by Kurt Caswell
And then John does, without a prompter: “I’m inventing a new language,” he says, “a language that doesn’t now exist to talk about ‘the beast within.’”
“John,” I said. “I don’t understand. How can you be inventing a new language? Do you mean the topic is unknown, or new, or obscure? What does it mean to invent a new language?”
“I mean I’m inventing a new language. We don’t know yet how to talk about ‘the beast within.’”
“Sure we do,” I say. “The idea has been around for ages. We’ve been talking about it for near forever. Vampires. Werewolves. Tarzan. Isn’t it the oldest story in books? What about Enkidu? Besides, this beast within is really just a deep part of the mind. It’s the unconscious, where the dragons live. All those stories of heroes—Beowulf, King Arthur, The Lord of the Rings, for pity’s sake—are just retelling the same damn story.”
“Well, yeah, I suppose you can say that. But what I’m doing is new.”
“John,” I say. “It’s not new.”
“Yes it is.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Yes it is.”
To be fair, John knows exactly what he’s talking about, and I have a nasty habit of (1) arguing for the sake of arguing; and (2) never admitting that I’m wrong. So perhaps it was the saint in John again that moved him to accept the ignorance of his friend: “Let me explain . . . ,” he said.
Sometime later, Carmen cruises by with Maria at her arm and interrupts John’s focus by rolling her eyes as if to say: Really, boys, can’t you just shut up? You’re ruining my day. Then she turns back and says over her shoulder: “Really, boys, can’t you just shut up? You’re ruining my day.”
“But Carmen,” John protests. “We’re having an intellectual conversation.”
“Puh-lease. Just have a look at the art,” Carmen says. “This is gorgeous in here, and you two are talking about nothing.”
“It’s the place,” John asserts. “We’re inspired by the art!”
“Somebody help me,” Carmen says.
Our conversation goes on for a bit longer, carries on into the next gallery, John claiming he’s inventing a new language, me claiming he isn’t, until Carmen, utterly disgusted, disappears with Maria through the maze of rooms.
Half the day goes by, and we’ve moved halfway across the city, on into the galleries surrounding the piazza, the Museo Correr, looking at an exhibit of gargantuan paintings that are maps of Venice. They’re beautiful, and I like maps. Maria is utterly bored, and so exhausted she can hardly stand up. She crawls around on the floor picking at imperfections in the ancient tiles, lolling about in her lethargy. I’ve been carrying my umbrella all this time, and a security guard chastises me for it: the hard steel point must not touch the priceless floor. Then she’s after Carmen for the same thing, and so we decide to head for the Café Fiorian, one of Byron’s favorite haunts, to bolster our energy.
Maria is now poised in front of a great map of Venice, where we assemble behind her. The map shows the city from above, its outline and the outlying waters. No wonder, you realize, that the splendor of Venice and its great power arose from the sea. The city itself is stationary, planted in the black mud of the lagoons, while its navy and merchant vessels go anywhere and everywhere at all speed. Some of the world’s great explorers, don’t forget, are Venetians: Giovanni Caboto, Nicolo de Conti, and of course, Marco Polo. And don’t forget the Festa della Sensa, or the marriage of Venice to the sea. Every spring, the mayor of Venice (the doge in the old days) rides a barge to the Port of San Nicolo, where he flings a gold ring into the bouncing waves.
We all stand together gazing upon the map, and we all see a map, except Maria, who sees a shape, a shape made by the city of Venice, which is so stupidly obvious now but was impossible for me to see until then, until Maria calls out, “Mama. Look! Venice is a fish!”
At Café Fiorian, Carmen and I each pay thirteen dollars for a coffee with milk, and John and Maria choose a tea service with little sandwiches light as air, which runs about forty bucks. But since Byron did, we do too. Apparently Byron took his breakfast here, and I go about the café’s interior in search of his portrait. Established in 1720, Café Fiorian was already one hundred years old in Byron’s day. I wonder if some of the furniture doesn’t date from that time. Did Byron sit in this chair, or that chair? Did he sit in my chair? Or, rather, I in his? But then my modest family history rears up, and I ask: is one place better than another because someone who thought they were better than others ate there? I don’t find the portrait I’m looking for, so I return to the table for my coffee. It’s good, but not that good; I can make equally tasty coffee at home.
