reply to this...the stranger made it, instinctively:
"I will pay nothing whatever if you do not take me where I want to go, and I will feed you to the fish."
"The signore wants to go to Lido?"
"But not with you."
"I am a good rower, signore. I will row you well."
"So much is true, when men begin to speak the truth." And once again the stranger began to relax, knowing the bullet had passed. "That is true, you row me well... even if you intend to roll me as well."
But nothing of the sort happened. Instead, they fell in with company: a boat came alongside and waylaid them, full of men and women singing to guitar and mandolin. They rowed persistently bow for bow with the gondola and filled the silence that had rested on the waters with their lyric love of gain. The stranger tossed money into the hat they passed about. The music stopped at once. They rowed away. And once more the gondolier's mutter became audible as he talked to himself in fits and snatches.
Thus they rowed on, rocked by the wash of a steamer returning citywards. At the landing two municipal officials were walking up and down with their hands behind their backs...in their own pockets and eyes looking toward the lagoon. The stranger was helped to shore by an old man with boat-hook who is a permanent feature of every landing-stage in Venice; he passed along the notes that he felt fairly compensated gondolier and gondola..."Place the luggage on the deck." He ordered, "I will go into the hotel to make certain of the reservation...when I return you will decide if you row or feed the fish."
The stranger returned, his luggage safely on the dock... "He ran away, signore," said the old man, "A bad lot, a man without a license. He is the only gondolier without one...he knew the officials were on the lookout...so signore you have free passage." He held out his hat... The Stranger dropped a few coins and directed that his luggage be brought directly to the Hotel des Bains. The luggage was loaded on a handcart and the Stranger followed them through the avenue, that white blossoming avenue with taverns, booths, and pensions on either side, which runs across the island diagonally to the beach.
The Stranger entered the hotel from the garden terrace at the back and passed through the vestibule and hall into the office. His arrival was expected, and the Stranger was served with courtesy and dispatch. The manager, a small, soft dapper man with black moustache and a caressing way with him, wearing a French frock coat, himself took him up in the lift and showed him his room. It was a pleasant chamber, furnished in cherry-wood, with lofty windows looking out to sea. It was decorated with strong scented flowers. Most essential, it had the biggest bed in the hotel, suitable for the Strangers six foot seven inch frame.
The Stranger, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others push aside with a glance, a lite comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous-to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, and the absurd. Thus the Strangers mind still dwelt with disquiet on the episodes of his journey thus far: on the horrible old fop with his drivel, on the outlaw boatman and his gouging. They did not offend his reason, they hardly afforded food for thought; yet they seemed by their very nature fundamentally strange, and thereby vaguely disquieting. Yet here was the sea; even in the midst of such thoughts he saluted it with his eyes, exulting that Venice was near and accessible. At length he turned around, disposed his personal belongings and made certain arrangements with the chambermaid for his comfort, washed up, and was conveyed to the ground floor by the green-uniformed Swiss who ran the lift.
The stranger took one of the many ferry boats from Lido to Venice, He would walk again among the tourist and watch the little nuns dressed in crisp habits...a remarkable and unusual sight for the stranger...nuns had long since given up the habits for more practical street clothing like suits, painters pants, surgical outfits or jeans. But here in Venice headed toward St. Mark's Square crossing the Bridge of Siege they were in abundance and adorable he thought as he slouched away in squeaky shoes from the landing toward the Bridge of Siege, the place were the hangman came with prisoners about to die. There they stood and looked out at their assassins...those who had condemned them to hang by the neck until they were dead.
Claude Wermuth took it all in, he watched the tourist heave to and fro...watched them mount the Bridge and then disperse into St. Marks Square craning necks to view the tower and the opulent carvings...the massive marble statues of the horses above the Cathedral and then into the square to find a café' to sit and sip espresso as Wermuth found himself doing while watching all the beautiful people about him.
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