The Wine-Dark Sea

by Robert Aickman

  Possibly, therefore, the dream had the effect of actually deterring Fern from looking out much more practical knowledge about Venice. All he knew about the place was scrappy, uncoordinated stuff ingathered from before the time when the dream had first visited him: for example, he had read a steam-rollered abridgement of Arthur Machen’s Casanova translation, and, long before that, a costumed legend of Venice in the Renaissance by Rafael Sabatini, which belonged to his mother. Fern fully realised that, even geographically, the real Venice could hardly be much like his dream. And it scarcely needs adding that the woman in the dream seemed outside the bounds of possibility, let alone the money to pay for her and the gondola. Just as the real Venice could not resemble the dream Venice, so real life could not resemble life in the dream.

  For years, then, Fern teetered along the tightrope between content and discontent; between mild self-congratulation and black frustration; between the gritty disillusionments of human intimacy and travel (for Fern the two became more and more inseparable), and the truth and power of his dream. It might be a twilight tightrope, but twilight was not an hour which Fern despised.

  So when trouble was added unto Fern in the end, he failed for a long time to be aware of it. Then one spring day, and what was more, in the office, he suddenly realised that his dream had not returned for a long time. He thought that it must have been months since it had last visited him; perhaps more than a year. And, in consequence, he perceived that the dream of the day, always so much paler, of course, but normally, and given even reasonably right circumstances, almost summonable at will, had become totally bloodless and faintly hysterical. Instead of advancing to meet him half-way when he felt the need of it, it was more and more requiring to be conjured, even compelled. It had become much like an aspirin: an anodyne strictly exterior, and so a deceiver. Fern soon came to see that for months he had been standing naked against life’s stones and spears without knowing it.

  Even though it was the spring, always the most difficult season of the year, he looked himself over, confirmed that he was surviving, and seemed to inaugurate an inner change. This was perhaps the moment, which comes to so many, when Fern simultaneously matured and withered. He became more practical, as people call it; less demanding of life.

  He was sincerely astonished when during that same summer he was given significant promotion in his work. In due course, he was equally surprised to find that the additional responsibilities of his new position by no means outweighed the advantage of the greater pay, as he had always supposed they would; the truth being that the tendency is for all to carry the same responsibility, so that soon all will receive the same reward, if reward will any longer be the word. People felt vaguely but approvingly that Fern had taken more of a grip on himself. Fern, cheated of his dream, sometimes even felt something of the kind himself. Two or three years passed, while the land steadily receded beneath Fern’s tightrope.

  When the dream snapped off (as seemed to Fern to have happened, so abrupt had been discovery), its place was taken in the back and the edges of Fern’s mind by the sentiment of death. ‘God!’ he had thought earlier, feeling pierced by a sword through the stomach, as, at that moment, we all do; ‘God! I am going to have to die.’ But in those days, with the rest of us, he had thought of it only occasionally. Now the thought was no longer an infrequent, stabbing shock. It was a soft-footed, never-absent familiar; neither quite an enemy to him nor quite a friend. The thought was steadily making Fern dusty, mangy, less visible; all in the midst of his perceptibly greater successfulness.

  And it was almost as it it were these two things in conjunction, the new practicality and the faint, ever-spinning sentiment of death, that brought about Fern’s ultimate decision actually to see Venice; as if he had abruptly said out loud, ‘After all, a man should visit Venice before he dies.’ With departure in sight, and upon the advice of an older man, he read the Prince of Lampedusa’s Gattopardo in an English paperback. ‘It happens to be about Sicily,’ observed Fern’s friend, ‘but it applies to the whole of Italy, and it’s concerned with the only thing that matters there, unless you’re an actual archaeologist.’ Fern gathered that the only thing which mattered was that Italy had undergone a great change.

  II

  Despite his ruminations and his hopes, Fern had never before travelled beyond France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia, to all of which regions he considered himself comparitively acclimatised and much attached. By the time he found himself, as will shortly be seen, thinking once more about his dream, he had been in and around Venice for seventeen days, and they had been days of surprise, horror, fantasy, and conflict.

