The jacket of amaranth cloth and white waistcoat – the house livery – sit loosely on young Luigi; the sleeves are at least an inch too long, the shoulders slightly overgenerous, and the collar does not fit properly, arching at the nape in an unpleasing loop.
Oreste Nava frowns as he re-examines his assistant from head to foot and then turns to look at Cesarino, the injured house steward, who is sitting in an armchair, his face towards the blank television screen and a stool supporting his foot, which is swathed in conspicuous bandages. The bedroom has a low ceiling but is spacious and furnished with solid, old-fashioned elegance: prints on the walls, carpets, and a luxuriant aspidistra in a fine bronze cachepot. A low bed has been thoughtfully provided next to the high iron one so poor Cesarino will have no need to do any climbing when he decides to sleep.
Luigi and Oreste Nava have come up here for a recapitulation and final check-up, and now Cesarino gives a nod of approval. “It’ll do,” he says without enthusiasm. “How do you feel in it?”
The boy wriggles around in the livery like a fairground contortionist. “Just great!” he announces euphorically.
“Don’t forget, you mustn’t move any more than you need to. Above all, keep your hands under control. A dinner’s not a basketball match.”
“Never played basketball,” Luigi replies, taking a leap and miming a flying catch.
The two older men exchange a sighing look, and Oreste Nava bends down to pick up the soft plaid which has slipped from Cesarino’s legs to the floor. The steward murmurs a thank you, poised between regality and self-pity, and glances at his watch. “Now you’d better go.”
“Pick up that tray, we’ll take it down with us,” Oreste Nava orders his assistant.
Luigi, who is admiring himself in the mirror above the chest of drawers, lifts the rich tray from which Cesarino took his refreshment at five o’clock, and moves towards the door.
“And mind that carpet,” the steward warns him again. “It’s as easy as anything to trip over it.”
In the kitchen, the cook and his assistants move like surgeons in an operating theatre, and give an indignant start when Luigi bangs the tray down on the stone mortar, the only free place. But they say nothing. The lady of the house rushes in and confabulates sotto voce with the cook, and Oreste Nava notes that the deference of the latter is in no way servile but indicates professional respect, from one qualified person to another. Besides, the lady is a sharp-eyed perfectionist, of the sort that can be a nuisance but know how to appreciate things. Nothing escapes her, and when she turns to scrutinize Luigi, in two seconds she takes in all that is unsatisfactory about the young man and his turnout. However, she concludes her scrutiny with a warm smile of encouragement. “Fine. Magnificent. Perfect.”
A beautiful woman, already dressed and made up but without her jewellery yet. Beautiful skin, splendid bare shoulders. And white suits her, no doubt about it. She darts swiftly through the suite of salons and reception rooms towards the dining room for a final inspection and Luigi, following her, voluptuously parodies her swaying form.
Oreste Nava tries to remember whether at that age he too had been obsessed with that one thing, whether he too had seen a beautiful bottom as the supreme result of Genesis. But he is at any rate certain he was not a buffoon.
He delivers a discreet jab into the insolent clown’s ribs and thinks: God help us.
There are two other hostesses in Venice who compete with Cosima for social supremacy. In their small way, and with the amateur tools of lunch and dinner, cocktail parties and balls, all three are seeking the solution to a problem that turns the best-trained sociologists pale and drives the most sophisticated computers mad: how to establish who truly counts, and who doesn’t, in the fluid world of today.
One of the three (the crustiest, the most pathetic) stubbornly continues to operate in the traditional field of European nobility, staking everything on the last reigning heads in activity, on deposed, forgotten or long-thought-dead monarchs, on scattered princes of the blood and problematical heirs to vanished empires. A circle which the other ladies call “archaeological” or “sepulchral”, declaring that the most suitable place for such banquets would surely be the island of San Michele with its cemetery.
Naturally these sarcastic remarks are not without a hint of secret envy. But the second lady (the most aggressive, the most cheerful) also arouses her portion of envy and sarcasm in her shameless and indiscriminate pursuit of international topicality, always carried out under the loose – often very loose – pretext of cultural connections: the great Russian cellist, but also, why not, the lunatic rock star; the leading specialist in Inca art, but also, would you believe it, the gorgeous English actor adored by three billion female TV viewers. In other words, ragtag and bobtail, as the other two ladies murmur. And the more popular, vulgar and unpresentable these characters are, the more violently seething the ladies’ curiosity.
