Venices

by Paul Morand

  In the old surroundings, life went on, rather like a play by Beckett performed in the amphitheatre at Nîmes.

  Venice became once more what she had been in the fifteenth century, a sort of Manhattan, a predatory city of extremes, howling with prosperity, with a Rialto which had been the Brooklyn Bridge of its age, and a Grand Canal that was a sort of Fifth Avenue for millionnaire doges; her airfields recalled the fleets of galleys sponsored by bankers; an Italian city without any Italians, like New York without Americans, where the Blacks, in this case, were fair-haired Dalmatians, and the Jewish brokers Greek shipowners (for, in the vicinity of San Giorgio dei Greci, the Greeks, who had come from Rhodes and Chios after the fall of Constantinople, were the true monarchs of the Republic, and her most famous courtesans were Greek too).

  Throughout History, Venice has shown two faces: sometimes a pond, sometimes the open sea, one moment peddling lethargy in bookshop windows, the next exploding into a far-flung imperialism (one that was so despotic that Christian Levant, weary of her harshness, came to prefer the Turk).

  Venice will be saved; offices installed in the Palazzo Papadopoli, run by scholars from every nation, are dedicated to doing so: a Californian oceanographer, an expert in smoke pollution, has flown in from Los Angeles; a specialist in terrestrial sub-stratas from Massachusetts, and another, an earthquake engineer from the Soviet Union; it’s called the Bureau for the Study of Maritime and Terrestrial Movement. Venice’s fate lies in the hands of these men. Based on information received from computers, their great project is to close the three entrances to the lagoon with gigantic air balloons that can be inflated or deflated at will.

  Due to the proximity of the two shores, tides in the Adriatic are much more violent and unpredictable that those in the rest of the Mediterranean; storms blow up as if inside a shell. (I was once nearly ship-wrecked, off Ancona, in 1920.)

  Venice is sinking thirty centimetres every century, which is not much more than the rest of the world, but Porto Marghera and Mestre, by pumping out excessive amounts of water, have destroyed the natural balance of the lagoon.

  SEPTEMBER 1970

  A FASCINATING EXHIBITION at the Palazzo Grassi: “The History of the Venetian Lagoon”; the geology, hydrography, botany, the navigation, the Gondola through the ages; hunting, fishing, the Lagoon in Literature and History. There were excellent ten foot-long maps on parchment: one by Ottavio Fabri and Sabbadino, from the sixteenth century; another by Minorelli and Vestri from the seventeenth. A Venetian mosaic of the Flood, dating from 589. Some xylographs depicting the construction of a twelfth-century Venice; no machinery, no dredger, nothing but human labour; wooden stakes are being dug in by hand by two workmen lifting wooden mallets; it really was the republic of beavers of which Goethe spoke.

  And what a surface! There are examples here of the silt, of reeds used for the first fences, of lichen hanging from some nameless mush.

  Sometimes I attempt to drain the lifeblood out of myself by imagining Venice dying before I do, imagining her being swallowed up without revealing her features upon the water before she disappears. Being submerged not to the depths, but a few feet beneath the water; her cone-shaped chimneys would emerge, her miradors, from which the fishermen would cast their lines, and her campanile, a refuge for the last cats from St Mark’s. The vaporetti, tilting under the weight of visitors, would survey the surface of the waters where they coalesce with the mire of the past; tourists would point out to each other the gold from some mosaic, held afloat by five water-polo balls: the domes of St Mark’s; the Salute would be used as a mooring buoy by cargo ships; bubbles would float up from above the Grand Canal, released by frogmen groping around for American ladies’ jewels in the cellars of a submerged Grand Hotel. “What prophecy has ever turned a people away from sin?” said Jeremiah.

  Venice is drowning; it may well be the best thing that could happen to her.

  IN CRETE CANDIA (HERAKLION), APRIL 1970

  ONE IS STILL in Venice, here, on the square where the lions on the Morosoni fountain belch forth from their mouths the melted snow from Mount Ida upon the citizens of Heraklion. It is a Venice that is far removed from the dreaded gusts of the bora, a Venice for the end of winter. On the square, the tables and chairs from the café spill out over the pavement and on to the road; I watch the passers-by; a bearded pope upon a puny donkey, people selling foreign newspapers that arrived on the midday plane, elderly peasants, still dressed in the Turkish clothes that were worn before the revolution, with a black turban wrapped around their grey heads, baggy trousers and scarlet boots made from goatskin.

