4 - Iosif A. Brodsky, "Watermark" (1980)

Iosif A. Brodskij, Watermark, 1989

 

Many moons ago the dollar was 870 lire and I was thirty-two. The globe, too, was lighter by two billion souls, and the bar at the Stazione where I’d arrived on that cold December night was empty. I was standing there waiting for the only person I knew in that city to meet me. She was quite late.

Every traveler knows this fix: this mixture of fatigue and apprehension. It’s the time of staring down clock faces and timetables, of scrutinizing varicose marble under your feet, of inhaling ammonia and that dull smell elicited on cold winter nights by locomotives’ cast iron. I did all this.

Save for the yawning bartender and immobile Buddha-like matrona at the cash register, there was no one in sight. However, we were of no use to each other: my sole currency in their language, the term “espresso,” was already spent; I’d used it twice. I’d also bought from them my first pack ever of what in years to come was to stand for Merde Statale, Movimento Sociale and Morte Sicura: my first pack of MS. So I lifted my bags and stepped outside.

In the unlikely event that someone’s eye followed my white London Fog and dark brown Borsalino, they should have cut a familiar silhouette. The night itself, to be sure, would have had no difficulty absorbing it. Mimicry, I believe, is high on the list of every traveler, and the Italy I had in mind at the moment was a fusion of black-and-white movies of the fifties and the equally monochrome medium of my métier. Winter thus was my season; the only thing I lacked, I thought, to look like a local rake or carbonaro was a scarf. Other than that, I felt inconspicuous and fit to merge into the background or fill the frame of a low-budget whodunit or, more likely, melodrama.

 

It was a windy night, and before my retina registered anything, I was smitten by a feeling of utter happiness: my nostrils were hit by what to me has always been its synonym, the smell of freezing seaweed. For some people, it’s freshly cut grass or hay: for others, Christmas scents of conifer needles and tangerines. For me, it’s freezing seaweed—partly because of onomatopoeic aspects of the very conjunction (in Russian, seaweed is a wonderful vodorosli), partly due to a slight incongruity and a hidden underwater drama in this notion. One recognizes oneself in certain elements; by the time I was taking this smell in on the steps of the Stazione, hidden dramas and incongruities long since had become my forte.

No doubt the attraction toward that smell should have been attributed to a childhood spent by the Baltic, the home of that meandering siren from the Montale poem. And yet I had my doubts about this attribution. For one thing, that childhood wasn’t at all that happy (a childhood seldom is, being, rather, a school of self-disgust and insecurity); and as for the Baltic, you had indeed to be an eel to escape my part of it. At any rate, as a subject for nostalgia this childhood hardly qualified. The source of that attraction, I’d always felt, lay elsewhere, beyond the confines of biography, beyond one’s genetic makeup—somewhere in one’s hypothalamus, which stores our chordate ancestors’ impressions of their native realm of—for example—the very ichthus that caused this civilization. Whether that ichthus was a happy one is another matter.

 

A smell is, after all, a violation of oxygen balance, an invasion into it of other elements—methane? Carbon? Sulphur? Nitrogen? Depending on that invasion’s intensity, you get a scent, a smell, a stench. It is a molecular affair, and happiness, I suppose, is the moment of spotting the elements of your own composition being free. There were quite a number of them out there, in a state of total freedom, and I felt I’d stepped into my own self-portrait in the cold air.

 

The backdrop was all in dark silhouettes of church cupolas and rooftops; a bridge arching over a body of water’s black curve, both ends of which were clipped off by infinity. At night, infinity in foreign realms arrives with the last lamppost, and here it was twenty meters away. It was very quiet. A few dimly lit boats now and then prowled about, disturbing with their propellers the reflection of a large neon CINZANO trying to settle on the black oilcloth of the water’s surface. Long before it succeeded, the silence would be restored.

 

It all felt like arriving in the provinces, in some unknown, insignificant spot—possibly one’s own birthplace—after years of absence. In no small degree did this sensation owe to my own anonymity, to the incongruity of a lone figure on the steps of the Stazione: an easy target for oblivion. Also, it was a winter night. And I remembered the opening line of Umberto Saba’s poems that I’d translated long before, in a previous incarnation, into Russian: “In the depths of the wild Adriatic…” In the depths, I thought, in the boondocks, in a lost corner of the wild Adriatic… Had I simply turned around, I’d have seen the Stazione in all its rectangular splendor of neon and urbanity, seen block letters saying VENEZIA. Yet I didn’t. the sky was full of winter stars, the way it often is in the provinces. At any point, it seemed, a dog could bark in the distance, or else you might hear a rooster. With my eyes shut I beheld a tuft of freezing seaweed splayed against a wet, perhaps ice-glazed rock somewhere in the universe, oblivious to its location. I was that rock, and my left palm was that splayed tuft of seaweed. Presently a large, flat boat, something of a cross between a sardine can and a sandwich, emerged out of nowhere and with a thud nudged the Stazione’s landing. A handful of people pushed ashore and raced past me up the stairs into the terminal. Then I saw the only person I knew in that city; the sight was fabulous.

