Me a quitter? Me a coward? Oreste Nava asks himself while he sits meditatively in the hotel foyer smoking his end-of-day cigar. Because this, basically, is the accusation levelled against him by his ex-colleague Landucci, whom he bumped into this afternoon. That was what he meant with all that business of yes, of course I see your point, you don’t want any trouble, you don’t like taking responsibility, you’re quite right to steer clear of risks, and all the other insinuations. As if there were something wrong in never having married, in having always lived happily in the hotels where he worked, in having always refused to get mixed up in business propositions like the one Landucci had put to him years ago.
The bulb has blown in the pink globe attached to the wall behind his desk, but Oreste Nava is off duty, “in civvies” (a sober grey suit), and doesn’t bother to inform the maintenance man, supposing he were still in the hotel. He’ll see to it tomorrow morning when he comes down in uniform from his comfortable room on the top floor. This is true freedom, true independence, he thinks, holding his cigar erect to avoid dropping the long cone of ash. Forget about Landucci’s business proposition.
I mean, as if. Take over that hole, the Gran Pizzeria Tropicale, on the Lido and make it even bigger, transform it into a modern, fancy fast-food restaurant, combining it perhaps with an olde-worlde pub. That was the big “proposition”. The two of them, Landucci and Nava, in partnership, hitched together in that usine à bouffer on the Lungomare Marconi, slogging away for customers who have never seen a knife and fork and maybe living in the apartment above so as to be permanently on call, with Landucci surrounded by his hard-working, up-and-coming family. And him, the businessman, all skin and bones, worn out, his eyes red from insomnia and promissory notes… Who could be blamed for not wanting anything to do with a life like that? What had cowardice got to do with it, in what way was he a quitter?
Dotted around the vast lobby are a few silent clients, browsing through magazines, waiting, drinking. Through the wide arch of the bar he can see three quarters of Piero the bartender, busily stacking his glasses, and the drunk American who has been sitting on a stool for an hour, as if petrified. He is a little man with thick blonde whiskers, who will sit silently for ages, knocking back the booze, and then start pestering Piero as to where and how he can buy a house in Venice. The word “agency” recurs each time, slobberingly stammered by the drunkard, pronounced in perfect American by Piero.
In his career Oreste Nava has seen it happen often: superb bartenders like Piero, wonderful waiters, exceptional chefs, top-class maîtres ending up like poor Landucci. Lads as smart as Landucci was in his day, with just one idea in their heads, whether in Monte Carlo, London, Nassau, Frankfurt or Crans: scrape together enough ready cash to go back to Italy and open an ice-cream shop in Foggia, set up a tavern in Tronzano. Holed up, buried alive for ever. And then, peeking out of their hole, they have the cheek to call you a yellow-bellied old blockhead. And the old blockhead takes it all meekly, instead of answering back, finding the right words to explain, politely, that courage… that the risk… that life…
Confused arguments whirl inside Oreste Nava’s head, as wispy and ungraspable as his cigar smoke, and his eyes do not immediately focus on the woman who enters the hotel.
But then the smoke clears: it is the princess from 346. On her own.
Neither she nor her friend has returned at any point during the day, his assistant at the desk told him a few minutes ago. And in the afternoon someone came to collect his suitcase, which means he must have gone off by himself. Besides, one only needs to look at the princess to realize this: she’s clearly shattered. In control, but only just.
Now she comes up wooden-faced to collect the key, then stands there in the middle of the lobby, her shoulders pulled proudly back, yes, but with her arms dangling loosely. She notices the bar is still open, but does not decide at once. She looks at the time, lights a cigarette and moves towards it. But the mumbling drunkard puts her off, and even before reaching the archway she turns round again, goes back and her eyes meet Oreste Nava’s; he is there ready for any eventuality, happy to be able to help even though off duty, and he brusquely rises halfway to his feet, forgetting all about the cone of ash, which detaches itself from the cigar and crumbles onto the arm of the chair.
But there is no recognition. Her eyes pass over him, wander desolately around the lobby, and finally come to rest on the elevator door. And a minute later the princess has gone back up to 346, and Oreste Nava blows the grey powder off the armchair, asking himself what can have happened. Is it just a quarrel, or a definite break-up? Or could her husband be on his way? Or perhaps, on the contrary, she is upset because she has decided to tell her husband everything and leave him. Unless there is a wife involved as well, whom he doesn’t want to leave. Not to mention the possibility that they could have realized they no longer love each other, or that they might have renounced each other because their love had no future…
Whirling hypotheses, dramatic dilemmas. And torment, worries, jealousy, regrets, remorse… Smoking his cigar, his eyes half-closed, Oreste Nava winds his way through remote precipices, pursuing the echo of clandestine anxieties and humiliations, of freezing or perfumed hours spent waiting by the corner of the ramparts, and he confusedly intuits that it was worth it all the same, that those were true feelings, true adventures, true risks. That that was true life.