Blood. Fame. And finally Power, which Cosima (the proudest, the most befuddled) associates, like bread with butter, with the title of chairman: of the party or the board, of the multinational company or the bank, of the foundation or the association, of the world corporation or intercontinental institution. It is a title that fascinates her, a word she pronounces with lingering sensuality: Chairman… Chairman…
She herself is, or has been, chairwoman of half a dozen committees for charity, for intervention, for aid – old picklocks to open the doors of power. But times are increasingly treacherous, hierarchies are increasingly unstable, doors often turn out to be dummies or give onto dusty lumber rooms, onto sewers, onto the void: power no longer lies there, perhaps never did.
Continually and painfully disoriented, Cosima starts all over again with another chairman, each time stifling the voice that whispers to her: And what if the strings of power passed through the vice-chairman’s hands? And there are honorary chairmen, perhaps out of touch but perhaps still highly influential. There are ex-chairmen, some of whom maintain the right to the title and others who don’t. There are future chairmen, chairmen ad interim, acting chairmen, shadow chairmen, crypto-chairmen…
To avoid all mistakes, Cosima lays on a dinner in honour of each one, in her classical-style, late-Renaissance residence on the Sacca della Misericordia, selecting the surrounding guests with care: women who are beautiful, or interesting, or witty, or aristocratic; men who are important but not too important, intelligent but in moderation, brilliant but up to a point. More than dinners, Raimondo says, they are monuments, where the guests play the role of allegorical statues around the plinth, on which there proudly towers, solitary and marmoreal, the Chairman.
“But the chairman of what?” I whispered to Raimondo as he came forward with outstretched hands amid the half-columns of the atrium. In the absence of a husband or long-established lover, it was he, as Cosima’s cousin, who received the guests.
“What did you say, sorry?” He turned to me absently and took me, accomplice-fashion, by the arm.
“The chairman.”
“Ah, yes, of some year or other of the… I’m not sure. But listen…” Leading me in the direction of the vestibule, he motioned with his chin towards David, who was walking around a column a few paces further back, and he lowered his voice, closed his eyes even, to murmur, “Quite dazzling, your Israelite.”
“You’re telling me.”
“The age isn’t quite right, but I swear for two pins —”
“Raimondo, please!”
“You know I didn’t manage to get anything from my spies about him? Where did you find him, who is he?”
“Ah…” I said, as best I could.
But the imitation was lost anyway, because in the vestibule there was already another group of allegorical statues busily divesting themselves of coats and furs and we found ourselves sucked into a close-knit cross-play of smiles, glances, bows, introductions. Some I knew, others I didn’t. On top of an authentically Venetian console table, surmounted by the portrait of an authentically Medicean ancestor of Cosima’s, I noted the precious place marker, a delicately carved and storiated piece of ivory, in which, around a rectangle representing the table, little cards were inserted with the names of the guests so one could see where one would end up and next to whom. I went over to take a peek.
In the centre, Cosima and Raimondo facing one another, obviously. And obviously the Chairman on her right. On her left a Chinese (vice-chairman?), Mr Wang Weimo. Then there was me, with a Monsieur Un Tel on my left. I would have David almost opposite, next to Mrs Wang.
I insisted again with Raimondo: “But what kind of chairman? One who gives money or one who asks for it?”
“Frankly, I don’t know. He’s chairman of a year, they’re preparing one of those international years – the Year of the Cardiopath, the Year of the Uncle, the Year of the Cow, you know the sort of thing… Cosima is hoping for the chairmanship for Italy, I presume.”
“I see. But where’s she got to?”
“She’s already working on the Chairman, she’s showing him the dessous of the palazzo.”
“And is there no Chairwoman?”
“She exists, but it seems she’s the kind who stays at home to feed the Chairchildren. Come on, let’s go and get something to drink.”
In the salon of the stuccoes David was talking to a beautiful woman I didn’t know who was laughing a lot, laughing too much.
And it was he, leaning forward slightly, who was making her laugh.
And it was I who had brought him here, to share him with all and sundry, instead of keeping him all to myself in our hotel-island.
The Year of the International Fool.