 

I had seen it for the first time several years before, in that same previous incarnation: in Russia. The sight had come there in the guise of a Slavicist, a Mayakovsky scholar, to be precise. That nearly disqualified the sight as a subject of interest in the eyes of the coterie to which I belonged. That it didn’t was the measure of her visual properties. Five foot ten, fine-boned, long-legged, narrow-faced, with chestnut hair and hazel, almond-shaped eyes, with passable Russian on those wonderfully shaped lips and a blinding smile on the same, superbly dressed in paper-light suede and matching silks, redolent of mesmerizing, unknown to us, perfume, the sight was easily the most elegant female ever to set a mind-boggling foot in our midst. She was the kind that keeps married men’s dream wet. Besides, she was a Veneziana.

So we gave short shrift to her membership in the Italian CP and her attendant sentiment toward our avant-garde simpletons of the thirties, attributing both to Western frivolity. Had she been even an avowed Fascist, I think we could have lusted after her no less. She was positively stunning, and when subsequently she’d fallen for the worst possible dimwit on the periphery of our circle, some highly paid dolt of Armenian extraction, the common response was amazement and anger rather than jealousy or manly regret. Of course, come to think of it, one shouldn’t get angry over a piece of fine lace soiled by some strong ethnic juices. Yet we did. For it was more than a letdown: it was a betrayal of the fabric.

In those days we associated style with substance, beauty with intelligence. After all, we were a bookish crowd, and at a certain age, if you believe in literature, you think everyone shares or should share your conviction and taste. So if one looks elegant, one is one of us. Innocent of the world outside, of the West in particular, we didn’t know yet that style could be purchased wholesale, that beauty could be just a commodity. So we regarded the sight as the physical extension and embodiment of our ideals and principles, and what she wore, transparent things included, belonged to civilization.

So strong was that association, and so pretty was the sight, that even now, years later, belonging to a different age, and, as it were, to a different country, I began to slip unwittingly into the old mode. The first thing I asked her as I stood pressed to her nutria coat on the deck of the overcrowded vaporetto was her opinion of Montale’s Motets, recently published. The familiar flash of her pearls, thirty-two strong, echoed by the sparkle on the rim of her hazel pupil and promoted to the scattered silver of the Milky Way overhead, was all I got in response, but that was a lot. To ask, in the heart of civilization, about its latest was perhaps a tautology. Perhaps I was simply being impolite, as the author wasn’t a local.

 

The boat’s slow progress through the night was like the passage of a coherent thought through the subconscious. On both sides, knee-deep in pitch-black water, stood the enormous carved chests of dark palazzi filled with unfathomable treasures—most likely, gold, judging from the low-intensity yellow electric glow emerging now and then from cracks in the shutters. The overall feeling was mythological, cyclopic, to be precise: I’d entered that infinity I beheld on the steps of the Stazione and now was moving among its inhabitants, along the bevy of dormant cyclopes reclining in black water, now and then raising and lowering an eyelid.

The nutria-clad sight next to me began explaining in a somewhat hushed voice that she was taking me to my hotel, where she had reserved a room, that perhaps we’d meet tomorrow or the day after, that she’d like to introduce me to her husband and her sister. I liked the hush in her voice, though it fit the night more than the message, and replied in the same conspiratorial tones that it’s always a pleasure to meet potential relatives. That was a bit strong for the moment, but she laughed, in the same muffled way, putting a hand in a brown leather glove to her lips. The passenger around us, mostly dark-haired, whose number was responsible for our proximity, were immobile and equally subdued in their occasional remarks to one another, as though the content of their exchanges was also of an intimate nature. Then the sky was momentarily obscured by the huge marble parenthesis of a bridge, and suddenly everything was flooded with light. “Rialto,” she said in her normal voice.

 

There is something primordial about traveling on water, even for short distances. You are informed that you are not supposed to be there not so much by your eyes, ears, nose, palate, or palm as by your feet, which feel odd acting as an organ of sense. Water unsettles the principle of horizontally, especially at night, when its surface resembles pavement. No matter how solid your substitute—the deck—under your feet, on water you are somewhat more alert than ashore, your faculties are more poised. On water, for instance, you never get absentminded the way you do in the street: your legs keep you and your wits in constant check, as if you were some kind of compass. Well, perhaps what sharpens your wits while traveling on water is indeed a distant, roundabout echo of the good old chordates. At any rate, your sense of the other on water gets keener, as though heightened by a common as well as a mutual danger. The loss of direction is a psychological category as much as it is a navigational one. Be that as it may, for the next ten minutes, although we were moving in the same direction, I saw the arrow of the only person I knew in that city and mine diverge by at least 45 degrees. Most likely because this part of the Canal Grande was better lit.

