Venice is returning to Greece what she stole from her; for more than four centuries she protected Crete, especially this town of Candia, which was besieged by the Turks for twenty-three years. This morning, I climbed the ramparts and clambered up on to the old red-brick parapets with their imitation fortifications, that first line of walls, built at the foot of Foscarini’s breaches, from which the scree crumbled, carrying down with it the jumble of centuries in an avalanche of stones emblazoned with the coat of arms of la Serenissima, Roman sarcophagi and curtains worn away with age.
El Greco left for the city of Toledo just in time, but Candia, confronted with Islam, stood firm. In those days, the white race was not ashamed of its hegemony, or of its Duke of Crete, who was appointed by the Adriatic doge; it scoffed at the wrath of Ahmet, the grand vizier who burned his prisoners alive. La Feuillade and the Due de Beaufort (the “roi des Halles”, and natural son of Henri IV), and the Hanoverian or Bohemian conscripts died here, for the West, adding their bodies to the ramparts built by San Micheli, the Venetian architect.
At dawn, facing the old port, the still sea beneath the sun-shades, a scene from a Claude Lorrain greeted me upon waking; everything was there, the vaulted docks that had been dug to house the old Venetian galleys, the crenellated battlements along the winding road, the black, tarred fishing-nets laid out in half-circles, the lateen sails with their oblique initials that impede the background view of the barbicans and casemates that had been demolished by earthquakes. The surface of the sluggish waters had not yet been scored by any propeller, or carressed by any oar; only an underwater swimmer’s flippers appeared between the breakwaters, like the dorsal fin of some submerged monster.
Venice had handed over her authority to other imperial powers; would the most recent of these, whose net was cast from Odessa to Mers el-Kébir, last longer than that of the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Normans, Byzantium, the Turk, or the British? The Venetian empire is still alive in Crete; here, she still holds sway; she is the “great presence” that the Italienische Reise talk about. It is as if Venice had never been expelled from the Orient; the day that Christopher Columbus discovered America was when la Serenissima chose to let herself expire; Vasco da Gama, by rounding the Cape of Good Hope, delivered the fatal knot; she survived for no more than three centuries, which is a great deal when one thinks that it only took a mere twenty years for the British Empire to become but a shadow of itself.
At midday I entered the bazaar, which was ablaze with oranges and lemons spilling from their baskets, peppers the colour of the Spanish flag, and kid goats with their throats slit. Between the arsenal and the cemetery the shops were parading their right to life, stretching out their medieval awnings, which were doing their best to support the overhanging moucharabies built of grey sycamore wood, dating from before Independence.
Gathered together around a glass of water outside the bars, with their bulging stalls and the cafés whose floors were pink with the dissected prawns consumed with apéritifs, were a dozen or so notable Cretans; the cheap restaurants hissed with the smoke from the frying. Clusters of hippies, perpetual castaways on the raft of leisure, drooled at the sight of cauldrons full to overflowing with snails cooked in onions, of grills upon which meatballs with lemon, or giouvarlakia, steamed alongside mizithra, cheeses made from honey, piled up in stacks.
In front of the Takio taverna, an English minibus, looking like a prehistoric cavern on Dunlop tyres, had given up the ghost; the foul stench of a public rubbish dump seeped from the open door, through which could be seen the remnants of gnawed bones on aluminium plates that had been placed on jerrycans; from the roof hung used espadrilles and plastic bags. A smell of pork in wine-flavoured sauce had enticed out of the vehicle a group of Nordic creatures, whose skin had turned to leather, and whose dark glasses were attempting to make a home for themselves in the fur-covered faces from which the only thing to emerge was an aubergine-coloured nose. In the winter the hippies had covered their naked torsos with a sheepskin bought from some shepherd or other on Mount Ida. I recognized these famished creatures: they were my English friends and my Yankee with the structuralist beard, the ones I had come across last summer in Venice. Exhausted by all the spare time they had on their hands, the little band were examining their pocket money, scrutinizing the menu in Greek and consulting one another, torn between the desire to eat something other than stolen chickens and the threat of arrest, followed by repatriation by the British consulate. (The Orthodox Church is not as indulgent towards vagabonds as the Roman Church.) Painted in white on the sides and on the back of their minibus, in three languages, were the words:
THE BOURGEOISIE STINKS
“A conventional fellow invites you to have some lunch,” I told them.
What would be the use of achieving my grand old age if one did not feel closer to a tramp outdoors in Crete eating two-drachmas’ worth of spaghetti from a paper plate, than to a conventional French family sitting at table in front of a haunch of venison braised in port wine?
I often feel jealous of lovers of the open road; they provide substance for a whole variety of dreams that Balzac described as: “the life of a Mohican”, and they remind me of our own life in 1920, of the way we heaped insults on society, our need for destruction and our defiant challenges scrawled on posters at the time that the Treaty of Versailles was bleeding Europe to death; they make me relive our attitude of “to hell with everyone”, “to blazes with everything”. But as for this lot, what will they do when they have finished wandering along the verges of non-existence? I make fun of them, I feel sorry for them, I envy them.
I asked them about how they spent their time: “We are reinventing Man’s relationship with the Earth,” was their reply.
I was expecting to see emerge from the minibus the British Valkyrie who, having consumed my grappa straight from the bottle, said she had no time for Venice; I could see again her blue eyes seeped in mascara beneath her headband, her mahogany lips and, beneath a Carnaby Street frock so long that it mopped up the spittle on the ground, her large feet, cracked and filthy, and her silver-painted toes.
Their mouths full and belching forth garlic, the wandering Pithecanthropi, having accepted my invitation to lunch, recounted how they had cremated their companion in the ancient manner, on the shores of the Libyan Sea, as recently as Christmas, on a morning when, after consuming a great deal of mastic resin, ouzo, raki and heroin, she had not woken up. She was the daughter of an ecclesiastical peer, a life peer… “That’s actually what explains why she wanted to do away with herself… Basically, she suffered from not being the daughter of a hereditary lord,” said the driver of the minibus (Magdalen and BBC accent) as he scratched a head of hair that was as greasy as a poodle’s; “People can say what they will, but Burke’s Peerage was always her little red book…”
1971
TRIESTE, VILLA PERSEPHONE
THE VENICE-TRIESTE TRAIN puffs away for two hours as it follows the new motorway that links the two cities: Jesolo, Aquilea, Monfalcone. There are skyscrapers amid the cornfields, hidden canals in the vineyards, out of which rise up purple-tinged osiers and the stumps of willow trees. North of Venice industry extends indefinitely, stretching up the boot of the peninsula up to the top of the thigh, as far as Trieste.