Between Eternities

by Javier Marías

  The cemetery of San Michele, though, is an impersonal place. Unlike the cemeteries of Hamburg or Lisbon or Scotland, there are no large groups of monumental sculptures or inspired inscriptions, but merely descriptive notes, firmly rooted in life rather than addressed to the hereafter: ‘Elizabetta Ranzato Zanon, a woman of strong character’, as one can see from the relief carving of her rather grumpy face; ‘Pietro Giove Fu Antonio, an honest businessman’; ‘Giuseppe Antonio Leiss di Laimbourg, an expert and disinterested lawyer with a heart of gold’. One of the more elegant graves appears to contain the remains of an apocryphal Emily Brontë character: ‘Gambirasi Heathcliff’. As a nod to the tourists, there are arrows on which appear three names: ‘Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Pound’. The first two are in the Greek section, where the composer lies beside his wife, Vera, their identical graves bearing only their names picked out in black-and-blue mosaic. They are very distinguished tombs, rather enviable, made from white marble and edged in red granite. On each tomb lie three withered carnations, which make me think of poor Schubert’s possibly fake tomb in Vienna, surrounded now by a garden. Far too many famous people have passed through Venice, and Pound’s grave, for example, is now a green mound bearing only his name, lost in the middle of the rarely visited and much neglected evangelical area, where twisted fragments of fallen crosses have impaled the gravestones themselves. It’s almost impossible to find Pound’s grave among the undergrowth. No one repairs the damage wrought by a recent storm. In the summer, the only visitors to the dead of San Michele are the lizards, no one else. Who in Venice would have time to tend the graves of these foreign dead, of the vanished lives of these visitors? Foreigners die here more definitively. Perhaps that’s why they keep coming, to tempt fate.

  The point of view of eternity

  In Venice, perhaps fortunately, there are only one or two paintings by Canaletto. Nearly everything he produced is to be found in Britain thanks to Consul Joseph (or Giuseppe) Smith (1674–1770), who spent forty-four years in the city before being honoured with that diplomatic title, although, in fact, he brought far more honour to the title than it did to him. As a fabulously wealthy trader in fish and meat and as one of the greatest art collectors of his day, Consul Smith lived for seventy of his ninety-six years in Venice, most of them in the Palazzo Mangilli-Valmarana, on the corner of the Grand Canal and Rio dei Santi Apostoli. He had more than enough time during those seven decades to gather together various collections of paintings, sculptures, musical instruments, scores, manuscripts, books, engravings, coins, cameos, medals and jewels, which he later sold for exorbitant prices to the Crown of England; he also sponsored and promoted many artists, among them the Ricci brothers, Zuccarelli, Rosalba Carriera and, of course, Canaletto. Of the latter’s work – and this is why so little of it can be found in Venice – Consul Smith managed to sell virtually everything and even dispatched the painter to work in London for ten years. Every wealthy English visitor wanted to take home some visual souvenir of his stay in the city, and what more appropriate, reliable or exact souvenir could there be than a view by Canaletto? His paintings were the equivalent of postcards for those pioneering tourists, the English aristocrats who always included Venice in their Grand Tour.

  But although the present-day visitor will see few Canalettos and will have to make do with reproductions or with memories, he will see many Venetian landscapes from the same period, by Guardi, Marieschi, Carlevaris, Bellotto, Migliara, in the city’s various museums. And yet, as I said earlier, perhaps it’s fortunate that there are virtually no Canalettos, those precise, detailed, almost photographic records, because the views you get in the paintings of those eighteenth-century vedutisti are, astonishingly, exactly the same as those you will see on emerging from the Galleria dell’Accademia or Ca’ Rezzonico or Museo Correr. This strange sensation produces an equally strange mixture of euphoria and unease. And the truth is that those feelings are only intensified if you have also seen certain paintings by Gentile Bellini, Mansueti or Carpaccio. For you discover that nothing has changed, not just in two hundred and fifty years, but in almost five hundred. The canvases from the cinquecento will show almost the same views as were painted in the settecento; and in the novecento, you stagger, exhausted, out of the museums, only to be confronted by the same scenes outside. The biggest change will doubtless be the people and their clothes: aristocrats and clerics, black bonnets, long hair, Renaissance cloaks, tight red, white or striped hose in Bellini and Carpaccio; artisans and members of the bourgeoisie, wigs, waistcoats, masks, Saturn hats and loose shirts in Carlevaris or Guardi; crowds of tourists and hideous Bermuda shorts or T-shirts bearing slogans in the streets outside. Everything else, everything non-human, remains the same.

