The Wine-Dark Sea (38 page)

Here indeed was an explanation: at least within limits. She was connected with ‘publicity’ and was merely dressing the part. It was an explanation all too consistent with what Fern had seen of the place. He laughed a little too brashly, a little too brusquely.

But no doubt she was accustomed professionally to all gradations of oafishness.

‘Complimentary, of course,’ she said.

That
,
thought Fern, was like the Venice he had so far seen.

The woman was an Italian and did not speak words such as
complimentary
with ease.

‘Are you alone?’ asked the woman.

‘Yes,’ said Fern. ‘Quite alone. You must invite someone else. I don’t qualify.’

‘But you do qualify,’ said the woman. ‘The city of Venice wants to help lonely visitors.’

It sounded ghastly, but the woman spoke with an aspect of sincerity that at least made it possible to reply with
reasonable
self-respect.

‘Tell me more,’ said Fern.

‘We go in a gondola,’ explained the woman, speaking carefully, in the way of professional guides, as if to a backward child, ‘along the Grand Canal and across the Lagoon.’

It was not the manner in which Fern had visualised the realisation of his dream, but no doubt it was the dream which controlled the situation, and not he. Just then he could hardly be expected to think it all out.

‘We?’ enquired Fern. ‘How many will there be?’

‘Just you and I.’ She said it with the dignity that certain Italian women can bring to statements that many other women can utter only with a blush and giggle or excessive explanation.

‘And, of course, the gondolier,’ she added with a
beautiful
smile.

‘I shall be very pleased,’ said Fern. ‘Thank you.’ He
managed
to accept with some degree of the same simplicity.

‘There you are,’ she said, using perhaps not quite the right idiom, and pointing to a gondola. Fern, even though apprehensive of capsizing the unknown craft, managed to hand her in as if to the manner born. They settled side by side on the cushions. Her cloak and wide skirt beneath spread themselves over his legs. She had neither spoken to the
gondolier
nor, as far as Fern had noticed, even looked at him. He cast off in silence, and they were out on the canal, with the other side, the Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore looking disproportionately nearer almost of the instant. Fern tried to squint backwards in order to examine the gondolier, but it was difficult to see more than his shoes.

Fern squinted backwards a second time. They were not shoes. They were black feet.

But now there was nothing to worry about: indeed, when things were rightly conceived, there never had been anything to worry about. ‘I think I saw you earlier this evening,’ said Fern conversationally. ‘On one of the narrower canals.’

‘People often see me, but it is only a few that I can call,’ she replied in her not quite perfect idiom.

She began to describe the sights they were passing. Fern knew most of them already, and more about them than the basic information deemed appropriate for Anglo-Saxon
visitors
. All the same, he liked listening to her deep voice and was often charmed by the way she put things. The effect of her simple tale was quite different when one was alone with her, he felt, than it would have been if she had been speaking to a crowd of tourists. They entered the Grand Canal. Just visible across the water to the left was the bollard on which that same afternoon Fern had summed up his conflictual
condemnation
; had sentenced Venice to depart from his life the next morning.

Fern continued listening respectfully, but by now he could feel the warmth of her body, and the spreading of her stiff skirt over his legs was delightful. It was difficult to listen indefinitely to such topographical platitudes when there was so much else that might be said, and doubtless a limit on the time.

He must have conveyed something of discontent to her because it seemed to him that her flow of facts (not all of them facts, either, he rather thought) began to falter. As they were traversing the few seconds of darkness under the Ponte dell’Accademia, she said, ‘Perhaps you know Venice as well as I do?’ Her tone was not peevish but friendly and solicitous, and Fern decided at once that it was a most unusual thing for a professional guide, always fearful of losing all justification for existence if any real knowledge on the part of the visitor is admitted. Fern’s heart warmed to her further.

‘I’m sure not,’ he said. ‘I’ve been here just over two weeks. Just long enough to know that two months are needed or perhaps two years.’

‘If I go beyond the obvious things, I get into what you call deep waters.’

