‘I wasn’t laughing,’ I said, though in fact I was on the verge of a nervous titter, such was his vehemence.
‘You looked as if you might be going to. Of course materially, it wasn’t serious, and yet in a way it was; before the war one bottle of brandy more or less didn’t matter, you could replace it; but how can you replace three thousand lire now, I ask you? And it was the principle of the thing. Somehow I should have minded less if he had had one redeeming virtue instead of one damning vice. His whole being seemed to be organized for deceit. But most Italians are that way, I fancy.’
‘I shouldn’t choose a gondolier as a touchstone of moral behaviour, either in Italy or elsewhere,’ I said, tired of his coat-trailing.
‘Oh, you wouldn’t, wouldn’t you?’ my friend said nastily. ‘Why not? Because he is a poor man, I suppose?’
‘No,’ I said, not wishing to be hoisted on the petard of social snobbery. ‘Because for centuries gondoliers have been dependent on the whims of well-to-do people like yourself, and have had to shape their conduct accordingly. With them it’s a matter of economics, not of morals.’
‘You would defend the Devil,’ he said violently. Then with a sudden change of mood he went on:
‘It was so ironical that during all the war years when we ought to have been wishing each other dead and so on, we hadn’t had an unkind thought about each other, and now, when our Governments had graciously announced we could be friends, we weren’t on speaking terms.
‘As soon as I could I wrote him a letter, in effect apologizing to him for having let him rob me and asking him to come back. I couldn’t bring myself to say that I had drunk the brandy myself or that Giuseppina had. I gave the letter to Giuseppina to post and never doubted it would do the trick. I’ve sometimes wondered whether she did post it, she hated him so much. Certainly he didn’t answer, or come back. Did I afterwards find out he wasn’t the real culprit? Unfortunately, no.
‘Lacking Antonio, Venice seemed an utterly strange place to me. For one thing I had never been ill in Venice before. I had always been particularly well—and, for me, active. The question was how to find time for all the things I wanted to do. And you know how, in that state, one doesn’t look about one very much. I won’t say I never looked at Venice, but I looked at it with the eye of health and hurry—any eye that doesn’t see much. Now I was a prisoner. My sphere of action was limited to one room and, as I got better, to two. I felt utterly cut off. In my old flat I had a telephone and Antonio to run errands for me: here I had no telephone, no Antonio, only Giuseppina as a link with the outside world: she had all the housework to do, as well as marketing and catering for me and, when I was ill, acting as my nurse: and I did not like to inflict any further duties on her, unless it was to ask her to post a letter.
‘And I didn’t want to write any letters. No! After Antonio’s defection my unwillingness to make myself known to my friends in Venice increased, until it amounted to a nervous inhibition. When I thought I was getting over it, I was really getting used to it. A feeling of snugness enfolded me; I was enclosed in my anonymity as in a cocoon, and I had no wish at all to break my bonds; indeed, every day I spun new ones, I didn’t want my convalescence to end and invented new symptoms which would keep me indoors. Giuseppina, with native shrewdness, was quick to discover this. “Si è impressionato,” she said, “you are frightening yourself”—and so I was, though not quite in the way she meant.
‘At the back of my mind was always the thought that Antonio, though absent as a friend was present as an enemy, and my dread of meeting him, if I went out, began to extend to all the inhabitants of Venice. So I was doubly a prisoner, a prisoner of myself and a prisoner of the flat; and when I got tired of the view of my own mind, I had the windows of my two rooms to look out of.
‘From my bedroom windows I enjoyed a roofscape. Domes and towers gave it grandeur and formal beauty, but what chiefly fascinated me was the roofs themselves. I came to know them as intimately as did the sparrows that hopped about on them: a sparrow on the house-tops, that’s what I was myself.
‘Low-pitched, almost flat, the roofs reminded me of shallow pyramids or squat pagodas—Venice has many forms and contours that suggest the East. Red-brown and weather-stained, the tiles lay along them like strings of broken flower-pots, on which, when the sun came out, the lizards basked and darted. (It didn’t come out very much: June had set in wet.) Instead of pots or cowls, the chimney-stacks had roofs on them like tables. Crowning some of the roofs, and higher than the chimney pots, were the altanas, platforms where the washing was hung out; flimsy-looking structures whose posts and palings made a pattern on the sky like Chinese Chippendale. Some of them had small hut-like attachments, bonnets or hoods to keep the weather out. There was something new every time one looked, some new arrangement of lines and surfaces; all, or nearly all, brown-pink and grey, with here and there the vivid green of a creeper, or the top of a cypress nodding against a wall.
‘This view had the slightly hypnotic effect on me that an abstract or a cubist picture might have. It took me out of myself, but not, as you will easily believe, towards anyone else. Except for a woman shaking a duster from a window or hanging washing out on an altana, it was a roofscape without figures—a geometrical world.
‘Below the two windows of my sitting-room was a canal with a pavement—a fondamenta—bordering it. You could only see the pavement by leaning out of the window, it was so far below; but what a rewarding sight it was! Together the canal and the fondamenta made a stage on which the scenery didn’t vary much but the action was always changing. Though nothing sensational ever happened, something was always going to happen; and that something was heralded by shouts of warning or encouragement, advice or reproof: nothing that took place, or looked like taking place, escaped somebody’s comment.
‘It was a way of living by proxy, and it exactly suited me, in my limp convalescent state, to be a spectator of the spectators. I didn’t try to write, I just sat looking. Very often I didn’t even take the trouble to go to the windows: I could see from my chair a great deal—the houses opposite, the big acacia with its tufted top, sensitive to every air that blew, the terrace beside it, sometimes the scene of impassioned carpet-beating, sometimes of alfresco parties, the petunias in boxes along its balustrade, the luxuriant bignonia that dripped from it, and the scarcely less luxuriant wistaria that climbed in and out of the bignonia. It was mid-June; the bignonia was beginning to put out its scarlet tongues—an insult which I took in good part; the wistaria was blooming for the second time; their blossoms did not accord, yet there was something touching about their friendship: it was so intimate yet on so grand a scale.
‘Next came the great palazzo to which the terrace was a foot-stool—the Palazzo Trevisan. It differed in plan from most Venetian palaces in having two wings with a courtyard in between. The courtyard was also a garden in the Italian sense—that is to say it possessed trees, shrubs, creepers and a fountain; but no flowers to speak of. It looked dreary in the rain but on bright days when the sunshine lay heavy on the housetops it made a great patch of shade for which the eye was thankful; and I could imagine how cool it was beneath the trees. The garden had a water-gate let into the wall and a flight of stone steps, stained and seaweedy, that were submerged at high tide. But I never saw it opened. No gondola ever drew up at the steps; the gondolier’s anxious cry, warning his fare against the slippery surface—“Piano—si scivola!”—was never heard. Not that the steps were unused. Barche and sandole—nondescript boats of all work—were moored to them, and moored, too, to the tall blue posts with their gilded and coroneted summits that stood, slanting this way and that, like a forest in the water.