Paul Morand: Venices

AUGUST 1969

THIS EXTREMITY of the Adriatic is a real lobster pot… All the refugees throughout History; within the arms of her lagoons the sea cradles a never-ending exodus : confronted with swamps that are impassable, Goths, Avars, Lombards have had to relinquish their prey; it was here that Philip-Augustus watched the Jews slip through his fingers, and where the Pope gave up trying to track down Aretino. Today, it is still Venice, rather than Crete and Istanbul, that the hippies, those scavengers after the Absolute, opt for before they set off from “foul” Europe.

I was coming out of one of those little delicatessens that are hidden away behind the Danieli, among the narrow streets at right angles to the quayside, where bedrooms as big as trunks can be rented by the day. Beneath the span of the Bridge of Sighs my eyes were dazzled by the setting sun which had transformed the entrance to the Giudecca, to the west of San Giorgio Maggiore, into a pool of rose essence.

I had just caught a whiff of a stench of goat: I was to leeward of three young men whose bare torsos had been scorched in the furnaces of the travelling life; they wore gold crosses around their necks, naturally. Their beauty was more offensive than ugliness. A protesting Valkyrie, her hair spread across shoulders gnawed by salt, appeared to be keeping them on a tight rein, reminiscent of some stone-age matriarchy; their armpits smelt of leeks, their buttocks of venison; their sleeping-bags rolled beneath their necks, they were stretched out, looking as if they had been shot, on the floor of a money-changer’s shop, against a background of international gold coins. They had let themselves go to such a degree that they seemed to have forgotten how to use chairs and they squatted down nimbly and naturally. Their fingers, the colour of iodine, rolled forbidden cigarettes; the chewing gum in the mouth of the third of them, an American, incorporated the national pastime of masticating with a naturally bovine brutishness. What could possibly restrain these creatures: some Bonaparte who had mistaken the century, a Chateaubriand who would never write a word, a Guatamelata without a destiny, a Lope de Vega without a manuscript? To imagine them at the age of eighty sent a shiver down the spine.

I came across them again on my way back from the Lido the following evening, seated Buddha-like with their life-belts on, at the back of a vaporetto ; these spineless young things did not know how to stand vertically.

We were approaching the Giardini. As we coasted along, the vapours ripped through the lagoon like scissors cutting through a length of silk; the water was frothy and whipped up with dirty snow like a real cappuccino .

I handed the Valkyrie my flask of grappa; the wretched ragamuffin grabbed it without a word of thanks.

“Man can revert to being an ape or a wolf in six months,” I launched forth, “but to produce a Plato, it must have taken millions of years… As for conceiving of Venice…”

“I shit on Venice,” replied the Valkyrie.

“You can leave that to the pigeons, Mademoiselle…” I said, taking back my empty flask.

1969

VENICE IN THE AUTUMN, disinfected of tourists (apart from the unbudgeable Buddha-like hippies, so lacking in any curiosity), her buildings decked in dust covers, cloaked in rain; it’s the least frivolous time. Venice in spring, when her paving stones start to sweat and the Campanile is reflected in the lake that forms in St Mark’s Square. Venice in winter, the time of the temperatura rigida and the congelamento , when the fire-wardens watch out for fires in the tall chimneys, and the wolves come down from the Dolomites. As for Venice in summertime, it’s the worst time…

1970

AN OVERCAST October sky this morning; an opaline grey, the colour of old chandeliers, so fragile that they sell marabou feathers with which to dust them.

1970

ON THIS OCTOBER EVENING, it was still summertime; the surface of the water was like a piece of shattered glass, with tug-boats wailing, transporter bridges scattering the flocks of seagulls that rested on the mud-flats, pilot ships towing sea-going oil tankers, ferries from the Lido disgorging their vehicles from both ends, and motor boats constructed of nickel, chrome and mahogany clattering against a surface hardened by speed; they are driven by elegant bare-chested Tritons who steer standing up — they are ashamed to steer sitting down in Venice. Everything seemed to be churning up the brackish water and to be drawing it towards itself as one might a sheet; this water disappeared beneath the hulls, just as in those regattas painted by Guardi in which the scores of gondolas transform the Grand Canal into a pontoon bridge.

THE SAME DAY

VENICE… rather than being a seminary of morbidezza is an academy of energy; Barrès might have been able to draw strength here by touching the water rather than the earth. That evening Venice-the-Red, where, in Alfred de Musset’s time, not a boat stirred, could offer nothing but deafening sirens, whipped-up waves and a sky perforated by jet planes; everywhere lights burned brightly, people shouted and everything was steaming with perspiration.

As we drew up in front of the Danieli, night was falling, but the constant hubbub continued; the flecks of froth clung to the bows until we reached the steps of the jetty. This screech of outboard motors wailing at five thousand revolutions per minute and the traffic pounding by all served to mount a challenge to that old literary hack whom we call Death; everything seemed to cry out: “Enough debris, enough relics, enough remains, put a stop to all this twilight! Enough of this moaning from such a gay city!”

In the old surroundings, life went on, rather like a play by Beckett performed in the amphitheatre at Nîmes.

Venice became once more what she had been in the fifteenth century, a sort of Manhattan, a predatory city of extremes, howling with prosperity, with a Rialto which had been the Brooklyn Bridge of its age, and a Grand Canal that was a sort of Fifth Avenue for millionnaire doges; her airfields recalled the fleets of galleys sponsored by bankers; an Italian city without any Italians, like New York without Americans, where the Blacks, in this case, were fair-haired Dalmatians, and the Jewish brokers Greek shipowners (for, in the vicinity of San Giorgio dei Greci, the Greeks, who had come from Rhodes and Chios after the fall of Constantinople, were the true monarchs of the Republic, and her most famous courtesans were Greek too).

Throughout History, Venice has shown two faces: sometimes a pond, sometimes the open sea, one moment peddling lethargy in bookshop windows, the next exploding into a far-flung imperialism (one that was so despotic that Christian Levant, weary of her harshness, came to prefer the Turk).

Venice will be saved; offices installed in the Palazzo Papadopoli, run by scholars from every nation, are dedicated to doing so: a Californian oceanographer, an expert in smoke pollution, has flown in from Los Angeles; a specialist in terrestrial sub-stratas from Massachusetts, and another, an earthquake engineer from the Soviet Union; it’s called the Bureau for the Study of Maritime and Terrestrial Movement. Venice’s fate lies in the hands of these men. Based on information received from computers, their great project is to close the three entrances to the lagoon with gigantic air balloons that can be inflated or deflated at will.

Due to the proximity of the two shores, tides in the Adriatic are much more violent and unpredictable that those in the rest of the Mediterranean; storms blow up as if inside a shell. (I was once nearly ship-wrecked, off Ancona, in 1920.)

Venice is sinking thirty centimetres every century, which is not much more than the rest of the world, but Porto Marghera and Mestre, by pumping out excessive amounts of water, have destroyed the natural balance of the lagoon.