Fear of Fifty (39 page)

The Merchant of Venice
is only
one
of Shakespeare's many versions of that tale. But it, too, is not quite a success—despite Shylock's fierce lines on being a Jew, despite the magic starry sky of Belmont, despite Jessica's dark perplexed beauty and Portia's prissy summation of justice as a sort of noblesse oblige given to poor wretches like the Jews as long as they convert on bended knee, renounce their blood, their food, their ducats, their daughters, and the Jewishness of their grandchildren.

So The Merchant
does not quite work either, it must be said. Perhaps it is the hate at its heart that brings it down. Hate rarely makes for good literature. But that other magic island play,
The Tempest,
resolves all its puzzles beautifully, and works, it must be said, like mad.

There is real love between the lovers, real repentance on the part of the sorcerer king, Prospero, real freedom for the chained spirits, Caliban and Ariel, real freedom for the poet as he takes his leave. The magic island
could
be Venice here (it is an island off the north of Italy after all), but clearly it is not. It
cannot
be, for Venice is above all the island of the dead, as Thomas Mann knew better than anyone. Venice is the place that traps tortured spirits. It is the flypaper island. It must constantly have new blood to replenish the old. Venice herself is no more, no less, than a vampire.

I knew a Danish pianist who came back to Venice to play in a shoddy bar year after year. In the winter and spring, he was employed by a sheik in Sharja for many, many ducats. But each summer and fall, he was compelled to return to Venice as if the ghost of his former self were summoning him there.

This melancholy Dane had done research about his ghost, who seemed to be a thirteenth-century baker. At night, his room would sometimes fill with a floury fragrance or the warm odor of baking bread. Pans and racks would crash and clatter. When he awoke, a fine white dust would cover everything. He would jolt open his eyes, unsurprised.

He was a blue-eyed, blond man, of slight build and weight, with that skull-beneath-the-skin face sometimes seen in Scandinavians. In motion at the piano he looked young, but when you drew near, you saw he was anywhere from fifty to infinity. His face was crazed with tiny lines. He was, like me, addicted to Venice, though you could see it was not good for his health.

Of course there had to be some lover there—some impossible lover, like my Piero, who came and fled unpredictably. The lover surely had the same unconscious childlike cruelty as Von Aschenbach's Tadzio. All Venetian lovers do.

Perhaps Piero was this Dane's lover as well as mine. Perhaps he was also Tadzio's lover. And Alfred de Musset's. And Byron's. And Shakespeare's. Who can tell? In Venice it is possible to lead multiple lives in multiple times. The multiple doorways make it possible. The fog and the shadows cover all. The
acqua alta
rises inexorably, covering the ground floors.

We talked many nights, the Danish pianist and I, and though I do not remember his name, I know that his story had something to do with mine. Eventually people who cannot get free of Venice die there. The lagoon needs their ghosts to lure back other ghosts-to-be.

Here was another problem with my Venice novel: It did not tell the ultimate truth about Venice. That was not because I was not doing my best. I was. But I did not yet
know
the ultimate truth about Venice. Venice is not sunny. Venice is a grave.

The snatched lovemaking between breakfast and lunch, the fierce passion from five to seven, are ways to bring you back and back and back to Venice. But the lovemaking does not produce life. It produces only ghosts, seductive ghosts, ghosts with incredible magnetic and sexual force, ghosts who can rattle pots in the greatest orgasm known on terra firma. In truth, it is not terra firma. It is the sea, and the barque of death floats west to the setting sun.

Not long ago (in the middle of this book), I went to Venice again with my daughter. We walked and talked and reminisced about other summers, when she was a little girl and I was single. But when I went to visit my old friends, she refused to come, preferring to stay at the Gritti, watching CNN and ordering room service. So I went alone.

