by John Berger
Ambrosia, food for the gods, and the thermos I had filled with cappuccino.
The two of them drink from blue paper cups with white Madonna-like figures printed on them, and the froth of the coffee lines his upper lip. Then they bite into the rolls. Zdena has pearly, very regular teeth.
It’s hard, he says. We’re living on the brink, and it’s hard because we’ve lost the habit. Once everybody, old and young, rich and poor, took it for granted. Life was painful and precarious. Chance was cruel. On feast days there were brioches. You like them?
They are filled with almond paste.
And these are morello cherries.
For two centuries we’ve believed in history as a highway which was taking us to a future such as nobody had ever known before. We thought we were exempt. When we walked through the galleries of the old palaces and saw all those massacres and last rites and decapitated heads on platters, all painted and framed on the walls, we told ourselves we had come a long way—not so far that we couldn’t still feel for them, of course, but far enough to know that we’d been spared. Now people live to be much older. There are anaesthetics. We’ve landed on the moon. There are no more slaves. We apply reason to everything. Even to Salome dancing. We forgave the past its terrors because they occurred in the Dark Ages. Now, suddenly we find ourselves far from any highway, perched like puffins on a cliff ledge in the dark.
I can’t fly.
You’ve never flown, even in a dream?
Perhaps.
It’s a question of belief.
In that case there’s no harm in being on your ledge, is there?
It has never occurred to Zdena before that a stranger might make advances to her grief, and that therefore she might flirt with him. She wants to weep at the absurdity of it and smile with the relief.
You have to be frightened, he says.
Frightened I am.
Then you’ll fly.
Look! She points through the window, where the snowflakes made their curtain. Look—there’s the sea.
We’ve lost the habit.
Of flying?
No, of living on a ledge.
The sea’s very calm.
It’ll come back.
You mean one day I’ll get used to it.
Things become familiar without your getting used to them.
Despair is familiar, Tomas, don’t you think?
Of course one can’t help imagining less pain, less injustice.
Dear God, why?
They asked the same question, Zdena, in Nineveh and Egypt. They asked it during the Black Death, when, in Europe, one person in three died of The Plague … Fourteenth century.
You had to write the entry about the Black Death in your encyclopaedia?
There wasn’t one. It came under Feudalism, Reasons for Its Decline. Try one of these, they’re made from walnuts. Walnuts were once thought to cure many illnesses of the brain.
Lightly roasted, they eliminate despair! she shrieks.
The thing about Italians is they understand pleasure, he says, all their ingenuity goes into pleasure. They’re the opposite of Slavs.
Are they? If you say so I expect you’re right, Tomas. We only live once, don’t we? And today we have to—no, I have to—I have to live without hope.
Tears fill her eyes.
Last summer, says the bald man, I visited a ruined temple. No inscriptions. No time. Only the grass growing and wilting and growing. And the sea below.
Outside Zdena’s window the morning colours roll by: greens, poppy reds, mustard yellows. Hill gives way to hill, and the far ones are lavender-coloured. They pass lorries from Sofia and Istanbul. Up by the windowscreen the light dazzles as from a hundred keyrings.
I could see a broken arch, says Tomas. It framed the sky and a little triangle of the sea. Everything so far away, my dear, and very slowly, so slowly it perhaps took an hour or more, I noticed that the sky framed by the ruin was brighter, had more light in it than the sky around, and that the little triangle of sea was of a deeper blue than the rest of the sea. Optical illusion, you’ll say! And you’re the scientist, and I’m your political enemy with a Party card. On a ledge … but not without hope, Zdena.
Zdena begins to shake with laughter, uncontrollable. And the bald man repeats: On a ledge in the dark, and he picks up her nearest hand to stroke it, whilst the bus hurtles on. At last she is calm. The two of them sit there. Zdena doesn’t pull her hand away and, as a coach from Budapest overtakes them, he reaches for her left hand, the one whose fingers often hurt her, and although he doesn’t know this and will never know it, he gently clasps the fingers that hurt, and comforts them, and she looks down at the man’s hand with its hairs curling like Qs, and she sighs.
