‘You are the moon and the stars,’ said Fern. ‘You are the apples on the tree, the gold of the morning, the desire of the evening. You are good, you are lovely, you are life. You are my heart’s delight.’
The Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi came into sight.
‘Isolde!’ said Fern tenderly.
He had found a travelling companion.
‘Tristan!’ she replied, entering into the spirit of it.
‘Perhaps that was when Venice died?’ suggested Fern. ‘When Tristan and Isolde was composed here.’
‘If Venice every really lived!’ she retorted.
But the gondolier changed the subject for them by turning off the Grand Canal on to the Rio di San Felice. They were bound for the wide waters of the Lagoon.
In the Sacca della Misericordia, the almost square bay on the Venetian north shore, all was silent. There are no footways and in the buildings was only an occasional dim light, suggesting a rogue tenant, even now up to no good.
‘Is this where the danger begins?’ asked Fern.
She made no reply, but drew even closer. Beneath the dim, lilac amphora of the sky, she was all black or white, like Pierrot. The gondolier, with strokes as strong and regular as if he were swinging a scythe, swept them forward to their consummation.
Here, to the north of Venice, the Lagoon was incandescent. It seemed to Fern, who had never seen it like this before, a nearer word than phosphorescent, because the light which gleamed from the water, faintly around the gondola, but in distant patches quite brightly, was multicoloured, blue, white, yellow, pink; and always with lilac in it too, from the infusion of the sky. There were small glittering waves, and vast, indefinite areas of coloured froth or scum, like torn lace. Already it was a little colder.
They approached an island. Fern saw the white shape of a Renaissance church and, extending from it along the entire shore, a high wall, as of a prison or asylum. Ranged in the small piazzetta before the church door was a line of figures, indistinct in respect of age, sex, or costume, but each bearing a lighted Venetian lantern, a decorated light on a decorated pole, a device, here, now, and always one of the distinctive splendours of Venice. The figures seemed to agitate the lanterns almost frenziedly, in welcome to Fern and his companion, but from the group Fern could hear no sound, though by now they were less than a hundred yards away, and the whiteness of the church behind them was luminous as a leper’s face.
‘Isn’t it San Michele?’ whispered Fern. ‘The cemetery island, where at night no one stays?’
‘The dead stay. By this time, no one knows how many of them. All who permit themselves to be taken from their beds, dressed in the streets, and buried.’ She pressed her soft cool lips on his to dismiss the thought.
When Fern looked up once more, they were almost past the island. The lines of figures with the gorgeous lanterns lay far astern, though the lanterns were still tilting at odd, wild angles. It occurred to Fern that the figures were not expecting the gondola to stop, but had come out in order to speed it on its way, as it might be the barge of Bianca Capello. He saw that the lights were now higher in the air, as the poles were lifted joyously to their full length. But there was still no sound beyond the sounds of night and the sea.
Out here, while the small, scattered navigation lights flickered and bickered, Fern could see that, in places, the water was not merely faintly radiant but transparent right down to the wrack and garbage settled on the bottom from earliest times. In other places, it was opaque, sometimes as if great volumes of powder had been dissolved in it, and sometimes as if it were effervescent and gaseous. Every now and then Fern could see bones, human or animal, arranged in dead seaweed, or a hideous pile of discarded domesticities, or a small, vague underwater mountain, not quite mineral, not quite vegetable, not quite animal, but riddled and crawling with life of a kind, notwithstanding. Big lumpy fish and pale grey and pink serpentine creatures, elaborately devious in structure, glided in and out of the clear patches, sometimes seeming almost to gambol round the gondola, occasionally breaking surface for a second, with a gasp and croak. Everywhere was an entanglement of seadrift, rotted but constantly self-renewing. The north shore of Venice, always the dark side of the city, was now a necklace of single lamps round the throat of the night: the different floors and the buildings were levelled off by distance and amalgamated with the public lamp posts of the Fondamenta Nuove. Over on the left of the gondola, the ancient glassworks of Murano, working day and night to produce brittle joys for visitors, thrust quick swords of fire into the encroaching blackness.
