by Jan Morris
Long ago, so the legend says, six men and a boy were staying at our particular cason. The men spent each night fishing, and the boy remained in the house and cooked. One morning the fishermen, returning from work, found the corpse of a man floating in the water. Hoisting it aboard, they laid it in the bows of their boat, intending to take it, after breakfast, to the Ponte della Paglia in Venice, where the bodies of drowned people were exhibited for identification. The boy, coming out of the house to greet them, saw this figure in the prow, and asked why they did not bring in their guest to breakfast. It was all ready, he said, and there was plenty for an extra mouth.
The fishermen had a truly Venetian instinct for the macabre. Peeling off their coats and entering the house, they told the boy to invite the stranger himself. ‘He’s as deaf as a post’, they said, ‘and awful stubborn. Give him a good kick and a curse, to wake him up.’ The boy did as he was told, but the man remained prostrate. ‘Give him a good shake’, the fishermen shouted, sitting down ribaldly at the table, ‘and tell him we can’t wait till doomsday for him! We’re working men, we are!’
Again the boy obeyed, and presently he returned cheerfully indoors and began to ladle out the food. All was well, he said. The guest had woken up, and was on his way. The fishermen’s flow of badinage now abruptly ceased. They stared at each other, say the story-tellers, ‘pallid and aghast’; and presently they heard slow, heavy, squelchy, flabby footsteps on the path outside. The door opened with an eerie creak; the corpse walked in, horribly stiff and bloodless; and by the time he had settled himself ponderously at the table, all those six churlish fishermen had been struck with a lethal chill, and sat before their polenta as dead as mutton. Seven dead men occupied the cason, and only the boy paddled frantically away to tell the tale.
One day I determined to visit the House of the Seven Dead Men: but no bricole mark the channels, the charts are notoriously vague, and early in the morning I went to San Pietro in Volta to find myself a pilot. Fishermen from the littoral, I discovered, no longer much frequented that part of the lagoon. Several, pointing out an island in diametrically the wrong direction, swore that it was the cason, they had known it since childhood. Several others admitted they did not know the way. One took a look at my boat and said kindly that he had other things to do. It was an aged, hirsute and wrinkled fisherman, an Old Man of the Lagoon, who finally agreed to a price, stepped aboard, and came with me.
It would be, he said, quite like old times, quite a little outing. He hadn’t been out there since the war, when he hid for a time from the Germans on a marshy reef near the cason. He was a talkative, jolly old man, wearing a slouch hat and geological layers of jersey: and he guided us merrily enough across the ruffled wastes of the central lagoon, the Vale of the Ditch of Low Water, the Small Vale of Above the Wind, where the seaweed lay only a few inches beneath our propeller, and swayed mysteriously with our passage. The day was grey and the wind cold, but as we voyaged the old man pointed out the landmarks – the Cason dei Mille Campi, a big stone lodge alone among the marshes; the distant white farmhouses of the mainland; the almost indistinguishable island of San Marco in Bocca Lama; Chioggia dim and towering to the south; the long line of Pellestrina growing vague and blurred behind.
The lagoon around us was deserted. The traffic of the big channels was far away, and only a few small shabby crab-boats lay at work in muddy inlets. Once or twice my pilot, who was not used to engines, ran us harmlessly aground: but presently we found ourselves in the deep water of the Fondi dei Sette Morti, the last stretch to our destination. Ah! what memories this stirred for the old man! Here his father had brought him as a boy, when he was first learning to handle a boat; and here, in the lean days before the war, he used to spend the long windswept night dredging the last possible mussel out of the mud; and over there, on that dank and blasted marsh-bank, he had hidden from the Germans, crouched beneath a canvas shelter, while his wife rowed out each week with his provisions; and just around this corner, between these shoals – port a bit here, it’s shallow, now back into the stream again – here, just around this corner, we would find…
But the old man’s voice trailed away: for when we rounded that marshy point, the cason was no longer there. That predatory, dissatisfied, restless, rapacious lagoon had been at work again. The water had risen above the shoals, and all that was left of the house was a sprawling mass of masonry, a pile of brick and rubble, through which the tide was already seeping and gurgling. The old man was astonished, but even more affronted. ‘Now why should a thing like that happen?’ he asked me indignantly. ‘Mamma mia! That house was there when I was a child, a fine big house of stone, the Cason dei Sette Morti – and now if’s gone! Now why should that have happened, eh? Tell me that!’