And while Raimondo jilted me for a gentleman wearing a highly serious grey beard and the rosette of the Legion of Honour in his buttonhole, while his niece Ida came marching down on me with the clear intention of lumbering me with the Chinese man’s wife, delightful but undoubtedly Chinese-and-only-Chinese-speaking, Cosima made her dramatic appearance: in the custody of the Chairman.
A big, red-haired man with freckles, he had placed a large familiar hand around the nape of her neck and was escorting her towards the nearest police station. A cordial sort. A jovial type.
From her cowering position she darted an all-round glare of challenge which stated: a Chairman is permitted anything, and anyone who ventures even the tiniest of smiles will go into my black book forever. It was perhaps by pure chance (or perhaps not?) that her glare managed to catch that fine blade-of-grass smile on Mr Silvera’s lips.
Scarcely a promising start.
Mr Silvera knows he has already made a friend and an enemy, an admirer and a disparager. The friend and admirer is this Raimondo, who is now sitting next to him on a pale divan waiting for the meal and is busily investigating his attire with bubbling murmurs of wonder. He seems particularly enchanted by the dress shirt, which has a frothy nineteenth-century jabot and a collar held in place at the top by two little buttons. It’s an American shirt with the Brooks Brothers label, over twenty years old, found in the Lista di Spagna that afternoon, Mr Silvera explains.
“No, but it’s divine,” says his companion, delicately fingering the jabot. “And what a mar-vel-lous idea to go to a second-hand shop, new things are always so fright-ful. Once, at St Moritz, I was invited to…”
There follows an anecdote in which Raimondo turns out to have made a complete fool of himself, but Mr Silvera is not deceived by his interlocutor’s sociable volubility and ostentatious homosexuality. He knows his real motive is a generous, protective one. Raimondo just saw the hostess eye Mr Silvera with suspicion, take note of his singular shirt, remark on the almost imperceptible difference of tonality between the jacket, which is so dark a blue as to seem black, and the trousers, which are the classic black. And he heard the hostess subject Mr Silvera to a brief, acidic interrogation.
Related to the Silveras of São Paulo in Brazil, the ones who —
No, no.
Just passing through Venice?
Yes, for a few days.
Tourism? Work?
Work, work.
Is he in antiques too?
No, no. A travel agency. Imperial Tours.
Ah, for the “Tourism and Information Technology” week beginning the day after tomorrow at the Cini Foundation, under the chairmanship of —
No, no.
But is Mr Silvera going to represent Imperial at the Trieste summit? Is he by any chance the chairman? The vice-chairman?
No, no, Mr Silvera is simply an escort, a guide, someone who takes groups to see the Rialto and the Bridge of Sighs.
Raimondo heard the hostess emit a shrilly unnatural laugh and read the dilemma in her eyes: highly unfunny joke or truthful-admission-likely-to-cause-immediate-fainting-fit? He saw her collect herself, turn her back brusquely on Mr Silvera, dropping him as a persona who is in any case non grata, and one whom her Roman friend should never have dreamed of bringing into the house, let alone to a dinner of this importance.
It was at this point that Raimondo took charge of Mr Silvera, stretching a friendly hand of solidarity to him under the guise of vague chit-chat. Mr Silvera has no need of it, does not feel at all uncomfortable in what is basically an assorted group like any other group he has escorted. But he appreciates the intention and is grateful for the gesture.
Now the Good Samaritan takes an almond from the tray presented to him by a servant in amaranth livery, bites into it affectedly, leans towards Mr Silvera and whispers another anecdote, this time about their hostess, who, it appears, had been very keen on the idea of having two dark-skinned servants – two “Moors”, as was the custom in old Venetian houses – and who at last through one of her committees against world famine had managed to obtain two Africans who were unfortunately of two different ethnic groups, Shoanan Ethiopian and Majeerteen Somalian, groups that had been mortal enemies for centuries, and so they could never be used together, since they caused the most terrible trouble.
Mr Silvera laughs no more nor less than is called for by what might seem ill-natured gossip at the expense of their hostess but which is instead a sign of recognition between equals, between wise, disenchanted connoisseurs of human weaknesses. And to make it clear he has understood, he slips lightly from perfidy to indulgence, observing that the wish to have her doors flanked by two Moors of flesh and blood rather than of wood or ceramics is basically a symptom of freshness, of attractive ingenuousness, the caprice of a child who takes meticulous care of her doll’s house.
