Paul Morand - Venices

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.

In this Slovenian countryside, that once formed the Austrian crown territories of Carinthia, Garniola and Styria, I was able to study at close quarters those Slavs who had been halted by the Alps on their march towards the Adriatic; they had rid themselves of Franz-Joseph’s jurisdiction only to find themselves confronted by the Italians, who had grown rich on Austrian booty as a result of the 1920 treaties; the Italians had gained Trieste, Istria, Dalmatia and Julian Veneto; their mandate was to prevent the Slavs descending on the Adriatic; fascism took care of this, depriving Trieste of its hinterland, denationalizing the towns, since they were unable to penetrate the countryside, dressing the Croats in black shirts and providing the Slovenes with boots.

With the end of the Serenissima, from 1814 onwards, Trieste, the Dominante, had prospered through the decline of Venice, which no longer needed to recruit slave oarsmen for their galleys. Trieste, once made wealthy by Vienna, the Greeks, the English and the Germans, prospered little after 1920, deprived of the two-headed eagle, the city thought only italianità and was indifferent to the miseries heaped upon priests and Slovenian teachers by the Irredentists, who purged the local administration and prohibited the Slav languages; after all, had not the Europe of the Treaty of Versailles been responsible for establishing the Italian presence, firstly in order to be rid of the Slavs, and then to contain them?