If she had changed her mind, C— would not have left the house unlocked; she would be expecting me, hoping that I would come, she would keep our appointment. I went straight to the bedroom, like a gourmand drawn to the kitchen. The door was unbolted.
“C—, it’s me!”
I could smell her behind the door.
I looked through the key-hole; a shirt was in the way. C— liked playing pranks, and I also knew she was a tease. But why leave me still yearning?
My ear at the door-frame, my hands on the cold marble mantel-piece. I hold my breath: there are two women. I can hear them satisfying one another; the pleasures of the eavesdropper; that lapping sound is not water splashing against the door of the house… I was granted the entire sequence, right up to the squealing of a rabbit carried away by rapaciousness…
Afterwards there was silence, total suspense. I knocked, hoping that it was just a curtain-raiser, C— was someone who liked to share. Nothing.
Every minute made me feel more foolish, more lonely, more excluded.
That evening, to my great disappointment, the door was not opened; everywhere Industry prevailed over Labour…
I never knew the secret of that evening. Later on, I heard tell of a family story, involving two female cousins. Who had insisted on that door being shut? C—, out of malice? The other person, out of jealousy or prudery, or because she liked secrecy? Or was it Man, in the person of myself, being pilloried?
Both of them are dead; they moan elsewhere, stoking the fires of hell. Above the entrance to the little house, I find the cartouche on the distempered walclass="underline" there one sees a cat lusting after two smoked herring…
I returned to the hotel, blaming myself and meditating bitterly on the role of men today, poor subjugated conquerors, routed by the feminist triumph that is breaking out everywhere; governors governed; one-time masters of the house doing the shopping, like Jouhandeau,3 whose slavery is the explanation for his wonderful portraits of Élise (like all men, Marcel is a coward; what redeems him is that at the last moment he reveals himself, through his sensitivity, to be more of a woman than women themselves…)
We are seeing the dawn of a primitive matriarchy, a post-nuclear one, it occurs to me. The despotic Don Juans and pimps, revealed to us in their majesty in so many cliché-ridden accounts, are nothing but poor submissive little girls who have surrendered. The recent strike by women in the USA, the republishing of Lysistrata; democracy, the blackmailer of the weak, brackets the Female with those who were once subjugated, the Blacks, servants, the working class, children and all those liberated people who have become the masters. The composition of the masses will change, but the masses will remain; that is what is meant by “revolution”, the etymology indicates the nature of the word: a return to the point of departure. Women, for their part, will recover from all this and will perfect their sensual aspirations. I can remember those handsome Berber farmers, who had come down from the Rif mountains and were being forcibly led to the souks by their wives; I used to come across them in Tangiers, being coaxed along by them into the shops and spending a fortune on useless necklaces, gaudy silks and hideous furnishing materials; once they were back home, they left all their fine apparel on their doorsteps and went back to their labours.
SEPTEMBER 1965 FROM THE TOP OF THE CAMPANILE
FROM THE TOP of the Campanile I survey the whole of Venice, which is as spread out as New York is vertical, as salmon-pink as London is black and gold. The whole place is bathed in showers, very much like a water-colour, with off-whites and dull beiges, picked out by the dark crimson shades of walls that look like the flesh of tuna. A violent breeze ripples through the Lagoon, driving clouds that are as light as those new nylon sails at the regattas on the Lido.
Through the iron bars on the top floor, which dissuade those contemplating suicide from doing so, I could see St Mark’s as if glued to the Doges’ Palace, at once a refuge, a treasury and an exit door from one of the wings of the theatre that is Venice. From this platform, one understands better the true role of St Mark’s, which was that of a private chapel to the Palace, not a public building as it is today, and not a basilica as is commonly believed.
At the entrance, I could make out the four figures on the porphyry relief with their broken boxer’s noses; the four Lysippus horses were leaping into the clouds, Venice’s only horses bowing their necks to which the gold still adheres, proud to be on view, but regretting, as former champions, that they could not challenge Colleone’s mount, or, if need be, Victor-Emmanuel’s prancing palfrey.
Perhaps the St Mark’s horses were nostalgic for their journey to Paris in 1798, their farewell to the tearful Venetians, their walk to the quayside and their embarkation aboard the French frigate La Sensible, their arrival at Toulon amidst all the paintings from the Italian campaign, their apotheosis on the Champ-de-Mars, behind the dromedaries and their installation on the Arc du Carrousel, to the accompaniment of formal addresses:
Et si de tes palais ils décorent le faîte
C’est par droit de vertu, non par droit de conquête.4
Anchored in front of San Giorgio Maggiore, the bulk of a British aircraft-carrier distorted the proportions, concealing the Lido which lay on the horizon, like a sleeping crocodile on the surface of the water. From on high I scanned the play of the currents, varying in shade accord ing to the salt content, where the antique green intersected the dirty green, the colour of excavated jade. Waterways marked out with stakes that are sunk into the mud, and slumbering dykes through which only the pilots and the old fishermen know how to find their way.
Goethe and Taine have described this view, from this very point; they saw those tables from Quadri’s café dotted in front of the Procuraties. Up there, I thought of Byron’s remark: “Nature alone does not lie”,… except for Venice, which does make nature lie and surpasses her; only man has dared put this challenge to the physical and architectural laws; what other creature — apart from the swallow building its nest — can make a soft substance hard? Who would have dared slosh about in this mud?
“The object is never as dark as its reflection,” painters say; only the reflection of Venice in our memories is lighter than the reality.
Who would attempt to build her again?
1965
DISCOVERED IN Cassini’s bookshop in the Via 22 Marzo the Memoirs of the last doge, Ludovico Manin: “10 May 1797; the French are at Mestre, any resistance is useless; the Serenissima arranged to bring in Dalmatian troops, but not in sufficient number. Without any bounty, Venice runs the risk of pillaging and fire.” “Tonight,” adds the doge, “we shall not sleep in our beds.” Poor Manin, whose graphic coat of arms bore an Adonis asleep beneath a tree…
The Council of Ten decided to let the consul, Villetard, know that the government of Venice would welcome the French troops “in a friendly manner”. The words overdid it; let the Venetians keep their friendship for them selves, Villetard replied to the doge.
On the 12th of May, the Slavic troops re-embarked for Dalmatia from the Giudecca. The French arrived. Would it mean a bloodbath? No. Manin shed tears as nobody has shed them since Diderot. Seven days later, there was a masked ball at the Fenice; both French and Venetian guards at the doors. On the 22nd, a Te Deum at St Mark’s. Contributions to the war were raised; hostages; the Librod’oro delle nobiltà veneziana was burnt. Another party at the Fenice, not very successful; how was it possible not to be frightened when you knew that Bonaparte, a few leagues away from here, had exclaimed: “I shall be the Attila Venice”?…5 General Baraguay, who was staying at Palazzo Pisani, held a reception; co-operation was languida. A committee from the Directoire arrived and searched through the libraries, taking away five hundred rare books and manuscripts and thirty of the best paintings.