‘But he wasn’t. The oval dining-table was half laid, the door of the cellarette, from which Antonio had been getting out the drinks, stood open. The room had a provisional, expectant air like a child abandoned in the middle of being dressed.
‘I knew Antonio’s tantrums well. He had always had these moods of being what he called “nero”—“black”—and was rather proud of them. They were manifestations of his proper pride, the “amor proprio” so dear to the Italian heart; they showed that he knew his own value and was not going to be put upon. They lasted sometimes for a day or even two days, after which, and without apology or explanation, he would come out of them and be his sanguine, sunny self again. They must have cost him something, for during these times he ate but little and spoke hardly at all; they were a kind of possession. I used to wonder how his wife, who was devoted to him, stood them; they had a very upsetting effect on me. But perhaps like most Italian women she liked a man to be a man and respected his displays of temperament.
‘To Giuseppina’s unconcealed displeasure—she said she would have much preferred to do it herself—he had decided to wait on me at meals. After the first explosion, when he generally absented himself for a time, he never let his tempers interfere with the performance of what he considered his duties, and I fully expected he would come back to help me through dinner.
‘But he didn’t. Giuseppina served me; she made no comment on Antonio’s absence but stood watching me. Any emotional upset affects my digestion, that is why I avoid them whenever I can, and have got the reputation, no doubt, of being an icicle. If I had given way to all the annoyance I have felt during the last twelve years I should long ago have been riddled with gastric ulcers. Oh yes, I should have, Arthur; you needn’t look sceptical. I should have been well advised that evening to have eaten nothing; but how could I, I ask you, with Giuseppina watching my every mouthful? She was determined I should do her cooking justice, and she never took her eyes off me, or stopped talking, except between the courses. At last I could not help speaking of the subject uppermost in my mind, and asked her where she thought Antonio had gone.
‘ “Oh, him,” she said, and made no other comment.
‘By bedtime the nerves of my stomach were thoroughly demoralized and I knew I was in for a bad night. By half-past five in the morning, with the first summons of the Ave Mary bell, I knew that I was in for fever, too. I kept going over in my mind phrases of forgiveness which should also make it clear that there was nothing to forgive, for I did not doubt that Antonio would come in the morning. But instead it was Giuseppina who called me, bringing my tea-tray but no bottle of brandy. She looked more cheerful than I had ever seen her, and I, misinterpreting the signs, asked her if she had seen Antonio.
‘ “Yes,” she said, “he came at seven o’clock and took the gondola away.”
‘ “Took the gondola away?” I echoed.
‘ “Yes, signore, he said he was not going to serve you any more.”
‘ “Did he say why?” I asked.
‘She hesitated a moment and then said, “He said it was because you would not pay him enough.”
‘My illness was sharp and what was more it was recurrent. It was one of those gastric disorders that visitors to Venice sometimes get, and I expect I should have had it anyway: the row with Antonio only aggravated it. But I had never had it before and didn’t quite know what was going to happen. I didn’t call in a doctor because every day Giuseppina assured me I was better, and in the end she proved to be right. But it did for me what an illness so often does, it changed the orientation of my thoughts. The needle of anxiety pointed to myself, not to Antonio. I could think of him without agitation and without working myself into a state.
‘I thought of him a good deal and remembered his many virtues. What patience he had! He never minded how long he was kept waiting. One of the grand ladies who used to employ him before he came to me, once forgot about him, went home another way, and left him out all night: but he didn’t hold it against her—he thought it reflected credit on her, and was the way a great lady should behave.
