But the lagoon is doomed, for its essences are too vaporous to survive. It is a place of vanished glories, lost islands and forgotten palaces – Malamocco drowned, Torcello deserted, Murano degraded, Mazzorbo moribund, Sant’ Ariano sepulchral, monasteries dispersed and campaniles toppled. Soon the speculators, the oil-men and the bridge-builders will dispel its last suggestions of secrecy.
On the chart of the lagoon, away among the shambling marshes in the south-west, there is an islet marked Cason dei Sette Morti – the House of the Seven Dead Men. It commemorates a legend. The Cason, an isolated stone house among the waters, was used by fishermen, in the days before motor engines, as a base for their operations; they would sleep, eat and rest there during intervals between fishing, caulk their boats and mend their nets, while one of their number went off to market with the catch. Several such lonely fishing lodges litter the emptier reaches of the southern lagoon – Cason Cornio Nuovo, Caso di Valle in Pozzo, Cason Bombae, Cason di Valgrande – mere specks in the mud, named for medieval master fishermen, or forgotten conceptions in crab-men’s minds.
Long ago, so the legend says, six men and a boy were staying at our particular cason. The men spent each night fishing, and the boy remained in the house and cooked. One morning the fishermen, returning from work, found the corpse of a man floating in the water. Hoisting it aboard, they laid it in the bows of their boat, intending to take it, after breakfast, to the Ponte della Paglia in Venice, where the bodies of drowned people were exhibited for identification. The boy, coming out of the house to greet them, saw this figure in the prow, and asked why they did not bring in their guest to breakfast. It was all ready, he said, and there was plenty for an extra mouth.
The fishermen had a truly Venetian instinct for the macabre. Peeling off their coats and entering the house, they told the boy to invite the stranger himself. ‘He’s as deaf as a post’, they said, ‘and awful stubborn. Give him a good kick and a curse, to wake him up.’ The boy did as he was told, but the man remained prostrate. ‘Give him a good shake’, the fishermen shouted, sitting down ribaldly at the table, ‘and tell him we can’t wait till doomsday for him! We’re working men, we are!’
Again the boy obeyed, and presently he returned cheerfully indoors and began to ladle out the food. All was well, he said. The guest had woken up, and was on his way. The fishermen’s flow of badinage now abruptly ceased. They stared at each other, say the story-tellers, ‘pallid and aghast’; and presently they heard slow, heavy, squelchy, flabby footsteps on the path outside. The door opened with an eerie creak; the corpse walked in, horribly stiff and bloodless; and by the time he had settled himself ponderously at the table, all those six churlish fishermen had been struck with a lethal chill, and sat before their polenta as dead as mutton. Seven dead men occupied the cason, and only the boy paddled frantically away to tell the tale.
One day I determined to visit the House of the Seven Dead Men: but no bricole mark the channels, the charts are notoriously vague, and early in the morning I went to San Pietro in Volta to find myself a pilot. Fishermen from the littoral, I discovered, no longer much frequented that part of the lagoon. Several, pointing out an island in diametrically the wrong direction, swore that it was the cason, they had known it since childhood. Several others admitted they did not know the way. One took a look at my boat and said kindly that he had other things to do. It was an aged, hirsute and wrinkled fisherman, an Old Man of the Lagoon, who finally agreed to a price, stepped aboard, and came with me.
It would be, he said, quite like old times, quite a little outing. He hadn’t been out there since the war, when he hid for a time from the Germans on a marshy reef near the cason. He was a talkative, jolly old man, wearing a slouch hat and geological layers of jersey: and he guided us merrily enough across the ruffled wastes of the central lagoon, the Vale of the Ditch of Low Water, the Small Vale of Above the Wind, where the seaweed lay only a few inches beneath our propeller, and swayed mysteriously with our passage. The day was grey and the wind cold, but as we voyaged the old man pointed out the landmarks – the Cason dei Mille Campi, a big stone lodge alone among the marshes; the distant white farmhouses of the mainland; the almost indistinguishable island of San Marco in Bocca Lama; Chioggia dim and towering to the south; the long line of Pellestrina growing vague and blurred behind.
The lagoon around us was deserted. The traffic of the big channels was far away, and only a few small shabby crab-boats lay at work in muddy inlets. Once or twice my pilot, who was not used to engines, ran us harmlessly aground: but presently we found ourselves in the deep water of the Fondi dei Sette Morti, the last stretch to our destination. Ah! what memories this stirred for the old man! Here his father had brought him as a boy, when he was first learning to handle a boat; and here, in the lean days before the war, he used to spend the long windswept night dredging the last possible mussel out of the mud; and over there, on that dank and blasted marsh-bank, he had hidden from the Germans, crouched beneath a canvas shelter, while his wife rowed out each week with his provisions; and just around this corner, between these shoals – port a bit here, it’s shallow, now back into the stream again – here, just around this corner, we would find…
But the old man’s voice trailed away: for when we rounded that marshy point, the cason was no longer there. That predatory, dissatisfied, restless, rapacious lagoon had been at work again. The water had risen above the shoals, and all that was left of the house was a sprawling mass of masonry, a pile of brick and rubble, through which the tide was already seeping and gurgling. The old man was astonished, but even more affronted. ‘Now why should a thing like that happen?’ he asked me indignantly. ‘Mamma mia! That house was there when I was a child, a fine big house of stone, the Cason dei Sette Morti – and now if’s gone! Now why should that have happened, eh? Tell me that!’
He was an urbane man, though, beneath his stubble: and as we moved away from that desolate place, and turned our prow towards San Pietro, I heard a rasping chuckle from the stern of the boat. ‘Mamma mia!’ the old man said again, shaking his head from side to side: and so we chugged home laughing and drinking wine, until, paying insufficient attention to his task, that fisherman ran us aground and broke our forward gear, and we completed the voyage pottering shamefacedly backwards, ‘Like a couple of crabs,’ said the old man, unabashed, ‘though even the crabs go sideways.’