Venices

by Paul Morand

  Lauzun and Ligne were merely witty; Byron transcribed Italian buffoonery into English humour; the epigrammatic retorts in Wilde’s plays are to be found in every line of the poet’s correspondence: “The women here have abominable notions about constancy…” and (departing for Missolonghi): “I prefer to love a cause than to love a woman.” When Cocteau, who was asked what he would like to take away with him if his house caught fire, replied: “I’d take away the fire,” he sounds just like the Byron of the Letters.

  “Why were there ten thousand gondolas four centuries ago, and five hundred today?”

  “The job’s a dead loss! (It’s as if you were listening to a Paris cab driver.) The season is too short… A gondola costs a million lire… Vaporetti and lance, they break your arms with the wash they make… You risk your life at every turning… On the Grand Canal they come at you like a bull in a china shop…”

  “But you’re singing?”

  “So as to forget…”

  The gondolier tells me that ever since the seventeenth century a gondola’s blade has had five prongs; the gondola’s reflection quivers over the waters that are mottled with sunshine and oil.

  Three o’clock in the morning.

  At this hour, with no one about, Venice is like a Guardi painting.

  No more funiculi.

  Were it not for the television aerials, one could be in the eighteenth century.

  Nothing ruffles the surface of the water apart from a foul-smelling gust from the direction of the Dogana, where the ripples are caused by a puff of wind which does not reach me.

  In ten minutes the peotta, the large gondola that collects the rubbish, will pass by on its way to the Giudecca. Venice is creating new islands out of refuse, making the most of her waste material.

  When the first motorboat speeds past, the reflections of mooring posts look like crooked, Solomonic columns.

  1925–1969 A CRUISE IN VENICE

  I CAN REMEMBER a farewell party at sea, some forty years ago. The Zara, a vessel of 500 tons, with its black hull and gold lines, and flying the American flag, was anchored off the Doges’ Palace, ready to take us to Asia Minor. There were not many of us, just five passengers; a wise choice. Half of Venice, then a small provincial town, flocked on board and stayed so late that we missed the tide; for a month we were obliged to drink water, since the ship’s cellars had run dry. The captain, an Englishman, almost died.

  As I recall that noisily celebrated departure, I ask myself in what way did a rather fashionable cruise like that one differ from those that serve as the background to modern novels. (I don’t regret having mixed in the society of those times; it meant that I didn’t have to spend my later life doing so, as Valéry or Gide did; it’s all experience.)

  The pleasures of life in the twenties were uninhibited, but one had to be well dressed and come from a good family; there was none of that American-inspired brutality, no cold wars or hot ones, no world of pressure groups, alcohol, drugs, machine guns and erotic films. Survival? We were still learning about good manners. It was the Americans who were Europeanised; not the other way round.

  People knew how to behave, even when playing the most reckless of games, those that have always existed; the scandals that took place in certain of the palazzi on the Grand Canal didn’t even reach the hotel bars; during an evening on board ship, when local society had gathered, you wouldn’t find any political agents, or betting clerks, or well-connected antique dealers without a license, or young women filling out their monthly wages in the gossip columns of unsavoury newspapers; the likes of couturiers, perfume sellers and suppliers had scarcely begun to mix socially with their clientele. Everybody still wore the clothes of their profession: pederasts offered themselves exclusively to males, without earning bits on the side from elderly ladies; Whites were simply less dark than Blacks, debauched old witches, celebrated for their weaknesses, did not publish their edifying memoirs, priests did not look like Protestant pastors, sociology students did not disguise themselves as Kurdish shepherds, and Kurdish shepherds as parachutists. Never could the current expression “to be out of sorts” be better translated than by our contemporary transvestites.

  One never saw one’s hostess getting up from table between courses, taking photographs of her guests herself for some illustrated weekly, and then reclaiming her expenses. The prying snapshot, with the blackmailing photographer entering through the kitchens (as at the Labia), hiding beneath the bed and testing the very limits of the law, was unknown; this all stemmed from an American businesswoman who gave cut-price parties and, a few years later, fetched up in Europe.

