Paul Morand: Venices

Yesterday, during mass in a little Canadian chapel, I was handed a cardboard box which everyone dipped into: it contained the hosts; as a child I was taught that to touch a host, even if it was not consecrated, was a sacrilege; I excused myself, saying that I could not take communion, not having been to confession in the morning; they smiled; it was quite customary to receive God without going to confession.

I have been away for too long; at home they speak a foreign language I no longer understand; besides, no dictionary exists.

Old age is governed by the minus sign: one is less and less intelligent, less and less foolish.

Autumn; lying fallow until now, the dead leaves begin to stir, clinging to the rim, rolling on towards winter.

1963

SERENATA A TRE 196…

THIS PIAZZETTA reminds me of something… An earlier disappointment, some misadventure that lay dormant here, unperturbed by memory for years… I allude to it only because after such a long time it seems to me to take on a symbolic value.

Cats in Venice never disturb themselves either, having nothing to fear from cars; the only criticism I have of cats is that they never say good morning. Venetian cats look as if they are a part of the ground; they don’t wear collars; their bellies are like deflated bagpipes, and in this treeless city they no longer know how to climb; they are weary of life, for there are too many mice, too many pigeons.

Here is one of them, painted on the outside of this little house. I am reminded of Tintoretto and of Giorgione, who both began life as house painters…

Here I am… so many years ago…

Beguiling C—. Even her ghost makes a fool of me! Who would not be led astray, beyond the grave? When she enraptured me, C— certainly did not corrupt my innocence, but how often did I leave her, raging at the confusion she brought to my emotions; and I was even more furious when her reappearance was enough to crush all resentment.

How to explain it? That insolent way she held her head, her enigmatic eyes, defiant and yellow as the deepest agate, her nose with its quivering nostrils, her unruly hair hat was like a fire no hat could extinguish. The centuries blended in her, she was proud like the Renaissance, as frivolous as the Baroque. A queen and a rag-and-bone woman; a sibyl and a little girl.

She travelled throughout her life, even within Venice, staying one year with aristocrats, another living among the women who threaded pearls or the boatmen on the Giudecca. She, who never opened a book, where did she gain a general knowledge that was often erudite? The key to that beautiful, fleshly enigma is not one to be unlocked easily.

She was so delectable that her mere presence was a veritable assault on one’s morals. Very tall, she would examine you thoroughly and with expertise from on high; you felt that even if you lay her on her back she would still pinch you, like a crab, that she would never ask for mercy, always consenting, but never giving of herself.

That was what I was suddenly reminded of by the little house in the Piazzetta, and the cat painted a tempera on the cartouche.

“Come this evening, after dinner… Don’t come in by the door to the canal, you’d be seen too easily. Go by the back door, the campo is always deserted.”

That evening, the door was ajar. The drawing-room was empty…

If she had changed her mind, C— would not have left the house unlocked; she would be expecting me, hoping that I would come, she would keep our appointment. I went straight to the bedroom, like a gourmand drawn to the kitchen. The door was unbolted.

“C—, it’s me!”

I could smell her behind the door.

I looked through the key-hole; a shirt was in the way. C— liked playing pranks, and I also knew she was a tease. But why leave me still yearning?

My ear at the door-frame, my hands on the cold marble mantel-piece. I hold my breath: there are two women. I can hear them satisfying one another; the pleasures of the eavesdropper; that lapping sound is not water splashing against the door of the house… I was granted the entire sequence, right up to the squealing of a rabbit carried away by rapaciousness…

Afterwards there was silence, total suspense. I knocked, hoping that it was just a curtain-raiser, C— was someone who liked to share. Nothing.

Every minute made me feel more foolish, more lonely, more excluded.

That evening, to my great disappointment, the door was not opened; everywhere Industry prevailed over Labour…

I never knew the secret of that evening. Later on, I heard tell of a family story, involving two female cousins. Who had insisted on that door being shut? C—, out of malice? The other person, out of jealousy or prudery, or because she liked secrecy? Or was it Man, in the person of myself, being pilloried?

Both of them are dead; they moan elsewhere, stoking the fires of hell. Above the entrance to the little house, I find the cartouche on the distempered wall: there one sees a cat lusting after two smoked herring…

I returned to the hotel, blaming myself and meditating bitterly on the role of men today, poor subjugated conquerors, routed by the feminist triumph that is breaking out everywhere; governors governed; one-time masters of the house doing the shopping, like Jouhandeau,3 whose slavery is the explanation for his wonderful portraits of Élise (like all men, Marcel is a coward; what redeems him is that at the last moment he reveals himself, through his sensitivity, to be more of a woman than women themselves…)

We are seeing the dawn of a primitive matriarchy, a post-nuclear one, it occurs to me. The despotic Don Juans and pimps, revealed to us in their majesty in so many cliché-ridden accounts, are nothing but poor submissive little girls who have surrendered. The recent strike by women in the USA, the republishing of Lysistrata ; democracy, the blackmailer of the weak, brackets the Female with those who were once subjugated, the Blacks, servants, the working class, children and all those liberated people who have become the masters. The composition of the masses will change, but the masses will remain; that is what is meant by “revolution”, the etymology indicates the nature of the word: a return to the point of departure. Women, for their part, will recover from all this and will perfect their sensual aspirations. I can remember those handsome Berber farmers, who had come down from the Rif mountains and were being forcibly led to the souks by their wives; I used to come across them in Tangiers, being coaxed along by them into the shops and spending a fortune on useless necklaces, gaudy silks and hideous furnishing materials; once they were back home, they left all their fine apparel on their doorsteps and went back to their labours.

SEPTEMBER 1965 FROM THE TOP OF THE CAMPANILE

FROM THE TOP of the Campanile I survey the whole of Venice, which is as spread out as New York is vertical, as salmon-pink as London is black and gold. The whole place is bathed in showers, very much like a water-colour, with off-whites and dull beiges, picked out by the dark crimson shades of walls that look like the flesh of tuna. A violent breeze ripples through the Lagoon, driving clouds that are as light as those new nylon sails at the regattas on the Lido.

Through the iron bars on the top floor, which dissuade those contemplating suicide from doing so, I could see St Mark’s as if glued to the Doges’ Palace, at once a refuge, a treasury and an exit door from one of the wings of the theatre that is Venice. From this platform, one understands better the true role of St Mark’s, which was that of a private chapel to the Palace, not a public building as it is today, and not a basilica as is commonly believed.

At the entrance, I could make out the four figures on the porphyry relief with their broken boxer’s noses; the four Lysippus horses were leaping into the clouds, Venice’s only horses bowing their necks to which the gold still adheres, proud to be on view, but regretting, as former champions, that they could not challenge Colleone’s mount, or, if need be, Victor-Emmanuel’s prancing palfrey.