The world can come crashing down on you as you sip your coffee. I was sitting in an armchair in the Veronese salon and good old Nava was offering me the sugar with an expression of inexplicable vapidity, when out of the corner of my eye I saw David bearing down on me.
Perfectly normal, after our long separation. A routine courtesy, on the part of any kind and affectionate husband or lover. But it was just this that enraged me. What was normal about us? Suddenly I couldn’t bear the fact that he had adapted so well to the formal rules of the evening. What he should have felt obliged to do at this point was some sudden act of rupture, something sensational and scandalous, I don’t know, sliding towards me on his knees, kissing me passionately in front of everybody, tearing off that jacket, that absurd shirt, lifting me in his arms and proclaiming: Ladies and gentlemen, I love this woman and now I’m carrying her off with me.
But if this didn’t come to him spontaneously, if he preferred to play the perfect man of the world, I certainly couldn’t make the first move myself. All those things I had thought about him (against him!) over dinner were writhing inside me like the protruding hands of zombies as they struggle to emerge from their graves in horror films. And it would have been truly horrific to let him catch a glimpse of even one of these hands, even a single fingertip. It was essential, it was a matter of life and death, that I should have the strength and coolness of mind to thrust them back underground. At all costs, my face had to match his in its normality.
With my blood congealing, my facial muscles back in the Stone Age and my voice God knows where, I prepared to receive him, like the perfect woman of the world.
“Everything all right?” he said.
“Fine, lovely dinner,” I said. “I haven’t complimented Cosima yet, but I want —”
“Nice lady,” he remarked.
“Yes, I told you so, she’s very much en beauté this evening. And the Chinese lady wasn’t too bad either. And that other extrovert on your right. Did you enjoy yourself?”
“Well, you know…” he said.
“I really enjoyed myself, it was a most interesting conversation, truly on the highest level. Even too high for me. Confucius, even.”
“Confucius was dedicated to you.”
“You don’t say. Like Shakespeare?”
“Well, you know…” he repeated.
“What do I know?” I said, showing my teeth. “I don’t know anything.”
“Drink your coffee,” he said, sorrowfully. “As soon as we can, we’re clearing out.”
“Why? I’m enjoying myself.”
“Drink your coffee.”
A disaster, the worst between-two-stools possible. Give up the crazed Madame de Staël fishwife approach? But then you’d have to be able to pull off a convincing Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, the type who doesn’t even notice such petty misfortunes. A complete debacle, the end of La Serenissima.
I drank my coffee as if it were hemlock, grateful to Ida, Raimondo’s niece, who came to relieve me of the Confucian.
“Can I steal him from you for a moment?”
“He’s all yours.”
A success, a real triumph which lasted a good hour. They passed him from hand to hand, from pouffe to stool, the mystery man. And they came to me as if I were his manager: but who is he, what does he do, where’s he from, where’s he going. Knives twisted in the wound.
Even Raimondo came up at a certain point, having guessed everything. “Would you make me a nice sweater for Christmas?”
“I’ll start tomorrow. How do you want it, braided, English-style —” I broke off with a pang. “I even gave him a cardigan,” I stammered. “Dark red. Cashmere.”
“Let’s talk about servants then,” said Raimondo. “You know my Alvise wants to retire? I told him quite truthfully that he’s the most important man in my life, but he pulls out the excuse of his emphysema, tells me to look around. But how? Where? Do you think Cosima would let me have one of her Moors?”
I looked around. David was far away, amid an attentive cluster which included Cosima. “He’s truly irresistible,” I said.
“Come along, you need a whisky.”
“Yes, that historic peacock hasn’t settled properly.”
He led me, whisky in hand, to one of the large windows giving onto the garden. They were deep-set windows, with stone seats protected by curtains which ventilated the confessional. We sat down.
“It’s like a confessional.”
“Take advantage of it to confess, my lost lamb. How many times?”
“Well… not that many, if one actually counts.”
“It’s the quality that matters. You’re totally besotted, aren’t you?”
“Yes, as I’ve never been before. Literally liquefied.”
“And he isn’t. Is that the problem?”
