Next morning when I woke up the sunlight was in the window and things were all right, but I could not walk across that part of the floor where my aunt had come up through the tiles.
I was afraid to cry after that night, since crying might bring her back to taste the sweetness or to scold me. But it was lonely in the house now that she was buried and gone. I had no idea what to do without her. The neighbor came in and talked about finding me work, and gave me food again; but the next day a man came, who said he had been sent by a creditor. He took away the chest of clothes and bedding. Later that day, in the evening, he came back, because he had seen that I was alone there. I kept the door locked this time. He spoke smoothly at first, trying to make me let him in, and then he began saying in a low voice that he would hurt me, but I kept the door locked and never answered. The next day somebody else came, but I had pushed the bedstead up against the door. It may have been the neighbor’s child that came, but I was afraid to look. I felt safe staying in the back room. Other people came and knocked, but I never answered, and they went away again.
I stayed in the back room until at last I saw the door that my aunt had gone through, that day. I went and opened it. I was sure she would be there. But the room was empty. The loom was gone, and the distaffs were gone, and no one was there.
I went on to the corridor beyond, but no farther. I could never find my way by myself through all those halls and rooms, or understand the patterns of the stars. I was so afraid and wretched that I went back, and crawled into my own mouth, and hid there.
My aunt came to fetch me. She was very cross. I always tried her patience. All she said was, “Come on!” And she pulled me along by the hand. Once she said, “Shame on you!” When we got to the riverbank she looked me over very sternly. She washed my face with the dark water of that river, and pressed my hair down with the palms of her hands. She said, “I should have known.”
“I’m sorry, Aunt,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Come along, now. Look sharp!”
For the boat had come across the river and was tying up at the wharf. We walked down to the wharf among the reeds in the twilight. It was after sunset, and there was no moon or stars, and no wind blowing. The river was so wide I could not see the other shore.
My aunt dickered with the ferryman. I let her do that, since people always cheated me. She had taken the obol off her tongue, and was talking fast “My niece, can’t you see how it is? Of course they didn’t give her the fare! She’s not responsible! I came along with her to look after her. Here’s the fare. Yes, it’s for us both. No, you don’t,” and she drew back her hand, having merely shown him a glimpse of the bit of copper. “Not till we’re both safe across!”
The ferryman glowered, but began to loosen the painter.
“Come along, then!” my aunt said. She stepped into the boat, and held out her hand to me. So I followed her.
The First Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner to the Kadanh of Derb
What you ask of me, my lord, is manifestly impossible. How can one person describe a world? One may indeed use a small pencil to describe a large circle, but if the circle is so large that one cannot make out the curve of it even from the top of a tower, why then the pencil will wear out before it has fairly begun its task. How many tones can one voice take? How can I describe even a single rock, and which rock should I describe? If I began by telling you that the Earth is the third planet of a system of nine, orbiting a middle-sized yellow sun at a mean distance of 93 million miles, with a 365-day period of revolution and a 24-hour period of rotation, and that it has a companion moon, what would I have told you but that a year is a year, a month is a month, and a day is a day, which you know already?
But since I know that you know that what you have been pleased to ask of me is impossible, and yet that you have asked it neither lightly nor cruelly, all I can do is answer; knowing that you know that my answer, in all its words, may mean nothing in the end beyond: Forgive me.
