Between Eternities

by Javier Marías

  Further on, past the Ponte Lungo and towards the west, as you approach the Stazione Marittima and the end of the Zattere and the walk itself, you see the most amazing sight of all. During the day, to the west, you can make out the industrial complexes of neighbouring Marghera, but what we’re interested in lies straight ahead, where La Giudecca ends. Looming out of the darkness on the other side stand two buildings of a Nordic or Hanseatic appearance; they are tall and square and one of them is a colossal seven storeys high, something you never see in Venice. The larger of the two is a colourless hulk. Shortly before you reach them, the waters of La Giudecca are still reflecting the bright lamps outside Harry’s Dolci, another establishment belonging to the Cipriani empire. There, however, beneath those Nordic hulks – like a chunk of Hamburg or Copenhagen – the water is blacker than at any other point, there’s not even a security guard’s flashlight or a light left on by some insomniac. There are no Gothic windows, no Renaissance mouldings, no white Istrian stone, not a trace of red, just a dark, gloomy, derelict, nineteenth-century construction: this is Molino Stucky, the vast flour factory erected in 1884 despite many protests, and which has stood empty since the Second World War. So far, no new purpose has been found for it that would justify its restoration, its return to life. The waiter in the restaurant opposite eyes these ‘modern’ buildings scornfully and tells me that they’re completely deserted apart from ‘pantegane come gatti’ (which means ‘rats as big as cats’). This mass of iron, brick and slate, the one factory to be built within the city’s confines, rises up, decayed and austere, like a trophy won by Venice itself, that paradise of the unnecessary and the useless, with its back turned haughtily on the present. Everything unnecessary and useless, everything that can only be walked past and looked at, remains alive, sometimes escaping ruin by a hair’s breadth. In the unnecessary and useless there is always a light, however faint, even if its sole purpose is to illuminate the surrounding gloom, as Faulkner once said about striking a match in the darkness. Molino Stucky, however, lies in permanent darkness, and the walker along the Zattere, across the water, will struggle to guess the past of that emblematic tower and pinnacle, those futile walls and blind windows, a far less distant, but less decipherable, past than that of any palazzo.

  The imaginary space

  You could walk from the west to the east of Venice (which is the longest possible distance) in about an hour, at a brisk pace and without getting out of breath. But almost no one does this: firstly, because it’s difficult, if not impossible, to follow a relatively straight line without pausing a hundred times en route; and, secondly, because of what we, rather pedantically, might call its ‘endless imaginary fragmentation’.

  Venice provokes two simultaneous and apparently contradictory feelings: on the one hand, it is the most homogeneous – or, if you prefer, harmonious – city I have known. By homogeneous or harmonious I mean that any point in the city that enters the observer’s field of vision, any luminous open space or secret misty corner, with water or without, could only possibly belong to this one city, could never be confused with any other urban landscape or evoke memories of elsewhere; it is, therefore, the very opposite of anodyne. (With the possible exception of Lista di Spagna, that stretch of street which, to the great confusion and misfortune of many visitors arriving by train, is the first thing one sees; it is best, therefore, to jump on a vaporetto or immediately cross the bridge.)

  On the other hand (and herein lies the contradiction), few cities seem more spread out and more fragmented, full of insuperable distances and places that feel utterly isolated. Venice is divided into six sestieri, or quarters: San Marco, San Polo, Cannaregio, Santa Croce, Dorsoduro and Castello. Even within each sestiere there are areas that seem a world away from any other, even the world that is not only next door, but adjacent and contiguous.