The other man’s eyes sparkle with gratitude. Exactly, exactly! Cosima doesn’t realize it, but her greatest charm consists precisely in this. She’s a woman who believes herself to be practical, realistic, astute and hard, and who on the contrary lives in a world peopled by allegorical figures: Famine, Hope, Brotherhood, Disease, Capital, Development. A simple woman, secretly shy and unprepared, who uses these abstractions to cushion herself from impact with the Facts of Life.
A shift to psychology has been effected, all poisonous vapours of gossip have been dissipated. And when the subject of their conversation summons Raimondo with a nod, he rises, benevolently whispering, “With Cosima, one always has to don some kind of fancy dress, otherwise she doesn’t understand or appreciate things, she doesn’t enjoy herself.” And in an even lower voice, lightly touching the jabot once again, he adds: “You don’t have some allegorical costume to put on, do you?”
Mr Silvera nods, smiling as well. “More than one,” he says. “More than one.”
The diners have just finished taking their places around the extended oval of the table and Oreste Nava, standing upright between two consoles and looking severe in his tailcoat, dominates them like the conductor of an orchestra. He is satisfied by what he sees.
On the immense tablecloth, embellished not only with the family coat of arms at the two extremities but also with the coquettish touch of a few darnings, the glass and silverware glitter, the flowers and china gleam, and the twenty-four candles add lustre to the gentlemen’s alabaster shirt fronts, the ladies’ eyes, their varnished nails and their priceless jewels. It is a scene of harmony and magnificence, further enriched by the background of six large wall paintings overflowing with flowers, foliage, game, fish, molluscs and fruit. And the whole noble casket is delicately crowned on high by creamy stuccoes, by russet and gilded woodwork, while, at their feet, the floor mosaics flank a carpet of imposing proportions which nonetheless maintains an air of subdued, supine practicality.
It is the carpet on which Cesarino tripped, and Oreste Nava runs his eye around the perimeter in search of any lurking folds or humps. A treacherous but propitious carpet, because without it Oreste Nava would not be here as spectator and performer in this beautiful ceremony. On either side of the screen that conceals the service corridor, awaiting a signal from him, stand young Luigi and young Issah, the Moor looking relaxed, Luigi taut and stiff. Oreste Nava imagines that, as often happens with frivolous types, the boy has at last been intimidated, if not actually scared, by the solemnity of the occasion; but he has to revise his opinion when their eyes meet and the clown stiffens yet further, tightens his jaw, pulls his shoulders back and swells his chest in a grossly caricatured pose. No sense of place. No sense of duty.
Oreste Nava, impotently rooted to the spot, directs a withering glance at him; but even if it were possible to address him, what could he say in practice? Tell him he should show a little more respect? Just what boring old farts are always saying, leaving themselves wide open to the immediate retort: Respect? Oh yeah, who for, what for?
Impotent, Oreste Nava brings his wandering mind back to the point. The dinner must turn out perfectly, and all those who take part in it must work together for the artistic perfection of the whole.
It is at this moment that the sacrilege occurs, but it is perpetrated not by poor Luigi, nor by the Moor. The rude shock comes from the ruddy Chairman, who concludes some remark to his hostess, briefly addresses his neighbour on his right, and then devotes his attention to the bowl of amber-coloured consommé on his plate. He hesitates. Where is the spoon?
Oreste Nava quivers; if he could, he would cover his eyes with his hand. Because the man finds the spoon, picks it up happily, dips it, lifts it to his mouth. But it is a delicate, exquisite little spoon of gilt silver! A spoon purely for show! A dessertspoon not to be used even for the dessert!
The concierge sees the lady of the house reel for an instant under the blow, then raise her shoulders and head, stiffen all over like Luigi, and dart her eyes imperiously over the whole length of the oval table. And gradually the guests, some for friendship’s sake, some out of acquiescence, some out of amusement, start to pick up their gilt-silver spoons and to dip them into the consommé, one after the other. A great show of strength, a show of great tact.
Having imposed her will, the hostess takes a sip of water and leaves her bowl untouched, choosing the road of compromise for herself, or rather that of indisputable privilege.
But no! Someone is not playing along, someone is holding out…
Paralysed in his tailcoat, a prisoner of silence, Oreste Nava has never so strongly wished telepathy were something similar to the telephone. Because without doubt that blockhead Luigi will fail to grasp the great lesson being offered by Mr David Silvera, who is now lifting the bowl in the correct fashion by its two handles and raising it to his lips, which are parted for the purpose of drinking but which seem to wear a very fine smile.
