The Planet on the Table (2 page)

“Until even you have trouble understanding that one, hey Mr. Joyce?”

“Smartass.” Always up on the latest in slang, he was, and in five languages too. He put down his book (the
Wake
? still puzzling over it? I couldn’t tell) and swung his walking stick around, pointed it at me. It really was quite a thorny stick. “The point is, you must press yourself! You must go beyond what you thought yourself capable of…”

“You mean I should push the outside of the envelope, I should seek new worlds, and go boldly where no man has gone before?”

“Smartass.” He poked the stick at me. Shook his head. “Being an American has no doubt destroyed your mind. This book…” he nudged the bronze volume with his foot; was that my book he had been reading?
The Planet in the Snow
? “All these bizarre distortions from the real… Well, I like that part of it, actually. And you must solve the esthetic problems of your time, it’s not my problem thank God. But listen! You asked me what you should do—do you want to bear what I say?” And he jabbed me a couple of times with the end of the stick.

“Yes.”

He leaned toward me, looked me right in the eye with those circular bronze specs. “Go back down there, and try again.”

After that we only talked about his time, which he was much more comfortable discussing. He told me some hilarious stories about Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach, and tore up Dublin one more time, with a great nostalgic longing in his voice. “But I’d not be buried there, not on your life!” Of course not; The exile still, and always. We laughed over the Zürichers and their great passion for order—the tram conductors we had both seen, sticking their beads out the window, waiting to take off until the plaza clock second hand swept up to the top… And he told me about writing
Finnegan’s Wake
, drawing on cardboard with colored crayons, so he could see the letters; the pained laughter tore out of him, creak, creak, creak! I questioned the wisdom of that particular project, and, made irritable by all those years sitting out in the snow, he got angry with me. “You haven’t given it enough!” he cried. In his agitation he even stood up, squeak!, and pounded his walking stick over his sitting block, as if to soften it. “That’s the best book I wrote, and you won’t even work at it!” And watching him, I thought that that faith in his work, fierce, unshakeable, was his real lesson to me. Fascinated, I pressed to see more of it; he began reminiscing about the difficulties of getting the book printed properly, and I said, “Typos, in
Finnegan’s Wake
? How could you tell?”

And with a metallic laughing roar of a shout, he thwacked me. That stick of his had more thorns on it than I cared to face, and I had to beat a retreat: he took off after me. If anybody had been up there that day, they would have seen a strange sight: a figure in a bright green suit and running shoes, chased among tombstones by a little nearsighted bronze man wielding a stick. But the good Swiss know better than to visit a cemetery in a snowstorm, and there were no witnesses. He chased me all the way home.

y the time Carlo Tafur struggled out of sleep, the baby was squalling, the teapot whistled, the smell of stove smoke filled the air. Wavelets slapped the walls of the floor below. It was just dawn. Reluctantly he untangled himself from the bedsheets and got up. He padded through the other room of his home, ignoring his wife and child, and walked out the door onto the roof.

Venice looked best at dawn, Carlo thought as he pissed into the canal. In the dim mauve light it was possible to imagine that the city was just as it always had been, that hordes of visitors would come flooding down the Grand Canal on this fine summer morning… Of course, one had to ignore the patchwork constructions built on the roofs of the neighborhood to indulge the fancy. Around the church—San Giacomo du Rialto—all the buildings had even their top floors awash, and so it had been necessary to break up the tile roofs, and erect shacks on the roofbeams made of materials fished up from below: wood, brick, lath, stone, metal, glass. Carlo’s home was one of these shacks, made of a crazy combination of wood beams, stained glass from San Giacometta, and drainpipes beaten flat. He looked back at it and sighed. It was best to look off over the Rialto, where the red sun blazed over the bulbous domes of San Marco.

“You have to meet those Japanese today,” Carlo’s wife, Luisa, said from inside.

“I know.” Visitors still came to Venice, that was certain.

“And don’t go insulting them and rowing off without your pay.” she went on, her voice sounding clearly out of the doorway, “like you did with those Hungarians. It really doesn’t matter what they take from under the water, you know. That’s the past. That old stuff isn’t doing anyone any good under there, anyway.”

‘Shut up,” he said wearily. “I know.”

“I have to buy stovewood and vegetables and toilet paper and socks for the baby,” she said. “The Japanese are the best customers you’ve got; you’d better treat them well.”

Carlo reentered the shack and walked into the bedroom to dress. Between putting on one boot and the next he stopped to smoke a cigarette, the last one in the house. While smoking he stared at his pile of books on the floor, his library as Luisa sardonically called the collection: all books about Venice. They were tattered, dog-eared, mildewed, so warped by the damp that none of them would close properly, and each moldy page was as wavy as the Lagoon on a windy day. They were a miserable sight, and Carlo gave the closest stack a kick with his cold boot as he returned to the other room.

“I’m off,” he said, giving his baby and then Luisa a kiss. “I’ll be back late—they want to go to Torcello.”

“What could they want up there?”

He shrugged. “Maybe just to see it.” He ducked out the door.

Below the roof was a small square where the boats of the neighborhood were moored. Carlo slipped off the tile onto the narrow floating dock he and the neighbors had built, and crossed to his boat, a wide-beamed sailboat with a canvas deck. He stepped in, unmoored it, and rowed out of the square onto the Grand Canal.

Once on the Grand Canal he tipped the oars out of the water and let the boat drift downstream. The big canal had always been the natural course of the channel through the mud flats of the Lagoon; for a white it had been tamed, but now it was a river again, its banks made of tile rooftops and stone palaces, with hundreds of tributaries flowing into it. Men were working on roof-houses in the early morning light.