  Venice is returning to Greece what she stole from her; for more than four centuries she protected Crete, especially this town of Candia, which was besieged by the Turks for twenty-three years. This morning, I climbed the ramparts and clambered up on to the old red-brick parapets with their imitation fortifications, that first line of walls, built at the foot of Foscarini’s breaches, from which the scree crumbled, carrying down with it the jumble of centuries in an avalanche of stones emblazoned with the coat of arms of la Serenissima, Roman sarcophagi and curtains worn away with age.

  El Greco left for the city of Toledo just in time, but Candia, confronted with Islam, stood firm. In those days, the white race was not ashamed of its hegemony, or of its Duke of Crete, who was appointed by the Adriatic doge; it scoffed at the wrath of Ahmet, the grand vizier who burned his prisoners alive. La Feuillade and the Due de Beaufort (the “roi des Halles”, and natural son of Henri IV), and the Hanoverian or Bohemian conscripts died here, for the West, adding their bodies to the ramparts built by San Micheli, the Venetian architect.

  At dawn, facing the old port, the still sea beneath the sun-shades, a scene from a Claude Lorrain greeted me upon waking; everything was there, the vaulted docks that had been dug to house the old Venetian galleys, the crenellated battlements along the winding road, the black, tarred fishing-nets laid out in half-circles, the lateen sails with their oblique initials that impede the background view of the barbicans and casemates that had been demolished by earthquakes. The surface of the sluggish waters had not yet been scored by any propeller, or carressed by any oar; only an underwater swimmer’s flippers appeared between the breakwaters, like the dorsal fin of some submerged monster.

  Venice had handed over her authority to other imperial powers; would the most recent of these, whose net was cast from Odessa to Mers el-Kébir, last longer than that of the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Normans, Byzantium, the Turk, or the British? The Venetian empire is still alive in Crete; here, she still holds sway; she is the “great presence” that the Italienische Reise talk about. It is as if Venice had never been expelled from the Orient; the day that Christopher Columbus discovered America was when la Serenissima chose to let herself expire; Vasco da Gama, by rounding the Cape of Good Hope, delivered the fatal knot; she survived for no more than three centuries, which is a great deal when one thinks that it only took a mere twenty years for the British Empire to become but a shadow of itself.

  At midday I entered the bazaar, which was ablaze with oranges and lemons spilling from their baskets, peppers the colour of the Spanish flag, and kid goats with their throats slit. Between the arsenal and the cemetery the shops were parading their right to life, stretching out their medieval awnings, which were doing their best to support the overhanging moucharabies built of grey sycamore wood, dating from before Independence.

  Gathered together around a glass of water outside the bars, with their bulging stalls and the cafés whose floors were pink with the dissected prawns consumed with apéritifs, were a dozen or so notable Cretans; the cheap restaurants hissed with the smoke from the frying. Clusters of hippies, perpetual castaways on the raft of leisure, drooled at the sight of cauldrons full to overflowing with snails cooked in onions, of grills upon which meatballs with lemon, or giouvarlakia, steamed alongside mizithra, cheeses made from honey, piled up in stacks.

  In front of the Takio taverna, an English minibus, l
ooking like a prehistoric cavern on Dunlop tyres, had given up the ghost; the foul stench of a public rubbish dump seeped from the open door, through which could be seen the remnants of gnawed bones on aluminium plates that had been placed on jerrycans; from the roof hung used espadrilles and plastic bags. A smell of pork in wine-flavoured sauce had enticed out of the vehicle a group of Nordic creatures, whose skin had turned to leather, and whose dark glasses were attempting to make a home for themselves in the fur-covered faces from which the only thing to emerge was an aubergine-coloured nose. In the winter the hippies had covered their naked torsos with a sheepskin bought from some shepherd or other on Mount Ida. I recognized these famished creatures: they were my English friends and my Yankee with the structuralist beard, the ones I had come across last summer in Venice. Exhausted by all the spare time they had on their hands, the little band were examining their pocket money, scrutinizing the menu in Greek and consulting one another, torn between the desire to eat something other than stolen chickens and the threat of arrest, followed by repatriation by the British consulate. (The Orthodox Church is not as indulgent towards vagabonds as the Roman Church.) Painted in white on the sides and on the back of their minibus, in three languages, were the words:

  THE BOURGEOISIE STINKS

  “A conventional fellow invites you to have some lunch,” I told them.