  The visitor knows this beforehand, and to some degree it is precisely this ‘archaeological’ aspect of the city that has impelled him to travel here. And yet it’s still impossible not to be a little surprised when you stop and think about it, or if you try the simple experiment of looking at a couple of paintings and then at your surroundings. Venice is the only city in the world whose past you do not have to glimpse or intuit or guess at, it’s there before you, at least its past appearance is, which is also its present appearance. Even more exciting and disquieting is the fact that the city’s present appearance is also the city’s future appearance. Looking at Venice now, not only do you see it as it was one hundred, two hundred and even five hundred years ago, you see it as it will be in one hundred, two hundred, probably even five hundred years’ time. Just as it is the only inhabited place in the world with a visible past, so it is also the only one with its future already on display.

  There has been some construction work – a few houses in the more working-class areas, the new headquarters of the Cassa di Risparmio in Campo Manin (the work of the famous architect Pier Luigi Nervi in 1963), the Previdenza Sociale, the Mussolinian railway station and a few others – but, apart from that, you could say that all building ceased in Venice before its current inhabitants were born. And you can, above all, be quite sure that nothing will be built, unless one of the houses were to be destroyed by some unforeseen event, leaving a gap for the architects of the present and the future to fill.

  It’s rather touching to think that, despite this, Venice has her own twentieth-century architectural genius in Carlo Scarpa (1906–78), who was born here. Scarpa’s case is significant though; his wonderful, instantly recognizable works are, in Venice, reduced to mere details, but he is nevertheless revered by his fellow Venetians, who live among the most perfect collection of architectural monuments in history; they go into raptures over the Olivetti Showroom in St Mark’s Square, the doors of the faculties of Architecture or Literature, the old lecture hall (restored by him) in Ca’ Foscari, the staircase in Casa Balboni or the courtyard of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia. In each of these, there might be four steps to admire, or a roof or a door or a radiator grille. That is what the work of the great Carlo Scarpa consists of in his native city. No one can touch Venice, and he was no exception. Venice is the city with the clearest idea of its own future, and that is why perhaps the past – the immense, omnipresent, overwhelming weight of the past – is never set against an identical and already known future, but against the threat of disappearance.

  Ever since my first visit to Venice in 1984, I have been back twice or more each year. Now, I may be wrong, but I have always had the sense that the threat of catastrophe, of irremediable calamity or total annihilation, was less a genuine fear among its inhabitants and more of a necessity. This deliberate feeling of dread – artificially created, in my view – immediately infects visitors too, probably even the most ephemeral ones, who have only to set foot on a bridge to feel that this could well be the city’s final day.

  Venice is the most protected and studied city in the world, the most closely monitored and watched. The universal desire is not only to preserve it, but to preserve it exactly as it is now. We know that it cannot cease to exist, that it cannot be lost. Probabl
y not even a world war would permit that. The terrible certainty that something we can actually see will always be there and will always remain the same, without the admixture of unease and uncertainty inherent in all human enterprises and communities, without the possibility of a new life or of an unprecedented rebirth, of growth or expansion, without the possibility, in short, of any surprise or change, means that Venetians see life from ‘the viewpoint of eternity’. That is the phrase used by Mario Perez who, despite his name (without an accent on the first ‘e’), is one of the few people born, raised and still living in Venice whom it has been my privilege to know. The viewpoint of eternity! The words froze my blood while we were having supper together: I was eating sole, and he salmon. Can there be a more frightening, unbearable, less human point of view?

