The Wine-Dark Sea (37 page)

The Venetian dream?

Perched on his bollard, Fern realised with a start that he had been in Venice seventeen days, and not given a thought to his own dream.

During those seventeen days, he had not spoken to a single person except in the ways of triviality and cross-
purposes
. He never struck up acquaintance easily, but the
conflictual
impact of Venice, at once so lovely and so appalling, had transfixed him into even more of a trance than usual. He had wandered with a set stare; lost in a dream of another kind, a seemingly impersonal dream in which the dreamer had been the shadow. Big ships were passing quite frequently along the Canale della Giudecca to his left, into and out from the docks renewed by Mussolini. Unlike so much else, the ships were beautiful and alive at the same time. The scale of things contracted to the problems of one dreamer. Fern felt very lonely.

A manifest Englishman landed with an Italian youth from the
traghetto
at Fern’s rear. He was bald and barrel-shaped. His large moustache and fringe of hair were ginger. He wore a brown tweed jacket buttoned across the stomach, dingy grey trousers, and an untidy shirt with a club tie. One might see him presiding knowledgeably over a weekend rally of motor cars in Surrey or Hampshire.

He walked out at the end of the stone promontory,
dragging
the Italian boy (in open white shirt and tight, bright trousers) by the hand. The Italian boy was making a girlish show of reluctance. The Englishman, a few feet away from Fern’s bollard, pointed with his free hand to some object in the distance; something about which it was inconceivable to him that no one else should care, let alone a person for whom he himself cared so much. All the same, the boy did not care at all. He was no longer going through the motions of petulance, but stood quite still, looking blank, bored, resistant of new knowledge, and professionally handsome.

‘Damn it!’ said the Englishman, ‘You might show some interest.’

The boy said nothing. An expression of dreadful
disappointment
and wild rage transfigured the Englishman’s
unremarkable
face. He said something in Italian which Fern took to be at once bitter and obscene. At the same time, he threw away the boy’s hand as if it had turned glutinous in his grasp. He then strutted off by himself towards the Zattere.

The Italian still stood looking fixedly at the paving stones. Then he thrust one hand into the back pocket of his trousers and produced a neat pocketbook: possibly a gift from the Englishman. After examining the contents with almost comic care, he returned the pocketbook to its place and strolled off. In pursuit, Fern imagined; thought he did not turn round to see. Judging from many experiences since his arrival, he thought that were he to do so, the next approach might be to him. He had found it a situation that put him at a loss in all its aspects. He simply could not live up to what was expected of a lone Englishman in Italy.

By now he felt so alone that he almost wished that he could. Hitherto in Venice he had been neither happy nor unhappy but simply amazed; on occasion aghast. Now the recollection of his dream had coincided with the rapid
dissolution
of the perambulating philosopher in him.
Acclimatisation
to Venice had set in with a rush. The September breeze blew gently up the Canale di San Marco in Fern’s face; sweet and cool, as it sighed for the slow sickness of Venice’s stifling summer. The flashy motor-boats cackled and yelped around him, driving the gondolas to their death. Fern, thrust back upon his own life, passed his hand over his legs, his arms, his shoulders. He felt a pain he had almost forgotten during the years he had walked his tightrope.

What could Venice do for him but sadden him further? Fern decided to go home the next day; if the owner of the pension would permit him to depart ahead of his time. He rose, extended and contracted his legs, stumped up and down a bit, gazed for the last time upon one particularly
incomparable
Venetian prospect, and felt quite equal to weeping, had it not been for the self-consciousness of solitude in a foreign land.

He walked away.

That evening, Fern pushed his way along the Molo. He wanted no more unsettled business in his heart.

The owner of the pension had indicated that for a room in modern Venice, as for so much else, there is always a queue. He tried to charge Fern up to the end of the week, but did not try to keep him. Fern had already suspected that in the campaign between the visitors and the Venetians there are few clear-cut victories on either side.