What about Byron in Venice, anyway? I’ve read some of his story, and it’s sad and desperate and rounded by folly. He fled England on charges of incest and sodomy, never to return again. He loved Venice, it seems, and boasted carnal pleasures with over two hundred women. He swam the canals home at night after carousing until the second cock. He was unusually productive, and life here seems to have transformed his artistry. He wrote much of his great poem Don Juan in Venice, and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Beppo, and Ode to Venice are all works set in and inspired by it. Despite his grand adventures and endless exploits, in his private time, it seems, he loved his dog best, a Newfoundland he called Boatswain. In his poem “Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog” (Boatswain died in 1808), Byron writes:
But the poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his master’s own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone.
Unhonour’d falls, unnoticed all his worth,
Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth.
These are wonderful qualities in a dog, indeed, and perhaps Byron aspired to them himself. But he was his own best enemy, as any student of literature knows. We have in Byron’s work and the work of many others after, the Byronic Hero, a great talent ringed with admirable passions but flawed in the grandest ways. The usual description goes thus: a distaste for society and social structures, including an absence of respect for rank and privilege (both of which Byron possessed); thwarted by love, death, rebellion, exile, a dark secret past, arrogance, and overconfidence; and a lack of foresight, all rolled into a poetic self-destruction. Ah, Byron!
One of the most fascinating parts of his life was his death. In 1823, he traveled to Greece to support the independence movement from the Ottoman Empire. After investing a great sum of his own money to refit the Greek fleet, he planned to help the politician Alexandros Mavrokordatos attack the Turks at Lapanto. But he fell ill to fever, recovered, and fell ill again. The usual remedy of the day was a good bloodletting to excise the poisons from the body. Covered in leeches and pierced by the doctor’s needle, he died on April 19, 1824. There was a great storm blowing afoul over his final days. Byron moaned and shivered, and went in and out of delirium. He muttered to himself in Italian and in English as the rain fell ceaselessly and the wind banged at the windows. As he realized his great life was flying off, he came to desire the end. He wanted to die. A friend reports that he considered asking God for mercy but then came to his senses and spoke aloud: “Come, come, no weakness! Let’s be a man to the last.”
I wanted desperately to resist the tourist’s silly love affair with the gondola, which was in its day the primary means of transportation in and out and around Venice. The city once supported some ten thousand gondoliers, but there are a mere five hundred or so now, and most of them cater to tourists. You can take a traghetti, a gondola serving as a ferry, across the Grand Canal for minimal cost, but you can walk over a bridge too. I happened to be on this bridge or that as a gondola passed under, and looking down on the sleek black boats, I saw fine couples enwrapped in each other’s company, a family of four, a single man or woman, an empty boat too. They came smoothly under me, the long lovely line of them cutting a brave path through the glassy wat
er, the gondolier calling out to the other boats beyond his blind spot, pushing the gunwales away from the canal walls with his foot. It did look, if I may say so, romantic and quintessentially Venetian. I guess Byron had a private gondola and gondolier, as the wealthy and famous keep a stretch Hummer with driver these days. Would I ever have another opportunity? Unlikely.
And so it came to pass that on passing a handsome young wheeler-dealer near the Rialto, Carmen was drawn aside by his angelic face and, using hers, struck us a deal. I don’t recall the price. It was expensive, but not offensive, so we took it. John, though his veins were nearly dry, offered up his euros smilingly.
Our gondolier wore all black—black shoes and trousers, a black vest—but for his black-and-white-striped shirt, the shirt you’ve seen in movies and thus hope to see on your gondolier. His face carried a stern look, his cheeks drawn down by creases along each side of his nose. His arms were beautifully shaped, long and muscled beneath his snug sleeves, and his hands were hardened by the soft wood shaft of his oar. He had hair, you could see that, the peak coming in tight to the brow, but he wore it shaved, right down against the dark bone of his head.