Those who knew Carlo waved, hammers or rope in hand, and shouted hello. Carlo wiggled an oar perfunctorily before he was swept past. It was foolish to build so close to the Grand Canal, which now had the strength to knock the old structures down, and often did. But that was their business, in Venice they were all fools, if one thought about it.

Then he was in the Basin of San Marco, and he rowed through the Piazetta beside the Doges’ Palace, which was still imposing at two stories high, to the Piazza. Traffic was heavy as usual. It was the only place in Venice that still had the crowds of old, and Carlo enjoyed it for that reason, though he shouted curses as loudly as anyone when gondolas streaked in front of him. He jockeyed his way to the basilica window and rowed in.

Under the brilliant blue and gold of the domes it was noisy. Most of the water in the rooms had been covered with a floating dock. Carlo moored his boat to it, heaved his four scuba tanks on, and clambered up after them. Carrying two tanks in each hand he crossed the dock, on which the fish market was in full swing. Displayed for sale were flats of mullet, lagoon sharks, tunny, skates, and flatfish. Clams were piled in trays, their shells gleaming in the shaft of sunlight from the stained-glass east window; men and women pulled live crabs out of holes in the dock, risking fingers in the crab-jammed traps; fishermen bawled cot prices, and insulted the freshness of their neighbors’ product.

In the middle of the fish market, Ludovico Salerno, one of Carlo’s best friends, had his stalls of scuba gear. Carlo’s two Japanese customers were there. He greeted them and handed his tanks to Salerno, who began refilling them from his machine. They conversed in quick, slangy Italian while the tanks filled. When they were done, Carlo paid him and led the Japanese back to his boat. They got in and stowed their backpacks under the canvas decking while Carlo pulled the scuba tanks on board.

“We are ready to voyage at Torcello’?” one asked, and the other smiled and repeated the question. Their names were Hamada and Taku They had made a few jokes concerning the latter name’s similarity to Carlo’s own, but Taku was the one with less Italian, so the sallies hadn’t gone on for long. They had hired him four days before, at Salerno’s stall.

“Yes,” Carlo said. He rowed out of the Piazza and up back canals past Campo San Maria Formosa, which was nearly as crowded as the Piazza. Beyond that the canals were empty, and only an occasional roof-house marred the look of flooded tranquility.

“That part of city Venice here not many people live,” Hamada observed. “Not houses on houses.”

“That’s true,” Carlo replied. As he rowed past San Zanipolo and the hospital, he explained, “It’s too close to the hospital here, where many diseases were contained, Sicknesses, you know.”

“Ah, the hospital!” Hamada nodded, as did Taku “We have swam hospital in our Venice voyage previous to that one here. Salvage many fine statues from lowest rooms,”

“Stone lions,” Taku added. “Many stone lions with wings in room below Twenty-forty waterline.”

“Is that right,” Carlo said. Stone lions, he thought, set up in the entryway of some Japanese businessman’s expensive home around the world… He tried to divert his thoughts by watching the brilliantly healthy, masklike faces of his two passengers as they laughed over their reminiscences.

Then they were over the Fondamente Nuova, the northern limit of the city, and on the Lagoon. There was a small swell from the north. Carlo rowed out a way and then stepped forward to raise the boat’s single sail. The wind was from the east, so they would make good time north to Torcello. Behind them Venice looked beautiful in the morning light, as if they were miles away, and a watery horizon blocked their full view of it.

The two Japanese had stopped talking and were looking over the side. They were over the cemetery of San Michele, Carlo realized. Below them lay the island that had been the city’s chief cemetery for centuries; they sailed over a field of tombs, mausoleums, gravestones, obelisks that at low tide could be a navigational hazard… Just enough of the bizarre white blocks could be seen to convince one that they were indeed the result of the architectural thinking of fishes. Carlo crossed himself quickly to impress his customers, and sat back down at the tiller. He pulled the sail tight and they heeled over slightly, slapped into the waves.

In no more than twenty minutes they were east of Murano, skirting its edge. Murano, like Venice an island city crossed with canals, had been a quaint little town before the flood. But it didn’t have as many tall buildings as Venice, and it was said that an underwater river had undercut its islands. In any case, it was a wreck. The two Japanese chattered with excitement

“Can we visit to that city here, Carlo?” asked Hamada.

“It’s too dangerous,” Carlo answered. “Buildings have fallen into the canal.”

They nodded, smiling. “Are people live here?” Taku asked.

“A few, yes. They live in the highest buildings on the floors still above water, and work in Venice. That way they avoid having to build a roof-house in the city.”

The two faces of his companions expressed incomprehension.

“They avoid the housing shortage in Venice,” Carlo said. “There’s a certain housing shortage in Venice, as you may have noticed.” His listeners caught the joke this time and laughed.

“Could live on floors below if owning scuba such as that here,” Hamada said, gesturing at Carlo’s equipment.

“Yes,” he replied. “Or we could grow gills.” He bugged his eyes out and wiggled his fingers at his neck to indicate gills. The Japanese loved it.

Past Murano the Lagoon was clear for a few miles, a sunbeaten blue covered with choppy waves. The boat tipped up and down, the wind tugged at the sail cord in Carlo’s hand. He began to enjoy himself. “Storm coming,” he volunteered to the others, and pointed at the black line over the horizon to the north. It was a common sight; short, violent storms swept over Brenner Pass from the Austrian Alps, dumping on the Po Valley and the Lagoon before dissipating in the Adriatic… once a week, or more, even in the summer. That was one reason the fish market was held under the domes of San Marco; everyone had gotten sick of trading in the rain.