Further than Murano it seemed impossible for even this gondolier to continue with so much power; but there was no sign of flagging.
‘He is a strong man,’ said Fern.
‘Here there is a current,’ replied his companion. ‘Here the struggle ends.’
Fern perceived that they had indeed changed direction. Ahead lay a long dark shore, as in his dream. But he knew quite well what it was. It was the Litorale; the long, narrow, reef strengthened and sustained through the ages to prevent the high seas or the Adriatic from entering the Lagoon and eroding Venice; a reef penetrated by three gaps or porti, through which shipping passed, one of which, Fern knew, must be somewhere ahead, the Porto di Lido, standing at the north of that notorious wilderness of pleasure. He realised now where their journey would end. Where else could an official tour of Venice terminate but at Lido?
‘We leave the Laguna Morta and enter the Laguna Viva,’ said his guide.
Fern was not sure that this was exactly accurate; but it did not really matter, because the next thing she said was, ‘This is the moment of love,’ and because that, for some little time, was what it proved to be.
After so many mortal years, Fern’s dream was proving more than true. Fern was proving himself right and the rest of the world wrong.
Now the sky was at last completely black, the stars gave little light, and the effulgent Lagoon was becoming the sombre sea. Upon all the black gondolier must have looked down, with more time to stare, now that his work was lighter, but about him it did not seem to Fern the moment to concern himself. To Fern, life had become an affair of moments only; a present without past, without future.
How long had passed by the hands of Fern’s watch, he never knew, because when, somewhat later, he looked at his watch, he found that it had stopped.
IV
When first he stirred, he realised that a fairly stiff breeze was blowing round the little craft. The gondola was tossing and plunging quite seriously.
Fern drew himself up and looked round. There were biggish waves, and the scanty lighting at the northern, garrison end of Lido, instead of lying ahead, was distinctly to the leftward, the garish glow of the pleasure grounds completely out of sight: to all intents and purposes, Fern realised with a shock, the lights of the Lido pleasure area were behind them. It was somewhere in this watery region that on the Festa de Sensa the Doge at the prow of the Bucentaur, loveliest vessel in the world, each year married the sea. It startled him that his own strange marriage had found its culmination just there. This was when Fern looked at his watch.
Then he twisted right round, for the first time since he had entered the boat, and, kneeling on the keel, looked straight back to the gondolier. Then he had his third and greatest shock. There was no one there at all. The gondola was merely being swept out to sea on the current. It came to Fern that, even though there are said to be but small tides or no tides in the Mediterranean, yet the very expression Laguna Morta referred to areas ‘under water only at high tides’; and that now the Lagoon was emptying, pouring out through the relatively narrow breach ahead.
When Fern first roused himself after the moment of love, he had left his companion remuffled in her black cloak, soft, small, and silent. Now he turned to where she lay beside him. He could not decide what first to say. It seemed terrible to speak at once of the mere practical circumstances, and worse if the circumstances were of danger, as he could not doubt they were.
He was appalled by the surmise that the gondolier, strong as he was, had been somehow swept from the boat, while the two of them had been lost in passion and the spell of the night. Gently, he put out his hand and drew away the black hood. Then, in the solitude of the sea and against the rising wind, Fern screamed out loud. Inside the black hood was a white skull; and an instantaneous throwing back of the entire black cloak, revealed inside it only an entire white skeleton.
V
At the Porto di Lido, the main entrance to the harbour of Venice, two very long stone breakwaters run far out to sea. There was no question for Fern of a storm having arisen, or of any serious change at all in the weather. The change was merely that brought about by leaving a more or less still and dead pool for the living, unpredictable ocean. Even the wind which so alarmed Fern was little more than the breeze encountered in almost all regions when one embarks seriously upon open waters. Between the Porto Di Lido breakwaters, therefore, vessels passed in and out in fair numbers, hardly sentient of the racing ebb which for a single gondola was so formidable.