  Another difference was the police; the last nations to be highly civilized had not yet acquired police forces; there was Austrian surveillance in Stendhal’s time, Mosca hiding among the double basses at the theatre in Parma and the Italian gendarmerie, those brave carabinieri with their red plumes, but that was all; our information networks did not exist yet; neither did directories for each of the ministries, the “contacts” for the different weapons, the secret services attached to the most tropical of embassies, the investigation bureaux of the large banks, newspaper and magazine spies, syndicates on the look-out, files of casinos, jewellers and palaces. It is about our own time that Gérard de Nerval might have spoken of a “gang of privileged robbers”; it’s not Cosmopolis that Paul Bourget would have written today, but Interpol.

  Having said this, there are a good number of similarities between a cruise in the 1920s and one today; you get away from the fogs, but become involved instead in disputes. Our voyage ended badly: as soon as we entered the Mediterranean, the family who had invited us began to quarrel among themselves; the poet on board had a premonition of a storm and disembarked at Bursa, and two other guests got off at Naples, so as not to have to take sides between the aunt and her niece. Left on their own, the members of the family locked themselves away in their cabins; as soon as they got back to Venice, they turned their backs on one another and never saw each other again; do they speak to one another from beyond the grave?

  VENICE, SEPTEMBER 1930

  ON THE 24TH OF SEPTEMBER 1930, I found myself sitting on a stone bench overlooking the lagoon. There where once the Bucintoro, its golden stern lighting up the primordial waters like the sun, and the Serenissima’s fleet lay at anchor—the ships flecked crimson, their long oars making them look like boiled lobsters—ten grey torpedo boats were lined up. The autumn sky trembled as the triangular shapes of the seaplanes approached; red, green and white tricolor pennants hung down to the ground (with all that ancient sense of “drapery” that flags have still retained in Italy); sailors from the Venetian battleships walked past, their eyes shining like copper. Officers wearing scarves and gold sword-knots passed with confident footstep to report for duty.

  Venice, the city of Nietzsche, was instructing the new Italy: “Men must be given back the courage of their natural instincts”… “national narrow-mindedness, military strictness, a better physiology, space, meat…” I am back in front of St Mark’s, just as I was twenty years ago. Why did I buy La Volonté de puissance yesterday? What coincidence made me open it at the chapter entitled “Contre Rousseau”? “Unfortunately man is no longer wicked enough…” “It is lassitude and moralism that are the curse.”

  The winged lion is proof that the future of Italy lies with the sea. St Mark versus the Orient, Manin20 versus Austria, Wagner and Nietzsche. In the Berliner Tageblatt, which I bought beneath the Procuraties, I read the words of Hitler, curt as a machine-gun: “If needs be, heads will fall.”

  14–24 September: ten days were enough. Hitler’s voice once more, at Leipzig: “I shall introduce a vast spiritual upheaval”… and the National Socialists’ manifesto: “We shall use iron restraint against all who oppose the material and spiritual rebuilding of the nation.”

  I look around me and I notice the blond creatures with bare knees who have descended from the Tyrol upon St Mark’s Square. The youth of 1930 are beginning to be seen everywher
e and to make their loud voices heard. It is a Germany that no longer reads All Quiet on the Western Front, that speaks of “real wars, which will stop all forms of frivolity”; a hot-blooded age that has not experienced suffering: the students who have elected Hitler are former Communist sympathisers.

  “We are entering a tragic period,” Nietzsche foretold, “a catastrophic age.”

  1936

  YESTERDAY MUSSOLINI brought Hitler to Napoleon’s headquarters at Stra. Behind them lay Treviso, the first foothills of the Dolomites and Mount Grappa. In front of them, the Euganean Hills that served Giorgione’s backdrop. Lichen-covered statues cast their drowning cries into the sea of shining magnolias. Ochre-coloured sails, pierced by an eye flushed red with conjunctivitis, pass by, Dutch style, at the level of the cornfields.