“And he… I don’t know. If we stick to the facts…”
So I told him about the coin he had given me, and then that sunset on the ship to Chioggia. Of certain extraordinary signs of delicacy he had shown towards me, of certain tiny, magic intuitions in and out of bed. I told him of the kisses he had given me in every corner of Venice, of the Pensione Marin and the suite where we had read about the firefighters on the Giudecca. I told him about the Ghetto, about Rabbi Schmelke and the bench. Between one sip of whisky and another, I told him – facts? No, a flood of chaotic sentences, dissecting inessential details, stacking up disconnected impressions, inexpressible nuances, being thoughtful one minute, drastic the next, dreamy, laughing, coldly deductive, tortuously inductive, and taken altogether totally confusional.
“Understand?” I said, taking a breath. It was a word I had used rhetorically a hundred times or so, but this time Raimondo emerged from his silence.
“No, I don’t understand.”
I paused to listen. Everything I had just said sounded to me like a cataclysmic clattering of crockery. “Please excuse my obscene outburst, but it’s the first time I’ve spoken to anyone about it.”
“No, no, that’s fine, no problem, that’s what I’m here for. But from what you say it sounds like the description of a grand but impossible love. What I don’t understand is why it’s impossible. All love affairs are possible now. That’s what’s so boring.”
“But I don’t understand it either! I don’t get it either!”
Raimondo put a hand on my arm. “No, sorry, but haven’t you asked him, haven’t you tried to clarify the situation?”
“How do you clarify anything with an artful dodger like that! He sidesteps, eludes you, slips through your fingers like water. I’ve tried, believe me, and all I got out of him was that he might be ‘called’ from one moment to the next, and then adieu.”
“Called? Who by?”
“Who knows? Mystery man.”
Raimondo scratched his head. “Scratch head, doubtful remain,” he said.
“Look,” I said, “I could talk to you about his mysteries until the cows come home and we’d never get to the bottom of them. Try and get him to talk, if you like, but I already know you won’t get anything out of him.”
“Don’t be too sure. You wait and see, I’ll get him to confess too,” said Raimondo, putting his arm around my shoulders by way of absolution and leading me out again.
But it was too late. With one arm around Cosima’s shoulders, the mystery man was entering another confessional.
Mr Silvera’s beautiful hand detaches itself with a leaflike flutter from the hostess’s beautiful shoulder, and the two stand there side by side without looking at each other, gazing up at the tall, nocturnal slit of the window. There is no embarrassment or tension in Mr Silvera, who throughout the whole evening has registered the woman’s curiosity, stimulating it from time to time with ease, and now, in the relative secrecy of this niche, he sets to work. From the thrifteria of his past, from the many lands and peoples he has known, from the many situations he has faced, he extracts without difficulty a tone at once confidential and lonely, a voice tempted by silence, like that of a top coming to the end of its spin. “You see, Cosima,” he says, “the truth is that I shouldn’t have been, I absolutely shouldn’t be here.” His gaze seems to indicate the long garden of the palazzo with the Casino degli Spiriti there in the distance, and next to it, glittering behind the trees, the black rectangle of water of the Sacca dei Miracoli.
“Here… in my house, do you mean?” The woman is surprised, but flattered, by this negative preference.
“No,” says Mr Silvera. “Here in Venice. I should only have stayed here a few hours, just long enough to take my party on a little tour.” He raises his hand and his wrist gives a bored demonstrative flex. “San Marco, the Palazzo Ducale, Murano… And then off again at once… to…” From the lights of the airport just visible in the north, directly in front of them, his gesture widens towards the east and the canal of San Nicolò, the Porto di Lido, the sea. But his hand is already fluttering vaguely down again and the direction of the journey remains uncertain. His eyes remain fixed on the lagoon, where the occasional dimly lit vaporetto still passes between the city and the scattered isles of the northern lagoon.
The woman’s lips peel apart as if the long pause had glued them together. “But you…” she starts to say, gazing at the dark shapes of the trees. Then she seems to shake herself like a wet sparrow; she resumes a worldly ease of manner and turns to Mr Silvera with animation. “I don’t wish to seem indiscreet, heaven forbid, I don’t wish to know where you were supposed to be going and why you didn’t go…” She stops, dissatisfied with herself and with her tool, which is revealing itself as inappropriate and useless. “I just wanted to say,” she continues in a lower voice, once again staring at the garden, “you aren’t seriously a guide, a group leader, are you?”
“No, not exactly,” Mr Silvera admits.
The woman now smiles at him without any awkwardness, feeling comforted and grateful for this admission which rewards not only her intuition but also – she believes – her powers of persuasion. “It struck me,” she comments, “as a rather strange job for someone like you.”
