We were approaching the Giardini. As we coasted along, the vapours ripped through the lagoon like scissors cutting through a length of silk; the water was frothy and whipped up with dirty snow like a real cappuccino.
I handed the Valkyrie my flask of grappa; the wretched ragamuffin grabbed it without a word of thanks.
“Man can revert to being an ape or a wolf in six months,” I launched forth, “but to produce a Plato, it must have taken millions of years… As for conceiving of Venice…”
“I shit on Venice,” replied the Valkyrie.
“You can leave that to the pigeons, Mademoiselle…” I said, taking back my empty flask.
1969
VENICE IN THE AUTUMN, disinfected of tourists (apart from the unbudgeable Buddha-like hippies, so lacking in any curiosity), her buildings decked in dust covers, cloaked in rain; it’s the least frivolous time. Venice in spring, when her paving stones start to sweat and the Campanile is reflected in the lake that forms in St Mark’s Square. Venice in winter, the time of the temperatura rigida and the congelamento, when the fire-wardens watch out for fires in the tall chimneys, and the wolves come down from the Dolomites. As for Venice in summertime, it’s the worst time…
1970
AN OVERCAST October sky this morning; an opaline grey, the colour of old chandeliers, so fragile that they sell marabou feathers with which to dust them.
1970
ON THIS OCTOBER EVENING, it was still summertime; the surface of the water was like a piece of shattered glass, with tug-boats wailing, transporter bridges scattering the flocks of seagulls that rested on the mud-flats, pilot ships towing sea-going oil tankers, ferries from the Lido disgorging their vehicles from both ends, and motor boats constructed of nickel, chrome and mahogany clattering against a surface hardened by speed; they are driven by elegant bare-chested Tritons who steer standing up — they are ashamed to steer sitting down in Venice. Everything seemed to be churning up the brackish water and to be drawing it towards itself as one might a sheet; this water disappeared beneath the hulls, just as in those regattas painted by Guardi in which the scores of gondolas transform the Grand Canal into a pontoon bridge.
THE SAME DAY
VENICE… rather than being a seminary of morbidezza is an academy of energy; Barrès might have been able to draw strength here by touching the water rather than the earth. That evening Venice-the-Red, where, in Alfred de Musset’s time, not a boat stirred, could offer nothing but deafening sirens, whipped-up waves and a sky perforated by jet planes; everywhere lights burned brightly, people shouted and everything was steaming with perspiration.
As we drew up in front of the Danieli, night was falling, but the constant hubbub continued; the flecks of froth clung to the bows until we reached the steps of the jetty. This screech of outboard motors wailing at five thousand revolutions per minute and the traffic pounding by all served to mount a challenge to that old literary hack whom we call Death; everything seemed to cry out: “Enough debris, enough relics, enough remains, put a stop to all this twilight! Enough of this moaning from such a gay city!”
In the old surroundings, life went on, rather like a play by Beckett performed in the amphitheatre at Nîmes.
Venice became once more what she had been in the fifteenth century, a sort of Manhattan, a predatory city of extremes, howling with prosperity, with a Rialto which had been the Brooklyn Bridge of its age, and a Grand Canal that was a sort of Fifth Avenue for millionnaire doges; her airfields recalled the fleets of galleys sponsored by bankers; an Italian city without any Italians, like New York without Americans, where the Blacks, in this case, were fair-haired Dalmatians, and the Jewish brokers Greek shipowners (for, in the vicinity of San Giorgio dei Greci, the Greeks, who had come from Rhodes and Chios after the fall of Constantinople, were the true monarchs of the Republic, and her most famous courtesans were Greek too).
Throughout History, Venice has shown two faces: sometimes a pond, sometimes the open sea, one moment peddling lethargy in bookshop windows, the next exploding into a far-flung imperialism (one that was so despotic that Christian Levant, weary of her harshness, came to prefer the Turk).
Venice will be saved; offices installed in the Palazzo Papadopoli, run by scholars from every nation, are dedicated to doing so: a Californian oceanographer, an expert in smoke pollution, has flown in from Los Angeles; a specialist in terrestrial sub-stratas from Massachusetts, and another, an earthquake engineer from the Soviet Union; it’s called the Bureau for the Study of Maritime and Terrestrial Movement. Venice’s fate lies in the hands of these men. Based on information received from computers, their great project is to close the three entrances to the lagoon with gigantic air balloons that can be inflated or deflated at will.
Due to the proximity of the two shores, tides in the Adriatic are much more violent and unpredictable that those in the rest of the Mediterranean; storms blow up as if inside a shell. (I was once nearly ship-wrecked, off Ancona, in 1920.)
Venice is sinking thirty centimetres every century, which is not much more than the rest of the world, but Porto Marghera and Mestre, by pumping out excessive amounts of water, have destroyed the natural balance of the lagoon.
SEPTEMBER 1970
A FASCINATING EXHIBITION at the Palazzo Grassi: “The History of the Venetian Lagoon”; the geology, hydrography, botany, the navigation, the Gondola through the ages; hunting, fishing, the Lagoon in Literature and History. There were excellent ten foot-long maps on parchment: one by Ottavio Fabri and Sabbadino, from the sixteenth century; another by Minorelli and Vestri from the seventeenth. A Venetian mosaic of the Flood, dating from 589. Some xylographs depicting the construction of a twelfth-century Venice; no machinery, no dredger, nothing but human labour; wooden stakes are being dug in by hand by two workmen lifting wooden mallets; it really was the republic of beavers of which Goethe spoke.
And what a surface! There are examples here of the silt, of reeds used for the first fences, of lichen hanging from some nameless mush.
Sometimes I attempt to drain the lifeblood out of myself by imagining Venice dying before I do, imagining her being swallowed up without revealing her features upon the water before she disappears. Being submerged not to the depths, but a few feet beneath the water; her cone-shaped chimneys would emerge, her miradors, from which the fishermen would cast their lines, and her campanile, a refuge for the last cats from St Mark’s. The vaporetti, tilting under the weight of visitors, would survey the surface of the waters where they coalesce with the mire of the past; tourists would point out to each other the gold from some mosaic, held afloat by five water-polo balls: the domes of St Mark’s; the Salute would be used as a mooring buoy by cargo ships; bubbles would float up from above the Grand Canal, released by frogmen groping around for American ladies’ jewels in the cellars of a submerged Grand Hotel. “What prophecy has ever turned a people away from sin?” said Jeremiah.
Venice is drowning; it may well be the best thing that could happen to her.
IN CRETE CANDIA (HERAKLION), APRIL 1970
ONE IS STILL in Venice, here, on the square where the lions on the Morosoni fountain belch forth from their mouths the melted snow from Mount Ida upon the citizens of Heraklion. It is a Venice that is far removed from the dreaded gusts of the bora, a Venice for the end of winter. On the square, the tables and chairs from the café spill out over the pavement and on to the road; I watch the passers-by; a bearded pope upon a puny donkey, people selling foreign newspapers that arrived on the midday plane, elderly peasants, still dressed in the Turkish clothes that were worn before the revolution, with a black turban wrapped around their grey heads, baggy trousers and scarlet boots made from goatskin.