Nothing ruffles the surface of the water apart from a foul-smelling gust from the direction of the Dogana, where the ripples are caused by a puff of wind which does not reach me.
In ten minutes the peotta, the large gondola that collects the rubbish, will pass by on its way to the Giudecca. Venice is creating new islands out of refuse, making the most of her waste material.
When the first motorboat speeds past, the reflections of mooring posts look like crooked, Solomonic columns.
1925–1969 A CRUISE IN VENICE
I CAN REMEMBER a farewell party at sea, some forty years ago. The Zara, a vessel of 500 tons, with its black hull and gold lines, and flying the American flag, was anchored off the Doges’ Palace, ready to take us to Asia Minor. There were not many of us, just five passengers; a wise choice. Half of Venice, then a small provincial town, flocked on board and stayed so late that we missed the tide; for a month we were obliged to drink water, since the ship’s cellars had run dry. The captain, an Englishman, almost died.
As I recall that noisily celebrated departure, I ask myself in what way did a rather fashionable cruise like that one differ from those that serve as the background to modern novels. (I don’t regret having mixed in the society of those times; it meant that I didn’t have to spend my later life doing so, as Valéry or Gide did; it’s all experience.)
The pleasures of life in the twenties were uninhibited, but one had to be well dressed and come from a good family; there was none of that American-inspired brutality, no cold wars or hot ones, no world of pressure groups, alcohol, drugs, machine guns and erotic films. Survival? We were still learning about good manners. It was the Americans who were Europeanised; not the other way round.
People knew how to behave, even when playing the most reckless of games, those that have always existed; the scandals that took place in certain of the palazzi on the Grand Canal didn’t even reach the hotel bars; during an evening on board ship, when local society had gathered, you wouldn’t find any political agents, or betting clerks, or well-connected antique dealers without a license, or young women filling out their monthly wages in the gossip columns of unsavoury newspapers; the likes of couturiers, perfume sellers and suppliers had scarcely begun to mix socially with their clientele. Everybody still wore the clothes of their profession: pederasts offered themselves exclusively to males, without earning bits on the side from elderly ladies; Whites were simply less dark than Blacks, debauched old witches, celebrated for their weaknesses, did not publish their edifying memoirs, priests did not look like Protestant pastors, sociology students did not disguise themselves as Kurdish shepherds, and Kurdish shepherds as parachutists. Never could the current expression “to be out of sorts” be better translated than by our contemporary transvestites.
One never saw one’s hostess getting up from table between courses, taking photographs of her guests herself for some illustrated weekly, and then reclaiming her expenses. The prying snapshot, with the blackmailing photographer entering through the kitchens (as at the Labia), hiding beneath the bed and testing the very limits of the law, was unknown; this all stemmed from an American businesswoman who gave cut-price parties and, a few years later, fetched up in Europe.
Another difference was the police; the last nations to be highly civilized had not yet acquired police forces; there was Austrian surveillance in Stendhal’s time, Mosca hiding among the double basses at the theatre in Parma and the Italian gendarmerie, those brave carabinieri with their red plumes, but that was all; our information networks did not exist yet; neither did directories for each of the ministries, the “contacts” for the different weapons, the secret services attached to the most tropical of embassies, the investigation bureaux of the large banks, newspaper and magazine spies, syndicates on the look-out, files of casinos, jewellers and palaces. It is about our own time that Gérard de Nerval might have spoken of a “gang of privileged robbers”; it’s not Cosmopolis that Paul Bourget would have written today, but Interpol.
Having said this, there are a good number of similarities between a cruise in the 1920s and one today; you get away from the fogs, but become involved instead in disputes. Our voyage ended badly: as soon as we entered the Mediterranean, the family who had invited us began to quarrel among themselves; the poet on board had a premonition of a storm and disembarked at Bursa, and two other guests got off at Naples, so as not to have to take sides between the aunt and her niece. Left on their own, the members of the family locked themselves away in their cabins; as soon as they got back to Venice, they turned their backs on one another and never saw each other again; do they speak to one another from beyond the grave?
VENICE, SEPTEMBER 1930
ON THE 24TH OF SEPTEMBER 1930, I found myself sitting on a stone bench overlooking the lagoon. There where once the Bucintoro, its golden stern lighting up the primordial waters like the sun, and the Serenissima’s fleet lay at anchor — the ships flecked crimson, their long oars making them look like boiled lobsters — ten grey torpedo boats were lined up. The autumn sky trembled as the triangular shapes of the seaplanes approached; red, green and white tricolor pennants hung down to the ground (with all that ancient sense of “drapery” that flags have still retained in Italy); sailors from the Venetian battleships walked past, their eyes shining like copper. Officers wearing scarves and gold sword-knots passed with confident footstep to report for duty.
Venice, the city of Nietzsche, was instructing the new Italy: “Men must be given back the courage of their natural instincts”… “national narrow-mindedness, military strictness, a better physiology, space, meat…” I am back in front of St Mark’s, just as I was twenty years ago. Why did I buy La Volonté de puissance yesterday? What coincidence made me open it at the chapter entitled “Contre Rousseau”? “Unfortunately man is no longer wicked enough…” “It is lassitude and moralism that are the curse.”
The winged lion is proof that the future of Italy lies with the sea. St Mark versus the Orient, Manin20 versus Austria, Wagner and Nietzsche. In the Berliner Tageblatt, which I bought beneath the Procuraties, I read the words of Hitler, curt as a machine-gun: “If needs be, heads will fall.”
14–24 September: ten days were enough. Hitler’s voice once more, at Leipzig: “I shall introduce a vast spiritual upheaval”… and the National Socialists’ manifesto: “We shall use iron restraint against all who oppose the material and spiritual rebuilding of the nation.”
I look around me and I notice the blond creatures with bare knees who have descended from the Tyrol upon St Mark’s Square. The youth of 1930 are beginning to be seen everywhere and to make their loud voices heard. It is a Germany that no longer reads All Quiet on the Western Front, that speaks of “real wars, which will stop all forms of frivolity”; a hot-blooded age that has not experienced suffering: the students who have elected Hitler are former Communist sympathisers.
“We are entering a tragic period,” Nietzsche foretold, “a catastrophic age.”
1936
YESTERDAY MUSSOLINI brought Hitler to Napoleon’s headquarters at Stra. Behind them lay Treviso, the first foothills of the Dolomites and Mount Grappa. In front of them, the Euganean Hills that served Giorgione’s backdrop. Lichen-covered statues cast their drowning cries into the sea of shining magnolias. Ochre-coloured sails, pierced by an eye flushed red with conjunctivitis, pass by, Dutch style, at the level of the cornfields.