What Do Women Want? (24 page)

When the Austrians built the railroad bridge connecting the mainland to Venice in 1846, they ended the city’s island status. But it is still almost as hard to get to as if it were an island. (Venice, built on one hundred eighteen small islands, is crisscrossed by about one hundred fifty canals and spanned by about four hundred bridges.) Even the most aristocratic Venetian, with the grandest family palazzo, must carry his own bags out of the railroad station to the
vaporetto
or through the maze of little streets that surround the large parking area at Piazzale Roma and wend his way through the labyrinth of Venice on foot in order to get home again. Of course, there are
motoscafi,
water taxis, but they are wildly expensive and their drivers often are querulous about taking passengers to the smaller canals when the tide is low. As one friend says, “Venice seems to take delight in humbling us all, reducing us to footsore pilgrims dependent on our strong legs and comfortable shoes.” If you are lucky enough to have a friend who meets you with a boat, then you sail into Venice in glory, feeling for all the world like Marco Polo come home. Otherwise everyone walks.

What was I searching for on all my trips to Venice? At first I thought it was Venetian art—painting, sculpture, architecture, music—all of which Venice has in glorious abundance. Of course, I loved Palladio, Longhi, Vivaldi, Albinoni, Bellini, Carpaccio, Veronese, Tintoretto, but as a writer I was also drawn to the gentle style of life that creation requires, a style far easier to achieve in Venice than in a city like New York.

I began spending summers in Venice with my family, renting apartments or houses there, and I grew to love the easy pace of the days, the way one activity flows into the next, the quiet, the light that glimmers inside as well as outside the houses. Venice may be the only city on earth where you can see the shimmer of canal water on a ceiling. So uniquely Venetian is this phenomenon that there is even a phrase for it in the Venetian dialect:
fa la vecia,
which translated literally, means “to do as the old woman does,” or “squint.” If your bedroom faces a canal, you wake up to this delicious shimmer on the ceiling, provided you do that very American thing—sleep with your shutters open. You also awaken to the joyous sounds of water lapping on stone and to bells pealing from the city’s many campaniles. Even the sounds of Venice are kind to the ears—compared, say with the sounds of New York.

But Florence also has bells, if not lapping water, and Rome has grander fountains. And not every Venetian bedroom is situated on a canal. What, then, makes Venice so special? I think it finally has to do with its being a moated city, cut off from time. Not only do many places in Venice look exactly as they did four or five hundred years ago, but the ghosts of decades and centuries past seem trapped within the ancient stones, trapped by the water that moats the city. For certain susceptible souls, Venice seems to cast a spell, making them return again and again until, somehow, they unwork the spell or succumb to it. “I want to die in Venice,” said a beautiful Brazilian lady I met once at a garden party. “And so I know I want to live in Venice.”

To die in Venice may seem romantic, but alas, the final resting place may be shockingly impermanent. The Jews lie peacefully in the Antico Cimitero Israelitico out on the Lido, in sacred ground given them by the Venetian Republic in 1386, but the Christians who are buried on the island of San Michele have only a twelve-year lease, after which their bones are dug up and flung upon something the Venetians ominously refer to as “the bone island.” Only the famous dead of San Michele are exempt from this fate. Ezra Pound, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, will not be displaced so long as their fame lasts. This is another Venetian irony. Fame is important not only before but after death. Venice is in some ways like Hollywood. Even dead, one is only as good as one’s last reviews.

After many trips to Venice, a novel began to be born for me out of the stones. It started, like my historical novel,
Fanny,
with a sense of place. As
Fanny
was a sort of homage to eighteenth-century literature and the landscape of England, so my Venetian novel was born out of my love for Venice and my sense that the stones held a story for me.

The story took shape, little by little, like a mosaic. The overall picture was not clear to me at first. But as I came back, year after year, writing purely for my own pleasure in Venetian notebooks with marbleized covers, I discovered a heroine who was a Shakespearean actress, who had come to Venice to make a film of
The Merchant of Venice,
and who, through a series of strange incidences and coincidences, finds herself back in the past (with a sixteenth-century adventure to pursue before she can return to her own time). As I wrote my novel in Venice and its surroundings, and as I read every book about the city I could lay my hands on, I had the sense that Venice was using me as an amanuensis, as she had used many writers before me—and will use many more after me.