Fern, in fact, passed no fewer than four incoming ships; and two others overtook him. Some of them came far too close to his uncontrolled cockleshell, but his wild shouting and waving reached never a soul aboard any of them, so black was the night, so black his craft, in accordance with the decree of 1562. Between the long breakwaters, the passing ships were the obvious danger: it was certainly not rough, though it was reasonably unpleasant for a man pitching about in a vessel so small as a gondola. The possibility of the gondola, instead of being run down, sinking beneath him, did not, therefore, seriously occur to him until the real sea was drawing quite near.
He shrank forward to the peak of the vessel, so as to separate himself from his now terrible companion, and squatted before the tall iron ferro, only a few inches ahead. The ferro would surely drag the boat down all the faster when the moment came.
At the very end of the leftward or San Erasmo breakwater, the shorter of the two, Fern could just make out a large inscription daubed by supporters of the previous Italian regime, and never obliterated owing to difficulty of access – and perhaps other things. It was to the effect that a simple hour as a lion is to be preferred to a lifetime as an ass.
And now there was only the Lido breakwater and, afterwards, the turbulent, nocturnal Adriatic. The gondola sped on like a black leaf on a millstream.
Fern had proved his resolution to leave Venice before the morrow night.
INTO THE WOOD
At night those unfortunates who suffered from insomnia or nightmare used to wander about in the fields or the woods, trying to reach a pitch of exhaustion that would give them back the power of sleep. Among the afflicted creatures were people from the upper classes, well-educated women – why, there was even a parish priest!
– AUGUST STRINDBERG (‘Inferno’)
These areas are not uncommon if you know how (or are compelled) to look for them. As men and women work more and more against nature, nature works more and more against men and women. All the same, a few of the areas are of long acceptance; dating back to the earliest memory of man, as the international lawyers put it. Some of them, in the beginning, were probably holy places of the pre-Christians; of whom a few even now survive on our continent, if, once more, you know how (or are driven) to look for them. Sometimes one is amazed to discover how little that is real or true ever finds its way into general knowledge: in so far, of course, as general knowledge is still an expression with meaning.
*
‘Harry and Molly Sawyer’ was what they had printed on their Christmas Cards; with an address in a Cheshire town that was hardly a town any more, but a sprawling and sleeping area for Manchester. Harry Sawyer’s business card indicated that he was an ‘Earth Mover’, though when one met him he seemed to have neither the back muscles of Atlas nor the mental leverage of Archimedes, nor yet the power to shake the world of Marx or Hitler; and when one saw his yellow, space-fiction machines on the move, each with SAWYER painted in black capitals on all four sides, each able to pulp a platoon of soldiers at a swing of the beam, one wondered how long he could possibly hope to keep them under control.
Margaret Sawyer saw as little of the yellow monsters as she could, and, with the other well-to-do Manchester wives, strove for domestic realisation among an ever-growing assembly of lesser monsters, all whirring, spinning, and chopping, in kitchen, washroom, and lounge. Among other things, the gadgets (‘gadflies’, she once thought) were supposed to give her more time for her children, two girls and a boy; but it seldom worked that way. Margaret could hardly hope to be happier than the other Manchester wives; but until one night in Sweden, she would have rejected the idea that she was positively unhappy. Nor was she: until that night she was insufficiently grown for happiness or unhappiness; might well have been among those who express doubt as to whether the words mean very much.
Sawyer had to visit Sovastad, on the eastern side of central Sweden; where a big, wide, dangerous, costly road was being built across the mountains into Norway. As he would have to stay there at least a week, the Swedes, hospitable ever, had suggested that he bring Margaret with him. Those of the Swedish wives who were not pursuing careers of their own, would be able to look after her during the day, and see that she had a good time. Margaret had acquiesced: one could not use a stronger word.