At the bar the American stubs his tongue on the word “agency” again and Oreste Nava lets himself sink back into his armchair, glad he has never lost any sleep over the Eden Rock of Sarzana, the motel on the outskirts of Campobasso.
Later, after turning and regulating two bath taps, from which tears seemed to gush forth, after dissolving an amber-scented sachet which transformed the tears into a sigh of white foam, after a long sojourn, feeling more like a gisante than a baigneuse in that slow bloodletting warmth, one could rise wanly from the water, more noyée de la Seine than Venus Anadyomene, and weakly wrap oneself in a sponge shroud, sit numbly on the marble edge for an incalculable length of time, finally stirring oneself for the last thing that remained to be done.
One had to get dressed again, taking into account the damp night air, slip on a warmer skirt, a pullover, and return to the bathroom to seek a posthumous face in the mirror. One had to comb one’s hair very slowly, repeating the same action with the obtuse insistency of a machine, as if one’s hair were incredibly long, the fair ankle-length locks of Mary of the Desert.
Then, after checking the time, one could curl up in an armchair and try to get beyond page sixteen of Corinne ou l’Italie by Baronne Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staël. And one might not succeed, and sit there, sit there looking at one’s hands. One could go to the window, open it, look outside. One could close it again, curl up in another armchair. One could say, or whimper sotto voce, “My God”. What one absolutely couldn’t do was go into the adjoining living room and open another door.
Until one had to rise to one’s feet again, put on a raincoat, diligently follow the corridors door after door, number after number, slip into the elevator, sink down into the silent lobby, step outside. Once again one had to walk, use one’s automatic stride to take one past cats, gratings, doorways, little bridges, to pace the whole length of Piazza San Marco arch after arch and then past the candid expanse of the Palazzo Ducale, until one reached the curvature of the Riva degli Schiavoni.
From lamp post to lamp post one had to follow it right to the end in the distinctly marine air, and on the way one could count the funereal gondolas swathed in their tarpaulins, count the chest-puffing tugboats at their moorings, the sleeping seagulls, the hotels, the restaurants, the rocking pontoons where the last vaporetti were loading and unloading the last passengers. One had to persevere alongside a Yugoslavian hydroplane drawn up by the Riva dei Setti Martiri, persist alongside a short, grey warship where an armed sailor paced to and fro forbidding entry to unauthorized personnel, keep going all the way to the Giardini, to a bench in the Giardini at the point from which the Queen of the Ionian Sea must have set sail with one passenger missing. And sit here, wait here, with one’s eyes gazing out there, to the right, towards the Punta della Dogana, the mouth of the Giudecca Canal.
One could vaguely notice an occasional passer-by who slowed down out of curiosity or whatever, three boys with vacillating intentions who drew back after a single glance, a dog, the eternal gangling dog sniffing the air. One could find oneself dazzled by the third or fourth flame from the lighter and stare once again towards the Punta della Dogana without seeing anything, and after another moment begin to make out… to imagine one made out… and then actually, positively, definitely see the shape of a ship which at 11.25 passed in front of Venice, sliding along blackly with its yellow stripes, with its muffled, secret throbbing, in front of the gardens, and then faded away with its few lights behind the tip of Sant’Elena.
One could also cry, but one clutched a dud coin in one’s hand and did not.
From the deck of the Marie-Jeanne Mr Silvera sees Venice pass by, the Giardini loom darkly against the sky, and amid the recesses of that cluttered, confused, labyrinthine attic which is his memory he rediscovers and reconstructs for an instant the Ospizio di Messer Gesù Cristo: gloomy, cold bedchambers for pilgrims and beggars, where under God knows what name he had once had to sleep, in God knows what year.
It rose there, behind the Giardini, near marshland that has now been filled in, and Mr Silvera rediscovers with some precision its straw, its single oil lamp, its human smells, and the voice – but not the words – of a Greek who had disembarked from the same galley as him and lain down beside him. He rediscovers and moves other ships: a dismasted English clipper, a row of Byzantine triremes on which is superimposed a line of goods wagons. He kicks back a wineskin, a rusty helmet, drives away a caravan of camels, removes a chimney stack, a Dodge truck, a market somewhere in Ukraine. He shifts the intense, brilliant eyes of an Indian prostitute. He shifts coloured veils, long jangling necklaces and the refractory buttons of a slinky, soft red boot.
In the shady attic of his memory, he seeks a slightly less shady corner to deposit this last souvenir: two tiny clogs of wood and brocade, with towering soles, such as were worn by the Venetian ladies of old when they went out into the street.
Ah, he thinks.
Ah, murmurs Mr Silvera, watching as the lamp posts of the gardens slide past, as the last lights of Sant’Elena, of Sant’Erasmo, of the Lido slip into the distance and fade away. And into the distance, back there on the embankment, fades the sound of the clogs of the shiksa who would have liked, had it been possible, to come with him, to walk with him until the Day of Judgement.