Zdena and Tomas separate in the Piazza San Marco, the square in Venice where most people rendezvous and meet.
I hear a glass object being polished. Standa, the large department store in Ferrara, has just opened.
The signalman in his black leathers and motorbike boots is making his way down an aisle and, silhouetted against the barrage of pearly and frosted lights, he looks like a black frog, straight out of Aristophanes. The floors are marble, the counters are black and the objects are gold. All the flasks—some of them giant ones—contain golden liquids.
The perfume fabricant’s counters are arranged like dolls’ houses in toy streets. In each house sits a woman with every hair on her head in place, and fingernails lacquered with the shades of perfect seashells. Some of these women wear glasses, some are young, some are mothers, one has come from Cairo and another from a village in the Trentino. Each day they have to spend an hour before they start work, preparing their faces. They must all show that they have taken a potion which will spare them from ever ageing. And the strange consequence of this is that the young seem old.
The signalman is looking at a chart with fifty different skin colours on it. Each colour is round like a small coin. He peers and then, his head thrust forward, he approaches closer and closer, searching among the fifty for his daughter’s coin: the colour, as he remembers it, of Ninon’s body when he scrubbed her back under the shower when she was a child.
Are you looking, Signore, for a makeup kit? Perhaps I can help?
Behind her ageless mask the ragazza dei cosmetici has protruding eyes and the thick lips of somebody wild.
I was thinking about a perfume, says the signalman.
For a man or a woman? she asks.
A young woman … my daughter.
Would it be for the day or night?
For a wedding.
Una festa di nozze!
She opens her wide eyes a fraction wider. They are perfectly lined in pale blue and, at this moment, are empty and sad.
Then maybe an aroma with a certain weight, something ceremonial, yes?
I suppose so.
Do you have one of our perfumes in mind?
No.
We could begin with Hazard?
I’m looking, he says, for a scent that goes fast.
She puts down the flask she has just picked up and examines him: this black frog in leather who speaks like a foreigner and uses such odd phrases.
To lift her, he explains.
Then let’s begin with Bakhavis.
To give her a lift.
She chooses a flask from many on a table, sprays the back of her left wrist, rubs the skin with her other palm, and holds her hand under Jean Ferrero’s chin. He inhales.
I don’t know, he says, it’s hard to choose.
What is she like, your daughter, is she like me?
No. She’s your height, that’s all.
What colour hair does she have?
She changes it. When she was small, she was fair.
What about her voice, is it high or low?
It depends on what she’s saying … I want her to feel like a queen.
The ragazza dei cosmetici takes another golden flask and sprays her left arm well above the wrist. The signalman seizes her hand
abruptly and raises it to his lips. One might suppose he was about to kiss it. Unfamiliar with the ritual gestures which accompany the sampling and choosing of perfumes in well-appointed stores, his actions are almost violent, but she is now amused.
More so, he says,
More what?
More mad! he says, still holding her hand.
Okay. Let me get our latest. It’s new this year and it’s called Saba.
Saba?
It’s fruity. With a lot of ambergris. It might suit her.
This time she sprays near the crook of her left arm. He lowers his face. And like this, her flexed arm almost surrounds his head.
Say you had a daughter and you loved her and you wanted her to have everything immediately, would you give her Saba?
She keeps her arm where it is and doesn’t answer. He shuts his eyes. The mystery of the exchange between perfume and skin exists even in a department store. For a moment, the two of them, ragazza dei cosmetici and signalman, dream their different dreams behind a screen which keeps out the world.
At last she says: Most girls would be very happy.
Only then does she disengage her arm.
I’ll take a small bottle of Saba.
Of perfume or eau de toilette?
I don’t know.
The perfume lasts longer when she puts it on …
Then both.
