This is the way, and in my case the why, I set my eyes on this city. There is nothing Freudian to this fantasy, or specifically chor- date, although some evolutionary—if not plainly atavistic—or autobiographical connection could no doubt be established between the pattern a wave leaves upon the sand and its scrutiny by a descendant of the ichthyosaur, and a monster himself The upright lace of Venetian fa<;ades is the best line time-alias-water has left on terra firma anywhere. Plus, there is no doubt a correspondence between— if not an outright dependence on—the rectangular nature of that lace's displays—i.e., local buildings—and the anarchy of water that spurns the notion of shape. It is as though space, cognizant here more than anyplace else of its inferiority to time, answers it with the only property time doesn't possess: with beauty. And that's why water takes this answer, twists it, wallops and shreds it, but ultimately carries it by and large intact off into the Adriatic.
he eye in this city acquires an autonomy similar to that of a tear. The only difference is that it doesn't sever itself from the body but subordinates it totally. After a while—on the third or fourth day here—the body starts to regard itself as merely the eye's carrier, as a kind of submarine to its now dilating, now squinting periscope. Of course, for all its targets, its explosions are invariably self- inflicted: it's your own heart, or else your mind, that sinks; the eye pops up to the surface. This of course owes to the local topography, to the streets—narrow, meandering like eels— that finally bring you to a flounder of a campo with a cathedral in the middle of it, barnacled with saints and flaunting its Medusa-like cupolas. No matter what you set out for as you leave the house here, you are bound to get lost in these long, coiling lanes and passageways that beguile you to see them through, to follow them to their elusive end, which usually hits water, so that you can't even call it a cul-de- sac. On the map this city looks like two grilled fish sharing a plate, or perhaps like two nearly overlapping lobster claws (Pasternak compared it to a swollen croissant); but it has no north, south, east, or west; the only direction it has is sideways. It surrounds you like frozen seaweed, and the more you dart and dash about trying to get your bearings, the more you getlost. The yellow arrow signs at intersections are not much help either, for they, too, curve. In fact, they don't so much help you as kelp you. And in the fluently flapping hand of the native whom you stop to ask for directions, the eye, oblivious to his sputtering A destra, a sinistra, dritto, dritto, readily discerns a fish.
mesh caught in frozen seaweed might be a better metaphor. Because of the scarcity of space, people exist here in cellular proximity to one another, and life evolves with the immanent logic of gossip. One's territorial imperative in this city is circumscribed by water; the window shutters bar not so niuch daylight or noise (which is minimal here) as what may emanate from inside. When they are opened, shutters resemble the wings of angels prying into someone's sordid affairs, and like the spacing of the statues on cornices, human interplay here takes on theaspects of jewelry or, better yet, filigree. In these parts one is both more secretive and better informed than the police in tyrannies. No sooner do you cross the threshold of your apartment, especially in winter, than you fall prey to every conceivable surmise, fantasy, rumor. If you've got company, the next day at the grocery or newsagent you may meet a stare of biblical probing unfathomable, you would think, in a Catholic country. If you sue someone here, or vice versa, you must hire a lawyer on the outside. A traveler, of course, enjoys this sort of thing; the native doesn't. What a painter sketches, or an amateur photographs, is no fun for the citizen. Yet insinuation as a principle of city planning (which notion locally emerges only with the benefit of hindsight) is better than any modern grid and in tune with the local canals, taking their cue from water, which, like the chatter behind you, never ends. In that sense, brick is undoubtedly more potent than marble, although both are unassailable for a stranger. However, once or twice over theseseventeen years, I've managed to insinuate myself into a Venetian inner sanctum, into that beyond-the-anialgam labyrinth Regnier described in Provincial Entertainments. It happened in such a roundabout way that I can't even recall the details now, for I could not keep tabs on all those twists and turns that led to my passage into this labyrinth at the time. Somebody said something to somebody else, while the other person who wasn't even supposed to be there listened in and telephoned the fourth, as a result of which I'd been invited one night to a party given by the umpteenth at his palazzo.
he palazzo had become the umpteenth's only recently, after nearly three centuries of legal battles fought by several branches of a family that had given the world a couple of Venetian admirals. Accordingly, two huge, splendidly carved aft-lanterns loomed in the two-story-high cave of the pa- lazzo's courtyard, which was filled with all sorts of naval paraphernalia, dating from Renaissance days onward. The umpteenth himself, the last in the line, after decades and decades of waiting, had finally got it, to the great consternation of the other—apparently numerous—members of the family. He was no navy man; he was a bit of a playwright and a bit of a painter. For the moment, though, the most obvious thing about this forty-year-old —a slim, short creature in a gray double- breasted suit of very good cut—was that he was quite sick. His skin looked post-hepatitis, parchment yellow—or perhaps it was just an ulcer. He ate nothing but consomme and boiled vegetables while his guests were gorging themselves on what would qualify as a separate chapter, if not a book.
So the party was celebrating the umpteenth's having come into his own, as well as his launching a press to produce books about Venetian art. It was already in full swing when the three of us—a fellow writer, her son, and I—arrived. There were a lot of people: local and faintly international luminaries, politicos, nobles, the theater crowd, beards and ascots, mistresses of varying degrees of flamboyance, a bicycle star, American academics. Also, a bunch of giggling, agile, homosexual youths inevitable these days whenever something mildly spectacular takes place. They were presided over by a rather distraught and spiteful middle-aged queen—very blond, very blue- eyed, very drunk: the premises' major domo, whose days here were over and who therefore loathed everyone. Rightly so, I would add, given his prospects.
As they were making quite a ruckus, the umpteenth politely offered to show the three of us the rest of the house. We readily agreed and went up by a small elevator. When we left its cabin, we left the twentieth, the nineteenth, and a large portion of the eighteenth century behind, or, more accurately, below: like sediment at the bottom of a narrow shaft.
We found ourselves in a long, poorly lit gallery with a convex ceiling swarming with putti. No light would have helped anyway, as the walls were covered with large, floor-to- ceiling, dark-brownish oil paintings, definitely tailored to this space and separated by barely discernible marble busts and pilasters. The pictures depicted, as far as one could make out, sea and land battles, ceremonies, scenes from mythology; the lightest hue was wine-red. It was a mine of heavy porphyry in a state of abandonment, in a state of perpetual evening, with oils obscuring its ores; the silence here was truly geological. You couldn't ask, What is this? Who is this by? because of the incongruity of your voice, belonging to a later and obviously irrelevent organism. Or else it felt like an underwater journey—we were like a school of fish passing through a sunken galleon loaded with treasure, but not opening our mouths, since water would rush in.