“I’ve done stranger ones,” Mr Silvera lets slip. “But the only job I’ve ever done seriously was something quite different.” He slips his hands into his jacket pockets, leaving just his thumbs out, and starts to rock very slowly backwards and forwards, heels and toes, as if adapting himself to the gentle rolling of a ship. “But unfortunately it’s something…” he adds. He stops, turns towards the woman, his eyes steady, firm. “You understand, it’s something I no longer have the courage to tell anyone. Something very difficult to say and above all to… explain… justify… even conceive.”
A quiver runs through the woman which she at once controls, as a huntress restrains the tiniest sprig. She stands immobile. It is not merely a pause of expectancy: what rises in her eyes is terror, the awful possibility that this unmentionable, inconceivable “thing” might not get mentioned to her, that Mr Silvera’s lips might decide not to let it slip out. Then she takes a cautious pace in the fragile silence. She seems about to turn towards the salon as if to look at someone, but does not. “And you haven’t said anything even to…” she asks in a low voice.
Mr Silvera barely moves his head from right to left. “No,” he says, briefly but with complicity, “not even to…”
In the huntress’s eyes he now reads the certainty of capture, the decision to leap from cover, from all circumspection.
“Try and tell me then,” she begs him openly. “Try and explain to me.”
Heels and toes, backwards and forwards. Mr Silvera starts to rock again. “If you wish,” he says in a low voice, and starts to explain.
It was not a confessional, it was a toy theatre, and the performance went way beyond all bounds of decency and tolerance. The curtains framed them, put them on show, drew attention to them. For all of those who sat there chatting, or unwrapping a chocolate, lighting a cigarette, putting down a glass, moving a cushion, blowing a nose, looking for something in a lamé handbag, it was impossible to refrain from glancing ever more frequently in that direction. A crescendo of peeking, a riot of twisted necks and arched eyebrows. What could they be saying to each other, those two?
I took various definitive decisions:
To ignore them completely. I went over to Ida and selected a gilded chair of faux bamboo which I rotated so my back was towards the couple, and I re-engaged energetically in an argument with her about the most recent directors of the Biennale: all fools, according to her; some of them passable, in my opinion.
But after a lively rally and a couple of serves that took us up to deuce, I stomped off the court. I decided to listen to what they were saying without any false scruples.
Between the second and the third window (theirs), not far from the wall, there was a circle of seats which seemed promising. I strolled casually around the salon until I reached the desired sofa, smiled at the publishing vice-chairman, who beckoned me to sit next to him. I perched half on the arm and strained my ears.
Nothing. A murmur. His, mostly. A musique de robinet with no acutes, no dissonances and no trills. An exasperatingly elusive mutter, the kind you hear from the adjoining room in a hotel (and you discover the morning after that they were two Albanian businessmen). I had never sympathized so keenly with the torments of the deaf. In complete silence I might have managed to pick something out, but the publisher had started to make up to me, he was dealing with my obviously superior beauty in a few brief words in order to reach (a woman’s weak point!) my superior intelligence.
I decided to disturb them. I responded to my wooer in a loud voice, I burst out laughing, I was alternately shy and flirtatious, and I reacted to his bland proposals (about some series of art books or other, a column on antiques in one of his magazines) as if he were demanding services worthy of a sixteenth-century courtesan. “I think a little column on the most important auctions would work very nicely”; “I’m an honest lass, don’t make me blush, avogador illustrissimo!” The poor man, with his flapping and ever-pinkening ears, was bewildered. A dialogue not only absurd but pointless too, because in the pauses I could hear the two of them continuing unperturbed.
I decided to make them uncomfortable. I went and settled myself on a divan by the wall opposite, under the Rape of Europa (Veronese and school), and I stared at them openly, obstinately. They were still standing, sideways on, and he was the one who kept talking. She was almost literally hanging on his lips, gazing up at him, and every so often she would speak, stating an objection or asking a question about something. She shook her head, joined her hands a couple of times, and once touched his forearm. She was greatly moved, intense. Or rapt. He was doing something I had never seen him do before, rocking slowly back and forth, his hands in his jacket pocket, his thumbs out. But never a smile. And they never turned towards the room, towards me.
“We’re at the Fenice,” Raimondo came up and breathed in my ear. “The Window Duet.”
“Does it look like a seduction scene to you?”
“Frankly, no. More like a scene at the accountant’s.”
“But can’t one intervene? After all she’s the hostess, she’s got certain basic duties towards her guests, hasn’t she?”