“You speak Italian?” our gondolier asked.
“A little Italian,” John said. “Carmen speaks it best. No, we don’t speak Italian. We speak Spanish.”
“Oh, Spanish,” he said, in English.
“But he doesn’t,” Carmen said in Spanish, pointing to me.
“German?” the gondolier asked of me.
“English,” John said.
“Then I will speak to you in English,” he said, though he was already.
“Ah, this is Venice,” he said pushing off from the moorings. “For one thousand years, this city has been alive! It should not be here. But it is here. Why is it here?”
He paused, adjusting his oar in the fórcola. We looked at each other. Did he want us to answer?
“Well,” John said. “I guess—”
“—It is here,” he said, “but it should not be here. This black lagoon. These canals and waters mean that no city should be here. But one thousand years ago we built it. The Venetians built Venice! Out here on the Grand Canal you will see it for yourself. One thousand years of architectural splendor! You will see it here.”
He had what you might call a taste for the dramatic.
“Right,” John said. “But how did they build it? Who built it? Where did the labor come from?”
“We built it, of course,” he said. “We Venetians built Venice in this black lagoon. Why here?” he asked again. “How did we do it?”
“Well,” John ventured again, “it seems to me that—”
“—Out here on the Grand Canal you will see it for yourself. One thousand years of architectural splendor! You will see it here. Wait a moment,” he said, sweeping his hands out in front of him. “Wait. There! Venice! You see the different style of architecture here. One thousand years of Venetian history all here on the Grand Canal. Byzantine. Renaissance. Baroque. Functionalism. Modernism. Post-modernism. Byzantine-Baroque. Baroque-Byzantine. Renaissance-functionalism-modernism. Postmodern-Baroque-modernism. Postmodern-modernism. And Byzantine. It’s all here.”
“So you regard Venice as a Byzantine city?” John asked.
“This is Venice,” the gondolier said. “Venice. It should not be here. But it is here, here in this black lagoon. It is because of this black lagoon that the Venetians built it. This black lagoon protects the city. It is safe here, in these waters. You may think these waters are a problem. Yes, they are a problem. But they are not a problem. You see, when the water comes up and floods the houses and shops, the people let the water pass. They get some warning and move everything from the first floor to the second floor to let the water pass. The water must pass,” he said. “If water not pass, water destroy!”
We turned now onto the Rio San Giovanni Grisostomo, where we’d do a little loop back to the Grand Canal. We passed under a bridge by the same name, and the hearty gondolier called out in his deep voice to warn other boats of our coming.
“You see here,” he said. “This was the house of a very wealthy man. It is here because he let the water pass. When the water came, he let it pass. Water must pass,” he said again. “If water not pass, water destroy!”
On around we went, the canal narrowing, the houses and shops close on each side, Maria futzing with a decorative golden winged lion along the gunwale, then with the little knob on her seat; John with his long arm around Carmen; and me sitting opposite, starring into the murky waters. We came to a corner again and the Teatro Melibran, an important venue for opera during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the crossroads with the canal that leads to the piazza, our gondolier called out again as we turned the corner to complete our circle.
“Ah,” he said. “Here used to be the great palace of a very rich man! It is still here,” he said, “because he let the water pass—”
I know, I thought. Water must pass. If water not pass, water destroy.
In the morning, I would take the early vaporetto to Marco Polo to fly back to Spain, and after a few days more, back home to the American West. My friends would be headed by train to Pisa before returning to Spain, where they would stay on for the rest of the summer. We had the evening for a final hurrah.
