honest — a reflection of the anonymity of a hotelmensch par excellence, a man of many hotel rooms, many mirrors, many faces. Better to stand by the grave and try to remember some photo of him sitting on a bench in Brooklyn, or bring to mind one of those recordings of his voice, at once powerful but broken, like that of someone who has passed many hours in solitude and acquired conviction through constant doubt.
Luchino Visconti (1906–1976)
The outcome of a long-awaited first meeting is often disappointing. The same is true of an encounter with a dead person, except that there’s no need to hide the disappointment: in that sense, a dead person is always more agreeable than a living one. If, on standing before him, we realize that, in fact, we have nothing to do there, that the amusement lay in looking for, rather than finding the grave — what are the stones of Venice going to say to you unless you’re Ruskin? — we can move away after a few minutes and the deceased will not reproach us. There’s no necessity to be polite to the dead, even though religion has attempted to instill in us absurdly decorous forms of behavior at funeral masses and in cemeteries. Not speaking, praying, and walking slowly with head bowed, hands clasped at waist level, are customs that matter little to those lying six feet under.
That’s why the apparently obtrusive presence of the elderly lady standing, as it then seemed to me, deep in thought by Pound’s grave turned out to be so timely. She edged toward the shadow of the tree where Brodsky and I were already sharing an uncomfortable silence and began to scratch her legs as if she had fleas. When she’d finished scratching, she moved a little closer and stopped in front of Brodsky’s tomb. I stepped aside. With complete calm, like someone carrying out routine domestic chores, she began to steal the chocolates which had been left for the poet. When she’d gathered them all up, she also took the pens and pencils. Looking me straight in the eye, she let out a short, abrupt cackle. Then, as if not wanting to seem impolite, she left a flower on the tombstone — purloined, I suppose, from Pound’s grave.
She bent to scratch her legs again, picked up her heavy bags filled with necrological souvenirs, and left the Protestant section. I saw her disappear among the graves, as in that W. H. Auden poem Brodsky was always quoting, “silently and very fast.”
FLYING HOME
Churubusco
For an impatient person, there’s no torture more cruel than the one that became fashionable on transatlantic flights some time ago, where a map of a portion of the world is projected onto a screen across which a tiny white aircraft advances a millimeter every sixty seconds.