We disembarked at the Accademia landing, prey to firm topography and the corresponding moral code. After a short meander through narrow lanes, I was deposited in the lobby of a somewhat cloistered pensione, kissed on the cheek—more in the capacity of the Minotaur, I felt, than the valiant her—and wished good night. Then my Ariadne vanished, leaving behind a fragrant thread of her expensive (was it Shalimar?) perfume, which quickly dissipated in the musty atmosphere of a pensione otherwise suffused with the faint but ubiquitous odor of pee. I stared for a while at the furniture. Then I hit the sack.

 

That’s how I found myself for the first time in this city. As it turned out, there was nothing particularly auspicious or ominous about this arrival of mine. If that night portended anything at all, it was that I’d never possess this city; but then I never had any such aspiration. As a beginning, I think this episode will do, although as far as the-only-person-I-knew-in-this-city was concerned, it rather marked the end of our acquaintance. I saw her two or three times subsequently during that stay in Venice; and indeed I was introduced to her sister and to her husband. The former turned out to be a lovely woman: as tall and slender as my Ariadne and perhaps even brighter, but more melancholy and, for all I could tell, even more married. The latter, whose appearance completely escapes my memory for reasons of redundancy, was a scumbag of an architect, of that ghastly postwar persuasion that has done more harm to the European skyline than any Luftwaffe. In Venice, he defiled a couple of wonderful campi with his edifices, one of which was naturally a bank, since this sort of human animal loves a bank with absolutely narcissistic fervor, with the longing of an effect for its cause. For that “structure” (as they called it in those days) alone, I thought, he should be cuckolded. But since, like his wife, he, too, seemed to be a member of the CP, the job, I concluded, was best left to a comrade.

Fastidiousness was one part of it: the other part was that when, somewhat later, I called the-only-person-I-knew-in-that-city from the depths of my labyrinth one blue evening, the architect, perhaps sensing in my broken Italian something untoward, cut the threat. So now it really was up to our red Armenian brethren.

 

Subsequently, I was told, she divorced the man and married a US Air Force pilot, who turned out to be the nephew of the mayor of a small town in the great state of Michigan, where I once dwelt. Small world, and the longer you live, no man or woman makes it larger. So were I looking for consolation, I could derive it from the thought that we now are both treading the same ground—of a different continent. This sounds, of course, like Statius talking to Virgil, but then it’s only proper for the likes of me to regard America as a kind of Purgatorio—not to mention Dante himself suggesting as much. The only difference is that her heaven is far better settled than mine. Hence my forays into my version of Paradise, which she inaugurated so graciously. At any rate, for the last seventeen years I’ve been returning to this city, or recurring to it, with the frequency of a bad dream.

With two or three exceptions, due to heart attacks and related emergencies, mine or someone else’s, every Christmas or shortly before I’d emerge from a train/plane/boat/bus and drag my bags heavy with books and typewriters to the threshold of this or that hotel, of this or that apartment. The latter would normally be courtesy of the one or two friends I’d managed to develop here in the wake of the sight’s dimming. Later, I’ll try to account for my timing (though such a project is tautological to the point of reversal). For the moment, I’d like to assert that, Northerner though I am, my notion of Eden hinges on neither weather nor temperature. For that matter, I’d just as soon discard its dwellers, and eternity as well. At the risk of being charged with depravity, I confess that this notion is purely visual, has more to do with Claude than the creed, and exists only in approximations. As these go, this city is the closest. Since I’m not entitled to make a true comparison, I can permit myself to be restrictive.

I say this here to save the reader disillusionment. I am not a moral man (though I try to keep my conscience in balance) or a sage; I am neither an aesthete nor a philosopher. I am but a nervous man, by circumstance and by my own deeds; but I am observant. As my belovd Akutagawa Rynosuke once said, I have no principles; all I’ve got is nerves. What follows, therefore, has to do with the eye rather than with convictions, including those as to how to run a narrative. One’s eye precedes one’s pen, and I resolve not to let my pen lie about its position. Having risked the charge of depravity, I won’t wince at that of superficiality either. Surfaces—which is what the eye registers first—are often more telling than their contents, which are provisional by definition, except, of course, in the afterlife. Scanning this city’s face for seventeen winters, I should by now be capable of pulling a credible Poussin-like job: of painting this place’s likeness, if not at four seasons, then at four times of day.