I wonder whether it was not the Battle of the Consommé that changed the course of the evening. I only witnessed half of the battle, so to speak, since from my place I could see David but not Cosima. However, Raimondo acted as a rear-view mirror for me, and the glance he threw me between two obligatory (as they were for him) spoonfuls was one of sheer delight: from it I deduced the hostess’s fury, which was doubled three seconds later by the defection of the Chinese lady who, sitting on David’s left, innocently enlisted in the rebel’s camp.
A just punishment for a bad joke casually played on both myself and my knight. You plonk him next to the most difficult and maddening guest of all, who can only stammer an occasional yes and sorry, and he at once makes an ally of her.
But knowing women, I wonder whether it was after being taken on and defeated in this manner that Cosima began to reassess this package holiday hey-you in his thrifteria turnout and to see him emerging from the tremulous aura of the candles as an elegant, handsome and fascinating Chairman of Mystery. To see him, that is, as I saw him. Or as I had superficially seen him long ago, pyramids ago, because there now existed between me and David something far greater than the intimacy of two lovers, there was this thing, this total compenetration that…
I gazed at him with a proud and tender feeling of possession, which it took but a flicker of candlelight to throw into a state of crisis. What possession? What compenetration? I still knew hardly anything about Mr Silvera, it could all be over between us tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and our pyramid was no taller or more imperishable than a drop of water.
Then I passed to a state of hopeless bitterness, of stifling anxiety, and from there returned to the question: Why? Why had I accepted and why did I continue to accept the idea that there was nothing to be done? I had given in too quickly, I had resigned myself to separation, to eternal farewells, without his having given one good reason, or even a decent excuse. A few ahs tossed out like smoke in my eyes, and a few oblique sentences, zigzagging like the number 1 vaporetto, had sufficed to shut my mouth. But that of the Chairman had long since been rotundly opened; the plump, regular, well-oiled diesel my ears had been trying in vain to exclude was his voice.
These dinners of Cosima’s worked a bit like board meetings, in which the Chairman was permitted to have the first, the middle and the final word; he was helped, that is, to develop his own arguments and was then spurred along by suitable comments and appreciative remarks, while any sparks of autonomous conversation that might spring up around the table were extinguished mercilessly. The poor directors had to get it into their heads that all that was expected from them were variations or elaborations on the Chairman’s theme, nothing else.
And the theme of Chairman Diesel was (surprise! surprise!) Venice, or rather its famous carnival, which towards the end of the eighteenth century and of the Republic lasted for six months – a whole city singing and dancing for half a year in its campi and campielli, day and night, in a fatal fever of dissolution. So did this good man hold forth in a Venetian palazzo; he was the sort of conversationalist that would have explained the Trojan War to Homer.
“La douceur de vivre,” said the woman on David’s right dreamily, the one who laughed too much.
“The dream of every tourist board director,” said Raimondo smoothly.
“But pretty hard work too,” I said lugubriously. “And agony above all for all those who didn’t feel like it, I imagine.” The idea of finding oneself for six months at a stretch amid a crowd of festive masks struck me as a torment worthy of a Dantean circle.
“But those who didn’t feel like it,” said David, turning to me and not the hostess, “had an elegant way out. All they had to do was slip a playing card into their hats and the people in fancy dress would leave them alone.”
“Very interesting,” said Diesel, “very, very civilized. It shows how the democratic pragmatism of the Venetians was…”
I saw David on the Ponte di Rialto with a knave of hearts in his tricorn hat, making his way (but without touching anyone) through a crowd of skeletons, harlequins, apes, pashas, columbines. Where was he going? How did he like things in the eighteenth century? I looked at him, hoping to catch at least a glance, if not a wink, but he had already resumed conversation with his neighbour on the right, who was laughing more than ever, all a-giggle and a-flutter from her noodle to her nipples.
