Dearest,
Here are the photographs:
1) Venice. The Lido. Hotel des Bains. March.
Sun shining. Shoes and socks off. That’s me, walking through the shallows. Tiny see-through fishes were warming themselves between the surface of the water and the shelled and ribbed sea floor. I am such a fish when the sun comes out, taking my chance, nearly at the top, but put out your hand, and I’m gone.
The Hotel des Bains, closed for renovation work, its clock stopped, its potted plants unwatered and brown. I like the seedy out-of-season feel of this photo.
You lay down, your body like a sun-sponge, gradually darkening. I walked on, thinking of Thomas Mann, and a book about a woman with webbed feet. This is an invented city, mercurial, unlikely, desired because it does not exist – or that what exists can be reworked, rewritten, scored over, and no one has ever found what it really is, its absolute self. There is no such thing.
Like love.
I turned round; the Hotel had vanished. A fisherman raised his hand to me. You were gone. There is no photo.
Here we are, searching for a café with an empty table in an empty square. We found it, didn’t we? Triumphant with ourselves. Here we are sitting down, sparrows coming to eat our bread, you pouring wine from a carafe cloudy with cold, the wine in it sparkling as the sun ran through it. These times hold my mind like a shell caught in a net.
3) Venice. Fondamenta Nuova. Night.
Here you are, in shadow, walking fast against the cold coming off the lagoon, cold forming into shapes like spirits. We came to a miniature osteria, just one room, serving purple wine from a vat, and tuna and onion on squares of bread. I gave some tuna to a cat slunk under a tarpaulin. I said to you, ‘Will you stay with me?’
You didn’t answer. You never do.
I took this photograph of you with your back turned.
4) Pensione Seguso. Our room. Iron bedstead. Wardrobe. Basin. You were snoring in the iron bed while I lay awake watching the light from the boats bounce off the chrome taps in the washbasin. I got up, went down the corridor to the bathroom, big and old, iron radiators, iron bath. This place has never been refurbished. Everything is iron.
I sat on the loo in the dark, and thought of taking a bag, disappearing, getting the boat to Athens, changing my name, never coming back. What would be the difference, after all, after the first surprise?
In the bedroom you were asleep. I lay down and broached the boundary. You put out an arm, a peninsula from your island home to mine. I can sometimes believe that you are there, and that I am there with you, in the same place, but that is as tantalising and impossible as this city, which can be visited but not known, which is inhabited, but by others.
5) The Zattere. Dawn.
The city comes to life to the noise of outboard motors cutting out towards the jetties, and the voices of men unloading crates, and after that, sack truck wheels up and down the bridges, carrying aqua minerale and beer, pasta and tinned tomatoes.
I took this photo – very Venice – thinking about love.
If you loved me this moment wouldn’t look any different. If you didn’t love me, it would look the same, but I read the scene through your love of me or not, as though love were a translation of life.
Maybe it is. How else to read it? How else to write it? We’re always reading what we see, and then rewriting it afterwards; perhaps it’s better to acknowledge our inventions than to pretend otherwise.
Look, there’s Aschenbach following Tadzio, feeling for the first time in his life what he has never been able to express. Look, there’s a woman walking on water, which for her at least, is easier than being in love.
6) Suitcases on the landing stage at the Ca’ Rezzonico.
Two Bellinis – not the paintings – then a ride by boat to the airport. At the other end, we go our separate ways, we always do. I am here on a Visitor’s Visa.
And yet, and yet and yet, we are good together in many ways. Impermanence is human, and however we screen it over, all of what we do is temporary, so why do the words for ever and ever mean so much? Why not accept that I am a visitor here and never seek right of residency?
But I have to live somewhere.
6b) Postcard of George Bush with an arrow through his head. Outside, the world I cannot control is writing a dark fairy tale of white superman heroes and dusky-faced fanatics, comicbook grotesques.
This is the War on Terror, the battle for all that is fine and good, except that each believes in its own fine and good and will destroy everything else – everything, in its name.
The planes come over – the TV news is all destruction. The Pentagon is spending $650 billion a year on the military. Its African aid budget is $4.5 billion.
It’s a lot of money to blow up a lot of homes. Pretty soon we’ll all be homeless now.
And so, while they tell me that the small and the particular does not matter, and that this is the world stage we are playing on, I want to know where I can call home, if not with you?
I’m doing my best with the big questions, but I have a small one too:
‘Do you love me?’
7) Near the Hotel Accademia. Evening. Our favourite bar. There’s the man who asked to marry you. At least he bought us both a prosecco. In the shop next door a woman is buying slices of prosciutto crudo and black olives. A boy with a dog is running after his sister on a bike.
The lights come on, spilling yellow on to the canals and casting shadows on the pavements. People are walking arm in arm, arguing good-humouredly, stashing their supper into string bags, looking for a place to eat.
