Thirst (7 page)

Now, today, spared by the mercenaries, Alessandro staggers from Biaggio’s wall. He will, evidently, die someplace else. He advances along Calle Bognolo in the direction of San Marco, stopping at frequent intervals. When the siege began, the city was already depopulated. The wealthy and well connected had received advance word of the Austrians’ approach. As for himself, Alessandro knew that the city was threatened, but he did nothing to protect his person or his household, not out of courage or patriotism, but out of indolence. Or did he too put all his faith in the Republic, in the President, now the beloved Dictator, Manin?

With the citizens gone, the dogs have come out, and they slink along the walls and into the yards. The dogs are mangy—presumably, the more appetizing ones have been eaten—but they are not thin. They’ve found food, somehow. Perhaps the Austrians have contrived a way to feed them, in order to taunt us.

There are fires this morning. Black smoke plumes over rooftops from three distant quarters. The fire department, led by Manin himself, will rush to put them out, but not before more citizens are left homeless.

Manin has forbidden priests to ring handbells on their way to administer last rites; he fears the din might panic the population. Instead silence looms over the city, a thundercloud of hopelessness.

On the door of a bakery, Alessandro sees a sign: “This shop is closed because of the death of its proprietor.” Scrawled on the wall alongside that, he reads: “Viva La Republica!” and “Viva Manin!”

There is human feces in the street: the dogs sniff it for the most intimate scents of their masters, and then trot away. The excrement is runny, sour smelling, and entirely different from the excrement of other animals, Alessandro thinks. It is a shade less dark. Here on the next street is more shit, though firmer—and recognizably a man’s, showing a faithful model of his entrails. Alessandro considers the following: that each animal evacuates in a particular way, depending on the size and shape of its anus and the strength and contours of the muscles that deliver the excretion. Perhaps in the future doctors will invent an entire medicine based on fecal measurements, a discipline to rival phrenology.

It is on the next street that he sees his friend Donatello Bartini, who is married to his cousin Celia. Bartini is on his stomach, one of his arms splayed beneath him. Alessandro thinks of the many kindnesses Bartini has shown him in the past; he can recall his high-pitched, easy laugh.

The best life is the one that prepares you best for death. This is the life in which you gradually lose your ties to the earth: those to your parents, your siblings and cousins, your wife, your children, your comrades.
Rather than being struck down when you feel yourself to be most loved, it is better to lose your teeth, your hair, your eyesight, and then your loved ones and thus for your body to lose weight in increments, so that in the end you barely disturb the soil of the earth you tread. This is what has happened to Alessandro in the last few days, losing everything, but fortunately in such a fashion that he can hardly recall his former health and prosperity. Now he is ready to die. The angels of death shall come and he will set a place at his table for them.

A number of citizens have congregated at the Piazza, but they make no demonstration. They do not speak, not to Alessandro nor to each other. Occasionally, one of them looks up at Manin’s offices. They are humiliated. They have placed all their hopes in Manin, in the Republic, in democracy—that is, in themselves, and they have discovered themselves wanting.

And it is now that Alessandro sees the first of the balloons since the Madonna della Salute, dropping slowly down the front of the dictator’s palace. It precipitates at his feet, a taffeta sack about an arm’s length across, open at the bottom, where, attached to the bag by some stiff wire, is a brazier. A string from this assembly dangles below it to a little cotton bag. The bag spills open as it alights onto the pavement. He recognizes its contents immediately: gunpowder. Alessandro tries to laugh at the dreamy ingenuousness of this invention, but there is no breath in his lungs. As he seats himself in the street, a gust of wind lifts the package away and skitters it across the cobblestones.

Alessandro remains. Who knows how long he lies
there? He sleeps, but he does not dream. An animal, perhaps a dog, sniffs his crotch. Someone murmurs a few words over his head. He listens to them without comprehension. The words are Latin, but the speaker employs an entirely different language, in which these words mean something other than what they do in Latin. When Alessandro awakes, his body is stiff from the awkwardness of his position.

He stands, unsteadily. He wonders if he has left the house without his walking stick. He is convinced that some Croat has taken it.