Maybe I no longer amused him, he was already fed up with me. I recalled a male friend of mine, an antiquarian from Paris who, with every new woman, after just one night, sometimes half an afternoon, felt nothing but boredom, the absolute metaphysical tedium of suicide. As soon as the thing was over, he confided to me, he would lean over the edge of the bed and instead of the carpet would see the cosmic void, the gouffre. Casanova must have been like that. And Lord Byron. And D’Annunzio. That was what David Casanova was up to in the twentieth century. A rapid visitor of female bodies, a sightseer of women. Not vulgar, certainly, not brutal or macho, not a happy-go-lucky playboy (but then neither had the others been). Gentle and delicate and irresistible, with that smile brimming with melancholy and resignation, the sort of smile even the Assunta would have fallen for, leaping headlong from Titian’s clouds. It was just that the resignation was a personal message for me, a warning: Watch out, darling, I soon get bored, you’ll have to resign yourself…
“It was undoubtedly one of the most picturesque churches in Venice. Demolished, razed to the ground, nothing left but a ruin round the back here on the Rio dei Servi,” said my neighbour on the left feelingly.
“But that’s terrible!” I responded with equal feeling. Which church? The Frari with the Assunta inside? And when? Why? I hadn’t been following, but I couldn’t care less. It was I that had been razed to the ground.
I ate as one might feed another person, an invalid, indifferent to the “historic” dish the menu card announced in its gilded frame: recomposed peacock, with thrush stuffing and side dish of maccaroni alla muratora. At Cosima’s dinners there was always a touch of gastronomic philology, different each time, picked up from ancient Veneto cookery books. (In this case the book was by Bartolomeo Scappi, and the peacock – which was extremely tough – was “recomposed” in the sense that they had put its tail back on, while the “maccaroni” were a sort of Piedmontese gnocchi.) And there was always, as now, a copious side dish of questions from the uninstructed with explanations from the philologists and gastronomes, historical reflections on Venetian fondachi and the trade in saffron, ginger, coriander on the Spice Route, on caravels and carracks, Magadazo (or Mogadishu), Calicut, the Moluccas, look, look, Mr Silvera…
And I had bored Mr Silvera with my historical menu. That was why he was now leaning over to the right and trying to get the monoglot Chinese lady to laugh (Lord only knows how, pulling faces, waving his hands). But at least she couldn’t go on and on about Pordenone and Santo Stefano, she wouldn’t force him to closet himself for hours in a collection of daubs, she wouldn’t make him stroll in the chazèr amid rabbis and renegades and moneylenders.
In a tiny pool of silence there fell distinctly the English word “ghosts”.
Ghosts? Who was talking about ghosts?
“No,” Raimondo explained, “spiriti in the sense of ‘high spirits’, wits who gathered there and made amiable conversation.”
Venice once again, or rather the Casino degli Spiriti, a square building that could be glimpsed from the windows of one of Cosima’s salons and which stood among the trees of a large wilderness of a garden.
“No ghosts,” said someone. “A pity.”
“A real pity,” said David’s Caucasian neighbour, joining hands iridescent with rings. “Imagine having dinner with the ghosts of Bembo and Caterina Cornaro! That’s what I call conversation!”
And this was what one calls a gaffe. In my rear-view mirror (Raimondo) I caught the reflection of Cosima’s indignation, smoothed over by David’s next remark.
“I don’t think they were all that amusing really, it was a rather elaborate and formal game with a touch of pedantry, a little like the dances of the time —”
“But Aretino would drop by,” stated someone. “They all came, including Bembo, Titian, Sansovino —”
“Exceptional people,” concluded Diesel in wonderment. “There must have been discussions on a very high level.”
A very high level? Just a minute: according to rumours picked up by Vasari, those were the very three who had bumped off Pordenone! And maybe it was right there, in that Casino among the dense trees, that the plan had been discussed and prepared, the poison procured, the killer… I saw David emerge from the shade of a gigantic plane tree and slip swiftly into the building by a side door. What was he doing there, in the sixteenth century? I saw the white-haired, catarrhal Titian hand him a phial, which David thrust into a pocket. I saw Aretino offer him, with a sneer, a velvet bag full of forged silver coins. A picture, a large dark daub of six and a half by ten feet unearthed by Palmarin in a villa in Ferrara and which Federhen was now going to export to South Africa or South America; there were oysters, pitchers and various fruits on the table in the background, Sansovino and Bembo peering from a damask curtain, a Dalmatian dog lying asleep in a corner.
