PART 1
He came to Venice to find love or write a novel, these being the two things a romantic could still sincerely yearn for. True love of course could reorient your entire life, while a work of art could give you respite. Creating a good work of art was like winning a wrestling match with life and for a while after that you could sit loosely, smoking a cigarette and basking in the victory.
With these goals in mind, Connor went to Venice. In theory he could have pursued them in London. London didn’t have quite the imaginary of New York, but it still provided those cinematic pickings for a yearning mind—the brick townhouses of Marylebone and low-lit pubs on Soho corners, the crowds milling across bridges and by the gutters of the Thames, exchanging glances and huddling under the rain towards the yawning mouths of 17th-century-stone buildings, all the museums and parks and theatres, the undeniable culture.
For Connor, though, London was saturated. Conversations had begun to repeat themselves, even when talking with strangers, even when discussing a completely new book. Worse, all his friends had caught the family bug. He had floated through his thirties with only the occasional friend succumbing to it—to what seemed like general derision—while he himself calmly and easily got involved in one long-term relationship and then a second. He had thoughtlessly assumed in both cases that this might be it. Neither had been. Then he’d hit his forties and many more friends had succumbed, in waves of impromptu wedding receptions and sudden babies. After three one-year birthday celebrations in as many months, a darkness fell over Connor. Something is rotten in the state of Norway, as a friend of Connor’s had once proclaimed, drunkenly and incorrectly, at a party. The expression had quickly been adopted by his coterie. Now that very friend had twins and wanted to move to the countryside (which he called, thanks to his American wife, ‘the suburbs’). Rotten indeed.
It wasn’t just the children. London was doing its best to stamp out any air of mystery that might cling to its old romantic bones. London was now a big party for the rich, and one either joined their sullied ranks or mutely despised them. Connor came to Venice because he sought somewhere without politics (he could afford to think this way because he didn’t have a family, and he didn’t want a family partly so he could continue affording to think this way). He had tried avoiding the politics in London like the plague, another malady ripping through his friends. Even so, one day it happened that he read a piece in the London Review of Books about how unnecessary it had been for the United States to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki and immediately afterwards went to the cinema for an afternoon screening of Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
The next day, a thought came to him: The only agency I can salvage is that of moving amongst the shadows cast by other people’s decisions.
It came, not like a revelation, but like the last chestnut falling from a tree in the autumn. It was breakfast. He was hungry. He set out for a walk through north London. Ah, early October. Where to? The Heath, of course!
He stopped by a bakery for a coffee and a pastry. He nosed around some shops. In the park, he felt uncomfortable with his own thoughts and so began rather intently observing other people. A good-looking woman with grey hair and a poetic air gave him a smile when she caught him looking. He smiled back. Soon, she had walked past him.
Half an hour or so later he was sitting in another café where he pulled his notebook from his pocket and jotted down some things about the people he’d seen. One young man in particular had struck him, wearing sweatpants and trainers and a felt coat and speaking on the phone with great intensity as he smoked a cigarette, which he stamped out guiltily when two small children approached him. A muse! Connor thought. It was the sweatpants, and his animated manner of conversing, cigarette-holding arm waving through the air, and the quite sudden guilty, natural expression that had seized him… For the next few days, Connor worked on a script. He wanted so badly to write about the good stuff: masturbating in other people’s beds, vomiting in pubs, bodies groping each other blindly, cigarettes between strangers in the cold…
Not long after the script failed to develop, Connor moved to Venice. London had been forcing him to stake a position on things. Venice instead accepted him with a soft feathery smile.
Why Venice? Well, it was beautiful. He had decided that if he weren’t in London he would have to live somewhere beautiful, and that excluded many places. In New York or Berlin, the same paradigm, he was certain, would re-emerge after just a few months—the necessity to stake a position. But in beautiful places, the environment is a constant source of interference to any secure conviction. Such beauty is powerful, like a charismatic speaker or even a social necessity, and yet it says nothing concrete beyond its self; silently it points towards transcendence. In the Frari one wades through the air lit by bright shafts and colourful, whispered suggestions, to face Titian’s Madonna. Forever she reaches beyond, pressed by angels, trembling before the orange light, rising above the tumble of limbs. One can wander in every week, even three times a week, and she’ll always be there, on the eternal edge of salvation. It is a painting that refutes the certainty of mere ideas. And the entirety of Venice does this. Connor wanted such a place. He had visited Porto as well, with a half-idea of being less cliché, but had rather quickly realised that some clichés were not worth abandoning—and had settled in Venice.