  Twenty years ago, Padua was an ancient university city, drowsing over its degrees; today, she has come to life again and the surrounding marshland has been dried out; the Paduans are learning their good manners from the walls: “Well brought-up people do not swear.” (I immediately make up a list of all the swear-words I can remember.) I also read: “Spitting is a custom of the past”; instantly, this leads me to wonder: why did our forebears spit? Is salivating any more unhealthy? Does expectorating get rid of phlegm any more effectively?

  The education of the masses; ten years earlier, in Moscow, I watched schoolchildren being taught to brush their teeth up and down, and not from side to side.

  1935

  KILL THE FLIES!” (One of Mussolini’s recommendations.)21

  1935

  FOR THE FASCISTS, Othello was not a coloured man; he was a More, which does not mean a Moor, but a native of Morea. The original Othello was the Doge Gristoforo Moro.

  On the Piazzetta, every male nowadays has the chin of Colleone and the look of a Guatamelata.

  1937

  RAIMONDO, the maître d’hôtel at the Splendid, has watched Europe parade along the Grand Canal for half a century; his stories would fill ten novels, with interruptions for seating new arrivals, distributing menus and taking orders.

  Here is his plat du jour.

  “I’m about to snuff it, Raimondo,” the Duke of N… said to me. “When you have closed my eyes, you must go down to the campo; you will sit down by the well; you will wait until a pretty woman goes by; I want her to be very, very pretty… You will accost her civilly: ‘Madame, the Duke, my master, has just yielded up his soul to God… a few steps away from here… His last wish: that a very pretty woman who was passing by should come and say a little prayer for him… before he is taken away to San Michele…’

  “I did not have to wait long, Monsieur. A beautiful girl walks past, eighteen years old, with good firm breasts, just as the Duke liked. I go up to her. She hesitates. ‘No one should disobey the wishes of a dead man, signorina… Povero! The Duke said to me: ‘One of my family, my brother, my sister-in-law, I don’t mind… A stranger would do the thing best.’

  “She followed me. We went upstairs. The letto matrimoniale, the curtains drawn, the lamps… The girl, tear drops in her eyes… it was worth all the family’s lamentations… It was the Bygone face to face with Today. It was il giorno vivente e la notte eterna.

  “When she was about to leave, I presented her with a little casket… ‘The Duke lived only for ladies; my master wanted his last thought to be for one of them. I have been asked to give you this…’

  “In the casket, Monsieur, was an emerald worthy of the treasure in St Mark’s, worthy of the Pala d’Oro.”

  1937

  SHOULD VENICE be illuminated with neon lights? Those who look to the past say no; the futurists reply: “Despite what you say, St Mark’s glistens in the light of our projectors; it’s a great success; the tourists love it.” The romantics hold firm; this morning they are parading on the square beneath a white banner: “WE WANT THE MOON.”

  1937

  MILITARY PLANES bearing the lion of St Mark on their wings. After the sea, the sky. The future of dictators is in the sky, the Duce has said so.

  A procession of little girls, hundreds of ribbons streaming from their shoulders; the arditi surround the well-booted townsfolk; their black, silken tassels gleam in the sunlight. It is the summoning of civilians, the adunata that takes place at five o’clock in the afternoon; avant-gardists and balillas take their places in squares marked out in chalk upon the ground of the campi, like pawns on a chessboard. Drivers stop in the middle of the Paduan countryside to don their black shirts before returning to Venice.

  1937

  ANCIENT INSCRIPTIONS were carved in stone; with their backs to the wall they confronted oblivion; they took eternity as their witness; they penetrated the heart of the countryside and were an integral part of the architecture; slight but immortal shadows, they kept pace with glory, victory or death. Nowadays, we no longer devote much time to the fact, we bring it about; we don’t accredit the result, we call it up, we don’t inscribe it, we just write it down, hurriedly, preferably on the least durable materials.

  In Italy the Ethiopian war exacerbated that academic passion for combining inscriptions with belles-lettres. No one race has left behind more marks upon walls than the Latin people; they covered everything with them; on catacombs, barracks, circuses, in streets and alleyways you can still make out election announcements, mortgage deeds, appeals to some famous gladiator or renowned retiarius; Ovid and Propertius are quoted on the walls of Pompeii, between a couple of caricatures or lovers’ dates; everywhere columns, tombs, aqueducts and statues still speak meaningfully to us over the centuries.

