Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

I said nothing. We simply stood there, leaning against the railing along the canalside, staring down the cul-de-sac at the pink house front, as if we both knew that all would be revealed if only we waited long enough, stared hard enough. Then the bells of Santa Maria della Salute began to chime. It might have been the cue for a revelation: the green door opened and around it came a head, a lion’s head larger than that on the door knocker; an old man walking with a stick and accompanied by a white-haired woman. They came hirpling towards us. Something happened to Viktor. He woke up, or woke up and all but fainted away. Pound appeared to have the same effect on him as Venice had on Axel — the reality was just too much for him. I nudged him in the ribs and as he pulled himself together I heard a panic-stricken: ‘What do we do?’ And I, to whom this man meant nothing, said: ‘Ask him. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?’ As far as I was concerned this was an interesting dilemma. You meet God. You are allowed one, possibly two, questions. What should you ask?

The woman and the old man were now level with us. Viktor took the plunge, he held up his hand, stopped the couple. They did not seem surprised, nor particularly well-disposed. Pound was wearing a broad-brimmed brown hat. His hair stuck out from underneath it. The maze of wrinkles on his face was like script, the marks of many lives. I remarked on his eyes, blue but with a sort of mist over them. Viktor approached Ezra Pound. Produced a book, ‘every heretic’s bible’ as he put it, the latest, expanded edition of The Cantos . The writer squinted at Viktor for some time before accepting the proffered pen and signing his name, along with a couple of words, on the title page. As he took the book back Viktor handed the bottle of aquavit to the poet, as a thank-you — or, why not: an offering — pointing as he did so to the ship on the label and reciting the first line from ‘every heretic’s bible’: ‘And then went down to the ship …’

Pound peered curiously at Viktor as he handed the bottle to his companion. Viktor’s worshipful expression did not appear to make much of an impression on him.

‘A masterpiece,’ Viktor said, or sighed almost. ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking, but which canto do you consider to be the most important.’ Viktor stood there, waiting for the magic word, the key that would lay the work wide open instead of, as now, being only slightly ajar. This was no formative trip, but something far more ambitious: a mission in search of the answer to all things, the ultimate truth. I was reminded of my own feelings on that day in my childhood when I was introduced to Uncle Melankton.

Pound stood as if in a dream, his mind somewhere else behind those misty blue eyes. ‘I was wrong,’ he said, motioning towards the book. He went on standing there, gazing into space, shook his head slowly while the fingers of one hand scratched the knuckles of the other. ‘Those poems don’t make sense,’ he said, ‘they were written by a moron.’ ‘But, but, but …’ I could see that Viktor was totally thrown. ‘But it’s … a masterpiece,’ he said again.

‘It’s a botch,’ Ezra Pound said. ‘Stupid and ignorant. I knew too little about so many things.’

And with that the ancient left us, walked off slowly along the canalside with the white-haired woman. Viktor just stood there with his mouth opening and shutting, as if he were choking on a sentence. I told him to relax, Pound was probably just feeling a bit down, I said. I followed the woman and the old man with my eyes until they disappeared into a restaurant. ‘Cici’ it said on the sign. And all at once I realised that I had come face to face with myself, a wonder who knew, nonetheless, that he was a fool.

Viktor was left with a faraway look in his eyes. Or maybe he was lost in one of those whirlpool visions Pound was always on about. Viktor stared into mid-air, at the point where the poet’s head had been. Aghast, I thought at first, but after he had been standing like this for some minutes it dawned on me that he was actually awestruck. ‘What heresy,’ he gasped. ‘To condemn your own life’s work.’ Viktor kissed the book. I had a nodding acquaintance with Hamlet , and to me Viktor looked exactly like Ophelia at the moment when she started to lose her marbles.

We wandered back to the hotel. Viktor was acting like an absolute lunatic. Hooting with laughter one minute, cursing and swearing the next. Shaking his head and slamming his fist into walls along our way. ‘Jesus!’ he exclaimed every few minutes. ‘Je-sus!’ In the hotel room he slumped down into a shabby armchair among all the other heavy, cherry-wood furniture, with a look in his eyes that could have won him a part as the occupant of a deckchair on the beach in the film of Death in Venice , which Visconti had just finished making. He opened the bottle of grappa we had bought. ‘Holy shit,’ he said after the first swig. ‘They wouldn’t win any prizes for this. I should have kept the aquavit.’

Barely a year later, in Lillehammer, Viktor Harlem received a blow on the head from a block of ice which left him staring into space in an institution for twenty-odd years. The look in his eyes the same as in Venice: faraway. Or rather, the light in his face was extinguished, as if a light bulb had gone out. I always had the feeling that his head would tinkle if I shook it. Despite Viktor’s affected wonder at Ezra Pound’s self-denigrating statement, it often occurred to me that it was actually in Venice that he was dealt the blow to the head that put him out of action for so many years. That he had been hit, not by a block of ice, but by a book. It was as if he needed twenty years to digest the shock of his guru describing his life project — a superhuman feat and the object of Viktor’s unstinting admiration — as a complete and utter failure. Each time I visited Viktor at the institution I was met by the eyes of someone who did not consider it worthwhile being fully conscious in such a meaningless world.

After all those years, he would one day get up and perform an achievement which would leave a lasting impression, but I knew nothing of this in Venice. To be honest I had worries enough of my own. In all probability I had been more thrown by the meeting with Ezra Pound than Viktor, at that point anyway. I needed room to breathe. I needed to be alone with my fear. It seemed clearer to me than ever: I could wind up a fool. Despite the knowledge of the powers pulsating within me.

Having deposited Viktor at the hotel with the bottle of grappa, I hopped onto the first vaporetto to come sailing along the Grand Canal. I had to take my mind off things, I had to find solace. I gazed at the buildings slowly slipping past, seeming to pile up in my memory. And suddenly I discerned a secret, mutual affinity between them, an all but invisible similarity, even between façades lying far apart; and at one spot, near the Rialto Bridge, it struck me that if I looked a little closer I would see that all of the house fronts were in fact the same façade. They were all part of an endeavour to say something about the perfect façade. Just as Cézanne painted the same mountain again and again. Palazzo Dario, Palazzo Barbarigo, Palazzo Loredan. Variations on the same possibility. I leaned over the rail of the vaporetto , trying to memorise each frontage — Palazzo Garzoni, Palazzo Grimani, Palazzo Bembo — so that in my mind I might be able to lay them one on top of the other, veil upon veil as it were, to create the underlying, ideal, façade, the palace in the depths, behind, beneath everything.

I am not sure, but sometimes I am inclined to see a connection between the television series Thinking Big and the ranks of façades along the Grand Canal. At the time I regarded the canal more as a long strand and the palazzos as almost identical pearls. Something I could collect, something which, by mere accumulation, could save me from ending up as a fool.