As she wraps the little boxes in golden paper and ties a bow in the ribbon with her seashell fingernails, she looks at the foreigner in his leathers and boots and says: You know something? My father doesn’t love me much. She’s lucky, your daughter … really lucky.
Water. Stagnant salt water, which protects the life of a city. Without it the city would drown in the high sea. For centuries Venice has learnt to live with the lagoon and its shifting sands, its dykes, its narrow channels for navigation, its salt and its strange pallor.
Zdena is sitting high above the water on the top deck of a motonave which has just cast off and is bound for Chioggia, forty kilometres to the southeast. Her gabardine coat is folded in a neat pile on her suitcase, placed on the bench beside her. She is wearing sunglasses, for the lagoon is pitilessly reflecting the hot sun.
Along the quayside, just beneath her, stroll thousands of tourists. Seen from above, they form, as they drift, two opposing currents, one going towards the Doges’ Palace, bone-white in the sunlight with its naked statues and carved loggias, and the other current flowing east past the notorious Hotel Danieli, whose green shutters and gothic windows hide salons and staircases decorated in gold and wine-red.
Although her skin is pale and her striped dress looks foreign, Zdena does not have the air of a tourist. She gives the impression of having taken this boat many times. Her small actions and gestures are all deliberate—as though she knows precisely what she is doing and where she is going. A ship’s officer who has noticed her because, with her high cheekbones and sad eyes, she is pretty, and, like himself, no longer young, wonders whether she’s a foreign engineer—on her way to inspect one of the old salt refineries—there is talk of them being renovated.
At present she is taking objects one by one out of her handbag and placing them methodically on her lap or on her folded coat. As the motonave gathers a little speed, a breeze stirs her hair so that one of her ears becomes naked like a boy’s. Perps she’s not an engineer, the officer in his immaculate white uniform decides, maybe she’s a dietician or a physiotherapist.
She takes out of her bag a keyring with a keepsake of a silver bear attached. A black diary. A small packet of Kleenex. A headscarf all screwed up. A stub of a pencil. An eraser. Some walnuts. From time to time she raises her head to take in the receding waterline of the city. A line like a signature known across the entire world. Venezia!
Beyond the Doges’ Palace soars the tall brick campanile on the Piazza San Marco. The previous tower constructed there foundered and collapsed in 1902, yet miraculously no one was hurt.
Beyond the San Giorgio Maggiore, on the island of Giudecca, far away, something is catching the light on the low wide dome of the Church of the Redeemer. It flashes like a message. A loose sheet of metal? Or the sun playing with the water somewhere? In its time, the Church of the Redeemer was a kind of tama, if I may compare such a noble edifice with the humble objects I sell.
It was planned in 1576, the result of a vow. Venice was being devastated by The Plague. A third of the population had already agonised and died. The Plague took the young as well as the old. Gruesome men, dressed as birds of prey and carrying a stick, crossed the bridges of the canals going from infirmary to infirmary. They were rumoured to be doctors who, to avoid contagion, dressed themselves from head to foot in oiled cloth or tarpaulin and wore black hats, spectacles, earpads, gloves, boots and, over their mouths, a contraption like a giant bird’s beak. They picked their way between the shivering bodies of the dying and, lifting up a blanket here or there with their stick, they sprinkled from their beaks on to the plague-ridden their powders and dried leaves. At night, like real birds, even vultures, the plague doctors vanished.
The vow, made in 1576, was that, if Christ in his mercy spared the rest of the population, Venice would build him another legendary church. Straightaway the City Council asked the great architect Palladio to begin drawing. The masons began cutting stones. Half the population survived. Four years later Palladio himself died. But the work went on and the church, built on a green field on the island of the Jews, the most beautiful church ever conceived by Palladio, was finished in 1592.