A moment ago as I glimpsed from the tail of my eye the enormous task that awaits me, like a mountain range to be climbed, it occurred to me that there may be an ulterior motive to your request. In asking me to describe my world to you, you may not be seeking information about my world at all. You may not plan to listen to my words, but only to the silences between the sentences, from which you will learn a good deal about your own world. If this is the case, I have no objection; indeed I prefer the arrangement. My job then is not to describe my world in general terms such as apply to all worlds, the language of astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., but rather to dwell upon the individual and transient, the fortuitous and peculiar; not to describe the class of flowering plants, but to mention the acrid odor of a Cecile Bruner rose full-blown on a balcony overlooking a great bay encircled by the lights of cities on a mild, foggy evening of September; not to give an outline of the evolution of intelligence or the course of human history, but to tell you, perhaps at considerable length, about my great-aunt Elizabeth. No general historical narrative, not even a close examination of the westward migration of the white peoples as it culminated and ended in the treks of the pioneers across the Great Plains, the Rockies, the Sierra, to the Pacific Shore, would give you an honest conviction of the necessity of the existence of my great-aunt Elizabeth. Even if I carried the narrative into such details as the fortunes of the individual families of the settlers of Wyoming, the existence of my great-aunt would continue to appear fortuitous. Only if I were to describe her, her life, her death, might you gain some understanding of the absolute necessity of her existence, and, through that, perhaps some comprehension of that millennial movement to the west which ended on the beaches of an immense fog-breeding sea; and, through that, perhaps a new understanding of some ancient migration of your own people, or the lack of any migratory movements in the history of your people; or of the nature of failure, or the character of your own great-aunt, or your own soul.
My lord, I see that instead of apologising and procrastinating I should simply thank you for the utterly unexpected and welcome opportunity to talk about my great-aunt, and begin at once to do so. It is not an opportunity often given to the Second Officer of a ship of the Terran Interstellar Fleet. But I do not think I will begin with my great-aunt. She is a difficult subject, and it has occurred to me, as I gain the courage to take a few quick glances directly at the appalling mountains which I am to climb (and from whose summits what fog-bound ocean will I see?), that it does not matter where I begin, and that I need not even stick precisely to the facts. Whatever I tell you, if you are listening to the silences between the sentences, you will hear the truth. As in music, when one has caught the rhythm, the pattern of the sounds and silences, then one hears the tune. There is, after all, only one tune I can sing. So I shall begin with a fairy tale.
Once upon a time there was a city. All other cities of all times and places were alike in many ways. This city was unlike them all, in many ways; and yet it manifested more fully than any of the others the Idea of a city. It was populated by birds, cats, people, and winged lions, in roughly equal proportions. The lions were all literate. Seldom did one see a lion without a book in its paw. The cats were illiterate, but highly civilised. Observing a large family group at ease in the shrubbery of a shady garden fenced from all intrusion, or a ritual confrontation of toms on the moonlit stones of a city square, or the leisurely progress from roof to roof of a silken and silvery maiden, one might well conclude not only that the city had been built for, but that the art of living in it had been brought to perfection by, the cats. But as soon as one looked at a lion one would have to question this; for, with all their resemblances to the cats in form and feature, the complete tranquillity of the lions, their universal expression of benevolent pride and conscious mastery, surely indicated a state of mind transcending mere happiness, approaching joy. You might see the corpse of a cat floating under a bridge along with soft-drink bottles and rotten oranges, but looking up from that sorry sight yo
u would see by the steps of the bridge a lion frowning beatifically through his mane, his stone wings folded; for what better place could he ever fly to?
It is easy to assume that the birds were the least happy inhabitants of the city. Many of them lived in cages. These prisoners certainly did not appear to be unhappy, singing ornate cadenzas in the style of Vivaldi from dawn to evening across the narrow ways, pecking at their birdseed and staring rapt at their little yellow reflections in the Christmas-tree ornaments hung in their airy cages. But all the same, they lived in cages. The pigeons lived free, but only as sturdy beggars. Daily they answered the summons of the bells for their handout, and in between handouts they pestered the tourists for more handouts. Perhaps it was their resentment at being thus reduced to the status of dependents, disenfranchised, their obscure anger at having been given few trees to perch in and few dangers to flee from, that made their excrement so corrosive. Whatever their motive, the pigeons were destroying some of the most exquisite elements of the city’s fabric, by shitting persistently and ruinously on the perishable stone of cornices, pinnacles, carvings. Not even the lions could escape the pigeons. In this work of destruction the pigeons were, however, surpassed by the people, whose factories on the nearby mainland emitted vapors far exceeding the corrosive powers of the most class-conscious pigeon, and whose motorboats were furiously engaged in trying to sink the city before it crumbled.