  In our own time, one is scarcely past the Italian border than one is surprised to see that this remarkable dialogue between the State and its citizens continues. Who is it who writes? Who dictates? When did they cover the towns with the lapidary, heroic or familiar thoughts, which the Communists brought back into fashion here in about 1920?22

  They are there, everywhere, those official phrases, daubed black on white, white on black. On the garage door of my hotel I read: Fascism is an army on the march. Above the municipal fountain: Fascism is a global development. At the entrance to the village: Fascism is politeness. The most current assertion is: We shall be proved right; and the death-head is seen everywhere, together with these simple words, which are hard to translate: Me ne frego (something like: Who the hell cares… but more obscene).

  The statements are most frequently aimed at Britain: We shall not accept sanctions from anyone, or: British courtesy reeks of Abyssinian oil. The slogan: A noi, Duce! defaces the most venerable of monuments, the walls of the Procuraties, stained grey by pigeon droppings, that old scraped bone that is Milan Cathedral, the sombre palazzi of Genoa and the mellow Signoria in Florence. And there’s this one, which dates from the time of the call up: Better to live the life of a lion for one day than live as a sheep for a hundred years!

  “Great poets need large audiences.” No square, no esplanade, not even St Mark’s would be able to contain the immense numbers of the public that Carlyle demanded. People stream past like water and the man in the street is obliged, however unwillingly, to listen to the strident, motionless cries that emanate from the walls of Venice, those talking walls of 1937. Of what interest are the bland affirmations, with their cold roman lettering, that are pasted up outside our town halls when compared to these exclamations? Their “no billstickers” doesn’t frighten a soul.

  The entire life of a country can be read either on the front of houses, which for foreigners have become more instructive than a book, or at the rear, where they are transformed into notepads. It is readers who file past ideas, and not the reverse.

  15 MAY 1938

  AT THE NEWSPAPER KIOSK, Venice’s Il Gazzettino illustrato is advertising an article entitled: “The Fatal Heroes”. On the same page there is a photograph of Mussolini and Hitler at Stra. I buy the paper; the “fatal heroes”: a series of historical pieces; the hero for that day: Byron.

  1938 DEATH OF D’ANNUNZIO

  IN
THE 1930S, a friend had obtained an audience for me; summoned back to Paris, I had to cancel my visit to Gardone, and returned from Venice to France. On arrival at the fork on the motorway at Lake Garda, a fascist guard handed me a packet: “From the Commandante”; at that period French cars were not very numerous; he had picked out mine. Inside I found a paper-knife made of inlaid gold, bearing these words uttered by the national hero: “I only possess that which I give.”

  JUNE 1939

  AT BLED, in Slovenia, by the lake shore, thirty kilometres from Ljubljana. An international tunnel is all that separates two worlds, the Latin and the Slav, Julian Veneto from Yugoslavia. One passes through fourteen centuries in twenty minutes.

  My wife is in Trieste, at her uncles’ house. Mussolini has just seized their Stock Exchange shares in order to prepare for war, giving them in exchange state-headed notepaper and uncultivated land.

  I was on my way to one of the Danube Commissions, two hours away, for the spring session; a reduced Europe: the Austrian admiral, a man of very noble blood and very tired; the Romanian, our president, a wily and devious diplomat on the brink of retirement; the Englishman, who drinks a bottle of whisky a day—he died of it; the Yugoslav, pettifogging, blunt and loathed; the Italian, a buffoon… Our assignment: to supervise the Danube, both technically, and a touch politically too, from Germany to the Black Sea. Our winter session was held in March, in Nice; the autumn one will take place in Galatz, at the mouth of the river, in an old Second Empire—the age of Romania—palace that is half-Turkish, half-Russian. Our old-fashioned yacht, flying the Commission’s flag, along with those of eight European nations, was berthed near Vienna. This very peaceful Commission’s only enemies were the rocks that studded the Iron Gates, the silt which obstructed the fluvial ports, or the fluctuations of the tributaries.