Paul Morand: Venices

PIAZZALE ROMA, 197…

WHAT THE railway line began, the pneumatic tyre has achieved. The land takes its revenge over the sea; ever since 1931 those who supported terra firma were the victors, having their way against Mussolini who, being artistically minded, wanted to cut off Venice from the Italian mainland.

Confronted with a garage for mammoths, Europe hurls herself upon Venice, hurriedly devours her, and then goes away again. Thieves who steal spare wheels, those who falsify police placards, money-changers, hitchhiking prostitutes and other knaves add to the confusion of the pilgrims in a Europe that is trying to patch together her different parts.

Bridges built of ancient brick are interspersed with foot bridges made of concrete, which are themselves overlooked by the multi-lane flyovers. The eurobuses and trains on rubber wheels holding eighty passengers pass minibuses setting off for Nepal. The whole of this Santa Croce district smokes with gas and carbon monoxide, Cinzano fumes and marijuana. Collapsing suitcases that have fallen off the top decks of buses like moraines from a moving glacier, the Japanese with their top-heavy Leicas, the 16mm film strewn over the ground, the mattresses and rolled-up sleeping-bags, bulging more with cooking utensils than with stuffing, everybody converges in this hotchpotch of humanity where people who have driven through the night try to glimpse Venice on a morning such as this, when the sun has not managed to pierce through the kilometres of dust.

Unlike the Basilica of St Mark’s, the Piazzale Roma is a cathedral of drivers. You have to choose between the museum and life.

NOTES

1. Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–89) was a Swiss artist and engraver widely admired for his precise and detailed portraits of Oriental people. [Tr.]

2. Which means broadly: “Whether I have the Palazzo Labia or not, I shall always be a Labia.” [Tr.]

3. Marcel Jouhandeau (1888–1979) was a prolific French novelist and essayist who in certain of his books (in particular, Chroniques maritales , 1935) provided a ruthless analysis of the difficulties of conjugal life and his relationship with his wife Élise. [Tr.]

4. And if they adorn the summits of your palaces / It is by right of virtue, not by right of conquest. [Tr.]

5. “ lo sarò un Attila per lo stato veneto .”

6. This was what I tried to explain to Paul Reynaud, as gently as possible, one spring evening in London in 1940, when he maintained that not a stone should be left standing in Paris. There had been four of us dining at Ava Wigram’s house, with Hore-Belisha; the British Secretary of State for War had arrived late after making a speech in the House of Commons and had immediately wanted to hear himself again, insisting that a wireless set be placed on the table, thereby making all conversation impossible. Hore-Belisha approved of Reynaud. Both men are dead; Paris remains.

WHO WOULD ATTEMPT to build Venice again? One man ventured to do so, Volpi, in full flight, in October 1917, anno fra i più tristi della storia d’ltalia . On land that one would hardly dare call firm, he constructed Italy’s second port, Porto Marghera, in a terrain that bred malaria, mosquitoes and frogs. It developed into two thousand solid hectares of refineries and factories producing aluminium or refined nitrogen.

In a few days’ time we shall celebrate the fiftieth anniver sary of this astonishing enterprise; in this very place, at the Doges’ Palace, the first Venice is to pay homage to the founder of the second, il signor conte Volpi di Misurata .

Having climbed the Giants’ Staircase, then the Scala d’Oro, I enter the Great Council room, and I stand beside the woman who was the constant and kindly shadow of the celebrated Venetian.

Seventy-two doges look down upon us, lined up between the victories won by la Serenissima that are painted on the walls. Facing one another are the Gothic bays giving on to San Giorgio Maggiore, bathed in the setting sun, and Tintoretto’s Paradise . Above our heads, as if sculpted from a massive piece of gold, the immense oval of the ceiling painted by Veronese pierces the joists that seem to be pushed upwards by the brushwork of the clouds towards a sky that is higher than the actual one; the structural details disappear beneath the golden profusion of this floating Bucentaurus .

The last time I had seen Volpi was in Paris, in his hotel bedroom, in 1943; I discovered a man who was worn out by events, and whose gigantic creation was being called into question from the Adriatic to Libya; within a quarter of a century everything had been lost. I thought again about what Philippe Berthelot had frequently told me, by way of justifying the long anti-Italian tradition of the Quai d’Orsay: “They’re a mediocre instrument, we shall never do anything with the Italians.” (That’s true of war, which is Death, but it’s not true of industry, buildings, agriculture, which are Life.)

The Venetians are made of stern stuff and are proof against the deluge. They always extricate themselves; their houses all have two exits, one on the water, the other on land.

A victory in Venice is worth a hundred victories anywhere else.

Tonight is very much a final victory for Volpi the Venetian. The whole of Venice is here: the Cardinal Patriarch brings the Pope’s blessing; Andreotti, that of the government; he reads a telegram from Saragat celebrating the “genius of the man”; the Under-Secretary of State to the Treasury pays tribute to someone who, as Mussolini’s Minister of Finance, and with the backing of the Bank of England and loans from Morgan, saved his country; the Syndic and the whole Municipality of Venice listen to an account of Volpi’s life over many reigns, not one of which witnessed an undertaking that could not be ruined: what Volpi wanted, fifty years ago, exists; the 100,000-ton and more oil tankers enter by Malamocco and arrive at Mestre. At home, nobody would mention his name; here, they think only of the glory of the very serene Serenissima; politics are forgotten; we are among Venetians; Italy is but one century old, Venice fifteen, and the old adage remains true: Veneziani, poi Cristiani! (Venetians first, then Christians).

OCTOBER 1970

YESTERDAY I WAS at the Venice Courthouse. A photographer from Chioggia was being tried, accused of holding arty parties, which were attended by young Venetian boys. Alerted by the number of cars with Treviso, Padua and Trieste numberplates that were being parked there at night, the Chioggia police burst into his studio; the guests fled through the windows. The man’s lawyer pleaded not guilty, Merlin’s law on prostitution not being applicable, according to him, to male prostitution.

8 OCTOBER 1970

AT THE FENICE, the first performance of Aretino’s Cortigiana , by the Teatro stabile, at the “Festival of Prose”. Two parallel “witticisms”: a man from Siena, a candidate for the cardinalate, is learning the art of becoming a courtier; he is brought on in a curious piece of machinery, a sort of oven for shaping courtiers; an amorous Neapolitan braggart ( gran vantatore ) arrives; a procuress, who is meant to smooth his path, substitutes the baker’s wife for the woman he idolizes. There were a great many secondary characters, the most successful being the caricature of a man of letters, attired in manuscripts, the pages of which were sewn on to his costume and hung down, making him look like a bookstall.

The performance was “perishingly” boring, as Lucien Daudet used to say. Dialogue in regional dialect, obscene allusions and anti-clericalism in the worst possible taste: “Here come the Turks! For fear of being impaled, everyone has fled, apart from the priests”; incomprehensible and ignorant comments on literature or contemporary politics. The actors declaimed for five acts, abusando del registro urlato ; dramatic art nowadays consists of nothing but exaggerated and bawled-out aggression; actors, whose job it is to “look as though” they are doing something, ought to be taught that they should look as if they are shouting, without actually doing so. If only they would give us Aristophanes, Calderón or Shakespeare, instead of constant Brecht. The result was the following, from this morning’s Corriere : “The audience, which to begin with was very large, disappeared during the interval.” “ Il pubblico, molto numeroso all’inizio, ha calato durante l’intervallo .”