For the quality in which Venice differed most clearly from all other cities and yet in which it exemplified and described them all, every one, most exactly, was its fragility.
A city, a splendid, old, crowded, active city full of thousands of busy lives, that might be destroyed by a pigeon—or a motorboat—or a wisp of gas? Ridiculous!
But then what is it that destroys cities? Why have the mighty fallen? Look, and you find a toy horse; a brass key; a couple of men chatting over wine; a change in the weather; the arrival of a few Spaniards. Nothing at all. A pigeon, a motorboat, a click on a Geiger counter.
The first lesson of Venice, then, is mortality.
Misread by Germans and other barbarians from the north (the city has always been besieged by Germans, and was in fact founded out in the deepest part of its lagoon in an effort to remove itself from the compulsive visitations of Langobard tourists—an effort which failed, in the long run), this perfectly straightforward message has been interpreted, with all the magnificent obtuseness of Teutonic thought, to mean that because Venice is more than usually mortal therefore Venice is a city of death, of dying, of disease, decadent, a city without healthy business, surviving like its pigeons as a parasite on visitors, a fever-dream city of morbidity, a place where aging pederasts go to die. This is, of course, rubbish. What is most mortal is most alive. There is no place in the world where the green beautiful murky tides of life run so high, where one is so vividly aware of the presence of living birds, cats, lions, and people walking, talking, singing, quarrelling, rolling metal shop blinds up and down, cooking dinner, eating breakfast, getting married, holding funerals, transporting Coca-Cola and zucchini from place to place in Coca-Cola and zucchini boats, making speeches, playing radios and musical instruments, selling electrified yo-yos that glow like fireflies as they roll up and down their strings in the dusk before the doors of the great cathedral, playing truant from school, kicking soccer balls, fighting, fishing, kissing, throwing tear gas at demonstrators, demonstrating, shortening their life expectancy by blowing incredibly fragile baubles of colored glass, etc., etc.—in other words, living. It I were an aging German pederast with a death wish, I should feel a terrible fool in Venice. Right out of my depth.
I have heard two Venetian housewives on the steps of a green canal discuss the qualities of various makes of electric food blenders for twenty minutes straight, in detail and with enormous vigor. The conversation was not notable for hectic and death-haunted ecstasy. Indeed, one reason why life is so strong there is that you can hear it. In other cities it is drowned out by the sound of motors. What you hear in the other cities is the noise engines make. What you hear in Venice, mostly, is the noise people make. The birds, too; the cats when they are in love; the lions make no noise worth mentioning, though the book they hold says softly, Pax tibi, Maree, evangelista meus. And thus the silence of Venice is the noisiest silence imaginable.
When I have been out in the vacuum between the stars, and have listened to it and been terrified, I have found a way to pull free from that absorbing terror (which Pascal mentioned, although he had never flown in a space ship) and rejoin myself: I pretend that I am waking up rather early in the morning in a hotel room in Venice. At first it is still, deeply still, the stillness of the level, misty, bluish-green lagoon, the stillness of the small canal between stone house walls around the corner. I know that the bridge near the hotel entrance is reflected, its arch making a perfect circle, in that stillness. Beyond that bridge is another bridge, and another beyond that, each borne up entire by its reflection: air, water, stone, glass, one. A pigeon up on the tiles outside the dormer window goes oocooloo roo. That is the first sound; that, and the faint whicker of wind in the pigeon’s wings, alighting. Footsteps come down the street past the hotel entrance, across the arched bridge, die away: the second sound, or pattern of sounds and silences. Somebody breaks some glass down in the courtyard of the hotel. They always break glass in Venetian hotel courtyards in the morning; it may be a ritual observance of the dawn, or a way of getting rid of the baubles unsold to tourists in the gewgaw shops yesterday, I do not know. Maybe it is how they wash dishes in Venice. A startling sound, but not unmusical, followed by loud swearing and a laugh. By now I am almost safe from the terrors of the hygienic void. Down in the courtyard a radio is playing while they sweep up the glass. Somebody on one of the bridges shouts something I cannot quite understand in the Venetian dialect to someone on another bridge; and then the great bells of the Campanile and the small bells of three neighborhood churches all undertake more or less simultaneously to invite parishioners to early Mass. It is all music, and I am home safe, listening to the profound, extraordinary silence of the city of life.