He was an urbane man, though, beneath his stubble: and as we moved away from that desolate place, and turned our prow towards San Pietro, I heard a rasping chuckle from the stern of the boat. ‘Mamma mia!’ the old man said again, shaking his head from side to side: and so we chugged home laughing and drinking wine, until, paying insufficient attention to his task, that fisherman ran us aground and broke our forward gear, and we completed the voyage pottering shamefacedly backwards, ‘Like a couple of crabs,’ said the old man, unabashed, ‘though even the crabs go sideways.’
EMBARKATION
Perhaps you are a millionaire, and can maintain your Venetian palace the year round, with your gilded gondola behind its grille, your bright-painted mooring posts, and the vivid blue curtains which, drawn aloofly across your windows, proclaim your absence in Park Lane or New England. The chances are, though, that one day you must pack your bags, pay your bills, give a farewell kiss to the faithful (and touchingly sniffing) Emilia, and sail away to less enchanted shores. Then a curious sensation overcomes you, as you pass among the retreating islands of the lagoon – a sensation half of relief, half of sadness, and strongly tinged with bewilderment. Venice, like many a beautiful mistress and many a strong dark wine, is never entirely frank with you. Her past is enigmatic, her present contradictory, her future hazed in uncertainties. You leave her sated but puzzled, like the young man who, withdrawing happily from an embrace, suddenly realizes that the girl’s mind is elsewhere, and momentarily wonders what on earth he sees in her.
For though there have been many scoffers at the Venetian legend, rationalists, sceptics and habitual debunkers, nevertheless the appeal of the Serenissima is astonishingly empirical. Nearly all its visitors seem to agree, when they leave Venice at last, that on the whole, and notwithstanding, it really is a very lovely place. An interminable procession of the talented has made the pilgrimage to St Mark’s, and been received into the Venetian state of grace. An army of visiting admirers has written its paeons – Goethe, Stendhal, Gautier, Hans Andersen, Musset, Charles Reade, Wagner, Taine, Maurice Barrès, Thomas Mann, Mendelssohn, Henry James, Rilke, Proust, Rousseau, Byron, Browning, Dickens, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Hemingway, Ruskin, Dante, Wordsworth, Petrarch, Longfellow, Disraeli, Evelyn, Shelley, Jean Cocteau – not to speak of George Sand, Ouida, Mrs Humphry Ward, Freya Stark and George Eliot, whose husband once fell, with an ignominious plop, from their hotel window into the Grand Canal beneath. Corot, Durer, Turner, De Pisis, Bonington, Dufy, Kokoschka, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Whistler have all painted famous pictures of Venice, and there is hardly an art shop in London, Paris or New York that will not offer you a sludgy prospect of the Salute by some less eminent practitioner.
Nietzsche, of all people, once said that if he searched for a synonym for music, he found ‘always and only Venice’. Even Hitler thought the city beautiful: he stayed at Stra, on the mainland, but he particularly admired the Doge’s Palace, so I was told by one of the custodians who escorted him around it, and legend maintains that he broke away from protocol to range the city by himself in the small hours of the morning (some say at a half-demented jog-trot). Garibaldi liked the Doge’s Palace, too, though not a man of artistic yearnings: he thought he saw a satisfying resemblance to himsel
f in the image of the heroic Admiral Veniero in Vicentino’s Battle of Lepanto. More slush has been written about Venice than anywhere else on earth, more acres of ecstatic maiden prose. Venice is paved with purple passages. But as John Addington Symonds once remarked, she is the Shakespeare of cities, unchallenged, incomparable, and beyond envy. Stockholm is proud to call herself the Venice of the North, Bangkok the Venice of the East. Amsterdam likes to boast that she has more bridges than Venice. London has her own ‘Little Venice’, in Paddington, where a notice on one irreverent householder’s gate warns visitors to ‘Beware of the Doge’. Venezuela was given her name by the conquistadores when they saw the amphibious villages on the Gulf of Maracaibo. Churchill himself did not object when an Italian admirer, trying to evolve a worthy translation for his title ‘Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports’, dubbed him the Doge of Dover.