‘And what courage he had. Many gondoliers are afraid of the water; a puff of wind or a drop of rain will send them scurrying for shelter. Storms get up very suddenly on the lagoon: we had many picnics there in exposed places miles from Venice; often we had to fight our way home against a head wind (for I rowed, too), and it took hours and was really a little dangerous, for a gondola is a most unseaworthy boat. But Antonio never minded that, or getting wet to the skin. He never reproached me with disregarding his warnings about the weather; he contented himself with saying that no other gondolier would do what he did; he was nothing if not boastful, but this at least was true. He had a great regard for appearances and perhaps he saw himself as Ajax defying the lightning. But in a humbler, less exhibitionistic way, he could be very devoted. Like a policeman, he hated having to run; it upset his dignity. Though amphibious, he was primarily a sea-creature, and though by no means awkward on dry land, he had a stiff-legged way of running—throwing his weight from one foot to the other as if he were reaching out to crush a beetle. He must have known it was inelegant, and it was particularly unsuitable to Venice, where an unguarded movement may easily knock someone over. But he would dash off to the station with my late letters and come back breathless but triumphant, saying “Ho fatto un corso!”—“I ran like the wind!”—and without making any complaint.
‘His dignity! It all came back to that. “Far figura”—how do you translate it? “Keeping up appearances”? Face-saving is at the root of the Italian character. He didn’t mind being a thief, but he didn’t like being called one. Among the popolo in Italy an insult is a thing in itself: un’ offesa, and whether it be well founded or not makes little difference to the gravity of the offence, perhaps none. By taking umbrage he was only acting according to his principles; a less dramatic course would have lowered him in his own esteem. How easy it would have been to treat the whole thing as a joke! And perhaps I could have, if he hadn’t wounded my own self-esteem by believing he could bamboozle me about the bottle—and all to satisfy his artistic sense! I had only to think of his stern accusing face—“What a lot of cognac you and Mr. Gretton drank last night, signore—what a lot, what a lot!” to feel myself getting hot under the collar. Of course I shouldn’t have minded so much if I hadn’t had all those things stolen from me in the war—all my trinkets, my cuff-links, my watch-chains, my travelling-clock—don’t laugh, Arthur!’
‘I wasn’t laughing,’ I said, though in fact I was on the verge of a nervous titter, such was his vehemence.
‘You looked as if you might be going to. Of course materially, it wasn’t serious, and yet in a way it was; before the war one bottle of brandy more or less didn’t matter, you could replace it; but how can you replace three thousand lire now, I ask you? And it was the principle of the thing. Somehow I should have minded less if he had had one redeeming virtue instead of one damning vice. His whole being seemed to be organized for deceit. But most Italians are that way, I fancy.’
‘I shouldn’t choose a gondolier as a touchstone of moral behaviour, either in Italy or elsewhere,’ I said, tired of his coat-trailing.
‘Oh, you wouldn’t, wouldn’t you?’ my friend said nastily. ‘Why not? Because he is a poor man, I suppose?’
‘No,’ I said, not wishing to be hoisted on the petard of social snobbery. ‘Because for centuries gondoliers have been dependent on the whims of well-to-do people like yourself, and have had to shape their conduct accordingly. With them it’s a matter of economics, not of morals.’
‘You would defend the Devil,’ he said violently. Then with a sudden change of mood he went on:
‘It was so ironical that during all the war years when we ought to have been wishing each other dead and so on, we hadn’t had an unkind thought about each other, and now, when our Governments had graciously announced we could be friends, we weren’t on speaking terms.
‘As soon as I could I wrote him
a letter, in effect apologizing to him for having let him rob me and asking him to come back. I couldn’t bring myself to say that I had drunk the brandy myself or that Giuseppina had. I gave the letter to Giuseppina to post and never doubted it would do the trick. I’ve sometimes wondered whether she did post it, she hated him so much. Certainly he didn’t answer, or come back. Did I afterwards find out he wasn’t the real culprit? Unfortunately, no.
‘Lacking Antonio, Venice seemed an utterly strange place to me. For one thing I had never been ill in Venice before. I had always been particularly well—and, for me, active. The question was how to find time for all the things I wanted to do. And you know how, in that state, one doesn’t look about one very much. I won’t say I never looked at Venice, but I looked at it with the eye of health and hurry—any eye that doesn’t see much. Now I was a prisoner. My sphere of action was limited to one room and, as I got better, to two. I felt utterly cut off. In my old flat I had a telephone and Antonio to run errands for me: here I had no telephone, no Antonio, only Giuseppina as a link with the outside world: she had all the housework to do, as well as marketing and catering for me and, when I was ill, acting as my nurse: and I did not like to inflict any further duties on her, unless it was to ask her to post a letter.