“After Napoleon, of course,” said a voice at the end of the table. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The church that had been demolished and razed to the ground had somehow been resurrected and was now tumbling back onto the escutcheoned tablecloth along with other ruins brought about by the arrival of the French and the closing of the convents, the confiscation of ecclesiastical goods, the suppression of religious orders. Santa Maria dei Servi was just one of many. But whole palazzi had disappeared too, entire collections of art had been sold, dispersed.
“But the Ghetto, on the other hand…” I started to say, thinking of the rabbis’ joyous dance. I broke off, my voice had gone, confiscated by l’Armée d’Italie. While I took a sip of water and the Chairman began a pronouncement about war and peace, about America and Russia and the Third World, I noticed a tiny little noise, a kind of prolonged chirping which undermined the solemn throb of his diesel.
It was the little Chinese lady laughing; David Casanova had managed it and the truth was that, once again, I hadn’t understood a thing about him. Amid so many hypotheses and daydreams, I hadn’t even taken the simplest of them into consideration. Forget about pyramids: he was a philanderer of staggering efficiency who fluttered around the place, swiftly sipped the first flower he came to, flitted on to another, sipped it no less swiftly, flitted onto another, sipped…
“Napoleon detested her,” I confided to my neighbour on the right. “But she was a woman who knew how to get what she wanted.”
“Sorry, who?” he asked, still in the sixteenth century or perhaps already back in the twentieth.
“Madame de Staël.”
“Ah yes, of course, an exceptional woman. Even the Duke of Wellington, who was after all the Duke of Wellington…”
There you are, see. Now that was one lady who never let herself get sipped by anyone, she had managed to keep her Benjamin Constant (who was after all Benjamin Constant) all to herself for years even though he dreamed of nothing but getting away. And all done without any qualms, with a good deal of screaming, weeping, carrying on, blackmailing, fainting, and a happy determination to dispense with all such niceties as reserve, fair play, tact and style. A harridan? A fishwife? Maybe, but meanwhile Benjamin Silvera – always inadequate, never necessary – was always there within reach.
I saw David handing me a bottle of smelling salts after a fit of hysteria. His face was all scratched by my nails, his jabot in tatters, and he was whispering to me to keep calm, he wasn’t going to leave after all, not tomorrow or ever…
The chirping had become more acute, it was tinkling the whole length of the table like a concerto of crystal goblets. What kind of laughter was it? Free and uncontrollable, to a Chinese ear? Or more scandalized/amused? Or maybe roguish/amorous? There was no way of telling, one would have to know Cathay, its customs and habits.
I took David back to the thirteenth century, dressed as Marco Polo, deluding himself that he had finally conquered the Mandarin Lady with his grimaces, whereas her laughter was the sign of his fall into disgrace, indeed of his death sentence – swish, off with his head.
Her eyes gleaming, the Mandarin lady turned to her husband, who was sitting on Cosima’s left. Rapid syllables gushed between them, further enthusiastic chirping, then David confided cheerfully to both of them:
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搔 |
愛 |
俟 |
靜 |
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⾸ |
⽽ |
我 |
⼥ |
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踟 |
不 |
於 |
其 |
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躕 |
⾒ |
城 |
姝 |
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隅 |
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I heard Cosima’s astonished voice: “You know Chinese?”
“Ah,” said Mr Silvera.
Ah no, I said to myself, Ah no.
Oreste Nava dispassionately reflects on the lapse of which he has just been guilty. With the sauce boat in his hand, he found himself behind the laughter-loving lady on Mr Silvera’s right when Mr Silvera concluded his little speech in Chinese. Chinese Chinese, not the pidgin language Oreste Nava can still recall a few words of from his time in Singapore all those years ago.
Immediately the hostess wanted to know what it was all about. A poem, or a short song from the Shih-Ching, Mr Wang explained in English, whose words Mrs Wang could not remember and which her honourable neighbour had had the goodness to recite. As his honourable fellow diners were aware, Mr Wang added, the Book of Odes was a collection of very old Chinese poems edited by Confucius himself, two and a half thousand years ago.
This information visibly impressed the hostess and all those present, and the request that Signor Silvera should provide an immediate Italian translation extended a cloth of silence, of palpitating expectation, over the whole table. It would have been a serious mistake, a grave lack of sensitivity, to have intruded with the sauce boat, even one of highly wrought silver.