All this strikes me as odd, for though Venice is obviously lovely, you might not expect her appeal to be quite so universal. The city undeniably stinks, for one thing; it can be disagreeably grasping of temperament, for another; its winters are cruel, its functions coarsened; its lagoon can be unpleasantly chill and colourless; its individual buildings, if you view them with a detached and analytical eye, range downwards from the sublime by the way of the overestimated antique to the plain ugly. I myself dislike most of the grandiloquent Grand Canal palaces, with their pompous façades, florid doorways and phallic obelisks. Many of the city’s celebrated structures – the Dogana, for instance, or the old prisons – would look undistinguished if deposited in Clapham or the Bronx.
Ruskin, who hated half the buildings in Venice, and worshipped the other half, wrote of San Giorgio Maggiore that it was Impossible to conceive a design more gross, more barbarous, more childish in conception, more servile in plagiarism, more insipid in result, more contemptible under every point of rational regard‘. Charlie Chaplin once remarked that he would like to take a shot-gun and knock the figures off the Sansovino library in the Piazzetta, deity by deity. Evelyn thought the Basilica ‘dim and dismal’. Herbert Spencer, the philosopher, detested the ‘meaningless patterns’ of the Doge’s Palace, the tesselation of which reminded him ‘of nothing so much as the vertebral spine of a fish’. D. H. Lawrence, taking a first look at the buildings of Venice, called it an ‘abhorrent, green, slippery city’: and I know just how he felt.
The allure of Venice, though, is distinct from art and architecture. There is something curiously sensual to it, if not actually sexual. ‘Venice casts about you’, as a nineteenth-century Frenchman put it, ‘a charm as tender as the charm of woman. Other cities have admirers. Venice alone has lovers’. James Howell assured his readers, in the seventeenth century, that if once they knew the rare beauty of the Virgin City, they would ‘quickly make love to her’. And Elizabeth Barrett Browning expressed some of this libidinous or perhaps narcotic rapture when she wrote that ‘nothing is like it, nothing equal to it, not a second Venice in the world’. Today the place is loud with motor boats, tawdry with tourism, far from virginal: but when I lean from my window in the early morning, when the air is sea-fresh and the day unsullied, when there is a soft plash of oars beneath my terrace, and the distant hum of a ship’s turbines, when the first sun gleams on the golden angel of the Campanile, and the shadows slowly stir along the dark line of the palaces – then a queer delicious yearning still overcomes me, as though some creature of unattainable desirability is passing by outside.
I think this is partly a matter of organic design. Venice is a wonderfully compact and functional whole: rounded, small, complete, four-square in the heart of its sickle lagoon like an old golden monster in a pond. Corbusier described the city as an object lesson for town planners. The variegated parts of Venice have been mellowed and diffused, like the two old palaces on the Grand Canal whose roofs intimately overlap above a minute alley-way. Her architecture is a synthesis of styles – eastern and western, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque – so that Ruskin could call the Doge’s Palace the central building of the world. Her canals and streets fit neatly into one another, like the well-machined parts of an engine. Her symbols are simple but catching, like advertisers’ images – the sleek winged lions, the golden horses, the Doge in his peaked hat, the twin pillars on the Molo, the ramrod Campanile, the lordly swing of the Grand Canal, the cobra-prows of the gondolas, rearing in the lamplight. Her slogans are exciting and memorable – ‘Viva San Marco!’ ‘Lord of a Quarter and a Half-Quarter’, ‘Pax Tibi Marce’, ‘Morto ο Vivo’, ‘Com’ era, dov’ era’. Venice has the feeling of a disbanded but still brilliant corporation, with the true ring and dazzle of capitalism to her ambiance. You feel, as you stand upon the high arch of the Rialto, that you can somehow capture the whole of her instantly in your mind – the whole of her history, all her meaning, every nuance of her beauty: and although her treasures are inexhaustible, in a way you are right, for Venice is a highly concentrated extract of her own reputation.