And so, on the whole, it had worked out. Margaret had never been so thoroughly and efficiently looked after in all her previous life; never had so concentrated a good time. There was a highpowered, unflagging, day-and-night cordiality among the richer Swedes, to which she was totally unaccustomed, and which by the end of the week, she found very exhausting, though she would have hesitated to say so, even to herself because back in Cheshire, she had supposed it to be the very thing she wanted. Harry also grew quieter and quieter. He admitted to her that he found Swedish businessmen and business methods very hard going. ‘Particularly the younger men,’ he said. ‘They’re so keen and sharp, they take the skin off your hands, and then they turn round and deliver a lecture about British Imperialism and what’s wrong with our hospitals. You can’t tell where you stand at all.’
Nor, despite the social whirlwind, did Margaret find Sovastad a jocund town. It straggled along the shore of a vast, black lake, described as one of the biggest not only in Sweden but in Europe; and the high mountains to the west cut off the sun half-way through the day, darkened the streets, and made the water look like tar. The lake was said to be so deep as never to have been fathomed, and, as often in such cases, to harbour a creature of enormous bulk, terrifying aspect, species unknown to zoology, and origin unknown to all. There were many representations of this beast in the conscientious provincial museum, round which Margaret was conscientiously conducted by three Swedish ladies, all better dressed than she was and better preserved also, all erudite about the exhibits, in a manner unimaginable in Manchester. In late mediaeval woodcuts, the creature appeared with protuberant eyes, a forked tongue, and a thick circle of whiskers like seaweed. In eighteenth-century guides to natural philosophy, it had quietened down into the likeness of a baroque ceiling embellishment. A century later, with the advance of the scientific attitude, the most barbaric devices had been constructed by the locals to trap and kill it. They were all faithfully exhibited, and the Swedish ladies explained in detail how they would have worked. Margaret was glad that there had been no occasion.
‘So the creature’s still in the lake?’ she asked. She could not pronounce the Swedish name for the monster.
‘The children think so,’ replied the Swedish ladies.
The lake was, in fact, named after it, they explained: ‘Lake Orm’, meaning ‘serpent’. It was one of the few Swedish words Margaret felt able more or less to manage. The high tessitura in which the language is spoken, the combination of breadth and altitude in the vowel sounds, were quite beyond her. All the same, a guidebook to the district which she came upon later, said that the name of the lake originated merely
in its serpentine periphery, with long arms reaching into the mountains like tentacles.
Sovastad, Margaret decided, was a little too small for its pretensions. The Swedes made the very most of every urban feature, designing them splendidly, using them fully, but the population was not big enough to prevent the rocks struggling through in almost every street and prospect, and determining the prevailing ethos. By half past three in the afternoon, the feeling would set in that this was a community almost as involved in a ceaseless struggle with harsh natural forces as a colony of Esquimaux. There was every amenity, but they were a little like the comforts of an air force base with a bitter war on its hands. Not that Margaret could think of any better adaptation to the forbidding rocks and endless winter, to which much reference was made, jocular but surprisingly grim also. Beyond doubt, the Swedes had done wonders, but a feeling of strain was pervasive. Perhaps only a newcomer, a visitor from abroad, would be aware of it.
At the same time, there was always in Sovastad a faint mistiness, a clammy softness; or, when the sun was striking directly down, an expectation of it. It too seemed to pervade the communal life; in the hectic quality of which was something almost Russian. When the sun did strike, the faint, vague mist seemed to make it still hotter. Then, very quickly, the high mountains would cut off the radiance, and within a quarter of an hour, Margaret would feel as chilled as previously she had felt warmed. She would have liked to wear trousers, but Henry implied that it would diminish their status, already none too secure. When Margaret pointed out how many of the Swedish women wore them, he inevitably replied that this was one of the very reasons why she shouldn’t.
The Wine-Dark Sea Page 30