  He could find kinship with no one. There was something terrifyingly insane about the total breakdown of the place: the utter discrepancy between the majesty and mystery of the monuments and the tininess of all who dwelt around them or came supposedly to gaze upon them. Fern looked upon these mighty works and despaired. Now he sat on an eighteenth-century stone bollard at the tip of the Punta di Salute, and summed it all up.

  Many times Fern had read or been told that the great trouble with Venice was the swarm of visitors. You could hardly see the real people, he had always been informed. Indeed, the real people were often said to be dying out.

  But by now it was the visitors who seemed to him a mere mist: a flutter of small, anxious sparrows, endlessly twittering, whether rich or poor, about ‘currency’ (Fern could fully understand only those who twittered in English); endlessly pecked and gashed by the local hawks; endlessly keeping up with neighbours at home, who were as unqualified to visit Venice as themselves. All visitors had at once too little time and too much. As he wandered down a calle or through a palazzo, he perceived that very few indeed of the visitors visited anything beyond the cathedral and seat of the former rulers; or saw much even of these, if only because of the crowd inside and the shouting of the guides, as mechanical and stereotyped as the swift mutterings of the priests.

  The visitors sat about the Piazzo San Marco, proclaimed by so many wise voices as the world’s most beautiful work of men (though infested with pigeons, shot or mutilated elsewhere in Italy), in a constant stew, rich or poor, about the prices: a preoccupation which was thoroughly justified. The women took off their shoes because they had walked a few hundred yards. They stuck out their poor legs, and, to do them justice, endeavoured intermittently but with pathetic unproficiency, to catch a life as it passed, to utter the right cries. If life, their faces enquired, could not be caught in Venice, where could it be caught? For a few, right back at home, Fern felt; for the majority, no longer anywhere. Of the men, most were past even making the attempt. They sat looking foolish, fretful, bored, insufficiently occupied, and, above all, out of place. Nor could Fern but agree it was hard that one could not buy an aniseed or a cup of coffee in a place so beautiful without the beauty being tarnished by the price – a price probably unavoidable from the caterer’s point of view, because of forces as uncontrollable by him as by Fern … And, of course, there were other visitors, mainly English, who despised the great and ancient monuments, structures on so different a scale from themselves, and spent their time poking their noses into what they conceived to be the ‘real living and working conditions’ of the Venetians.

  It was not so much the visitors, with their fleeting passage, their phantom foreign money, that startled Fern, but these same Venetians. So far from the place being half empty, as he had been led to expect, it was swarming from edge to edge; and it swarmed with sentimental, self-satisfied philistines, more identical and mass-produced than he would have thought possible, inescapable except inside the faded, ill-kept palazzi where one had to pay to enter. Those among the Venetians who were not leeching on the visitors seemed to be industrial workers from the vast plants lined up across the water at Mestre; labour force to the war machines of a new invader holding the city under siege of modernity and required merely to await the inevitable self-induced collapse, much as the Turks waited for Byzantium to destroy itself.r />
  The human din in Venice cancelled the quiet which might have been expected from the absence of Motor Moloch. It continued throughout the twenty-four hours, merely becoming after midnight more sinister, shrill, and unpredictable. Every night, gangs of youths screamed their way through the alleys. Folding iron shutters crashed like cannon through the early watches. Altercations, sexual or political, continued fortissimi in male voices for fifty minutes at a time. Fern, in his pension attic, would look at his watch and see it was two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock. The noise would diminish, he would fall asleep, and then there would be more screaming boys, more clanging shutters. It was a highly traditional uproar perhaps, but Venice seemed to have an unhappy aptitude for combining only the worst of past society with the society of today. What might once have been falcons, had become hawks, and were now carrion crows.

