an older brother; in fact, he and Lucy were like a big brother and big sister—and extraordinarily so!—during my stay in England.
In short, we met and were glad to be chatting again at the Bellinghausen. After the obligatory comments—our ailments, our friends, the situation in the country—Hugo manages to turn the conversation to one of his favorite topics: Romania, or rather, Romanian literature. He is elated that the Latin Union of Romance Languages Prize, awarded a few days ago in Rome, was given to the Romanian Alexandru Vona, whom he knows well. He won it for a single novel, he tells us, which Vona finished writing in 1947 and was finally about to have published. The novel, Bricked-up Windows, has shaped his destiny. It continues to be his destiny! The few intimate friends whom the Romanian author had allowed to read the novel claimed that his narrative style revealed such a sublime and rigorous quest for form that, if one were to make comparisons, the only names that might come to mind would be the great writers of our century: Kafka, Joyce, Broch, or Musil. For decades, the novelist lived with the certainty that he would never see his work published. Nevertheless, he continued to care for it, refining it in secret. His first surprise must have been its publication in 1993 in its original language, Romanian; then came the translation to French, and now the prize awarded him unanimously by an exceptionally brilliant jury comprised of, among others, Vincenzo Consolo, Luigi Malerba, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Rubem Fonseca, and our dear friend Álvaro Mutis. And from Vona, Hugo bounces to other writers he knows—some personally, others by their work—because one of his greatest passions, perhaps the most eccentric, is, you may have already guessed by now, Romanian literature.
Hugo speaks with characteristic passion as he moves within his sphere; the names he cited elude me, with the exception of the most obvious: Cioran, Eminescu, Eliade, Gian Luca Caragiale; the same thing, I imagine, happens to Monsiváis. He recounts the exploit of a poet and Hispanist—was it Gialescu?—who, although gravely ill from osseous tuberculosis, devotes the rest of his life to translating Góngora’s Soledades which he does so masterfully that today it is considered one of the most remarkable renderings of the Andalusian poet’s work in any foreign language. From there, I begin to get lost, my mind wanders, and not because Hugo’s discussion fails to interest me, rather because I discover that an old man, the doyen of all the world’s old men, the quintessential Nestor, is waving ardently at me from at a faraway table. I watch him stand up suddenly and begin to walk, very slowly, dragging two feet that by all appearances are attempting to rebel against him; he moves his arms as if he were feeling his way or attempting to propel himself. He smiles as though our presence in the restaurant both surprised him and filled him with happiness.
He is wearing stylish clothes, greenish-gray flannel trousers and a slightly wrinkled checkered jacket, which adds a discreet elegance to his figure. His white mane is full and unruly. His face has a pinkish hue, like that of a baby, but scored in every direction with wrinkles of varying lengths and depths, which seems out of place with his infant-like coloring. He reminds me of the last photos of Auden: “My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain…” The only one among us who could not see him was Carlos, because this radiant specter of happiness was approaching from his rear. The names of classmates came to mind suddenly en masse; at that moment, I tried to imagine the face of a younger man, to return it to adolescence and assign it a name, but it was impossible.
Waiting on the tip of my tongue were all the platitudes that one says at moments such as this: “It’s great to see you, old man, especially in such good shape! Obviously, life has treated you well, am I right? Now I know why our colleagues call you Dorian Gray. But they’re wrong, you’re in much better shape, much better of course,” and other such nonsense, only to buy time and give the other person the opportunity to say something that will allow me to identify him.
He opened his arms just a step from our table, as I was about to stand and embrace him. Fortunately, I stopped; I would have made a spectacle of myself. The old timer walked past us without stopping, without even looking at us, his smile growing bigger, and his arms flailing even more. He stopped at the table right behind ours. I was saved from having to repeat such drivel and listen to him do the same. Someone at the table next to us said: “You’re looking good, Flacus! Just look at him! I’m so jealous, Flacus!” And the salvo of hot air that the occasion demanded continued; the gamut of banalities that language has accumulated for such cases. I turned around to watch the show. It was a long table, with some ten people, everyone fawning over Flacus, who, with a content look he attempted to mitigate with words of modesty, responded: “Don’t be so sure, not everything that glimmers is gold; I don’t always feel as good as today; don’t be so sure, you can’t judge a book by its cover…!”
I breathed a sigh of relief. At that moment, I realized that we had all stopped talking. What was curious was that the three of us, Hugo and I from the beginning of the old man’s march, and Monsiváis from the time he walked by the table, thought that he was a friend from our youth whom we were not able to place. Perhaps an actor from our generation, a young leading man with a brief but intense career, retired from the profession many years ago. But that possibility turned out to be, without our knowing why, unconvincing.
We devoured our dessert and downed our coffee, as if trying to escape that character who was so close to us. The suspicion that someone could at that very moment be saying the same thing about us made us a little uneasy to say the least. In short, one must grow accustomed to such discomfort upon reaching a certain age.
After the first “vision,” I returned to Venice at least a dozen times. I have wandered every corner of it, and read with interest and pleasure many of the texts that have been written about it, its history, its art, and its customs. There also exists a store of fiction set in Venice. In almost every one of these novels it is considered more than just a setting; rather, it becomes a character. Sometimes it is the protagonist itself.
Puritans, by training, by creed, or by temperament, tend to demonize it; in some, the rejection coincides with an irresistible attraction, and that duality is transformed into delirium. Ruskin passionately described each of its stones, and at the same time was horrified by the customs and traditions of its inhabitants. Evil dwells in the heart of Venice; it is a sea of abomination; its contaminating power is the work of the devil, they say. Should an innocent person manage to escape from there, he does so with a damaged soul. Some are even denied that privilege. They succumb; such is the case of Aschenbach from Death in Venice. Half of mankind allows itself to berate it, lecture it; they attempt to reform it, redeem it from its sins and vices; they demand it cease to exist in order to purge its sins; they rejoice in its decline; only its sinking—death by water—will succeed in purifying it.
Its defenders at times employ disconcerting arguments. Berenson becomes rhapsodic over its colors. He marvels at its extraordinary school of painting, the only one in Italy that lacks “primitives,” because it was born with a handful of masterpieces. The celebrated aesthete asserts that Venice was the first modern European nation, but the reasons underlying this assertion seem rather paradoxical: “Since there was little room for personal glory in Venice, the perpetuators of glory, the Humanists, found at first scant encouragement there, and the Venetians were saved from that absorption in archeology and pure science which overwhelmed Florence at an early date. […] As it was, the feeling for beauty was not hindered in its natural development.” Venetian painting is created, and he insists on this point at various times, to be simply an object of pleasure.
What Berenson highlights—his admiration for beautiful and healthy bodies; his love for colorful and sumptuous decoration; the disposition toward pleasure, carnival; the permanent use of the mask and erotic extravagance—is what scandalizes Puritans. On the other hand, anyone who has the slightest propensity for sensuality will in La Serenissima feel as if he were in the Temple of Venus. It is no wonder Casanova is known world-over as the son of Venice.
Venice is boundless and unfathomable.
