Paul Morand - Venices

I often feel jealous of lovers of the open road; they provide substance for a whole variety of dreams that Balzac described as: “the life of a Mohican”, and they remind me of our own life in 1920, of the way we heaped insults on society, our need for destruction and our defiant challenges scrawled on posters at the time that the Treaty of Versailles was bleeding Europe to death; they make me relive our attitude of “to hell with everyone”, “to blazes with everything”. But as for this lot, what will they do when they have finished wandering along the verges of non-existence? I make fun of them, I feel sorry for them, I envy them.

I asked them about how they spent their time: “We are reinventing Man’s relationship with the Earth,” was their reply.

I was expecting to see emerge from the minibus the British Valkyrie who, having consumed my grappa straight from the bottle, said she had no time for Venice; I could see again her blue eyes seeped in mascara beneath her headband, her mahogany lips and, beneath a Carnaby Street frock so long that it mopped up the spittle on the ground, her large feet, cracked and filthy, and her silver-painted toes.

Their mouths full and belching forth garlic, the wandering Pithecanthropi, having accepted my invitation to lunch, recounted how they had cremated their companion in the ancient manner, on the shores of the Libyan Sea, as recently as Christmas, on a morning when, after consuming a great deal of mastic resin, ouzo, raki and heroin, she had not woken up. She was the daughter of an ecclesiastical peer, a life peer… “That’s actually what explains why she wanted to do away with herself… Basically, she suffered from not being the daughter of a hereditary lord,” said the driver of the minibus (Magdalen and BBC accent) as he scratched a head of hair that was as greasy as a poodle’s; “People can say what they will, but Burke’s Peerage was always her little red book…”

1971

TRIESTE, VILLA PERSEPHONE

THE VENICE-TRIESTE TRAIN puffs away for two hours as it follows the new motorway that links the two cities: Jesolo, Aquilea, Monfalcone. There are skyscrapers amid the cornfields, hidden canals in the vineyards, out of which rise up purple-tinged osiers and the stumps of willow trees. North of Venice industry extends indefinitely, stretching up the boot of the peninsula up to the top of the thigh, as far as Trieste.

I cross the city from which Stendhal, suspect and barely tolerated, fled as frequently as possible to Venice, on “unauthorised transfer” (this Foreign Office, Personnel Department style survives still), as soon as he had drawn his salary as consul sans exequatur , the Austrian police resented the bold Jacobin innovations of his Histoire de la peinture ; this was the Stendhal who, in January 1831, was beginning a short story, Les Mesaventures d’un Juif errant , whose hero kept all he possessed in a violin case, and who, after each disaster that befell him, started again with noth ing; a penniless Stendhal who was waiting for Louis-Philippe’s government to pay him his wages so that he could buy shirts and who, like Joyce later on, was growing bored here; both men were biding their time awaiting the great regrading of human beings that is known as death. For Beyle, in Trieste, just as in Milan and Civitavecchia, it was always a case of an ill wind; it was one of fate’s ironies that this eternal loser should have had ancestors whose name was Gagnon [ gagner means to win]; what winnings could there be for someone who always took the wrong turnings in life? Beyle only ever loved Italy, which gave him the pox: “Kiss the lady,” his mother told her little boy, aged five; instead, he bit the beautiful lady.

The Grand Canal, Trieste

Through the villa’s old Austrian postern gate, blinded by some tame turtledoves flying past, after crossing an old-fashioned park I reach the house belonging to my two female cousins by marriage that clings to a spur out of which some depressed-looking trees, one on top of another, are searching for air, hemmed in as they are on all sides by twenty-storey blocks of flats that take advantage of the lack of foliage to peer out, between the bare branches, to see what is happening among their neighbours. It is the setting for a novel by Boylesve or Mathilde Serao. Quincunxes of rheumatic plane trees, their ancient scars filled with cement; the sea in the background; down below, the invisible city rumbles and weeps and murmurs, waiting for the moment to devour this old neighbourhood which makes its skyscrapers feel ashamed.

Intersected by two terraced ornamental ponds, and with box hedges shaped into balls, the path continues to climb up to the steps and towards the verandah of the Maria-Theresa dwelling, its pediment surmounted by some Vertumnus or other, eaten away by lichen, and flanked by fake Gothic towers from the time of the Emperor Franz-Josef, a noble residence from which the black smoke of its oil-fired heating system was now rising into the morning sun.

I come across my recluses, returning from their vegetable garden, carrying leeks in their baskets and holding between two fingers the first lady’s slippers, which they have picked in their latest luxury, a greenhouse for orchids. At table in the vast dining-room, where the Viennese silverware, a relic of long-vanished banquets, Héléne’s maternal grandmother — a grey tulle boa round her neck and with her hair cut short and very curly in the style of 1875 worn by the Tsarina Maria Feodorovna and her sister, Queen Alexandra of England — gazes down on the ritual of the midday dinner (with soup), and supper , eaten at half past six in the evening.

Trieste is a strange pocket of civilisation indeed, a city that conceals itself, with a population that is silent, reticent and fearful, and which still has a flavour of bygone times, surviving as if she were an exception, her tail between her legs, embarrassed by her Latin character in the midst of the blond Slovenes, the new conquerors from the opposing shore.

My cousins link every general political matter to news from a member of their family, one that is dispersed widely from Canada to Bombay, or to those of it who were left behind after the anguish brought about by dictatorships of the left or the right.

“The Trautt… you know: they were shot by the Nazis and thrown into a common grave…”

“Calliroe has just been thrown out of Alexandria, and given six hours’ notice…”

“Aristides’s memoirs have been banned in Athens…”

“Uncle André died in Vienna during the war, but what a wonderful way to go: he was listening to Tristan for the umpteenth time!”

“Dimitri is still doing hard labour on the Danube… When the Liberation came, he was able to identify his daughter because of a bracelet she wore on her arm.”

On the menu for the day is chicken fried à la triestine , which reminds me slightly of the way they cook it in Virginia, and it is brought in ceremoniously by their old Dalmatian servant who, in 1944, opted to be Italian rather than become a Yugoslav. Seen from Trieste, Venice is the southernmost point of civilization.

“Martha Modi in Parsifal , now that was quite something!”

“Karajan is no longer the figure he was twenty years ago…”

“It’s the soothing effect of that French woman…”

“What a mess she made of The Valkyrie !”

“Bertha’s spending the summer at Irène’s…”

“Sophie’s in Rome…”

“Athenai’s is expecting her second, in Salzburg.

“And Hilda’s having hers in February, in Marseilles…”