My friends clutched me back the way island people clutch new-comers—out of a terrified boredom. They made me lunches, dinners, teas, and told me of special properties for sale in Venice. Messages were left for me at the hotel desk by old lovers, but when I phoned, they were never home. When I returned, there were
new
messages, which also proved unreturnable. There were messages from people I did not know. Was a thirteenth-century baker among them?

My Danish friend was gone. I thought I saw Piero in his motorboat, puttering along the Grand Canal alone, but then it seemed not to be him. I tried to call him, but a secretary said he was
“fuori Venezia.”
¹²
The sky lowered and darkened. Windows flew open in my old room (Hemingway's, I was told) at the Gritti. Footsteps creaked the ceiling all night, but when I complained I was told by the concierge that nobody had the room upstairs.

Eventually, on the fifth day, I found myself in a green garden (reputed to have been a cemetery once) in Dorsoduro. Statuary of cloaked, hatted figures with veiled faces lurked in the velvety shadows. The hedges were mossy dappled green, and here and there, a brilliant fuchsia or cyclamen burst out of the greenery like a flower pot on a grave.

I was sitting in the center of a group of women. One was an Austrian artist who had lived here for nearly thirty years (drawn by Italian lovers and the light). She had now given up men (of all nationalities). Another, a plump American divorcee, had finally sold her New York place and settled here. Another, a rich English widow, had bought a palazzo on the Grand Canal and was renovating. Another was the voluminous duchess who kept my Piero, her Piero, anyone's Piero. He was sailing in the Mediterranean. No one knew where.

We talked of diets, exercise classes, food, wayward children, wayward servants, wayward men. They all urged me to give up New York, my husband, my family, and move here for good. The pace of life was easier, they said, and I could write here.

But I could only write about the past, I thought, and eventually I could not write at all because grass would cover my fingers. The graveyard was creeping up on me, and Venice made that process sweet. The barque that rows toward the sunset was waiting at the edge of the canal. The lapping, seductive sound the water made was the sound of Venice:
vieni, vieni.

The death it offered was not
la petite morte.
It was the grand one. And it was inexorable.

Venetian lovers, whoever they were, whatever sex, were just her handmaidens, her flacks, her walkers. They lured robust people here. But we could only stay of our own free will—which is the way death wants us. She gets us ready in Venice, step by step, oar by oar, orgasm by orgasm.

I remembered the first time I was drawn to Piero, eight or nine years before. We were on his sailboat in the Basin of St. Mark's on a balmy night in mid-July. It was the Feast of the
Redentore,
commemorating the liberation of La Serenissima from some plague of half a millennium ago. A bridge of boats was built from the Piazza del Giglio in San Marco to Santa Maria della Salute in Dorsoduro to Palladio's magnificent church of the
Redentore
on Giudecca. The whole city was walking on the water, so it seemed. Those who were not strolling the bridges, carrying candles, food,
prosecco,
were reclining in their flower-strewn boats, drinking the fruit of the vine. Music of Vivaldi, Monteverdi, and Albinoni wafted across the waters. The great ones—the profiteers who were threatened by jail sentences that never materialized—were ensconced on a sort of floating royal box, a reviewing stand on pontoons that blasted Venetian music over the waters. Television crews bobbed in little motorboats to broadcast this
festa
to the ogling rest of Italy, which still regards Venice as an oddity, half Italian, half otherness.

Piero's sumptuous duchess was cooking crayfish, squid, and black risotto made with the ink of Venetian
seppie.
I was watching with amazement both at her culinary skill and at her imperturbability. Piero slid close to me.

He breathed on my neck, ran one finger down my forearm in a possessive, premonitory way. He took me with his eyes.

I was lost in that faun-brown gaze, smelled the fire beneath his brown skin, his curly golden satyr hair. His sweat was goatish and delicious—or was it my own? We seemed to have the same smell.

“I am sorry I am not so free,” he said, indicating the duchess. What he meant was the opposite—as often is the case:
I am glad I am not so free. She is my inoculation, my protection, my invisible shield. But I shall be glad to bring you back to Venice again and again for little licks and tastes of my magic staff.