He thinks he must now cross the city one more time. And he comes upon such trifling sights as rats the size of cattle, cats dressed in the Milan fashion playing bassoons while driving by in a four-by-four pulled by archbishops, angels in meal sacks, and his sister, whom he buried just last week. She says, “There are lamb chops in my chamber pot.” He kisses her on her lips; her breath tastes of anise. Several canals have been drained, and in the muck Alessandro sees the skeletons of his family and neighbors, some of which have lain there for centuries. Underneath the bones lie the roofs of the buildings of another city. Vienna perhaps.

In the Campo San Luca, Alessandro passes friends. They stare at him, horrified. Alfredo Scitelli sputters, “I dreamed that you were dead.” In fact, Alessandro knows that Alfredo is dead, but he politely replies, “I’m honored.” In Venice, of course, not all the suffering is done by men and women. For example, the still-red roses in the Contessa’s window box are being driven mad by the screams of her rotting gardenias.

A second balloon floats down to Alessandro’s feet. Others drift over the tops of the city, and he is glad to have lived long enough to see them, for this is a view well into the next century. The smoke he saw earlier was from the fires set by the balloons . . . Frederick gains no tactical advantage over our army. This is warfare against the populace: much more effective, and fitting, for we are a democracy and it is we free citizens who should pay for the follies of our government. Someday democracy will reign throughout Italy, all men will be victims, and all men will be held responsible.

In Paris last year free citizens chased Louis-Philippe to England; Metternich soon joined him there. Kossuth declared Hungarian independence. In Prague, Pavlacki organized a Slav Congress. In Berlin, rebels armed with paving stones battled troops. Frederick was forced to bombard Vienna itself. In Milan, the Austrians were repelled with military props taken from La Scala. But now the Austrians are coming back.

How beautiful, how graceful, these sacks of flame. On the next block one lands upon a pile of refuse. A smile crosses the loose skin of Alessandro’s face, which feels when he rubs it as if it were about to fall off his skull. The brazier lights the refuse, but the fire does not spread to the gunpowder, and Alessandro stands by it, savoring the odor of burning garbage.

He sees the future: these devices can be perfected to travel great distances, so that the Austrians can lay waste to our cities without ever leaving their country. This is a major advance in warfare, which can now proceed without morally implicating the combatants. In the
future, generals will eradicate whole cities while sipping their tea or writing memoirs about battles they will win after their own deaths.

Alessandro watches the balloons in their unhurried descent. Some interrupt their fall and, buoyed by a gust twisting around the square, return to the skies. He reaches out to touch one. As he does so, the cords that hang from it lean toward him and embrace and gently lift his desiccated body off its feet. He is not surprised by this, not even a little: everything since the first day of the siege has been wonderful—terrifying and wonderful.

The first moments of his ascent are vertiginous. While the balloon carries him off the ground very slowly, the cobblestones appear to rush away beneath his feet with great velocity. He thinks he sees himself being lifted; then he thinks he sees himself being left behind. For a few seconds or so, he can stretch his leg and tap the ground with his slippers, but then almost suddenly he is high enough above the pavement to fear being dashed against it. But he is not afraid.

From his height, three times as high now as, say, the San Marco campanile, Venice appears untouched by war. Here and there fires smolder, but otherwise the scene is sunnily placid. Alessandro sees the Austrians’ positions: there is a gun emplacement at Campalto, another on San Giuliano, ships all around the Lagoon. They’ve taken Fort Malghera; near Malghera is a novel construction, a set of cannons being mounted on a bed of timber, their breeches sunk into the earth to give them optimal elevation, and thus the greatest range. What a spy he would make, if only he could communicate his
discoveries to the military command, if only we still possessed a military command. A few cattle graze on the mainland; a vessel rests at anchor. Alessandro understands now that height is the advantage of the future, that in the next century or in the century after that, men will live in lofty towers flush against the sky, from which they will occasionally fall with terrific impact, making courtyards thrillingly dangerous places. Great armies of men will erect these towers, transforming the face of the earth, while they themselves remain wretched and ill used. And just as these balloons can carry bags of gunpowder, they can also carry armies, from one ocean to the next, from Africa to China, mixing bloods and languages, so that in the future the entire race of man will speak a single tongue, but this tongue will express nothing of importance. Wars, of course, will take place in the sky, as armies rush to conquer one cloud after another.