Zdena takes from her bag a hairbrush with minute white globules on the end of its metal darts, and draws it once through her hair before placing it on her coat. Next, her new Slovak passport. Ninon’s last letter. A purse she has set aside for Italian money with its fantastic currency of hundreds of thousands. A packet of aspirins. A powder compact. A photo of Ninon at school.
Until recently, the annual problem for Venice was drinking water. The wells and cisterns often went dry. And so water had to be brought in barges across the lagoon from the river Brenta. The barges followed the same lane through the shallow salt waters as the motonave is now slowly navigating. But the water barges came in the opposite direction.
Again Zdena raises her head, touches her sunglasses and gazes towards the southwest. The motonave is going too slowly to create a wake. The water astern simply undulates, and in it the seaweed moves like hair. The imposing Santa Maria della Salute, built opposite the Doges’ Palace on the very tip of the Island of the Trinity, is now the size of Zdena’s cigarette lighter laid flat on the Kleenex packet.
I might call the Salute too a tama.
Forty years after Palladio’s death, The Plague returned to the city of Venice. Within sixteen months fifty thousand people had died, their corpses burnt or ferried across the waters. Then, for a moment, the epidemic seemed to abate: a temporary reprieve. Hastily the authorities organised a competition for the design of another church and vowed that if the city was again spared, this new church would stand at the very entrance to Venice and its Grand Canal as a thanksgiving!
Baldassare Longhena, who won the competition, arranged an imposing monument with two domed octagonal rotundas, and with carved daylights and buttresses like gigantic abalone shells.
Yet to build this massive baroque tama on the very tip of the island so that it would be the first and last thing that any visitor coming across the water to the city would see, it was necessary to reinforce and give support to the soil. Otherwise the whole edifice ran the risk of drowning. So a million posts of oak and larch and elder were driven into the earth to make a wooden raft to support the stone building.
Today the Venetians call the Salute’s whorled buttresses her orecchioni, her big ears.
A comb. A lipstick. A green notebook. A shopping list. A pair of earrings. Some traveller’s checks. On this journey to her daughter’s wedding, Zdena wants everything to be tidily arranged and cared for. The contents of her handbag are the last touch. Like t
his she hopes that everything about herself will have a clear, crisp outline, which, when she meets her daughter, will offer and express confidence. In her own way Zdena arranges for the same reasons as Baldassare Longhena and Palladio.
The ship’s officer, more and more intrigued by the behaviour of the foreign woman, strolls past her twice trying to make up his mind. The first time he smiled at her, but her response was to go to the ship’s railing and, holding her handbag upside down, shake it. Three gulls swooped near and their shrieks trailed behind them. Then they disappeared and she came back to her seat.
It’s hot, isn’t it, Signora?
Sorry, no Italian me, she replies in her inappropriately expressive voice.
You speak English?
Too hot for English …
Meticulously, Zdena puts things back into the bag. The ship is surrounded by the quiet and stillness of the lagoon, just as a person who leaves home on an early summer morning is surrounded by a new and endless day. The powder compact. The black diary. The stub of pencil. The Italian money.
The ship is sailing away even from me.
On the first pages of the diary, which she didn’t open, is written a note for Zdena’s dictionary. Her handwriting is small and very upright as if the letters were numerals:
“K. Kautsky. Karl. Born 1854 Prague. (Looked for his house but couldn’t find it.) A man’s long life of unceasing political struggle against exploitation, colonialism, war. (He had a beard like they all did.) Remained steadfast in his belief that History can have a sense. Marxist. (Was Engels’s secretary.) During his life he had to flee into exile at least four times. (Four times he had to begin again.) When he was in his sixties, he laboriously came to the conclusion that violent revolution was unnecessary. In 1919 Lenin called him a renegade. After 1947 in our country (he died in 1938, exiled in Amsterdam) his name became synonymous with cowardice, craven ambition and counterrevolutionary plotting. To be bracketed with Kautsky by the State Prosecutor was tantamount to a demand for a death sentence.”
The motonave is out of my hearing, and the water makes no noise at all. All is silence now.