20. Daniele Manin (1804–57) Italian statesman who, after the Revolution of 1848, became the head of the Venetian Republic. He was active in the heroic Venetian resistance against Austria. [Tr.]
21. 1967. On the walls in Peking: “Kill the birds!”
22. 1970. The graffiti of the P.C. (il partito comunista) has returned: seen, yesterday, on a wall in the Brenta, the following invective, worthy of Alfieri: AMERICANI SERVI DELLA MORTE (Americans, lackeys of Death!).
III MORTE IN MASCHERA, 1950
MARIA P—, a Venetian friend whom I questioned about the end of the last war, in which she herself had been involved, told me: “Venice was a dismal place during that winter of 1945; everything was rationed; news, especially: the local press was full of details about other fronts, about the German advance in Alsace, but was silent about what was taking place on our own doorstep; there were maps of the Neisse front, but nothing about the Ravenna-Bologna one. I could hear the bombs destroying Padua. There was no more electricity; the vaporetti had no fuel; there were notices on the walls providing descriptions of all sorts of lethal contraptions that fell out of the sky, which the public should not touch.
“On the 26th of April, my Gazzettino appeared in a smaller format. On the 27th of April, it had become a single sheet of paper: Milan occupied, Mussolini arrested, Canadian troops at Mestre. On the 28th, my newspaper was nothing but a leaflet, in which the Volunteers for Freedom and its glorious fighters were restoring the glory of the Risorgimento to Italy, which had been darkened by twenty years of Nazi-fascist barbarism. The Canadian armoured-cars would not stay for long; once Venice was taken, the Allies sped off in great haste: intent on preventing Tito from spilling over into the Julian Veneto…”
SEPTEMBER 1951
A EUROPEAN FESTIVAL, twenty years old today… A man of taste hurled his joy at being alive into the Cannaregio. Did not Ludwig II of Bavaria drown himself in two feet of water?
It would be absurd to talk about this latest evening like a young girl discussing her first dance, but from the moment I arrived I knew that I was coming to say farewell to a certain world; a recluse through necessity and alone these past eleven years, from the top of my glacier I suddenly fell upon a delightful skirmish, into a death knell of the imagination. A ball? A ball in Italy, as in Stendhal!
In St Mark’s Square, there was what a Venetian Montaigne would call “the throng of foreign peoples”. It wasn’t a matter of hairdressers or make-up girls having missed their trains or planes, of “ticket-holders” jeopardised by last-minute defections — local politics, the American press, left-wing puritanism and the resentment of those who had been excluded were all blended together here.
On the terrace of Florian’s, which was littered with more feathers than an eiderdown, Churchill, his paintbox in a shoulder-bag, held up his fingers in a V-sign, but no one was interested; that day, V stood only for Venice.
Whether he was conscious of it or being challenging, it was pleasing to think that a great amateur painter was parading himself, just for the sake of bringing Venice back to life, of helping those characters painted by great or lesser masters — captive goddesses on their Gobelins tapestries, who had grown bored on their museum canvases — to emerge from their frames; others could have done so, but only he dared; in a world of yellow-bellies, he was a caballero.
As I walked around, I admired a Venice that was inflamed in red and saffron, and I was reminded of spiny rock-fish, with monstrous heads, emerging from a dish of bouillabaisse.
We wanted to be the first, so that we could see without being seen. The porter examined our invitation cards as carefully as a cashier might look at a large denomination banknote, so many were the forged invitations circulating.
It was too early. B. was not yet dressed; he received us with good humour, his brow beaded in sweat, and in shirtsleeves, for he had not yet donned his Gagliostro costume, being more concerned with decorating his palazzo.
Leaning over the main balcony, which was festooned with girandole, I looked out over the spectators who had been squeezed into the narrow embankments and were hanging on to the cornices along the length of the houses. Only the church of San Geremia, lit tangentially like a backdrop in a theatre, separated the Palazzo Labia from the Grand Canal. In neighbouring windows, rented out for a fortune, heads were leaning out from stacked floors over the empty space below.
All that Venice could muster in the way of boats and small craft was compressed into this junction of the city’s two biggest canals.
The windows of the palazzi were draped in tapestries, and the Aubusson carpets that ran down the steps were soaked in the waters of the Canal.
Through the exhaust fumes, the exhalations of tobacco and the smoke from the open-air rotisseries and burning torches, the projectors beamed down directly upon the first arrivals.
“Miracolo vivente di sogno e poesia!” cried a woman selling printed handkerchiefs beneath an open parasol, as she dashed off St Mark lions, one paw resting on the gospel.
Venice that evening added her own note of unreality to the illusions of a festival; the “guests” loomed out of the darkness into the falso giorno of a city that was herself a work of artifice. Lights concealed in corners beamed down as the caterpillar-like procession wended its way forward.
The theme of the spectacle: Marco Polo, the prodigal son, was returning home, bringing back with him to the Adriatic Chinese Chippendales or Turks painted by Liotard.1
Photographers from the world’s press directed their gleaming lenses at the principal performers.
Between two figures of Barbary apes flanked by a Mandarin court, on Tartary junks more gilded than the Bucintoro, a Catalan with waxed moustaches basked in the beams of light. Damascened in silver, the giants followed. And behind them came the goyescas, their roles performed by descendants of Goya’s models, who were given an ovation from the shops below to the roofs above.
The stream of fire that surged the length of these floating altars led towards the entrance to the Cannaregio, where those taking part in the procession set foot on a Savonnerie carpet drenched in the waters of the dark canal; upon disembarking, the women secured their footing with the help of Moorish porters who restored their delicate balance, flanked by two rows of yellow galley slaves, their oars held erect.
Chandeliers from Murano, decorated with real flowers, as delicate as those confections of threaded sugar that adorned Venetian festivals during the Renaissance, lit up the inner courtyard; there people were already bustling about preparing their tableaux vivants of the Beauvais tapestries that hung from the walls, the famous Parties du monde.
Without a care for the morrow, pleasure-loving Europeans, oil-rich Asians, bored Americans, kings from Candide, the jet-setters and a sea of shipowners continued to file past the church on the corner, where San Geremia did his best to restrain his lamentations: “You’re heading straight for the cemetery…” he cried. “Watch out for San Michele!”
The masked apotheosis of that night twenty years ago was a Catherine II, a sky-blue sash across her bust, adorned, like some glacier, with diamonds from the Urals: she is no longer alive. I can see a Louis XIV in gold and white and, like some intoxicating perfume, I can still sniff his victorious presence; his sumptuous garb upset a colleague dressed in designer clothes, his hair as golden as a comet, who followed behind: today they are both dead. A Parisian Petronius who afterwards towered above the crowd of onlookers from the top of his palanquin, the very image of the glorious life, now sleeps in the peace of the graveyard. A bacchante, the English queen of Paris, dressed only in a panther skin, was led along by little Caribs; her steely eyes and her frosty laugh were extinguished forever immediately after her triumph.