Fifteen
years ago Nancy and I visited Venice. We stayed at the Pensione Seguso on the Zaterre in a sestiere of Venice called the Dorsoduro. Dorsoduro literally means “hard backbone.” It is probably a folk-etymological
distortion of osso duro ‘hard bone,’
a reference to the soil. This part of Venice is less swampy. The terra is
firmer, as it were. Here compacted clay lies beneath the swamp Venice was
built on in the 5th century when the Venetians-to-be took refuge from the marauding
Goths.
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| Santa Maria della Salute by Claude Monet (1908) |
Just
a few minutes walk from the pensione was Santa
Marie della Salute, a church built to thank God for ending the bubonic
plague of 1630. The plague took 100,000 Venetians, over half the island's population,
Titian among them. The architect, Baldassare Longhena, designed a massive stone
structure whose bulk by rights ought to have submerged the entire island. Of
course, it didn’t. His first step was to sink a million pilings through the
swampy ground into the compacted clay beneath, into the dorsoduro. Longhena never saw his masterpiece to its completion. He
died in 1682 at the age of 84, five years before the church was finished.
Our bedroom
in the pensione was on the fifth floor in a corner of the building. We could
see the canal beside us out of one of the windows. If you leaned way out, you could
see the Chiesa del Santissimo Redentore across
the Giudecca canal. I remember the
curtains you had to part to gain the view. They were heavy and purple. They
reminded me of the line from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven: “And the silken, sad uncertain rustling of each purple
curtain.”
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| Chiesa del Santissimo Redentore |
What
was remarkable happened in the person of a lodger, an elegant old man in his late
eighties. We met him on our second evening in the dining room. He was dressed for
dinner despite the slightly down in the mouth feel of the room, to say nothing
of the food. He wore a trim blue blazer, an ascot and carried a cane. His gold-grey hair was long and overran the
collar at the back. He was alone as, indeed, he had been whenever we saw him. He
had been coming to the pensione for years.
“How
long will you stay?” I asked.
“Half
a year,” he said, maybe longer.
It
was the maybe longer that made me look at him twice. Despite his elegance he
was showing his years. He looked tired, maybe worse. I was curious. But there
are conversational boundaries, even for strangers.
He
told us that he was a Shakespearean actor, that he had appeared in a number of
films and stage plays, that he had children who lived in Great Britain but that
he was essentially here on his own.
When
I asked him why, he merely said, “I love Venice.”
Both
Nancy and I had the same reaction to him, an old man of considerable style who
ought not be spending nights talking to strangers he will never see again.
There was something very sad about him and it was that sadness that I think
kept us from trying to know him any better than a good morning or a good
evening. Instead, we thought, though we never said so aloud, that he might very
well die in Venice, alone, estranged if only by distance, from his family, his
homeland, his memorabilia. Here was Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice in the flesh.
Recently,
two of my friends have lost their wives. In both instances the wives were
seriously maimed, either by a deep dementia or a crippling disease that made life
cost more than it was worth. When news of their deaths came, I was relieved.
Soon enough I realized that I was the only one who was relieved. In each case the
widower, the one who bore the sadness of watching his wife die, now bore the
sadness of not having a partner to look after even in sickness.
These
recent deaths have brought back to me the memory of that old man in Venice, the
one in the Pensione Seguso. I realize
now that while I was sad, he wasn’t. I think I know why. He would never be
bereaved because his partner would never die. I’m thinking, of course, of
Venice.