  This feeling is not entirely false, insofar as it’s not exclusive to the visitor, who, unfamiliar with the city’s meandering streets, might miscalculate and think that he set off from his starting point earlier than he actually did; rather, it has deep roots in the inhabitants of Venice themselves, and I am not referring, as I did earlier, only to the most powerful, to the movers and shakers (although never have I known movers and shakers move or shake less), but to the ordinary inhabitants, shopkeepers, the few remaining craftsmen, housewives, and, of course, children, who, here as elsewhere – unlikely as it may seem – have to go to school. Mario Perez tells me that he knows a lady who, like him, lives in Castello, but who has never once set foot in St Mark’s Square; now and then she asks him how things are going over there in the same tone of voice in which she might inquire about events in Madagascar or some other remote place from which he had just returned after a long voyage, bearing fresh news. This ‘imaginary’ distancing is a condition of existence in Venice: you live mainly in the restricted world of the street, the canal or the quarter, and the totality of Venice (and therein lies its harmony and homogeneity) is perceived only in fragments, albeit perfectly articulated. The Venetians are, of course, the ones most keenly aware of this fragmentation and articulation, but the astonishing thing is that, intuitively and possibly with no need for it to be put into words, this awareness instantly takes root in visitors as well, however transient and unobservant they may be. And it is doubtless this intuited notion that forbids them – if I may put it so – from entering many parts of the city, into which they will never venture even if the map is telling them that they are only a step away.

  Perhaps they’re right not to take risks. The more adventurous visitor might reach Campo dell’Anconetta heading towards Strada Nova, very close to the Grand Canal, which will always serve him as the city’s axis. Suddenly, seduced by curiosity or by the desire to see a particular church, he might turn left and cross no fewer than three canals – Rio della Misericordia, Rio della Sensa, Rio della Madonna dell’Orto – and find himself in front of the superb church bearing the latter name. And the five minutes it took him to get there might be enough to give him the strange impression that he is a thousand leagues from the Grand Canal. Having studied the ten Tintorettos in that church and the beautiful Bellini Virgin depicting a lunatic Christ Child who looks as if he’s either going to choke to death at any moment or pounce on his extraordinary mother, the visitor will doubtless retrace his steps and be astonished to find how close he was to something that was clearly far away while he was wandering beside those secondary canals, because he really was far away.

  Space in Venice should be measured by state of mind and character and by the idea that emanates from each sestiere, each quarter, each canal and each street, not by the number of yards separating them. For example, the same person seen in different places will vary, even though his function or activity is the same in all of them. There is in Venice a beggar (oddly enough, despite all those tourists, you don’t see many, which is why they’re easy to recognize) who begs for alms in all six sestieri. He’s rather chubby and getting on in years; he wears a hat that is a tad too small for him, plays the panpipes – an instrument that betrays his southern origins – and displays to the compassionate gaze of passers-by a pale, plump plastic calf that emerges from a very short white sock. It is the cleanest leg I have ever seen, and I always stop to look at it. I give him a few coins to reward such cleanliness as well as the pleasant sound of his pipes. This eminently recognizable man, however, is quite different depending on whether he’s in San Marco, San Polo, Cannaregio, Santa Croce, Dorsoduro or Castello. In the first of those sestieri, he seems like a fraud or a local con man preying on tourists; in the second, his ‘foreign’ terrone aspect seems more pronounced and he looks out of place; in the third, he blends in so well that no one even notices that he’s begging for alms with his impeccable leg. It’s the setting that dictates how things appear, and so it isn’t the same seeing a tourist crossing the Rialto Bridge as it is seeing him crossing one of the various Ponti delle Tette. These are the darkest and most hidden, the least touristy of bridges, offering th
e most limited views, and their name arises from the fact that they were the only bridges on which the Doge would allow the impoverished streetwalkers of the eighteenth century to show their tits – or tette – to the passers-by and thus attract more clients, who were apparently too distracted at the time by the exquisite courtesans arriving from all over Europe and by a prevailing fashion for homosexuality.