In Venice, he was exotic—an Englishman, a writer; and at the same time banal—an Englishman, a writer. In Venice, there was no hustle. The cultural events brought in wealthy individuals and would-be hustlers who were soon swallowed up by noontime Spritzes and dense alleys, impenetrable to Apple maps. In Venice, the middle ground for writers remained, that ground between elitist nonsense and political nonsense. Venice was a place where writers, Connor felt, could still bank on sensibility. The artworld events and the old churches with their beacons of artwork stood like two opposite poles for discussions, or flights of fancy, or critique. And in Venice, the family bug was absent. The lagoon had killed it. Apart from that segment of the tourist population robustly ignored by the rest, those families guiding small children away from the canals and ushering them into museums, everyone else here was much more interested in passion than stability. In all this happy theorising over his new home, Connor was of course aware that some people actually lived here, that Venice had those political, rooted beings known as citizens, some of whom even had families. He fancied himself able to distinguish them; indeed as he learned Italian he fancied he could hear the Venetian accent—closed, he had been told, cutting syllables off at the end like extra bits of fat. Anyway, one could see the locals: they carried purses and held the hands of children with scooters, they were dressed to live, and not to visit. But if they were supposed to introduce an element of normality, of banality, to Connor’s tableau, actually they did quite the opposite—they were the most romantic beings of all, like some bird of paradise native to a jungle one camps out in, itchy and awestruck.
The drinking was good too. None of the rest would have mattered if the drinking weren’t good. At Schiavi, a well-trod establishment by the Accademia, the ‘ex-pats’ congregated and met each other with the same ease as teenagers after school. Schiavi closed at 8.30 in the evening, but by this point, Venice was dark, and it could have just as easily been eleven or three in the morning. Venice had an ancient darkness. There were no segments dividing the night; after the light had extinguished, there was just one great uniform block, secrets, whispers, and all, lying before morning. When the sun rose over the lagoon, time woke up as well, and took off again to its metronome.
Once Schiavi closed it was common to head to il Mercante. The little cocktail bar had two floors and elegant little railings and sofas and old imitation paintings on the wall. Stained-glass lamps shaped like flowers glowed above the seating areas and jutted among bottles on the metal, industrial shelves. The waiters filled your glass with cucumber water and promised to make whatever you wanted. When they got to know you they welcomed you with a glass of something strong as well. And around the corner was a favourite wine bar, la Bottiglia.
There were enough new people constantly rolling in, enough restaurants and bars that with the absence of cars felt distant, that mundanity, it seemed to Connor, did not threaten. After drinking for unknowable quantities of hours he would hurry to his flat by the Rialto Bridge. He would walk so fast, swinging around the alley corners like a madman, that he knew he would miss a turn and get lost. It was what he wanted. In no time at all he would find himself in a dark wet alley with not a soul in sight. At the end of it was the black certainty of a canal. But what seemed like a dead end, once reached, beckoned to the left, down a tight, barely lit corridor of street; and after a few paces an oasis of light would suddenly spill out, a restaurant with tablecloths still serving wine to guests, still playing some scratchy, rowdy jazz from the speakers. So it couldn’t be that late after all! How were you supposed to know? Living by the Rialto Bridge was convenient, for eventually a sign for tourists would save him, too, and send him home…
The drinking swept up everything. To make up for that chasm of time that sucked reason away, one had to start well before nightfall. Prepare oneself. After lunch Connor would take a stroll and inevitably find someone in Cannaregio who would invite him for a Spritz or glass of wine. These people would have nothing of the drunkard to them. They would appear fresh and vigorous, well-dressed and well-groomed; and they would eagerly begin conversing on important topics while lighting a cigarette under the chill, clear light. And the purpose of these conversations would not be, as in London, to declare oneself a such-and-such with such-and-such beliefs, but to play a match of tennis. To have fun, but seriously. It was all proper; what could Connor do but join? And once one started drinking, one didn’t stop; at best one could take an occasional pause for a wander inside a bookstore or a chapel, or perhaps acquiesce to a cicchetto or two before dinner.
Connor did not consider curbing his new habits. He determined instead that what was getting in the way of his writing was the second thing he had come to Venice for: love. How could one write a novel without love, reciprocal or not (and he noted casually to his companions at Schiavi that the letters for ‘love’ were already in ‘novel’, whispering this reality)? If he didn’t find love he would be destined to write trash, probably about British politics again. A producer had been prodding him to attempt a sharp comedy about Liz Truss. But he couldn’t bear it. No, before his novel, he needed love, that was the proper order.
And having made these thoughts known to enough acquaintances, soon an opportunity for love appeared.
Melanie Erspamer