‘And I didn’t want to write any letters. No! After Antonio’s defection my unwillingness to make myself known to my friends in Venice increased, until it amounted to a nervous inhibition. When I thought I was getting over it, I was really getting used to it. A feeling of snugness enfolded me; I was enclosed in my anonymity as in a cocoon, and I had no wish at all to break my bonds; indeed, every day I spun new ones, I didn’t want my convalescence to end and invented new symptoms which would keep me indoors. Giuseppina, with native shrewdness, was quick to discover this. “Si è impressionato,” she said, “you are frightening yourself”—and so I was, though not quite in the way she meant.
‘At the back of my mind was always the thought that Antonio, though absent as a friend was present as an enemy, and my dread of meeting him, if I went out, began to extend to all the inhabitants of Venice. So I was doubly a prisoner, a prisoner of myself and a prisoner of the flat; and when I got tired of the view of my own mind, I had the windows of my two rooms to look out of.
‘From my bedroom windows I enjoyed a roofscape. Domes and towers gave it grandeur and formal beauty, but what chiefly fascinated me was the roofs themselves. I came to know them as intimately as did the sparrows that hopped about on them: a sparrow on the house-tops, that’s what I was myself.
‘Low-pitched, almost flat, the roofs reminded me of shallow pyramids or squat pagodas—Venice has many forms and contours that suggest the East. Red-brown and weather-stained, the tiles lay along them like strings of broken flower-pots, on which, when the sun came out, the lizards basked and darted. (It didn’t come out very much: June had set in wet.) Instead of pots or cowls, the chimney-stacks had roofs on them like tables. Crowning some of the roofs, and higher than the chimney pots, were the altanas, platforms where the washing was hung out; flimsy-looking structures whose posts and palings made a pattern on the sky like Chinese Chippendale. Some of them had small hut-like attachments, bonnets or hoods to keep the weather out. There was something new every time one looked, some new arrangement of lines and surfaces; all, or nearly all, brown-pink and grey, with here and there the vivid green of a creeper, or the top of a cypress nodding against a wall.
‘This view had the slightly hypnotic effect on me that an abstract or a cubist picture might have. It took me out of myself, but not, as you will easily believe, towards anyone else. Except for a woman shaking a duster from a window or hanging washing out on an altana, it was a roofscape without figures—a geometrical world.
‘Below the two windows of my sitting-room was a canal with a pavement—a fondamenta—bordering it. You could only see the pavement by leaning out of the window, it was so far below; but what a rewarding sight it was! Together the canal and the fondamenta made a stage on which the scenery didn’t vary much but the action was always changing. Though nothing sensational ever happened, something was always going to happen; and that something was heralded by shouts of warning or encouragement, advice or reproof: nothing that took place, or looked like taking place, escaped somebody’s comment.
‘It was a way of living by proxy, and it exactly suited me, in my limp convalescent state, to be a spectator of the spectators. I didn’t try to write, I just sat looking. Very often I didn’t even take the trouble to go to the windows: I could see from my chair a great deal—the houses opposite, the big acacia with its tufted top, sensitive to every air that blew, the terrace beside it, sometimes the scene of impassioned carpet-beating, sometimes of alfresco parties, the petunias in boxes along its balustrade, the luxuriant bignonia that dripped from it, and the scarcely less luxuriant wistaria that climbed in and out of the bignonia. It was mid-June; the bignonia was beginning to put out its scarlet tongues—an insult which I took in good part; the wistaria was blooming for the second time; their blossoms did not accord, yet there was something touching about their friendship: it was so intimate yet on so grand a scale.