“I know, the Chairman is getting rather irritated. Tomorrow he’s got a plane at seven, he’d like to go off to bed.”
David talked and talked. She widened her eyes, then nodded (smart of her, she’d got the point). Then she raised her chin, asked something (stupid of her, she’d missed the point). At a certain juncture she put her hand to her mouth and opened her eyes so wide she seemed on the point of fainting. She must have received some – for her – supreme revelation.
Raimondo looked around and then picked up a silver dish with a few chocolates on it.
“No, thanks.”
“They’re not for you,” said Raimondo, winking. “I’m sending Nava on a mission. He’ll bring down the curtain.”
It is with real relief that Oreste Nava sets out to perform his duty. That excessively long conversation in the window has discomfited him as well. Not because he needs any supervision in emptying ashtrays, taking away empty glasses, offering drinks; but because he has become increasingly aware that the guests have been passing from curiosity to embarrassment and finally to disapproval.
An unpleasant and disappointing conclusion to an evening which has otherwise proceeded most artistically, at least as far as the service is concerned. After the initial Sacrilege of the Spoon and the slight défaillance of the sauce boat, there has been no further accident or mishap; the two boys have proved above all praise and the much-feared carpet has claimed no other victims. Only the hostess, unfortunately, has failed to come up to scratch, and nothing Mr Silvera might have said to her can justify such irresponsible, not to say shameless behaviour; above all in a lady who seemed so keen on good manners.
What can Mr Silvera have been saying to her all this time?
An insistent courtship as a result of a sudden overwhelming passion would seem the most likely hypothesis, and this is clearly what the spectators are all thinking. But on the four or five occasions he happened (by pure chance) to pass the window, Oreste Nava did not hear a single word to which a romantic meaning could be attributed. From the curtains there came, for example, the name Rembrandt, a typical name in conversations about art. Later, the name St Paul, a sign that the chat had taken a religious turn. Then the name of a tourist locality, Antioch. Then that of a certain Fugger, probably a mutual acquaintance. And then there was a question from the lady about the chariot races in Byzantium, a dip into ancient history.
But that doesn’t mean anything, Oreste Nava reflects as he makes his way towards the window with his silver plate, it doesn’t mean anything at all. Amorous seduction knows a thousand roads, a thousand diversions, a thousand false routes to reach its goal. It is only slapdash youths like Luigi who persist in going for the straight line and nothing else, unaware of how much more interesting, exciting, and ultimately satisfying it can be to reach the pussy via Rembrandt and Byzantium.
With a finely judged cough Oreste Nava approaches the niche and then without further ado inserts the chocolates between the two presumed lovebirds. The hostess stands there, staring at them as if they were huge brown insects of extragalactic origin; she raises unseeing eyes to Oreste Nava, and then she recognizes him, bestows a dazed smile on him, and looks over her shoulder towards the salon she has so long neglected. “Oh, good heavens,” she murmurs. And as she emerges from her hypnosis, the enchantment is broken.
But when she returns (at long last!) to her guests there remains an aura of grogginess about her, a gently befuddled air, an obvious torpor in her movements, her gestures, her voice. And as she bids goodbye to the Chairman of the Spoon and then to all the others as they follow in dribs and drabs, Oreste Nava is reminded of the church door after a funeral. Not that the lady’s attitude is tearful or heartbroken; there is about her something of the languor of a lopped flower, an absorbed dreaminess, as of one who, self-enfolded, concedes herself distantly to her condolers, already cherishing in secret her own tender grief.
She takes leave of Mr Silvera with an interminable gaze, but without a word. And then, impulsively (this, too, a typical post-funeral gesture), she folds his accompanying princess in a long, close embrace.
When they have all left, Oreste Nava returns to the salon where Luigi and the Moor are already diligently waiting to start clearing up. But why on earth haven’t they started yet? With a hitch-hiker’s cock of the thumb, Luigi indicates the third window recess, within which, Oreste Nava notes, the hostess has reinstalled herself in order to gaze out at the trees, the water, the dark night. Luigi strikes his right hand on his left wrist, to signify a quick exit. The Moor smiles toothily. Oreste Nava moves respectfully but firmly towards the window, clears his throat, waits for the somnambulist to stir from her contemplation.
“Yes…” she says at last, in a distant voice. She moves reluctantly from the niche just as her cousin re-enters the salon. Signor Raimondo nods to Luigi, pinches the Moor on the cheek, then signals to Oreste Nava to drop everything, takes the hostess by the hand, draws her to a divan and sits down beside her.