  What would be the use of achieving my grand old age if one did not feel closer to a tramp outdoors in Crete eating two-drachmas’ worth of spaghetti from a paper plate, than to a conventional French family sitting at table in front of a haunch of venison braised in port wine?

  I often feel jealous of lovers of the open road; they provide substance for a whole variety of dreams that Balzac described as: “the life of a Mohican”, and they remind me of our own life in 1920, of the way we heaped insults on society, our need for destruction and our defiant challenges scrawled on posters at the time that the Treaty of Versailles was bleeding Europe to death; they make me relive our attitude of “to hell with everyone”, “to blazes with everything”. But as for this lot, what will they do when they have finished wandering along the verges of non-existence? I make fun of them, I feel sorry for them, I envy them.

  I asked them about how they spent their time: “We are reinventing Man’s relationship with the Earth,” was their reply.

  I was expecting to see emerge from the minibus the British Valkyrie who, having consumed my grappa straight from the bottle, said she had no time for Venice; I could see again her blue eyes seeped in mascara beneath her headband, her mahogany lips and, beneath a Carnaby Street frock so long that it mopped up the spittle on the ground, her large feet, cracked and filthy, and her silver-painted toes.

  Their mouths full and belching forth garlic, the wandering Pithecanthropi, having accepted my invitation to lunch, recounted how they had cremated their companion in the ancient manner, on the shores of the Libyan Sea, as recently as Christmas, on a morning when, after consuming a great deal of mastic resin, ouzo, raki and heroin, she had not woken up. She was the daughter of an ecclesiastical peer, a life peer… “That’s actually what explains why she wanted to do away with herself… Basically, she suffered from not being the daughter of a hereditary lord,” said the driver of the minibus (Magdalen and BBC accent) as he scratched a head of hair that was as greasy as a poodle’s; “People can say what they will, but Burke’s Peerage was always her little red book…”

  1971

  TRIESTE, VILLA PERSEPHONE

  THE VENICE-TRIESTE TRAIN puffs away for two hours as it follows the new motorway that links the two cities: Jesolo, Aquilea, Monfalcone. There are skyscrapers amid the cornfields, hidden canals in the vineyards, out of which rise up purple-tinged osiers and the stumps of willow trees. North of Venice industry extends indefinitely, stretching up the boot of the peninsula up to the top of the thigh, as far as Trieste.

  I cross the city from which Stendhal, suspect and barely tolerated, fled as frequently as possible to Venice, on “unauthorised transfer” (this Foreign Office, Personnel Department style survives still), as soon as he had drawn his salary as consul sans exequatur, the Austrian police resented the bold Jacobin innovations of his Histoire de la peinture; this was the Stendhal who, in January 1831, was beginning a short story, Les Mesaventures d’un Juif errant, whose hero kept all he possessed in a violin case, and who, after each disaster that befell him, started again with noth ing; a penniless Stendhal who was waiting for Louis-Philippe’s government to pay him his wages so that he could buy shirts and who, like Joyce later on, was growing bored here; both men were biding their time awaiting the great regrading of human beings that is known as death. For Beyle, in Trieste, just as in Milan and Civitavecchia, it was always a case of an ill wind; it was one of fate’s ironies that this eternal loser should have had ancestors whose name was Gagnon [gagner means to win]; what winnings could there be for someone who always took the wrong turnings in life? Beyle only ever loved Italy, which gave him the pox: “Kiss the lady,” his mother told her little boy, aged five; instead, he bit the beautiful lady.

  The Grand Canal, Trieste

  Through the villa’s old Austrian postern gate, blinded by some tame turtledoves flying past, after crossing an old-fashioned park I reach the house belonging to my two female cousins by marriage that clings to a spur out of which some depressed-looking trees, one on top of another, are searching for air, hemmed in as they are on all sides by twenty-storey blocks of flats that take advantage of the lack of foliage to peer out, between the bare branches, to see what is happening among their neighbours. It is the setting for a novel by Boylesve or Mathilde Serao. Quincunxes of rheumatic plane trees, their ancient scars filled with cement; the sea in the background; down below, the invisible city rumbles and weeps and murmurs, waiting for the moment to devour this old neighbourhood which makes its skyscrapers feel ashamed.