We drink up, walk on, always through the backs, always away from the known. We find bars big enough for eight and squash in to make ten. We eat where there are no menus.
The woman in the cucina told us that we must have artichokes with raddichio. We did; it turned out to be brussel sprouts, cut in half and covered in Parmesan and olive oil.
9) Vaporetto stop – Saluti.
We are in our coats huddled in the middle, waiting for the lurch towards the stop, and the slide of the metal gate, and the rope flung over the bollard.
You asked me to take this picture of the boatman because you said he looked like Jesus.
Two Americans are videoing the scene so that they can show it to their friends at home. But there will be nothing to show. Once left behind, there is only Disney Venice, a fake, a pretend, a tourist attraction. Be here, and it’s still possible to find the city, but you can’t take it home with you. Venice is a quantum city, a Schrödinger’s cat of a map, simultaneously dead and alive, true and false, solid and watery, firm and disappeared.
Like us.
Like love.
10) Fishmarket. Rialto. Night.
Two boys beating drums with hands that move so fast they blur. A man sitting at a table selling tickets for a concert tonight. A mafioso on his mobile: camel-hair coat, straight Armani jeans, Berlutti shoes, shades. A water taxi purrs out of nowhere and collects him.
You turn back towards me, smiling. I like this photo.
11) The Frari. The night of the eclipse.
Already the moon is half covered by the sun that tints her chalky surface to copper like an etching plate. Night sky. Copper moon.
A Japanese person took this photo of us holding hands.
Your fingers are strong. You are good at opening jam jars. The portcullis our fingers make together is the way in to a private castle, the fortress we sometimes share, when the world is outside. But for us both it is a second home.
Look at the moon, serene and beautiful, untroubled by the flag planted on her surface. She will not be so easy to colonise, and I wonder why we are looking for new worlds to own when we have taken so little care of the one we have?
Perhaps I should ask myself that, and you too. When we have spoiled each other in each other’s eyes, will we just go elsewhere? It’s the fashion, it’s almost the rule. Why look after what you have, when you can damage it and buy a new one?
But we can’t live on the moon, and we can live here on earth. I don’t want speculative space; I want to be with you.
It’s late. Without speaking we get into bed and make love, deceiving ourselves that we are together – or do we deceive ourselves that we are apart?
12) Venice. Various.
This is an old city, built to last, not built to be endlessly torn down and redeveloped. I want to live in such a city, not too far from the forest and the sea, and I want to call it by your name.
Here’s the cat we befriended – thin and sharp like a blade on four legs.
Here’s you, standing outside Prada, looking pleased with yourself because you have bought a new skirt.
Here’s the one of me buying prawns as long as my forearm.
Here’s me again, wearing red. I look like a bottle of Campari Soda.
Here are those old postcards you wanted. I packed them in my luggage by mistake. Venice – 1945. In the Second World War, it was agreed not to bomb Venice. It could not be replaced. Much else was bombed that could not be replaced, but we replaced it anyway. Since then, the preferred method, public and private, is bomb and replace.
Like us
Like love.
13) The boat to Athens from our window.
Here’s our view, across to the Giudecca where ships the size of cities sail past on their way to fabulous unknown ports – Atlantis, Byzantium, Calcis.
Here’s the ship, blocking out everything. Everything! Do you remember how we woke in the middle of the night – I suppose it was just before dawn, the small hours?
The room was shaking with vibration and noise, like under the footprint and bellow of some animal long extinct. I went to the window, and there was the ship slowly moving forward; deck lit, hull dark, blocking any sight except itself. It stopped on a slight turn, as it always does, to mark its farewell to the city.
I went back to bed, couldn’t sleep, because all the sizeable ships that carry my nightmares trawl this channel, and stop for a moment so that the small figure in the small window can see them before they pass on, knowing that they will turn and return, some other small-hours night.
14) The Guggenheim Museum.
Our favourite museum. Photographs not allowed. I sneaked this from the garden, when you were standing in the long open windows, looking serious and happy. I wondered what I’d be thinking if I had seen you there, a stranger. This is a photograph of a stranger, taken unawares.
15) You standing by the lion in the Arsenale. This is your impersonation of the lion, and it is surprisingly good. The mouth is right. After I had taken this photo, we sat down and ate pizza while you drew the lion on your paper napkin. We were happy that day, and close.
And if I say to you that I am glad of everything we have done together, and sorry that we will not be here together in forty years, laughing at a faded photo of you impersonating a lion, it having weathered well, you less so, as we stand fabulously old, in a city that understands what spirit it takes to be old, to be beautiful, to be much looked at, to be itself, to be never quite caught, to have a past, to be content, to have seen much, to have remained, to have continued …
Keep the photos.