That’s my ambition. If I get sidetracked, it is because being sidetracked is literally a matter of course here and echoes water. What lies ahead, in other words, may amount not to a story but to the flow of muddy water “at the wrong time of year.” At times it looks blue, at times gray or brown; invariably it is cold and not potable. The reason I am engaged in straining it is that it contains reflections, among them my own.

[…]

The eye in this city acquires an autonomy to that of a tear. The only difference is that it doesn’t sever itself from the body but subordinates it totally. After a while—on the third or fourth day here—the body starts to regard itself as merely the eye’s carrier, as a kind of submarine to its now dilating, now squinting periscope. Of course, for all its targets, its explosions are invariably self-inflicted: it’s your own heart, or else your mind, that sinks; the eye pops up to the surface. This of course owes to the local topography, to the streets—narrow, meandering like eels—that finally bring you to a flounder of a campo with a cathedral in the middle of it, barnacled with saints and flaunting its Medusa-like cupolas. No matter what you set out for as you leave the house here, you are bound to get lost in these long, coiling lanes and passageways that beguile you to see them through, to follow them to their elusive end, which usually hits water, so that you can’t even call it a cul-de-sac. On the map tis city looks like two grilled fish sharing a plate, or perhaps like to nearly overlapping lobster claws (Pasternak compared it to a swollen croissant); but it has no north, south, east, or west; the only direction it has is sideways. It surrounds you like frozen seaweed, and the more you dart and dash about trying to get your bearings, the more you get lost. The yellow arrow signs at intersections are not much help either, for they, too, curve. In fact, they don’t so much help you as kelp you. And in the fluently flapping hand of the native whom you stop to ask for directions, the eye, oblivious to his sputtering A Destra, a sinistra, dritto, dirtto, readily discerns a fish.

 

A mesh caught in frozen seaweed might be a better metaphor. Because of the scarcity of space, people exist here in cellular proximity to one another, and life evolves with the immanent logic of gossip. One’s territorial imperative in this city is circumscribed by water; the window shutters bar not so much daylight or noise (which is minimal here) as what may emanate from inside. When they are opened, shutters resemble the wings of angels prying into someone’s sordid affairs, and like the spacing of the statues on cornices, human interplay here takes on the aspect of jewelry or, better yet, filigree. In these parts one is both more secretive and better informed than the police in tyrannies. No sooner do you cross the threshold of your apartment, especially in winter, than you fall prey to every conceivable surmise, fantasy, rumor. If you’ve got company, the next day at the grocery or newsagent you may meet a stare of biblical probing unfathomable, you would think, in a Catholic country. If you sue someone here, or vice versa, you must hire a lawyer from the outside. A traveler, of course, enjoys this sort of thing; the native doesn’t. What a painter sketches, or an amateur photographs, is no fun for the citizen. Yet insinuation as a principle of city planning (which notion locally emerges only with the benefit of hindsight) is better than any modern grid and in tune with the local canals, taking their cue from water, which, like the chatter behind you, never ends. In that sense, brick is undoubtedly more potent than marble, although both are unassailable for a stranger. However, once or twice over these seventeen years, I’ve managed to insinuate myself into a Venetian inner sanctum, into that beyond-the-amalgam labyrinth régnier described in Provincial Entertainments. It happened in such a roundabout way that I can’t even recall the details now, for I could not keep tabs on all those twists and turns that led to my passage into this labyrinth at the time. Somebody said something to somebody else, while the other person who wasn’t even supposed to be there listened in and telephoned the fourth, as a result of which I’d been invited one night to a party given by the umpteenth at his palazzo.

[…]

That happened only once, although I’ve been told there are scores of places like this in Venice. But once is enough, especially in winter, when the local fog, the famous nebbia, renders this place more extemporal than any palace’s inner sanctum, by obliterating not only reflections but everything that has a shape: buildings, people, colonnades, bridges, statues. Boat services are canceled, airplanes neither arrive nor take off for weeks, stores are closed, and mail ceases to litter one’s threshold. The effect is as though some raw hand had turned all those enfilades inside out and wrapped the lining around the city. Left, right, up, and down swap places, and you can find your way around the city only if you are a native or were given a cicerone. The fog is thick, blunting, and immobile. The latter aspect, however, is of advantage to you if you can find your way back via the tunnel your body has burrowed in the fog; the tunnel is likely to stay open for half an hour. This is a time for reading, for burning electricity all day long, for going easy on self-deprecating thoughts or coffee, for listening to the BBC World Service, for going to bed early. In short, a time for self-oblivion, induced by a city that has ceased to be seen. Unwittingly, you take your cue from it, especially if, like it, you’ve got no company. Having failed to be born here, you at least can take some pride in sharing its invisibility.