Fern had even an excuse for his promenade. It was to be his last night in Venice, and, as he might have put it in his manly and practical aspect, ‘You can’t leave Venice without ever having been in a gondola.’ Gondolas may not last much longer, nor may people. But gondolas, being no longer very functional, are not much good without someone to love on the journey.

On the Molo, Americans stood about, japing one another uneasily or over-confidently; wondering how to fill in before flying on to Athens or back to Paris the next morning; questing for highballs or local vintages on the rocks. Uncontrolled Italian children and their plump, doting parents effortlessly dominated the prospect. Away to the south, over towards Chioggia, single lights gleamed romantically. The sky was turning to deep lilac and filling with festive, silvery stars.

Fern turned leftwards up an alley, where it was quieter, then wound about through dark courts and passages, like a beetle through a tome. Immediately he was alone, or almost so, among the great dark buildings, his mind returned to those small, elegant bedrooms and boudoirs at the top of the palazzo he had visited. The recollection of them made him shiver with the pathos of something so hopelessly
irrecoverable
that was still so hopelessly necessary. Thinking about them, feeling still the intensity of their atmosphere, he could smell the perfume of the Venetian decadence; that long
century
when the lion drowsed, awaiting Napoleon, the city fell irrevocably to pieces, and all the fashionable wore curious, enveloping masks, so that they looked partly like strange animals, partly like comedians, and partly like ravishers and ravished.

There was such a figure standing before him; dark and motionless against the rail along the side of a canal, which edged the small piazzetta Fern entered; neither quite in the light from the one lamp in the piazzetta, nor quite out of it. Fern slipped into a shadowy doorway and stared, silent and listening to his heartbeat.

On the other side of the canal loomed a formless stone structure, from all the windows of which seemed to shine an even, pale light, something between pink and blue; and Fern, whose hearing was at all times excessively acute, thought he could detect the faint echo of music and revelry seeping through the thick walls and closed casements. Then he realised that the pale light was the reflection of the late
evening
sky on the glass, and that the sound was no more than the general cry of Venice. He drew himself together.

Almost in silence down the canal came a gondola. Fern, however sharp his ears, could hear only the softest plash, plash, plash. Then the
ferro
came into view, and the gondola stopped by the figure against the railing. The gondolier seemed to be dressed in black. But Fern’s attention was
concentrated
upon the equally dark passenger; the person for whom the gondola had come.

At first, and in the most curious way, nothing more seemed to happen. The gondola just lay there in the faintly coloured dusk; with the gondolier almost invisible, and the presumed passenger still apparently waiting for someone or something, certainly making no motion to step aboard, indeed making no motion of any kind. Two middle-aged men, both dressed in light colours, crossed the piazzetta from the opposite corner, and proceeded in the direction from which Fern had come. They were talking loudly and simultaneously, in the usual way, and gave no sign of noticing the gondola and the figure by the railing. Of course, there was no reason why they should notice them. All the same, Fern felt that two or three minutes must have passed while the group remained motionless in dim outline against the vast stone building on the other side of the canal.

At least that length of time passed before it occurred to Fern that it might be for him they waited. He had set forth to destroy his dream (even though he had not expressed it quite like that) and thereby, as so often, might have wound up the mechanism for making it come true; because life goes ever crabwise, as the great Venetian, Baron Corvo, constantly proclaimed. Fern shrank back into his dark doorway. He feared lest the whiteness of his face give him away.

The strange set piece lingered for a few more moments. Then Fern realised that the figure which had been standing by the railings was now somehow in the gondola, and that the gondola was once more coming towards him. It glided down the side of the piazzetta, making only the ghost of a sound; the plash, plash, plash of the paddle might have been the wings of a night bird, or the trembling of Fern’s own heart muscles. Five or six gay little children ran across the piazzetta in the line of the two men in grey. They were heavily
preoccupied
with abusing and hitting one another.