  Intersected by two terraced ornamental ponds, and with box hedges shaped into balls, the path continues to climb up to the steps and towards the verandah of the Maria-Theresa dwelling, its pediment surmounted by some Vertumnus or other, eaten away by lichen, and flanked by fake Gothic towers from the time of the Emperor Franz-Josef, a noble residence from which the black smoke of its oil-fired heating system was now rising into the morning sun.

  I come across my recluses, returning from their vegetable garden, carrying leeks in their baskets and holding between two fingers the first lady’s slippers, which they have picked in their latest luxury, a greenhouse for orchids. At table in the vast dining-room, where the Viennese silverware, a relic of long-vanished banquets, Héléne’s maternal grandmother—a grey tulle boa round her neck and with her hair cut short and very curly in the style of 1875 worn by the Tsarina Maria Feodorovna and her sister, Queen Alexandra of England—gazes down on the ritual of the midday dinner (with soup), and supper, eaten at half past six in the evening.

  Trieste is a strange pocket of civilisation indeed, a city that conceals itself, with a population that is silent, reticent and fearful, and which still has a flavour of bygone times, surviving as if she were an exception, her tail between her legs, embarrassed by her Latin character in the midst of the blond Slovenes, the new conquerors from the opposing shore.

  My cousins link every general political matter to news from a member of their family, one that is dispersed widely from Canada to Bombay, or to those of it who were left behind after the anguish brought about by dictatorships of the left or the right.

  “The Trautt… you know: they were shot by the Nazis and thrown into a common grave…”

  “Calliroe has just been thrown out of Alexandria, and given six hours’ notice…”

  “Aristides’s memoirs have been banned in Athens…”

  “Uncle André died in Vienna during the war, but what a wonderful way to go: he was listening to Tristan for the umpteenth time!”

  “Dimitri is still doing hard labour on the Danube… When the Liberation came, he was able to identify his daughter because of a
bracelet she wore on her arm.”

  On the menu for the day is chicken fried à la triestine, which reminds me slightly of the way they cook it in Virginia, and it is brought in ceremoniously by their old Dalmatian servant who, in 1944, opted to be Italian rather than become a Yugoslav. Seen from Trieste, Venice is the southernmost point of civilization.

  “Martha Modi in Parsifal, now that was quite something!”

  “Karajan is no longer the figure he was twenty years ago…”

  “It’s the soothing effect of that French woman…”

  “What a mess she made of The Valkyrie!”

  “Bertha’s spending the summer at Irène’s…”

  “Sophie’s in Rome…”

  “Athenai’s is expecting her second, in Salzburg.

  “And Hilda’s having hers in February, in Marseilles…”

  My room is ready; a hot air heater that must be a hundred years old has emitted a column of black grime up the walls as far as the ceiling, where the Baroque period Venetian stucco is congested with Viennese Second Empire shells. There’s a cup of herbal tea by my bedside light; my dear cousins had deliberated for a long time while they waited for me: “The last time he stayed, did he have camomile or verveine?” “No, I believe it was orange flower. I don’t know what’s happening to my memory!”

  Tomorrow morning, we shall visit the Orthodox cemetery, as I had requested.

  Greek independence, one hundred and fifty years ago, was responsible for a sudden dispersal of the Greek people; some set out once more on the ancient paths towards the Black Sea and the trade in wheat, from Galatz at the mouths of the Danube, as far as Odessa; others, feeling their way along the shores of the Mediterranean, like a blind man along a pavement, had gradually reached Trieste or Marseilles; later, they would venture as far as Bombay, London and New York. The E— had lived in Trieste, in their gardens on the headland, or in a house on Station Square that was as square and massive as a Genoese palazzo. Today, nothing is left apart from this villa, which is struggling to survive Italy’s present plight. Perfect French is spoken here, as well as German with an Austrian accent, otherwise it is the Dalmatian spoken in Trieste. “In the spring of 1945,” Triestinos say, “Field Marshal Alexander could have landed here, driven out the Croat partisans, and spared us forty days of deportations, pillaging and assassinations; in order to bar the way to Tito, who wanted the whole of Julian Veneto as far as Isonzo, thus presenting the West ‘with á. fait accompli’, no less than three months of negotiations were required in Belgrade and in London. How feeble all these experts were, with their A zones and B zones! Trieste had to keep her head down in order to avoid being caught in the vast net which the Slavs wished to cast over her.”