‘I can well imagine,’ replied Fern, not necessarily
imagining
very clearly. ‘Let’s stick to the obvious things.’

Fern, when he thought about it, could see and hear that the Canal Grande, most beautiful thoroughfare in the world (as so many have said), was its usual horrible self, loaded with roaring power-craft, congested with idiot tourists, lined with darkened palaces that should have been alive with lights; but he found that for once he was hardly thinking about it at all. He even reflected that he was glad the power-craft made his own progress slower; though it was, as ever in modern Venice, hard on the black gondolier.

‘It was all so beautiful once.’

Fern could hardly believe his ears. He had so far found it a point of honour among Venetians not to admit that things had ever been better than they were now. He believed, indeed, that most of them were quite sincerely unaware of the fact.

Fern took his companion’s hand. It seemed a very soft and unprofessional hand, and she let it lie in his undisturbed.

She spoke again. ‘There is a rich American woman further back who has collected all the ugliest things in the world. You could never believe how ugly and how many. She keeps them in a half-built palazzo, which she never finishes. I could not bring myself to spoil so nice an evening by pointing it out.’

‘I know about her,’ smiled Fern. ‘I’ve been there.’

‘Can such a woman be capable of love?’

They were slowly passing the Palazzo Rezzonico.

‘Never the time and the place and the one capable of love, said the English poet.’ Fern was rather surprised by himself.

A speed-boat full of white-shirted youths whizzed across their bows, almost capsizing them.

‘It will be better out on the Lagoon,’ said Fern’s
companion
, drawing up her feet. ‘Less interference and more real danger.’

Fern could not be sure what exactly she meant, but she seemed to find the prospect pleasurable, because her eyes gleamed for a second inside her hood as she spoke.

‘Why danger?’

‘At night there is always some danger out on the Lagoon.’ She said it placidly, perhaps with a faint potentiality of
contempt
. Fern did not risk making the potential actual.

However curious Fern was about her, he asked no
personal
questions. He probably felt that they could elicit only inappropriate answers, but more important was the fact that he found the relationship easy and delightful, just as it was. Particularly unwise would have been any reference to the many others with whom she must have made this excursion, ‘lonely people’: Fern knew it was an odious cliché. It had never before occurred to Fern as possible that what was, after all, companionship on a business basis could so touch his real feelings. Least of all was it the way in which he had dreamed it.

But now she seemed to have shrunk away into the
blackness
. Fern still held her hand, but he felt that the racket around them, the emptiness of the palaces, spread a
paralysing
infection of disillusionment. He too began to long for the Lagoon.

He decided that sincerity was best.

‘I really didn’t mean to stop you talking. I was enjoying it.’

‘I have nothing to tell which you do not know already.’ Her voice was muffled by the black garment into which she had withdrawn.

‘I used to have a dream,’ said Fern in something of a rush. ‘For years I dreamt that I was doing – exactly what I am doing now.’

‘Venice is everyone’s dream,’ she replied. ‘Venice
is
a dream.’

‘With no reality?’

‘The reality is what you call a nightmare.’

They were within two or three hundred yards of the Rialto bridge, high and wide with the marble bowers of ancient jewellers and poison-sellers. Here the scene on both sides of the canal was more animated; people sat at waterside café tables; a barge ploughed up and down bearing massed singers of ‘O Sole Mio’ and ‘Torna a Surriento.’ Many people were at least attempting to enjoy themselves.

‘The city fathers would hardly approve of your calling Venice a nightmare,’ said Fern, pressing her hand.

‘The city fathers, as you call them, are all dead. Everyone in Venice is dead. It is a dead city. Do you need to be told?’

Then Fern got it out; put it into words. ‘I need you to love me.’

Amid the glare of the café lights, and the booming of the drum, he lifted himself on to his elbow and looked down at her elusive face, cased in its dark hood.

She said nothing.

‘Make my dream come true. Love me.’

She still did not speak. Now they were actually abreast of the man with the vast drum. He shouted something
light-hearted
and scatological as the gondola toiled past the broken water. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

‘Make my life worth while. Redeem me.’