Carmen, the intrepid, was on the hunt for a local place for supper, something out of the way and into the breach of real Venetian life. We set out to explore down the Via Garibaldi and into the Arsenale. We happened upon a little place along that wide street, busy with mostly everybody in town, a place between places. Since we were not sure where we were going, Carmen said, “We might as well have one drink.” And so we did, a beer and a few snacks, as we settled in among the local people. We roused and toasted to friendship, to the holy interlude between then and after, to this easy moment without cares. What more could anyone want, really, but a moment, just a moment in Venice with his friends? Before long we were afoot again, wandering beyond the Arsenale and into Castello, God knows where, lost really, again, among the winding streets from this plaza to that, all of us feeling suddenly hopeless, except Carmen.
“I’m hungry,” Maria complained.
“I don’t think we’re going the right way,” John said.
“We’re not going to find anything out here,” I whined, certain the universe was bent against us.
“How about here?” Carmen said in her unshakeable optimism, as a little restaurant rose up out of nothing. “Looks like we can have the bigoli with salsa. I want to try that before we leave.”
Over supper we played a spelling game—in English, thank goodness, as it’s the only language I know. It’s so hard to be trapped inside one language when your friends command several more. But do I go around feeling sorry for myself? Of course I do, when even Maria, who is a quarter my age, is fluent in two and working on two more. No wonder she trounced the lot of us at our game. I suppose we might say three hallelujahs in praise of the young and cerebrally fit.
John and Maria turned in, while Carmen and I thought we might make a visit to Harry’s Bar. Everybody who is anybody in Venice, so the saying must go, finds the way to Harry’s Bar. Hemingway loved the place and wrote about it in his novel Across the River and into the Trees, and you can add to the list Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Peggy Guggenheim, Woody Allen, Princess Aspasia of Greece, and on like that. And so, being nobody at all, Carmen and I found the front doors closed. Closed? It was just after eleven. Not quite the hours I was used to keeping in Spain, where, as John loved to inform me, this is the time most Spaniards are wondering what to have for supper. Carmen and I went on, looking for a clean place to sit. It was stop and go. Stop and go. Stop and go, turning through the streets until we happened upon a bar with tiny bright lights and modern furnishings. It wasn’t really my kind of place, but as Carmen likes to say, “We might as well have one drink, no?”
She ordered a grappa and I a sambuca. When the time came for a second round, we each o
rdered what the other had had. Grappa, a kind of brandy made from pomace (the skins, seeds, and stems of grapes left over from winemaking), has a powerful kick, and this was only the second, maybe third time I’d ever tasted it.
“This grappa is really strong,” I said.
“This?” Carmen said. “This? We Galicians drink this from our mother’s breasts!”
Oh, glorious, thought I, this really is a fairy city of the heart.
And what about this story? What of Venice? You can’t arrive at grand conclusions. You can’t capture it in a phrase or sentence, in an image or dance routine. You might do well enough to repeat what others have said. Guy de Maupassant: “Venice! That single word seems to send an exaltation exploding in the soul.” Cees Nooteboom: “a paradise of beauty that was driven out of itself because the earth could not endure so much wonder.” Diogo Mainardi: “There can be no better place than this.”
But even then, everything that has a beginning also has an end, a time when it will no longer be what it is. The universe was born out of the Big Bang, and it looks like it will expand outward forever until the stuff of it is so spread apart as to be nothing at all. Before that, long before, our sun will run out of fuel. It will expand and expand and consume our little earth and all the inner planets before collapsing into a white dwarf. You and all your precious things, your photographs and iPhone, your favorite movies and coffee cups, your Ford pickup and backyard garden will vanish into the oblivion of black space. Not a remnant will remain, not even a memory of human life, as there will be no one left to remember. But take heart. One can hardly say this about Venice. Perhaps it is the one true exception, or rather it is the exception’s exception, the city that was a nation, the swampy mudflat that became a marble island, the dwarf that is a giant. And it will always be so. You can never come to the end of Venice, the way you can never come to the end of Shakespeare or Mozart. So why bother with this great theme? As I said, its vastness allows everyone to say something, and so, I’ve gone ahead and tried to say it: ah, Venice, again.