  I suppose the only way of making that certainty and that viewpoint bearable is to give in to the temptation of believing in the imminent destruction of what will doubtless survive us, and to foster the threat and fear of total extinction. Each time I arrive in Venice, I find the population alarmed about something or other, be it an old threat or a new. Sometimes it’s stone decay, which is corroding the city faster than in past centuries; sometimes it’s the backpackers and the excessive number of pendolari (day-trippers, of whom there can be as many as thirty thousand daily); at others it’s the acqua alta, when the tide is unusually high and overflows into the lower parts of the city (starting with St Mark’s Square), ruining shopkeepers, requiring benches to be put together to form improvised mini-bridges in the streets, and causing terrible flooding, as happened on 4 November 1966, that disastrous day when the water rose more than six feet, leaving everything stained with damp and caked in salt for months afterwards; the city is, of course, slowly sinking, at the rate of about six inches a century, they say; the nearby industries have succeeded in corroding the stone in only a matter of years, far more quickly than in any of the previous, far less productive centuries; and there is always the possibility that an earthquake might transform Venice into a vast, labyrinthine underwater palace (years ago, minor tremors caused some of the smaller islands in the lagoon to vanish).

  One of the more recent threats has been the proliferation of algae in the bottom of the lagoon, together with a plague of Chironomidae, insects that resemble clumsy mosquitoes and sometimes form such dense clouds that they blacken windows or force trains to stop and planes to abandon take-off. The detritus from the factories in neighbouring Marghera acts like a fertilizer on the algae, which grows and reproduces so fast that four boats scooping up thousands of tons of the stuff day and night haven’t been enough to clear the lagoon bed. The algae rots in the boiling summer heat. The fish die and float on the surface as if they were the water’s unexpected, multiple gaze. And depending which way the wind is blowing (or even if there is no wind at all), a smell of pestilence takes over the city. It’s the all-enveloping stench of putrefaction. The fetid odour wakes you in the middle of the night, and whereas in any other place this would be assumed to be a temporary phenomenon, in Venice, you somehow imagine it will be perpetual, global, a state of mind, a clear sign that the end of civilization is nigh. These perhaps are the disadvantages of living life from the viewpoint of eternity.

  The night stroll

  Apart from going to see the things you feel obliged to see and which are never-ending, the only diversion in Venice in August is to walk and look and walk and look. Not that there’s very much more to do in winter, apart, now and then, from the occasional concert or, under the auspices of Agnelli, a new exhibition hung on the pink-tinged walls of Palazzo Grassi.fn1 In fact, the only thing Venetians have in common with their former invaders, the Austrians, is their passion for music. Concerts are the one event for which you cannot find tickets, and among the few moments that remain fixed in the homogenizing memory of Venice’s inhabitants is the night, for example, when the pianist Sviatoslav Richter stopped time (and this in a place where time stands still anyway) with the second movement of a Haydn sonata at La Fenice. But then, in August, everything grinds to a halt, and for those citizens and tourists who don’t want to see one of the films being shown on the giant open-air screen erected in Campo San Polo and who aren’t too worn out by their daytime wanderings, by the heat or by Stendhal syndrome – which claims many victims here – their only option will be to walk and look.

  The city changes completely at night. It’s one of the liveliest cities I know during the day, but when the sun sets, everything disappears or closes, and as the hours pass, Venice becomes ever more deserted and ever more the province of individual noises. The sound of footsteps is intercut with the slap of water, and almost any corner of the city looks even more like a stage-set than usual, given that a set never looks quite so set-like as when it’s empty. But what really changes Venice is the darkness itself. At night – this is the complaint of many of the biblical hordes of tourists – it’s barely lit at all, apart from the occasional church or palace on the Grand Canal. Along the minor canals and backstreets, which constitute the real city, there is only perhaps a street lamp here, a lantern there, the occasional miserly crack of light between those watermelon-green shutters. There are places where the darkness is almost total, and you can stand on a bridge for hours vainly trying to make out anything more than the mere outline of buildings and the invisible flow of water. Water is the city’s fundamental element. By day, it reflects and intensifies the light and colour (blood red, yellow, white) of the houses and the palaces. By night, though, it reflects nothing. It absorbs. On moonless nights – last night, for example – it’s like ink, and so seems much more stagnant than it actually is. Then the only real illumination comes from the buildings made of that intensely white Istrian stone: Santa Maria della Salute or the Palazzo Mocenigo Casa Nuova; San Giorgio Maggiore or Il Redentore, seen from the Zattere.