Since Venetians love to share the love of their city, my Venetian friends were wonderfully helpful with research. Marino Zorzi, the director of the Marciana Library, shared with me the volumes and volumes of handwritten diaries of Marin Sanudo, Venice’s great Renaissance voyager. Count Girolamo Marcello introduced me to the state archives of the Serenissima, housed in a library in his palazzo since the fall of the Venetian Republic, in 1797, and gathering dust there awaiting her resurrection (at which time the Marcellos must restore them to the state). Finally I was taken on a tour of the Arsenale by Maurizio Crovato, an expert on Venetian boats. Before I could be admitted, I had to endure a security check more suitable for the NASA space center than for an arsenal that has been virtually a museum for centuries. Venice may no longer be the terror of the tides, but she relinquishes her image as a great imperialist power slowly, if at all.

On a freezing afternoon a year ago, I wandered through the Arsenale trying to imagine it in its heyday, when a galley could be assembled and equipped in one day. Such traveling back and forth in time is somehow easier in Venice than in other places. In fact, that is one of the reasons writers love to work in Venice, whether they are writing about the city or not.

Some writers come to Venice to submerge themselves in their own pasts. “We have been coming to Venice for some twenty years,” the late Leo Lerman told me once, “and in these last years, I’ve been working on a long book of memoirs.” Then, as if quoting from the work-in-progress, he said: “Venice, seeming so remote from the Manhattan of my long, long ago childhood, is closer to that childhood than the Manhattan in which I live today. I hear the island sounds, I smell the sea and the salt air, and I am plunged into my remote past. Above me I see the skies of my early boyhood. I am transported. Then, too, in Venice there is also the stable, intricate Proustian social structure that I imagined as I rode high on the upper deck of the Fifth Avenue bus past the mansions of the powerful and great. . . . These mansions frequently derived from the Venetian palazzi I look out on every day from my windows on the Grand Canal.”

When I began my novel about Venice, I knew I was following in a venerable tradition, but at first I didn’t realize how venerable. The Italian scholar Marilla Battilana suggests that for English writers, “Venice itself has become almost an archetype.” It represents the distant Oriental city, a Xanadu reached by means of a perilous sea journey, a labyrinthine place to which one voyages in search of love but in which instead one encounters subterfuge, disguise, and betrayal. According to Battilana, writers through the ages created what might be considered a “composite myth of Venice”; they have also immortalized Venice as the city of justice, a city where a wise sovereign dispensed a higher justice than can be found elsewhere in the sublunary world.

Venice was apparently first mentioned in English literature in the fourteenth century, in a book called
Mandeville’s Travels.
At that time it was already seen as an exotic place, a sort of European Cathay to which one traveled en route to the Holy Land. But the city’s literary reputation for sin and depravity began with the Elizabethan Roger Ascham, who in his book
The Schoolmaster
(1570) so inveighed against the lechery and depravity of Venice that he made all Englishmen eager to visit the city. “I learned, when I was at Venice,” wrote Ascham, “that there it is counted good policy, when there be four or five brethren of one family, one only to marry, and all the rest to welter with as little shame in open lechery, as swine do here in the common mire.” If that wasn’t designed to lure lusty young Englishmen down from London, what was?

And down they came. Thomas Nashe, a contemporary of Shakespeare, not only was lured to Venice but left and wrote a book called
The Unfortunate Traveller
(1594), in which he took the Venetian myth even further along. Fornication and deception thrive in Nashe’s Venice, and another major element in the composite myth of Venice is introduced: master and servant exchange identities in order to savor the Venetian mysteries. Inevitably they encounter Venetian justice and find it both severe and Solomon-like.

It was Shakespeare, however, who established forever the Venetian connection between love and justice (
The Merchant of Venice
) and the Venetian connection between love and death (
Othello
). The inamorata and the judge are, in fact, fused in
The Merchant of Venice
—and disguise and hidden identities are important to the action. With Shakespeare, the myth of the lagoon city is complete and its two poles are established. In the comedies, love mates with justice (“The quality of mercy is not strain’d”); in the tragedies, love mates with death (“I kiss’d thee ere I kill’d thee”).

After Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Coryat, Sir Henry Wotton, Thomas Otway, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Oliver Goldsmith, Lord Chesterfield, all added to the myth of Venice. But it was with the Gothic novelists, the so-called pre-Romantics, that Venice truly came into her own for Anglo-Saxon writers. Ann Radcliffe set
The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794) in a Venice she had never seen. It was clear that if Venice had not existed, it would surely have been invented for the Gothic tales of virgins in jeopardy that have proved to be a durable literary genre even in our own time.

To the Romantic poets Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth (Keats never got to Venice), Venice meant something more: a place to reflect on the lapsed glories of ancient civilizations, to muse gloomily on the passing of all mortal things, and to ponder the eternity of the poetic spirit. The decadence of Venice was the focus, and Venice herself became a moral lesson for the English—showing how their country, too, could decay if they didn’t watch out.

To modern writers from Henry James to Thomas Mann, Venice has been the city of love and death, and this association has been echoed by contemporary filmmakers. Venice is the place where artists go to be reborn (but often die), the place where love yields to death, and the waters close, mercifully or indifferently, over all. Of the two poles of the mythical Venice shaped for us by Shakespeare, we have chosen the tragic pole. It is hard to imagine a contemporary novel or film set in Venice that is not Gothic, macabre, replete with ghosts and mirages.

It is also hard to tell how much of the city’s spell is life and how much is literature. The two are by now so intertwined that it is impossible to untangle them. Walking the streets of Venice in a writer’s fog, one can imagine Shakespeare coming to the ghetto to research
The Merchant of Venice;
Byron swimming home along the Grand Canal after a fete, with his servant rowing behind him, carrying his clothes; Browning staying on alone in the Ca’ Rezzonico after Elizabeth Barrett’s death; Henry James writing in the Palazzo Barbaro, then taking a stroll in the Campo Santo Stefano below. That Venice has so often sat for her literary portrait is, in fact, a part of her essence. She is like some grand decrepit prima donna surrounded by aging portraits of herself, or an old movie star showing you her yellowing clippings; she is the world’s dowager city.

Contemporary writers also find Venice enormously compelling. Joseph Brodsky, Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy, and Jan Morris have written wonderfully evocative travel books about her.

What troubles the writer in Venice is the same thing that delights her: Everything that can be said about Venice has already been said by somebody. Henry James even exulted in this fact. “It would be a sad day indeed when there should be something new to say,” he wrote. Gore Vidal quotes this with evident satisfaction in
Vidal in Venice.

In our disposable twentieth-century society, Venice matters more than ever. Compared with a New York that compulsively rebuilds whole neighborhoods every three or four decades, Venice seems to be permanence itself. But she, too, is in peril—that has always been part of her allure. The water is rising (or the city sinking, depending on which expert you ask). Hydrocarbon pollution from Mestre, Venice’s industrial neighbor, has weakened the stones beyond redemption. The canals, no longer cleaned the way they used to be, are filled with muck to a height of several feet.

Whenever the perilous high tides hit, they reactivate the eternal discussion about saving the city from the ravages of twentieth-century industry. Many Venetians believe that the canal dug in the lagoon to accommodate large oil tankers has opened Venice to the fury of the tides in a way never before possible. The mythical Venice is imperishable, but the physical Venice is another story. Its survival may depend upon a decision to banish the large oil tankers, thus allowing the lagoon to resume its previous level. No such decision has yet been made, and the chronic dilatoriness of the Venetian authorities may well doom the city to the fate of Atlantis.

My Venice is the Venice of winter, the Venice of Dorsoduro, the Venice of fog. Walking down the Zattere in
la nebbia,
wearing rubber boots against the high water, one finds it hard to tell where terra firma leaves off and sky and water begin. The city seems to hang in the air like a mirage. Sounds bounce off the waters and deceive you with their closeness or farness. Figures appear and disappear around corners. The past beckons. It is quite possible to believe that it can take you and never give you back.