  In Venice, though, each fragment is a whole. Sometimes the streets are so narrow and tortuous that we can see very little, yet a fragment, any fragment, will form a momentary whole, and will be unmistakably Venice. There is nothing more instantly identifiable or more complete than the little San Trovaso squero, or dry dock, for gondolas, a tiny wooden construction (wood for once, not stone) next to which a few vessels lie waiting in the dark to be repaired: for the gondolas, which, as I mentioned before, are the perfect height from which to view the city (even the vaporetti are too high in the water), continue to have a function and a life and can still be restored, unlike the Molino Stucky. From an arcade behind La Fenice, you can see the glaucous waters of the Rio Menùo, a scrap of pink palace, a large door painted in the usual watermelon green, and a few steps. From where I am writing, I can see the pillars of my balcony, the Rio delle Muneghette, two boats, the shop selling toy windmills, and the Scuola di San Rocco in the background. There are people who will have spent a lifetime seeing only the San Trovaso dock or that fragment of the Rio Menùo or this view from my terrace, just as the old lady in Castello, whom Mario Perez told me about, hasn’t once set foot in St Mark’s Square.

  Venice is a hypercity. Perhaps the smug Venetians who insist that everything else is mere campo are, after all, right. There are no exteriors, here everything is stone, everything is built, the gardens you can see from the top of the Campanile are nowhere to be found when you wander through Venice: they are private, enclosed, and belong neither to the walker nor to the general population. Yet there need be nothing artificial about one’s relationship with this place of stone, as the panicky, harassed tourists believe, who mistakenly travel here in an exclusively cultural spirit. When I call Venice a hypercity or, as Venetians would have it, the City par excellence, I mean, above all, that in the minds of the people who love it, it is those things necessarily and naturally, and perhaps not as deeply cultured as you might think, but at once instinctive and not in the least accidental. A city like this can be natural without, at the same time, owing anything to chance. Perhaps there is another way of understanding and describing it. According to Daniella Pittarello, an Italian from Padua who has lived here for ten years: ‘Venice is an interior.’ And she adds that it is precisely because there is no outside and because it is complete in itself, that it can be so difficult, albeit necessary sometimes, to leave, just as it gets harder and harder to leave home when you haven’t done so for a long time. Henry James saw it in a very similar way: ‘where voices sound as in the corridors of a house, where the human step circulates as if it skirted the angles of furniture and shoes never wear out …’ To say that Venice is an interior is a possible summation of everything I have said so far. It means that it is self-sufficient, that it has no need of anything outside itself and that this same self-sufficiency is what creates that ‘endless imaginary fragmentation’: the narrow becomes wide, the near becomes far, the limited becomes infinite, the identical becomes distinct, the timeless becomes transient.

  The things we carry with us

  Between December 1984 and October 1989 – for personal reasons I need not go into here – I flew to Venice fourteen times, from Spain and from England and, on one occasion, from the United States. My stays in the city varied in length from the hectic four days of my first visit to the seventy days of my longest visit; and during that five-year period, I spent, in all, a total of nine months in Venice, long enough for me to feel it was a place in which I partially lived, my second – ever-present – city, to which I went and from which I returned, and to which I always thought I would go back. There I wrote a good part of my novels The Man of Feeling and All Souls, and my day-to-day Venetian life was nothing like that of a tourist, or even of a traveller. I fitted into the routine of the people who so generously took me in, two women, both called Daniela, who shared a house. In order to distinguish them, I would address one as Daniela plus her surname and the other as Daniella, with two ‘l’s. Since they both worked and had to go out early and I had more time at my disposal, I was left in charge of washing the dishes (rather inexpertly), doing the shopping and running various other domestic errands. Indeed, I had time enough to write those two novels and to stroll about the city on my own, always aimlessly, slowly, calmly, just seeing what I might come across, without any of the haste of normal visitors and the programme of visits they set themselves when they have only a few days in which to get to know a city. At one point, I came very close to settling down there, and had even found myself a job. I didn’t know that my fourteenth visit would be my last, or, rather, I didn’t know that twenty years would pass before my next visit.