He pours himself a whisky, crosses his legs, and says in a resolute, almost threatening tone: “And so.”
There is no moon, there are no stars, but the Venetian night can do without such cosmic trappings, it can draw on its own, far more sophisticated stockpile of romantic effects; it has such dreamy devices, such caressable contrivances up its sleeve that Mr Silvera and his companion, at the critical moment of their departure from Cosima’s palazzo, are overcome by its immediate seduction.
From the way he feels his arm taken, Mr Silvera at once notes an absence of either reproof or reappropriation; her head instinctively finds its place on his shoulder and their footsteps slip into an easy concord, while the tensions and contractions of the evening are gradually placated, smoothed out in the scirocco-stirred air, in the soft, subtle wheedling of the water against the stone, in the delicate variations of shade among the slumbering buildings.
And so, in silence, they enter a narrow sottoportico and re-emerge into the minuscule Campo dell’Abbazia, which offers itself like an unexpected reward, a prize preserved exclusively for them – an old trick of the old city, repeated millions of times in its annals of love but never failing in its effect. Thus, in silence, they linger between the two sacred facades, the pair of statues, the two right-angled canals that border the campo, and finally Mr Silvera, still in silence, spreads his raincoat like a cloak over the steps in front of Santa Maria Valverde and they both sit and contentedly contemplate that intimate territory, Adam and Eve in an Eden of a hundred square feet – but all the work of man.
Mr Silvera (leaning back on one elbow, while she entwines her fingers around his knee) can think of no other spot in the world, among the many it has befallen him to see, where artifice attains such heights of naturalness, radiates such a sense of fullness, a fullness that cannot be perfected or increased, like the sea, a forest, a desert. The best – he reflects – that could be achieved by the sweat of the brow after man’s banishment from the Eden of divine fabrication.
From the water they hear occasional subdued thuds as the moored boats bump into one another, and friendly creaks, light metallic arpeggios of chains. Opposite them, a small wooden bridge extends its humble planks over the canal.
There is nothing to say in such a place, and Mr Silvera and his companion sit in silence and gaze around themselves, compressing into these soft minutes the years of the pyramids.
Later, after haphazard wanderings through the intricate chiaroscuro of gullies, dilatations, cavities, recesses and projections, after fleeting encounters with other elusive denizens of the nocturnal city – cats, passers-by, dry leaves – they finally intersect the insinuating serpentine of the Grand Canal.
On their right, beyond a few segments of wall, they see the lights of a boat stop, which they reach by turning a few corners. The floating landing stage is that of San Marcuola. Inside its glass walls the man on one of the benches does not even look up when they enter; he has his mind on his own affairs and sits hunched over, his hands abandoned on his knees, totally anonymous and innocuous. And yet from him there emanates a strong, jarring sense of extraneousness, almost a smell, a malign, sardonic stink of clock hands, dials, hourglasses, vaporetto timetables, the elusive putrescence of real time, of finite time, which Mr Silvera and his companion now feel they are re-entering with a headlong plunge, as into an imprudently forgotten canal. With a certain dismayed impotence they therefore take their places on a bench and sit there, waiting taciturnly and at a slight distance from each other, separated by a sudden wave of physical fatigue.
Other waves lap against the landing stage, nuzzling it softly, or – more rarely, as when a large motorboat or barge passes along the canal – administering sharp smacks. Then the rigid parallelepiped quivers and lurches in all directions as if its transparent sides were about to transmogrify into some unknown freak of geometry.
The man gets laboriously to his feet, thus announcing the arrival of the vaporetto, an eye of light that cuts the water slantwise, draws up, and only at the last minute reveals the dark boat, the half-empty blue seats inside. Nobody gets off and only the unsuspecting chronoleper boards it, since Mr Silvera and his companion are going in the opposite direction. But the evil has been done.
Mr Silvera gets up in turn and starts to walk up and down the open side of the glass cabin, looking at the spectral curve of the palazzi, the feeble, scattered lamps, the distant lights of other stops identical to this one.
“Aren’t you tired?”
“Yes, a little,” says Mr Silvera, stopping. “I wanted to see if there was a taxi around.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Energetically making its way up the canal, a police motorboat splutters a few yards from the landing stage and the two dark silhouettes upright at the prow turn their heads towards Mr Silvera. The wash soon comes and breaks against the pontoon and Mr Silvera keeps his balance, rocking along with the motion of the waves, heel and toe, back and forth.
