Paul Morand: Venices

SEPTEMBER 1970

A FASCINATING EXHIBITION at the Palazzo Grassi: “The History of the Venetian Lagoon”; the geology, hydrography, botany, the navigation, the Gondola through the ages; hunting, fishing, the Lagoon in Literature and History. There were excellent ten foot-long maps on parchment: one by Ottavio Fabri and Sabbadino, from the sixteenth century; another by Minorelli and Vestri from the seventeenth. A Venetian mosaic of the Flood, dating from 589. Some xylographs depicting the construction of a twelfth-century Venice; no machinery, no dredger, nothing but human labour; wooden stakes are being dug in by hand by two workmen lifting wooden mallets; it really was the republic of beavers of which Goethe spoke.

And what a surface! There are examples here of the silt, of reeds used for the first fences, of lichen hanging from some nameless mush.

Sometimes I attempt to drain the lifeblood out of myself by imagining Venice dying before I do, imagining her being swallowed up without revealing her features upon the water before she disappears. Being submerged not to the depths, but a few feet beneath the water; her cone-shaped chimneys would emerge, her miradors, from which the fishermen would cast their lines, and her campanile, a refuge for the last cats from St Mark’s. The vaporetti , tilting under the weight of visitors, would survey the surface of the waters where they coalesce with the mire of the past; tourists would point out to each other the gold from some mosaic, held afloat by five water-polo balls: the domes of St Mark’s; the Salute would be used as a mooring buoy by cargo ships; bubbles would float up from above the Grand Canal, released by frogmen groping around for American ladies’ jewels in the cellars of a submerged Grand Hotel. “What prophecy has ever turned a people away from sin?” said Jeremiah.

Venice is drowning; it may well be the best thing that could happen to her.

IN CRETE CANDIA (HERAKLION), APRIL 1970

ONE IS STILL in Venice, here, on the square where the lions on the Morosoni fountain belch forth from their mouths the melted snow from Mount Ida upon the citizens of Heraklion. It is a Venice that is far removed from the dreaded gusts of the bora, a Venice for the end of winter. On the square, the tables and chairs from the café spill out over the pavement and on to the road; I watch the passers-by; a bearded pope upon a puny donkey, people selling foreign newspapers that arrived on the midday plane, elderly peasants, still dressed in the Turkish clothes that were worn before the revolution, with a black turban wrapped around their grey heads, baggy trousers and scarlet boots made from goatskin.

Venice is returning to Greece what she stole from her; for more than four centuries she protected Crete, especially this town of Candia, which was besieged by the Turks for twenty-three years. This morning, I climbed the ramparts and clambered up on to the old red-brick parapets with their imitation fortifications, that first line of walls, built at the foot of Foscarini’s breaches, from which the scree crumbled, carrying down with it the jumble of centuries in an avalanche of stones emblazoned with the coat of arms of la Serenissima, Roman sarcophagi and curtains worn away with age.

El Greco left for the city of Toledo just in time, but Candia, confronted with Islam, stood firm. In those days, the white race was not ashamed of its hegemony, or of its Duke of Crete, who was appointed by the Adriatic doge; it scoffed at the wrath of Ahmet, the grand vizier who burned his prisoners alive. La Feuillade and the Due de Beaufort (the “roi des Halles”, and natural son of Henri IV), and the Hanoverian or Bohemian conscripts died here, for the West, adding their bodies to the ramparts built by San Micheli, the Venetian architect.

At dawn, facing the old port, the still sea beneath the sun-shades, a scene from a Claude Lorrain greeted me upon waking; everything was there, the vaulted docks that had been dug to house the old Venetian galleys, the crenellated battlements along the winding road, the black, tarred fishing-nets laid out in half-circles, the lateen sails with their oblique initials that impede the background view of the barbicans and casemates that had been demolished by earthquakes. The surface of the sluggish waters had not yet been scored by any propeller, or carressed by any oar; only an underwater swimmer’s flippers appeared between the breakwaters, like the dorsal fin of some submerged monster.

Venice had handed over her authority to other imperial powers; would the most recent of these, whose net was cast from Odessa to Mers el-Kébir, last longer than that of the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Normans, Byzantium, the Turk, or the British? The Venetian empire is still alive in Crete; here, she still holds sway; she is the “great presence” that the Italienische Reise talk about. It is as if Venice had never been expelled from the Orient; the day that Christopher Columbus discovered America was when la Serenissima chose to let herself expire; Vasco da Gama, by rounding the Cape of Good Hope, delivered the fatal knot; she survived for no more than three centuries, which is a great deal when one thinks that it only took a mere twenty years for the British Empire to become but a shadow of itself.

At midday I entered the bazaar, which was ablaze with oranges and lemons spilling from their baskets, peppers the colour of the Spanish flag, and kid goats with their throats slit. Between the arsenal and the cemetery the shops were parading their right to life, stretching out their medieval awnings, which were doing their best to support the overhanging moucharabies built of grey sycamore wood, dating from before Independence.

Gathered together around a glass of water outside the bars, with their bulging stalls and the cafés whose floors were pink with the dissected prawns consumed with apéritifs, were a dozen or so notable Cretans; the cheap restaurants hissed with the smoke from the frying. Clusters of hippies, perpetual castaways on the raft of leisure, drooled at the sight of cauldrons full to overflowing with snails cooked in onions, of grills upon which meatballs with lemon, or giouvarlakia , steamed alongside mizithra , cheeses made from honey, piled up in stacks.

In front of the Takio taverna, an English minibus, looking like a prehistoric cavern on Dunlop tyres, had given up the ghost; the foul stench of a public rubbish dump seeped from the open door, through which could be seen the remnants of gnawed bones on aluminium plates that had been placed on jerrycans; from the roof hung used espadrilles and plastic bags. A smell of pork in wine-flavoured sauce had enticed out of the vehicle a group of Nordic creatures, whose skin had turned to leather, and whose dark glasses were attempting to make a home for themselves in the fur-covered faces from which the only thing to emerge was an aubergine-coloured nose. In the winter the hippies had covered their naked torsos with a sheepskin bought from some shepherd or other on Mount Ida. I recognized these famished creatures: they were my English friends and my Yankee with the structuralist beard, the ones I had come across last summer in Venice. Exhausted by all the spare time they had on their hands, the little band were examining their pocket money, scrutinizing the menu in Greek and consulting one another, torn between the desire to eat something other than stolen chickens and the threat of arrest, followed by repatriation by the British consulate. (The Orthodox Church is not as indulgent towards vagabonds as the Roman Church.) Painted in white on the sides and on the back of their minibus, in three languages, were the words:

THE BOURGEOISIE STINKS

“A conventional fellow invites you to have some lunch,” I told them.

What would be the use of achieving my grand old age if one did not feel closer to a tramp outdoors in Crete eating two-drachmas’ worth of spaghetti from a paper plate, than to a conventional French family sitting at table in front of a haunch of venison braised in port wine?