  Fern went to hear Rigoletto at the Fenice and to hear a concert with a famous conductor and a famous soloist: Both occasions were more than half empty, and such people as were there were either elderly Americans doing their duty by a dead ideal (often at the behest of their hotel porters) and intermittently slumbering, or dubious Italian youths, palpably with free seats and very concerned to make clear that fact to the fools who had paid. The performances in themselves seemed to Fern good, but that only made it worse. They seemed to be provided for a bygone generation, a bygone species of man, a world that had been laughed out of life and replaced by nothing.

  Fern wandered through the shouting, pushing crowds, more and more sick at heart. As, at the concert, the beauty of the performance only made more poignant the entire absence of an audience, so, in the city at large, the incomparable magnificence and grace of the structures only made more dispiriting the entire absence of these qualities in the beholders. The stripped palaces, indifferently maintained even when a few rooms were ‘open to the public’, failed even to evoke their past. They would appeal only to those ultimate playboys who positively prefer their roses or their canals to be dead.

  Fern found only one place that satisfied when regarded even as a ghost, and as thus offering life of a kind and in a degree. This was a suite of comparatively small bedrooms and dressing rooms and powder rooms high up in one of the remoter palaces, all fragile woodwork in faded green, red, and gold, with elaborate Murano looking-glasses; tender, canopied beds; and flowery dressing tables. These small, fastidious, flirtatious rooms, alone in all Venice, vouchsafed that frisson which is history. Obviously, few came near them, other than an occasional perfunctory cleaner, from year’s end to year’s end. This might spare the delightful rooms for their proper wraiths, but it also pointed to an insoluble dilemma.

  In most of the palazzi, Fern could spend a morning or afternoon and see only a handful of his kind in the whole building, and all of them rushing through in twenty minutes. Nor could this be sensibly objected to: with the destruction of their owners the palazzi had been destroyed also. It was offensive to pretend that these corpses still lived; odious to seek profit from their corruption.

  Between the beauty of Venice and the people there was no link: not even of ignorant awe; perhaps that least of all. Much as the folk had pillaged the Roman villas, so Venice was being pillaged now; and Fern sensed that the very fact of the pillage being often called preservation implied that total dissolution was in sight. Venice was rotted with the world’s new littleness. To many her beauty was actually antagonistic, as imposing upon them a demand to which they were unable to rise. Soon the Lagoon would be ‘reclaimed’ and the Venetian dream submitted to a new law of values; a puritan law antithetical to the law of pleasure that had prevailed there for so long; the terrain applied to the uses of the post-Garibaldian mass, existing only in its own expansion. Mestre and multiplication would compel unconditional surrender. The state of affairs that Fern now looked upon was more of a pretence, more of a masquerade than anything even in Venice’s past. It was perhaps proper that Venice should end with a divertissement, but Fern felt that the fires of dawn were visible through the holes in the scenery; the decapitation overdue.

  The Venetian dream?

  Perched on his bollard, Fern realised with a start that he had been in Venice seventeen days, and not given a thought to his own dream.

  During those seventeen days, he had not spoken to a single person except in the ways of triviality and cross-purposes. He never struck up acquaintance easily, but the conflictual impact of Venice, at once so lovely and so appalling, had transfixed him into even more of a trance than usual. He had wandered with a set stare; lost in a dream of another kind, a seemingly impersonal dream in which the dreamer had been the shadow. Big ships were passing quite frequently along the Canale della Giudecca to his left, into and out from the docks renewed by Mussolini. Unlike so much else, the ships were beautiful and alive at the same time. The scale of things contracted to the problems of one dreamer. Fern felt very lonely.

  A manifest Englishman landed with an Italian youth from the traghetto at Fern’s rear. He was bald and barrel-shaped. His large moustache and fringe of hair were ginger. He wore a brown tweed jacket buttoned across the stomach, dingy grey trousers, and an untidy shirt with a club tie. One might see him presiding knowledgeably over a weekend rally of motor cars in Surrey or Hampshire.