  When you have lived for a while in a city, especially if it has proved to be an intense experience and happens to coincide with one of those ages so crucial in most people’s lives (between the ages of thirty-three and thirty-eight in my case), regardless of how much time passes, you never stop thinking about that place. You carry it around with you, it becomes part of you, and I often have the strange feeling that I could leave my apartment in Madrid, or anywhere else, and head straight for some particular spot in that distant city, to a church, a shop, a square, to the Zattere or San Trovaso if it’s Venice, to St Giles or Blackwell’s if it’s Oxford, or to Cecil Court or Gloucester Road if it’s London. It didn’t feel as if twenty years had passed since my last stay there, and yet they had, almost half a lifetime, if you like. We live in a reality that is very different from the past and we certainly don’t lose touch with that reality when we receive a sudden visitation from the distant past. However, as I’ve often said before, space is the only true repository of time, of past time. And that is why, when you go back to a familiar city, time undergoes a brief, sudden compression, and what was far away in Madrid the day before yesterday becomes spuriously close in Venice today. After a first few hesitant steps, those same steps automatically take you along routes you had apparently forgotten the day before, and which you suddenly remember. Almost without thinking, you say: you have to go down there to reach such-and-such a place and to reach so-and-so you head in that direction, and you never get lost or go wrong. There, before me, was the house to which I once had the key, the address was San Polo 3089; I can’t go in there now, not just because I no longer have a key, but because the two Danielas no longer live there. Sitting on the steps that separate the water – Rio delle Muneghette – from the back of the Scuola di San Rocco that I used to see from the balcony where I would stand when taking a break from writing those two, now old, novels, I smoke a cigarette and look across at the house and that balcony. The house used to be white, but its new owners have painted it an orangey-pink colour, yet I say to myself: that’s the house, I’m sure of it, I spent many an evening and afternoon there; on many nights, I slept there; I would get up in the morning and look out at the water and at the steps on which I’m sitting now, twenty years later.

  Fortunately, Venice is barely allowed to change at all, and the barges full of fruit are still there next to Campo San Barnaba, where I would do my somewhat inexpert food-shopping; the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo is still there, in a square scorned by tourists and which, in any other city, would be its crowded centre. And, to my great good fortune, the people are still there too, and I’ve made my peace with them. I had supper one night with the two Danielas and with Cristina; they had barely changed, as if they had made a pact with some minor, rather inoffensive devil. Suddenly, in their company, it wasn’t that time hadn’t passed for each of us (far from it: they’ve all been married, one is divorced and the other is in the process of getting divorced, one has daughters, another moved to
Florence, but came back to Venice especially to see me), but our talk and our laughter were, implausibly, just the same, at least for a while, as it used to be when we were young. It’s always very cheering to find there are people and places that are always there, even though they’re far away or seem to have been lost. We probably only really lose what we forget or reject, what we prefer to erase and no longer wish to carry with us, what is no longer part of the life we tell ourselves.

  Author’s note

  Though it is said in this text that Venice never changes, that is inaccurate of course, as all places suffer some changes, even if slight ones. It must be noted that Venice, An Interior was written in 1988, when, to give just an example, Molino Stucky was the derelict building here alluded to, and not the present-day hotel it has become.

  ALL TOO FEW

  * * *

  Noises in the Night

  I sometimes wish I were slightly harder of hearing, so that I didn’t have to suffer quite so much from the degree of ‘noise pollution’ that exists here in Spain and which is exceeded only by the levels reached in Japan. I’m referring to the strange noises that are made, it would seem, by all neighbours, but especially by those who live in the apartments above us when they get home at night.

  In fact, I know of no one who has not, at some point in his life, in some apartment he’s lived in, come to the conclusion that the upstairs neighbours are in the habit of dragging their furniture about in the wee hours or simply moving it around (beds included), and not just on one night, but almost every night. I’m sure you’ve had the same incomprehensible feeling. Are they so dissatisfied and uncertain about the position of their furniture that they have to experiment constantly, with the sofa here and the wardrobe over there, the armchairs in that corner and the tables over by the window? Now, there may well be a large number of individuals who really are in a state of hopeless indecision as to how best to furnish their bedrooms and living rooms, but it’s entirely impossible that there are so many of them that we’ve all had to put up with at least one. So what is going on? What unfathomable things do people get up to late at night, especially those who have to rise early to go to work or to take their children to school, and who do not appear to be remotely bohemian?