“So am I allowed to know what you were telling Cosima?”
“Ah,” Mr Silvera says, sotto voce.
“You were an hour chatting away behind those curtains.”
The tone is one of wholehearted, amused indulgence, but Mr Silvera knows that behind these sincerely generous intentions, ferocious tigers are ready to pounce. The slightest hint of evasiveness would unleash them. “We mostly talked about the Diaspora,” he reports after an honest calculatory reflection.
“The Diaspora? Never knew Cosima was interested in Jewish history.” The big felines are stirring suspiciously, their fur bristling. “Did you tell her we’d been to the Ghetto?”
“No,” says Mr Silvera with convincing firmness. “It was China that brought it up. I was explaining the Eastern Diaspora to her, the fact that Jewish merchants reached China centuries before the Jesuits, before Marco Polo, centuries before Christ even, it would seem.”
“Before Confucius? Before Ch’ing nü, the oblivious lady?”
Mr Silvera avoids the sideswipe by taking it literally. “Not before. More or less around the same time, according to some scholars.” And taking advantage of the beasts’ momentary bafflement, he swiftly goes on to describe the famous synagogue of Kaifeng, founded in 1163, ventures down the secret trails that led to India and Persia (and vice versa), reaches Constantinople (where for a short while all the charioteers of the Hippodrome were Jews), climbs up to Greece, redescends to Babylon, pauses briefly in Carthage and would like to pass over to Spain when on the horizon there appears a Phoenician vaporetto (Line 1, for San Marco–Lido), borne opportunely on the billows of the Grand Canal to interrupt the Western Diaspora.
Mr Silvera and his companion do not descend into the squalid hold but remain standing outside, their faces to the wind. However, there are no kisses or hugs between them, magical Chioggia is further than China, the lady is by no means oblivious, the tigers are not yet asleep.
“And couldn’t you have told her all this on a sofa?”
The wind, the engine noise, the pelting of the water against the prow strip the sentence of its bitterly incredulous inflections, rendering the words vain and scattering its syllables so Mr Silvera feels authorized to shelter behind an ambiguous gesture of impotence: he throws his arms wide and makes no reply.
They do not talk again until they reach the door of the hotel, at which point she asks: “And where did you learn Chinese?” But she immediately steps into the revolving drum, as if she had no wish for an answer, or at any rate expected it to be a lie. And in this same mood of peevish testiness she goes straight to the desk, where the night porter hands her the large key and a folded note. She opens it, casts a distracted eye over it, and lets it slip from her fingers. Mr Silvera bends to pick it up. “It’s for you,” she says, in a voice which through inertia has remained cutting, inconsistent with the bewilderment in her eyes.
It is a hotel card, which records a telephone call for Mr Silvera at 21.20. In the little box provided there is no name, just a (local) telephone number and the porter’s scribbled sentence: Call back any time.
“Ah,” says Mr Silvera.
So the call had come after all, and I discovered that I wasn’t in the least prepared for it, that while I had feared it greatly I hadn’t really taken it into consideration. Like death, it was one of those events so intractable, so jarringly certain, that one never knows how to slot them into the everyday chanciness of life. One goes off, does things, takes a vaporetto, a coffee at the bar, eats a peacock, strolls: how could one ever move with that cumbersome, ponderous cube of lead in one’s handbag?
I sought and found my cigarettes, my lighter, and I remember, for example, that my hands were trembling. But I cannot recall any other details of those decisive moments. My legs must have carried me over to an armchair in the lobby, in which I found myself sitting. He had disappeared into the little passage where the phone booths were situated. Because this thing must be extremely urgent, dramatic, I mused to myself. Or to get the worry off his mind at once. Or maybe because, if he phoned from our suite, I would be bound to hear what he said? I also remember, at the borders of my anxiety, a chipped glass ashtray in front of me and a wild jealous hypothesis: the call was from Cosima, who wanted to declare her crazy love to him, I can’t live without you, join me at once or I’ll kill myself. I even tried to remember the number I had so stupidly dropped instead of reading it carefully and committing it to memory. There was a seven, I felt sure, and a zero.