‘Next came the great palazzo to which the terrace was a foot-stool—the Palazzo Trevisan. It differed in plan from most Venetian palaces in having two wings with a courtyard in between. The courtyard was also a garden in the Italian sense—that is to say it possessed trees, shrubs, creepers and a fountain; but no flowers to speak of. It looked dreary in the rain but on bright days when the sunshine lay heavy on the housetops it made a great patch of shade for which the eye was thankful; and I could imagine how cool it was beneath the trees. The garden had a water-gate let into the wall and a flight of stone steps, stained and seaweedy, that were submerged at high tide. But I never saw it opened. No gondola ever drew up at the steps; the gondolier’s anxious cry, warning his fare against the slippery surface—“Piano—si scivola!”—was never heard. Not that the steps were unused. Barche and sandole—nondescript boats of all work—were moored to them, and moored, too, to the tall blue posts with their gilded and coroneted summits that stood, slanting this way and that, like a forest in the water.
‘No one said them nay, no one told them to tie up elsewhere, for the noble family who owned the palace, and from whom it took its name, had long since left and now it was inhabited, so Giuseppina told me, by many families, some of whom were well to do, while some occupied tenements of no more than two rooms each. The palace had come down in the world. It was encased in pale grey stucco, and had the tall, round-headed windows of the late sixteenth century, each bordered by a thin band of Istrian stone; the balconies, the dripstones, the sham machicolations which held up the roof, were of the same material. The shutters were painted brown outside, but inside they were grey, a darker grey than the stucco, so that when they were open the palace was a symphony of shades from white to dark grey, and might, if it had looked smarter, have been compared to a fashionable elderly lady dressed for a garden-party; but it didn’t look smart—no building in Venice does.
‘Some of the occupants of the palace opened their shutters in the daytime, some left them ajar, some kept them closed; few kept them completely closed, for the front that faced me was the north front, and the sun only reached it in the evening. Venetians—perhaps all Italians—are very shutter-conscious. Facing south, my sitting-room got the full force of the sunshine, if there was any; whether there was or not, Giuseppina would come about midday and try to close my shutters, leaving me in darkness; otherwise, she said, the sun would fade the covers—she was very jealous of her mistress’s possessions. But I insisted on having them left a little open, for me to see out by; when this had been done, my flat and the palace opposite were like two people looking at each other through half-closed eyes.
‘When the sun had gone round I threw the shutters back and resumed my watch at the window. I must have sat for many hours of every day in this way, like a passenger in a railway train, not taking in any special featur
e of what I saw but passively enjoying the sense of sight.
‘Several days passed and then, one morning, Giuseppina brought me a letter.
‘I thought at once that it was a letter from Antonio, for there was no stamp on it, it had come by hand. But the handwriting told me it was not.
‘Giuseppina watched me open it. It was written in Italian in a very sloping hand, with spidery letters not easy to read. I have it here,’ my friend went on, and pulled out his pocket-book; but like a speaker who does not have to rely on his notes he read, or rather translated, without consulting it:
‘ “Egregio signore,—It is many days now that I have seen you looking from your window and it seems to me that always your eyes have been fixed on me.” ’
My friend looked up, and almost as though he were illustrating the letter, he raised his eyes to mine. Then he dropped them and went on:
‘ “Perhaps I am mistaken, but I think you do not look at me without interest. It would not be possible to gaze so long at one object unless the object had aroused one’s interest. And I, signore, am also interested in you. I know your face—ah, very well. I know—do not ask me how—that you are a foreigner. Ah! You would be surprised if you knew how much I know about you. Do not think it is because I am inquisitive. I cannot help knowing about you, any more than I can help knowing whether we have the sun or not. I ask only one thing, signore, do not leave Venice, do not leave me, without making a sign.” ’
My friend’s voice grew a little unsteady at this point, and he broke off.
‘How did she finish it?’ I asked. ‘Foreigners have such odd ways of ending letters.’
‘She didn’t finish it,’ he answered.
‘She didn’t even give her name?’
He shook his head.
‘But how could she expect you to make a sign when you didn’t know her name or her address?’
The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley Page 35