From the depths of her black cloak she looked into his eyes.

‘You said you dreamed no longer. Do you know why?’

‘I think I began to despair of the dream coming true.’

The dream stopped when you decided to visit Venice. Never visit Venice.’

She stirred, withdrew her hand, and kissed him softly with cool lips.

‘Set me free,’ said Fern. ‘Give me peace.’

In the long darkness beneath the Ponte di Rialto, he put his hand on the tight bodice over her breast. When they emerged, his arms were so fast around her that nothing could ever part them. The sorters in the Post Office on the
Fondamenta
dei Tedeschi perceived this and called shrilly. It was rare to see anyone in a gondola except the elderly and
exhausted
, with death making a busy third at the paddle.

There was no more for Fern to say except endearments. On and up past the dark palaces went the gondola, ploughing and labouring, tilting and rocking, as powered craft, large and small, shot past like squibs and rockets. The very extremity and eccentricity of the consequent, artificial motion added to the isolation as Fern made love on the deep, velvety cushions. Their black gondolier must have had the tirelessness of a demiurge, so regular and relentless was their advance.

‘You are the moon and the stars,’ said Fern. ‘You are the apples on the tree, the gold of the morning, the desire of the evening. You are good, you are lovely, you are life. You are my heart’s delight.’

The Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi came into sight.

‘Isolde!’ said Fern tenderly.

He had found a travelling companion.

‘Tristan!’ she replied, entering into the spirit of it.

‘Perhaps that was when Venice died?’ suggested Fern. ‘When
Tristan
and
Isolde
was composed here.’

‘If Venice every really lived!’ she retorted.

But the gondolier changed the subject for them by turning off the Grand Canal on to the Rio di San Felice. They were bound for the wide waters of the Lagoon.

In the Sacca della Misericordia, the almost square bay on the Venetian north shore, all was silent. There are no footways and in the buildings was only an occasional dim light,
suggesting
a rogue tenant, even now up to no good.

‘Is this where the danger begins?’ asked Fern.

She made no reply, but drew even closer. Beneath the dim, lilac amphora of the sky, she was all black or white, like Pierrot. The gondolier, with strokes as strong and regular as if he were swinging a scythe, swept them forward to their consummation.

Here, to the north of Venice, the Lagoon was
incandescent
. It seemed to Fern, who had never seen it like this before, a nearer word than phosphorescent, because the light which gleamed from the water, faintly around the gondola, but in distant patches quite brightly, was multicoloured, blue, white, yellow, pink; and always with lilac in it too, from the infusion of the sky. There were small glittering waves, and vast, indefinite areas of coloured froth or scum, like torn lace. Already it was a little colder.

They approached an island. Fern saw the white shape of a Renaissance church and, extending from it along the entire shore, a high wall, as of a prison or asylum. Ranged in the small piazzetta before the church door was a line of figures, indistinct in respect of age, sex, or costume, but each bearing a lighted Venetian lantern, a decorated light on a decorated pole, a device, here, now, and always one of the distinctive splendours of Venice. The figures seemed to agitate the
lanterns
almost frenziedly, in welcome to Fern and his
companion
, but from the group Fern could hear no sound, though by now they were less than a hundred yards away, and the whiteness of the church behind them was luminous as a leper’s face.

‘Isn’t it San Michele?’ whispered Fern. ‘The cemetery island, where at night no one stays?’

‘The dead stay. By this time, no one knows how many of them. All who permit themselves to be taken from their beds, dressed in the streets, and buried.’ She pressed her soft cool lips on his to dismiss the thought.

When Fern looked up once more, they were almost past the island. The lines of figures with the gorgeous lanterns lay far astern, though the lanterns were still tilting at odd, wild angles. It occurred to Fern that the figures were not expecting the gondola to stop, but had come out in order to speed it on its way, as it might be the barge of Bianca Capello. He saw that the lights were now higher in the air, as the poles were lifted joyously to their full length. But there was still no sound beyond the sounds of night and the sea.