It is partly a matter of light. The Venetian painters were preeminent in their mastery of chiaroscuro, and Venice has always been a translucent city, a place of ravishing sunsets and iridescent mornings, monochromatic though its long winters can seem. Once it was vivid with gilded façades and frescoes – the Doge’s Palace used to glow with gold, vermilion and blue – and here and there, on decomposing walls or leprous carvings you may still see faint lingering glimmers of the city’s lost colour. Even now, when the Venetians hang out their flags and carpets in celebration, put up their gay sunshades, light their fairy-lamps, water the geraniums in their window-boxes, sail their bright pleasure-boats into the lagoon – even now it can be, at its sunlit best, a gaudy kind of place. The atmosphere, too, is remarkable for a capricious clarity, confusing one’s sense of distance and proportion, and sometimes etching skylines and façades with uncanny precision. The city is alive with trompe-l’oeil, natural and artificial – deceits of perspective, odd foreshortenings, distortions and hallucinations. Sometimes its prospects seem crudely one-dimensional, like pantomime sets; sometimes they seem exaggeratedly deep, as though the buildings were artificially separated, to allow actors to appear between them, or to give an illusion of urban distance. The lagoon swims in misty mirages. If you take a boat into the Basin of St Mark, and sail towards the Grand Canal, it is almost eerie to watch the various layers of the Piazza pass each other in slow movement: all sense of depth is lost, and all the great structures, the pillars and the towers, seem flat and wafer-thin, like the cardboard stage properties that are inserted, one behind the other, through the roofs of toy theatres.
It is partly a matter of texture. Venice is a place of voluptuous materials, her buildings inlaid with marbles and porphyries, cipol-lino, verd-antico, jasper, marmo greco, polished granite and alabaster. She is instinct with soft seductive textiles, like the silks that Wagner hung around his bedrooms – the velvets, taffetas, damasks and satins that her merchants brought home from the East, in the days when all the ravishing delicacies of the Orient passed this way in a cloud of spice. When the rain streams down the marble façades of the Basilica, the very slabs seem covered in some breathtaking brocade. Even the waters of Venice sometimes look like shot silk. Even the floor of the Piazza feels yielding, when the moonlight shines upon it. Even the mud is womb-like and unguent.
The Venetian allure is partly a matter of movement. Venice has lost her silken dreamy spell, but her motion is still soothing and seductive. She is still a dappled city, tremulous and flickering, where the sunlight shimmers gently beneath the bridges, and the shadows shift slowly along the promenades. There is nothing harsh or brutal about the movement of Venice. The gondola is a vehicle of beautiful locomotion, the smaller craft of the canals move with a staccato daintiness, and often you see the upper-works of a liner in stately passage behind the chimneys. There are several places in Venice where, looking across a canal, you may catch a momentary glimpse of people as they pass the openings in an arcade: their movement seems oddly smooth and effortless, and sometimes an old wom
an glides past enshrouded in black tasselled shawls, and sometimes a priest strides silently by in a liquefaction of cassocks. The women of Venice walk with ship-like grace, swayed only by the gentle wobbling of their ankles. The monks and nuns of Venice flit noiselessly about its streets, as though they had no feet beneath their habits, or progressed in a convenient state of levitation. The policemen of the Piazza parade slowly, easily, magisterially. The sails of the lagoon laze the long days away, all but motionless on the horizon. The chief verger of the Basilica, when he sees a woman in trousers approaching the fane, or a short-sleeved dress, raises his silver stick in a masterly unhurried gesture of dismissal, his worldly-wise beadle’s face shaking slowly to and fro beneath its cockade. The crowds that mill through the narrow shopping streets do so with a leisurely, greasy animation: and in the winter it is pleasant to sit in a warm wine shop and watch through the window the passing cavalcade of umbrellas, some high, some low, manoeuvring and jostling courteously for position, raised, lowered or slanted to fit between one another, like the chips of a mosaic or a set of cogs.
And in the last analysis, the glory of the place lies in the grand fact of Venice herself: the brilliance and strangeness of her history, the wide melancholy lagoon that surrounds her, the convoluted sea-splendour that keeps her, to this day, unique among the cities. When at last you leave these waters, pack away your straw hat and swing out to sea, all the old dazzle of Venice will linger in your mind; and her smell of mud, incense, fish, age, filth and velvet will hang around your nostrils; and the soft lap of her back-canals will echo in your ears; and wherever you go in life you will feel somewhere over your shoulder, a pink, castellated, shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinnacles of the Serenissima.