  The walker who fears getting lost in the gloomier corners of the city, but fancies a lengthy stroll along a spacious promenade by the water, has two options: Riva degli Schiavoni or the Zattere. The first, which begins at St Mark’s Square, will be popular with those who require some continuity of appearance between different places. There, on Schiavoni, they will still find people, possibly too many: the hustle and bustle of street-sellers, crowds of young people, Japanese and Spanish, standing around the obelisks, restaurants and bars, although few of the latter will remain open past midnight. The extremely bronzed waiter at the Bar do Leoni, who was filing his nails at mid-afternoon in readiness to welcome customers exhausted by fatigue and ecstasy, will already be putting the chairs back on the tables. A little further east, the endless lines of moored motoscafi are rocked by the coming and going of the lagoon waters, producing, as they do, an extraordinary symphony of metallic squeaks and bumps that must be a torment to the inhabitants of the old people’s home opposite. There are still crowds on Riva degli Schiavoni, but they are a spent force. Only Harry’s Bar, a short distance in the opposite direction, will proudly continue to be full of life, with its gallery of well-dressed characters and its American families following in the footsteps of the blessed Hemingway. Its small legendary dining room, preserved intact since 1931 by the Cipriani family, is definitely the best restaurant in the city, and a meal there is something that should be afforded even by those who really can’t.

  But the other long fondamenta, or walkway, that takes you past broad stretches of water (in the Grand Canal there are only short sections that are passable) is the so-called Zattere (meaning, literally, rafts). The Zattere runs along the southernmost edge of the city, from which you can contemplate the island of La Giudecca, separated from Venice proper by a wide canal of the same name, so wide and deep that ships sail down it. The extraordinary Fondamenta delle Zattere is well known but somewhat hidden and will be found only by those, for example, who, after visiting the church of Santa Maria della Salute, go as far as the end of the Dogana, the old Customs House, and then turn back on themselves. Unlike the Riva degli Schiavoni, it is silent and fairly solitary. No
w and then you might encounter a café terrace where a few of the city’s inhabitants and a handful of well-informed visitors are enjoying a quiet drink or an ice cream, but otherwise there are only long stretches of stone pavement, to one side of which is a wall and to the other water, although the wall is now and then interrupted by a low bridge beneath which flows a rio, or minor canal, pointing the way back into the heart of Venice.

  On the other side of the Canale della Giudecca, you can see the island, with the Palladian Chiesa del Redentore lit up, and further east, greatly foreshortened, on its own island, the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, also designed by Palladio. The walker must then turn his back on that and start crossing bridges: Ponte dell’Umiltà, Ponte Ca’ Balà, Ponte agli Incurabili. The only thing approaching a crowd you are likely to meet is a couple who have perhaps reached the Zattere by chance or on a whim and are standing on a bridge, unsure which way to go next, or perhaps watching one of the big ships passing, and which has suddenly become a moving part of La Giudecca. Since both buildings and ships in Venice are on a level with the water, and since the buildings are never more than two or three or four storeys at most, they can easily disappear behind a large vessel, and there are moments when a Russian or Dutch or Greek ship completely supplants the Chiesa del Redentore or Chiesa delle Zitelle, as if in a scene from a Hitchcock film, erasing them from our vision for a few seconds. You come across children too, fishing for squid and plaice with nets. ‘Una seppia e sette passarini,’ says one small bespectacled child, when I ask him what’s in his plastic bag. Meanwhile, a lizard escapes along the wall to my right. After the next bridge, della Calcina, there is a plaque commemorating John Ruskin, ‘the high priest of art’, to whom, according to the inscription, ‘every marble, every bronze, every painting, every thing cried out’. This inconsiderate cacophony might go some way to explaining the more hysterical passages in that high priest’s Stones of Venice.