The marble lions are tarnished and when it rains their once mighty roaring is reduced to a mewl; they’re in dire need of a polish, just like the rest of this sad floating republic. My father arrived here in the 1960s, a straniero: strano e nero. When the lagoon rose through the fist-sized holes in the floor of his flat, he would huddle atop the immense wardrobes on a mattress and grit his teeth through the winter. Those old, porous palaces, whose upper floors housed the few penniless nobles whose hallowed ancestors once terrorized the Mare Nostrum. Those palaces, much like the one I’m sleeping in, smelt like Latin jungles: mahogany everywhere. I love this tiny room and its Franciscan sparseness. All my life, I’ve felt like a Jew, or a Gipsy, or some hapless scion of a lost wandering tribe, but they, at least, have Bar Mitzvahs, music … all I’ve left is this room. This was an empire ruled from rooms: chambers decorated for a single, specific purpose: to impress its numerous enemies. I can’t sleep. There’s a ghostly halo above my bed where a clock used to hang. One way, I suppose, to stake a claim on timelessness, if not serenity.
Venice