Peeping out, Fern saw that the passenger was still
standing
in the gondola, somewhat towards the bow. The whole course of events was too fanciful, so that Fern’s only
resolution
was to withdraw. He was waiting until the
disappearance
of the gondola should make this possible. The gondola could hardly have taken more than a minute to pass, but before it had departed from Fern’s view, as he hid in his doorway, the standing passenger made a slight movement; from within the dark hooded cloak a woman looked straight into Fern’s pale face, and seemed to smile in welcome. In an instant, the gondola was gone.

A narrow
fondamenta
continued alongside the canal from out of the piazzetta. Fern ran to the corner and hastened after the vanishing boat, which seemed now to be travelling very much faster. As he sped on, his shoes clattering on the stones, he wondered if insidious Venice had promoted an insanity in him, a mad confusion between dream and dread. He was pretty sure that, if he should run at all, he should by rights run in the opposite direction. But having started to run, having begun such a disturbance of the night, he had to run on. He nearly managed to overtake the boat just as it was passing under the next bridge. One would have been
convinced
that the gondolier at least must have heard him and seen him, but the gondola slid on undeflected. Fern realised that beyond the bridge the
fondamenta
did not continue. He stood on the crest of the arch and watched. He did not care, had no title, to call after. The stones of Venice closed softly over the departing shadow.

And then, only twenty or thirty minutes later, something happened which explained these small but singular events.

Deep in thought, and troubled in soul, Fern strolled back to the wide promenade which faces the Canale di San Marco and is the principal waterfront of the city. The distance from the piazzetta of the odd events was not great, but in Venice, for better or for worse, one can seldom walk straight ahead and unobstructed for more than a few paces, and Fern, his mind in any case on other things, lost himself in a small way at least twice. In the end, he emerged on the Riva degli Schiavoni. Everything was brightly illuminated, the sky was perfect, and Fern reflected that, after all, Venice did look rather festive, even a trifle exalted, as she should do. But his mind was on his own loneliness, and on his dream: if, at this late hour, he had, after all, made a tiny concession to Venice, he wanted someone with whom to join hands on it, wanted that person badly. Even so, he stood still, uncertain whether to turn leftwards where it would be quieter, or rightwards where adventure was more likely. Now that the chance had gone, he very positively wished that he had spoken to the woman in the piazzetta. It could hardly have been a matter of life or death. Fern trembled slightly. He was indeed an irresolute creature. By now, reason told him, it could hardly matter less which way he turned.

He simply lacked the heart, the energy, the curiosity to wander off towards the darker area to the left; to take a brisk solitary constitutional along the front, safe except perhaps from cutpurses, as his father would certainly do, and think nothing of it, indeed be all the better for it. Fern turned towards Danieli’s (a line of American women leaned like beautiful wasting candles over the rail of the roof-garden, high above); towards the Piazza; towards life, in the commercial or Thomas Cook connotation of the word.

Within a minute or two, he thought he saw again the woman whose face he had seen so momentarily in the gondola.

She was standing by herself in much the same way at the edge of the canal, though this time it was the Canale di San Marco, almost the sea. She was still wearing the hooded black cloak, as in a picture by one of the Longhis, but was no longer so muffled in it. It looked to Fern that beneath it she was wearing a spreading, period dress. Despite the crowd, which had by no means ceased to push and bawl in his ears, he was really frightened. He did not put the thought into words within his head, but his thought was that this was an
apparition
, and that he was having a breakdown. The figure stood there so motionless, so detached from all those vulgar people, so spectrally apparelled; and, of course, so recurrent. As in the piazzetta, he stood and stared; not unlike a ghost himself. Everything faded but that single figure.

Then she walked steadily towards him, twenty or
thirty-five
yards, and spoke.

‘English?’

She really was dressed in an eighteenth-century style, and beneath her hood Fern could see piled-up hair.

‘Yes,’ said Fern. ‘English.’

‘The city of Venice would like to invite you for a gondola trip.’