I was not born there and have never lived there. When I say “home safe” I am using a metaphor from the game of baseball.
I have visited Venice four times, each time for four days only. Each time it was a little lower in the water.
If you were to ask me pointblank (as you have asked me to describe the Earth) whether I want to go back to Earth and why, I might well answer, “Yes: to see Venice in the winter.” I have seen it only in late spring and summer. In winter, they tell me, it is terribly cold, and the museums are closed even more often than in summer, so that you cannot go warm yourself at the red and golden fires of Titian and Veronese. The white fog seeps among the stones. In the storms of winter St. Mark’s Square, that loveliest living room ever built, whose ceiling is the opalescent sky, has often been flooded. The cathedral itself has been invaded by the sea, waves and mosaics interchanging their netted and glittering reflections, the five gold domes floating like balloons above the breakers, the four bronze horses of Neptune snorting and trembling as they scent their native element. No doubt the lions continued to gaze downward with detached and frowning approbation, scarcely troubling to stir their folded wings. The gondolas, I suppose, floated tied to the very tops of their striped mooring poles, or else were put away, knocking on the ceilings of flooded boathouses; or did they drift across the great square beneath the horses and the gold balloons, the procession of the Angel and the Three Kings, the bell tower which fell down in 1903 but got right up again, the agitated pigeons searching for their daily handout on the shallow, cold, grey waves? Beneath the waves at evening did the electric yo-yos flicker up and down their strings, attracting the ghosts of long-drowned Langobards?
Winter and summer, the gondolas were black. They were painted black a long time ago in mourning for something—the loss of a battle, the fall of the Republic, the death of a baby—I cannot remember why gondolas went
into mourning. They were the most elegant boats people have ever made, more elegant even than the boat that brought me here. The warning cry of the gondolier, as heguided his craft towards the sunlight at the end of a narrow side canal under balconies and arched bridges, through a trembling of shadows, was soft and yet carried clearly along the ways of stone and water: “Hoy-y-y,” he called, and the cats and lions on the sun-warmed angles of the bridges listened and said nothing, as you, my lord, do now.
The Diary of the Rose
30 AUGUST
Dr. Nades recommends that I keep a diary of my work. She says that if you keep it carefully, when you reread it you can remind yourself of observations you made, notice errors and learn from them, and observe progress in or deviations from positive thinking, and so keep correcting the course of your work by a feedback process.
I promise to write in this notebook every night, and reread it at the end of each week.
I wish I had done it while I was an assistant, but it is even more important now that I have patients of my own.
As of yesterday I have six patients, a full load for a scopist, but four of them are the autistic children I have been working with all year for Dr. Nades’s study for the Nat’l Psych. Bureau (my notes on them are in the cli psy files). The other two are new admissions:
Ana Jest, 46, bakery packager, md., no children, diag. depression, referral from city police (suicide attempt).
Flores Sorde, 36, engineer, unmd., no diag., referral from TRTU (Psychopathic behavior—Violent).
Dr. Nades says it is important that I write things down each night just as they occurred to me at work: it is the spontaneity that is most informative in self-examination (just as in autopsychoscopy). She says it is better to write it, not dictate onto tape, and keep it quite private, so that I won’t be self-conscious. It is hard. I never wrote anything that was private before. I keep feeling as if I was really writing it for Dr. Nades! Perhaps if the diary is useful I can show her some of it, later, and get her advice.
The Compass Rose Page 9