But Oreste Nava knows perfectly well that these are excuses unworthy of him, post hoc explanations that might be good enough at best for a young man like Luigi. He knows perfectly well that he had failed to come up to his own ideals of efficiency and imperturbability, that he had stood there like a chump, with his sauce boat in one hand and his jaw dangling, forgetting all about his duty, his service and his uniform in his desire not to miss one word of the translation, which his Far Eastern memories had automatically made him align from top to bottom and from right to left, after the Chinese fashion:
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(14) Scratch |
(10) Love |
(5) Wait |
(1) Oblivious |
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(15) Head |
(11) But |
(6) I |
(2) Lady |
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(16) Doubtful |
(12) Not |
(7) Near |
(3) Your |
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(17) Remain |
(13) See |
(8) Ramparts |
(4) Beauty |
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(9) Corner |
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Ch’ing nü, everyone tries to pronounce enthusiastically, ch’ing nü, oblivious lady, who has forgotten her appointment. And that poor chap, left there scratching his head. Ch’ing nü: a jewel, a delight, a masterpiece!
Oreste Nava is familiar with these hyperbolic outbursts, but the poem struck even him as beautiful, a simple, fresh, gentle poem. A love poem which could be appreciated even by young Luigi, indeed, especially by young Luigi. And still standing there with the sauce boat in hand, Oreste Nava lost himself in reflecting on the following incredible but true fact: two thousand five hundred, or even three thousand years ago, love was already what it was now, more or less. The same situations, same feelings…
At this point his eyes, as they strayed towards the corner of the ramparts, met the hostess’s, as they had already done countless times during dinner in a busy exchange of silent signals. Caught out, the guilty party came to his mortified senses. But the hostess’s eyes did not contain the slightest hint of reproof; they slid over him with infinite indulgence, boundless comprehension, and came to rest ecstatically on Mr Silvera (who refused the sauce, as did his neighbour).
Great stuff, Eastern wisdom, Oreste Nava now says to himself while the hostess reveals to Mr Silvera that she has always greatly admired, and even occasionally practised, Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan and Indian philosophy.
“They’re very interesting civilizations,” declares the Chairman of the Spoon. “Very, very interesting, and we Westerners…”
But his reflections have no audience, his ratings are clearly at rock-bottom, Oreste Nava has seen them take a gradual downward turn from the consommé onwards. It is not to him that the hostess turns to express her own affinity with Confucius and Buddha, her own faith (a good fifty–fifty) in the transmigration of souls, it is not to him that she pours out a passionate defence of the Siculo-Tibetan guru Turiddh¯anand¯a, whose meditation courses she followed last year in Ascona, just before the canton police turned up. A man of superior spirituality, who for this reason has been greatly slandered by his many jealous enemies. A man who knows how to give his followers a sense of detachment, an inner peace, a mystic sense of life; qualities, as Mr Silvera is aware, entirely lacking in Western civilization, which is so materialistic and absurdly competitive.
“But I find that the basic values of the West,” the Chairman of the Spoon objects in a minor tone, “although they may have entered —”
A female voice cuts in on him. “I find that knitting gives me a greater spiritual tranquillity than anything else. A nice raglan sleeve is a real exercise in transcendental concentration, at least for me. Crochet too.”
It was the princess from 346 who spoke. Polemically, almost sarcastically. Oreste Nava has already noticed her showing several other little signs of impatience or nervousness, and it is clear something is not to her taste this evening, maybe she finds the conversation a little tedious, too intellectual and historical, what with Titian, Confucius and the questionable guru Turiddh¯anand¯a. A pity. She too could do with a touch of that Eastern wisdom that places one above the little setbacks, the petty resentments of life.
Oreste Nava thinks nostalgically back to the exotically luxuriant gardens of Singapore, next to which other things seem to dwindle in importance, even the furious rages aroused in him by the staff, the Chinese, Malaysians, Kanaks, Indians and local layabouts. When he realizes that in serving the salad that oafish ch’ing, the oblivious Luigi, has missed out the wife of the vice-chairman of a publishing house, the look he turns on him to induce him to make amends is not the optical equivalent of a hefty kick up the backside but seems suffused with millenary indulgence, with all the philosophical, mystical understanding to be found East of Suez.
* That is: “Chìng nǚ qí shū, szù à yú chéng yú. Ai ér bù jiàn. Sāo shǒu chí p’ieh.” [Editor’s note.]