  He walked out at the end of the stone promontory, dragging the Italian boy (in open white shirt and tight, bright trousers) by the hand. The Italian boy was making a girlish show of reluctance. The Englishman, a few feet away from Fern’s bollard, pointed with his free hand to some object in the distance; something about which it was inconceivable to him that no one else should care, let alone a person for whom he himself cared so much. All the same, the boy did not care at all. He was no longer going through the motions of petulance, but stood quite still, looking blank, bored, resistant of new knowledge, and professionally handsome.

  ‘Damn it!’ said the Englishman, ‘You might show some interest.’

  The boy said nothing. An expression of dreadful disappointment and wild rage transfigured the Englishman’s unremarkable face. He said something in Italian which Fern took to be at once bitter and obscene. At the same time, he threw away the boy’s hand as if it had turned glutinous in his grasp. He then strutted off by himself towards the Zattere.

  The Italian still stood looking fixedly at the paving stones. Then he thrust one hand into the back pocket of his trousers and produced a neat pocketbook: possibly a gift from the Englishman. After examining the contents with almost comic care, he returned the pocketbook to its place and strolled off. In pursuit, Fern imagined; thought he did not turn round to see. Judging from many experiences since his arrival, he thought that were he to do so, the next approach might be to him. He had found it a situation that put him at a loss in all its aspects. He simply could not live up to what was expected of a lone Englishman in Italy.

  By now he felt so alone that he almost wished that he could. Hitherto in Venice he had been neither happy nor unhappy but simply amazed; on occasion aghast. Now the recollection of his dream had coincided with the rapid dissolution of the perambulating philosopher in him. Acclimatisation to Venice had set in with a rush. The September breeze blew gently up the Canale di San Marco in Fern’s face; sweet and cool, as it sighed for the slow sickness of Venice’s stifling summer. The flashy motor-boats cackled and yelped around him, driving the gondolas to their death. Fern, thrust back upon his own life, passed his hand over his legs, his arms, his shoulders. He felt a pain he had almost forgotten during the years he had walked his tightrope.

  What could Venice do for him but sadden him further? Fern decided to go home the next day; if the owner of the pension would permit him to depart ahead of his time. He rose, extended and contracted his legs, stumped up and down a bit, gazed for the last time upon one particularly incomparable Venetian prospect, and felt quite equal to weeping, had it not been for the self-consciousness of solitude in a foreign land.

  He walked away.

  III

  That
evening, Fern pushed his way along the Molo. He wanted no more unsettled business in his heart.

  The owner of the pension had indicated that for a room in modern Venice, as for so much else, there is always a queue. He tried to charge Fern up to the end of the week, but did not try to keep him. Fern had already suspected that in the campaign between the visitors and the Venetians there are few clear-cut victories on either side.

  Fern had even an excuse for his promenade. It was to be his last night in Venice, and, as he might have put it in his manly and practical aspect, ‘You can’t leave Venice without ever having been in a gondola.’ Gondolas may not last much longer, nor may people. But gondolas, being no longer very functional, are not much good without someone to love on the journey.

  On the Molo, Americans stood about, japing one another uneasily or over-confidently; wondering how to fill in before flying on to Athens or back to Paris the next morning; questing for highballs or local vintages on the rocks. Uncontrolled Italian children and their plump, doting parents effortlessly dominated the prospect. Away to the south, over towards Chioggia, single lights gleamed romantically. The sky was turning to deep lilac and filling with festive, silvery stars.

  Fern turned leftwards up an alley, where it was quieter, then wound about through dark courts and passages, like a beetle through a tome. Immediately he was alone, or almost so, among the great dark buildings, his mind returned to those small, elegant bedrooms and boudoirs at the top of the palazzo he had visited. The recollection of them made him shiver with the pathos of something so hopelessly irrecoverable that was still so hopelessly necessary. Thinking about them, feeling still the intensity of their atmosphere, he could smell the perfume of the Venetian decadence; that long century when the lion drowsed, awaiting Napoleon, the city fell irrevocably to pieces, and all the fashionable wore curious, enveloping masks, so that they looked partly like strange animals, partly like comedians, and partly like ravishers and ravished.