The cities of the future have already been built in the clouds; we may see their spires upon the rush of dusk in summer. Alessandro passes up through a cumulous boulevard. In the clouds the canals are filled with stones, over which gondoliers pull wheeled carts filled with water. The hot air that lifts the balloons of the Austrians powers the engines of the cloud cities, and in these cities the temperature of the streets is therefore several degrees warmer than what we are accustomed to, causing winters of warm, wet rain and miasmatic summers. Citizens pay to have their homes chilled or, to avoid the plagues brought by hot, close places, they sleep out on the streets without homes altogether. In the clouds, the build ings have multiplied in number and size, so that even a
greengrocer’s is as great as a cathedral on the earth. Alessandro looks at his arm and, as it has taken on the ethereal properties of the higher spheres, he can see through his skin the sheath of blood that lines the inside of his body and the quicksilver shimmer of his soul.

Here in the sky all objects are dissolved of their physical substance; their intrinsic nature is visible, revealing not only the souls of men but those of inanimate objects. What makes a boat a boat or a house a house becomes apparent above the clouds. Alessandro wanders through libraries of pageless, coverless books, each of the volumes simply the idea itself, shorn of words.

There are two realms, the earth and the sky, and laws that operate in one are void in the other. For example, the earth draws objects made of earth to earth—men, buildings, their tools—while the sky draws objects made of the sky to the sky. These include vapor, the hot air that lifts the Austrians’ balloons, and the human spirit. On earth we speak of cause and effect, implying that one follows the other. This is not true in the sky, where all effects are preordained, and the heavens wheel and blaze in an effort to propagate the cause—Alessandro’s death was long foretold, but only now can his killer be determined. In the heavens, angels float on milk, which comes from the tears of plants that grow in the dust between the stars, which are really little holes in the celestial dome through which spills the radiance of God.

In this sphere rivers flow uphill, night is lit and day is dark, the righteous prosper, bodies at rest tend to travel in eccentric circles, finches speak Dutch, children give birth to their fathers (but not to their mothers), and
over a candle flame water turns to an ice that reflects your future. The moon is made of this ice, and it reflects the pock-marked, blistered future of the earth.

Alessandro keeps climbing. Up! Up! The planet has dissolved to a bauble, the towers of the cities upon the clouds are no longer visible, and still he climbs, now he flies, now he hurtles. And at last he reaches the very last sphere. His body presses against it, and although his mass is no more than that of a trail of smoke, the firmament is just as insubstantial. It gives at first, like a length of cloth, but tautens as he continues his ascent. Alessandro is suddenly aware that there is no atmosphere from which to draw breath. He gasps, sucking at nothing. And then, as he is about to suffocate, pressed against the lining of the universe, there is a ripping sound, the fabric gives way, a new star is seen in the sky above Venice, and he is enveloped by a light so pure that it can only be heard.

H
arrah suffered a severe sleep disorder. Like most people, he would lie in bed at night, opening and closing his eyes for several minutes, waiting. As his eyelids grew heavy, however, Harrah would become aware of the pressure of sunlight against them. This happened every night. His eyes would flicker open for a moment, he’d find himself in his darkened room, and then they’d close again. Still the sun pressed against his eyelids, trying to force them open, even after he pulled the blanket over his face. Finally, he’d give up, and this time when he opened his eyes, it would be in an apartment washed with morning daylight, on the side of Manhattan opposite the one in which he had just gone to bed.

Then, of course, he dressed for work. He was employed by two midtown firms. It was an annoyance that the office he went to from his East Side apartment was located out of the way on Seventh Avenue, while the one he had to reach from Columbus Avenue was on Park. The worst aspect of his condition, besides the fatigue, was having to pay rent twice.