But these were things only spies could manage to do, agents with years of training in the mnemonic glance. In any case, I couldn’t remember Cosima’s number. And in any case (my brain was still working, even though in slow motion), at 21.20 Cosima was at the centre of her oval table, under my eyes or almost, and was still looking askance at that strange, impertinent fellow diner in jabot and tiny buttons, who was already returning from his phone call, who didn’t see me at first and stood there gazing into the shade, he himself a finely etched man of the shade, the real mystery man.
It seemed to me then (and it still does) that with Mr Silvera my every propensity for curiosity had been exhausted, dried up, atrophied forever. Never again would I be able to make conjectures, to speculate, work with my imagination, ask questions or wonder about anybody. I would never wish to know anything about anyone, ever.
He came and sat down in the armchair next to mine and must have taken pity because he said at once: “It was just someone who wants to see me early tomorrow morning.”
Deadly nonchalance.
“Great news,” I commented. And I added: “Because if he’d wanted to see you now, would you have gone?”
He didn’t answer. He had said all he had to say in the Window Duet, in the Dialogue with Cosima. There was nothing left for me, no private message, no explanation, no revelation. If he needed help, it wasn’t my door he knocked at. If he had to get some terrible secret off his chest, it was not to me that he made his confession. If he needed money, it wasn’t me he asked.
I got up, twirling the key. “Shall we go then?”
He came along behind me as if I weren’t there, and even in the elevator he maintained the same attitude – or at least that was how he appeared to me, like the way he moved through the crowd, not evading but avoiding people, having retreated into some mysterious shell of his own. I was almost surprised that when we reached 346 he stopped with me instead of proceeding on down the corridor.
Between the four walls of the living room I felt lost. I was not familiar with such a state of paralysis. I had never, one might say, found myself with a man in a situation in which I didn’t know what to do. As an experience it was both anguishing and humiliating, like finding oneself at the top of a cathedral spire with no idea how to get down, and at the same time like being unable to open the most banal of drawers. But he was the one who had sent me up that cursed spire, he was the damned drawer. I was seething. Without looking at him, in a voice that would have split a sequoia trunk, I said: “Well, I’m done in, I’m going off to sleep, goodnight.”
I took one angry step towards my room, but Mr Silvera opened the drawer and drew out the saddest, most irresistible of his ahs.
He didn’t say, he was unable to say anything else, and as I clung to him with serpentine adhesiveness, I not only felt those nodules of anger, exasperation and jealousy dissolve within me one by one, but amid one incandescence and another I hugged myself, dwelling with amusement, with emotion even, on the memory of my hysterics throughout the evening. After all, we had had our lovers’ tiff, I told myself, counting my blessings; it was one more thing we had shared. And I caressed him without knowing whether he was asleep or not, and since we were in the dark now, at an impossible hour of the night, I thought: I love but I can’t see, and I felt like laughing. And I thought tenderly of those Chinese lovers and their missed date. And I asked myself lewdly: but what about afterwards, when Ch’ing nü, the oblivious lady, remembered their appointment and came to the corner of the ramparts and the couple withdrew into a pomegranate wood or a bamboo hut?
Those most ancient of poets undoubtedly possessed words that were still fresh, still uncontaminated, to sing the subsequent developments. Precious, expressive ideograms, lively sounds to evoke gestures simultaneously passionate, elegant, complicated, savage, gentle. Silvery words ending in ing, coupled with insinuating iengs and iangs, an emphatic pounding of u’s and of o’s and dulcet labials, voluptuous sibilants culminating perhaps in an explosive and suave uang.
How would they have managed nowadays, three thousand years later, in a world like ours, where the coats of lubricity lay so thick it was impossible to name even this thigh, this earlobe, this neck?
Or maybe even then they didn’t name anything but preferred to rely on metaphors: the moon abandoning itself to the ripples of the lake, the pine and the birch mingling their locks in the storm… And slowly, metaphorically, I had a go at it myself, but using Venice, the capital city of amore: making my gradual way, for example, down a calle and retracing my steps up certain fondamente, and then loitering in a campiello, strolling around another, slipping into a narrow sottoportico and darting across a bridge so as to start again over there, on the other side of the canal, up a wider calle, down the opposite fondamenta, brushing the base of a campanile and lingering around a cupola, kissing the mosaics of a coscia, amid a confused unlatching of mullioned windows and a stiffening of obelisks, an ever richer intertwining of nails, faces, earlobes, gondolas, porticoes, from one sestiere to another, from one island to another, look, look, Mr Silvera, a towering campanile, a precious well head, a divine ceiling, a lip, another island sinking into the lagoon, ah, Mr Silvera, ah.