So it began. It brewed in the lagoon a full year, was consummated on a full-moon night a year later, went on intermittently for years, and ended forever when I fled Venice in a panic, not even having seen him.

The wind blew hard from the canal. Windows, pots, and pianos rattled, crashed, played jagged melodies, and blew a cloud of flour dust over everything. I looked in the mirror. I was white as a ghost.

“Woman whom I call Mother—if indeed that is your name,” my now fifteen-year-old daughter said, “we
have
to get out of here. Something terrible is going to happen.”

In an hour flat, we were packed and had water-taxied to the car-rental depot with all our luggage. As we drove furiously across the causeway to terra firma, a savage storm chased us, rocking our station wagon, darkening our windows.

We had left just in time. Ghosts were whirling and shrieking in the air above the lagoon. The ladies of the cemetery garden were calling,
“Non scappi!
” (Don't run away!)

But I had my pedal to the metal and Milan in view. Back to life, to the rush and ugliness of traffic, to the worldliness of business, to telephones that do not reach the dead.

Even Browning left, and Byron and the Shelleys too. George Sand abandoned Venice when her book was done. Only Aschenbach stayed on. And Pound. And Stravinsky. They are buried here.

Once across the causeway, the ladies of the dark garden could not get me.

“Mommy,” said Molly, “I've never been so glad to get out of there. I used to love Venice when I was little—what happened?”

“You were young enough for Venice then,” I said, driving madly to the mainland.

“I don't get it, Mom.”

“We're not ready to be Venetian yet,” I said.

But in my mind's eye I saw the waters closing over the place, the golden mosaics floating and falling apart, the Byzantine saints slowly going to pieces.

This doomed Atlantis would sink under the warming waters one day and no one would be the wiser. Archaeologists of 5040 would dig it up, marveling at death's handiwork.

I thought of the day we buried our artist friend Vesty Entwhistle in the green garden graveyard of San Michele, the cemetery island, and how we dropped golden tiles into the earth over her because she had worked such golden squares into her mosaics. Another life to feed the teeming ghosts. La
Serenissima
triumphs whenever anyone is buried there.

Twelve years later, the skull-faced diggers disinter the bones of all those who are not sufficiently famous to draw new tourists. They cast such unworthy bones into the common ossuary—a bone island I have only heard whispered of. For the first twelve years, you have your taste of immortality. And then, if you are no longer famous, off you go—skull, pelvis, spinal vertebrae, tibia, fibula, all. Whose immortality is actually much longer than that? Immortality, after all, is your memory in minds that loved yours.

I no longer want to die in Venice. And so, of course, I cannot live there.

I suppose I am too old to risk being Venetian now.

Past fifty, we learn with surprise and a sense of suicidal absolution, that what we intended and failed, could never have happened.

—Robert Lowell, “For Sheridan”

Whatever gains I ever made were always due to love and nothing else.

—Saul Bellow,
Henderson the Rain King

What is one's personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account of my growth must be that of their stimulating and enlightening influence.

—Edith Wharton,
A Backward Glance

 

 

For any writer, the most ineffable of all truths about herself is the inner story, the story she writes without knowing why, the automatic, instinctive story her unconscious feeds her intravenously. My story is picaresque.

I discovered this only after having written six novels—all of them novels of some road or other (the road to Vienna and back, to California and back, to eighteenth-century London and back, to divorce and back, to sixteenth-century Venice and back, to alcoholism and back, etc). In each one, a troubled heroine smilingly triumphs over adversity after encountering a lot of ruts and ditches, bastards and badboys, on the bumpy road of life.

Born into a melancholy, hyperintellectual, phobic, paranoiac, Russian-Jewish family, I
needed
such a tale. And such an ending. So did my readers.

In midlife, I was drawn to memoir because I needed to understand myself before it was too late. And what better way to understand yourself than to look at the myths by which you have lived your life?