The Pacific and Other Stories (3 page)

They loved it more than I can convey, and from that moment our fortunes were assured in terms of opportunities offered, monies earned, praise lavished, oceans crossed in quiet airplanes, and distant respect tendered by millions.

Rosanna’s success was so astonishingly quick partly because she was already in the semimonstrous state of disconnection for which most people require years of constant flattery, ready limousines, and obsequious retainers. She skipped her education in the cruelties of status, having had them from the beginning even in her laundress bones. Which is not to say that she had no regrets, but only that she would do whatever was needed to be done, instantly and in spite of them, as if they did not exist.

Were it not for her beautiful voice, I never would willingly have come, once I had known what she was like, within a hundred kilometers of her. And I was never interested in her other than professionally. Although she must have a soul, someplace, loving Rosanna would be like—how shall I put it?—smoking an unlit cigar, walking a dead dog, swimming in an empty pool, or listening to the radio when it is off. One thing that has made her tolerable is that in return for my plucking her from her wet sheets, she has shared her considerable fortunes with me. One might even say generously, were it not for the original contract of representation and the half-dozen times she has tried to break, evade, or alter it. It was, however, very carefully worded. Don’t forget, I was a bookkeeper, whose eye was trained in harrowingly close textual analysis.

She even proposed to me. Granted, it was because of a quirk in the law that would have dissolved the agreement upon our marriage, a marriage that quite apart from its nearly-impossible-to-express repulsive attributes, would have been quickly followed by divorce so as to render Rosanna a free agent.

“Naturally I won’t marry you, Rosanna, and you know it.”

“Why not?”

“Because, as you know, our representation agreement would cease to govern upon our marriage.”

“It would?”

“What a surprise!” I said. “Last week you spoke to the lawyer, who. …”

“What lawyer?”

“DeMarco.”

“Oh, him.”

“Who told me that he had given you, at your request, a disquisition on this very subject. I was expecting you to ask me to marry you. But, Rosanna, even were all things equal, I couldn’t marry you, because of Lucia.”

“What is she to you!?” Rosanna asked indignantly.

“My wife.”

Rosanna stormed off, laundress-style. I’m thoroughly used to it. I bear it. To this day, she’s responsible for half my income, and although she’s a lot of work, the work consists of choosing offers rather than begging for them, and there is a difference. Even were she struck dead by more cholesterol, the revenue from CDs and broadcasts would continue, though it would be reduced. Maybe I would find another great diva. Maybe not. What’s the difference? My children are grown. Neither Lucia nor I are anymore interested in living grandly. I like to fish, shoot, and read. She is content running the house and helping to take care of the grandchildren. In short, for me the age of Rosanna Cadorna could come to an end and I would not be unhappy.

Still, because we are not quite ready to retire—perhaps in three or four years—and from long ingrained habit, I continue to serve Rosanna above and beyond my essential obligations. This is not because I want to, but as a reflexive defense learned after her three nonperformance suits. I am not required to find the tentlike clothing that fits her, arrange for special water filtration at her villa, or sit with her while she eats, but I do, solely to build immunity. Thus, when she came to me last summer (the summer of 2001), and more or less ordered me to Venice, I went.

That I would go was not a certainty, not these days, when I am more and more able to take or leave her, and at first I resisted.

“Cassati,” she said, putting a book in my hands, “look at this.” On its dark cover was a detail from a painting, a beautiful young girl who reminded me painfully of my daughters when they were young, before they had left home—
Il Colore Ritrovato: Bellini a Venezia.
“Color refound,” or, better, “rediscovered,” or, even better, “Color Restored: Bellini in Venice.”

They had washed Bellini’s paintings until they glowed like jewels, and now these were exhibited in the Accademia in Venice, with this book the record of both his effortless genius and their ingenious efforts.

“Beautiful,” I said.

“And amazing,” she added.

“Yes.”

“To think! He was a great painter!”

“He was.”

“Too.”

“‘Too’?”

“As well as composer.”

It took a moment for me to understand. “Bellini?” I asked.

“What a genius!”

“It was a different Bellini,” I told her. “There were two, you know. One was a painter. He came before. The other was a composer. He came after.”

“Two?” She was skeptical.

I nodded.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“I didn’t know that, Cassati, but I still want you to go to Venice and check it out.”

“Check what out?” I didn’t want to go to Venice. I had other plans.

“Bellini.”

“I told you, it’s a different one.”

“Okay, check him out anyway.”

“What do you want me to check?”

“See how things are.”

She saw the way I was looking at her. I had no idea what she was talking about. “What do you mean, ‘How things are’?”

“See if you can buy some of the paintings. I like them, especially the one of Father Christmas taking the mummy.”

“I assure you, Bellini painted no such scene.”

“Yes, he did, it’s on page a hundred and six.”

I turned to the page. “That’s not Father Christmas, Rosanna, it’s a priest of the temple, and that’s not a mummy, it’s the Baby Jesus in swaddling cloths.”

“So much the better.”

“You can’t buy these paintings, they’re the property of the state.”

“Maybe for me they would make an exception. I’ll ask the president.”

“He won’t do it.”

“I’ll ask the Pope.”

“Neither will he.”

“Go, anyway.”

“To Venice?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you go to Venice? Why do I have to go to Venice?”

“Too many people would recognize me. Besides, I leave tomorrow, as you know, for Buenos Aires.”

“What exactly do you want me to do?” (I had lost.)

“Check out the paintings, in person, look around, report to me, and get a copy of this book.”

“But you have a copy of the book.”

“You can keep this one. Get me a fresh one.”

That was why, last summer, I went to Venice.

T
O THE QUESTION
what is the difference between Venice and Milan other than a difference in tone, in the sunlight, and in the air, the answer is that Milan is where you busy yourself with the world as if what you did really mattered, and there time seems not to exist. But in Venice time seems to stop, you are busy only if you are a fool, and you see the truth of your life. And, whereas in Milan beauty is overcome by futility, in Venice futility is overcome by beauty.

It isn’t because of the architecture or the art, the things that people go to look at and strain to preserve. The quality of Venice that accomplishes what religion so often cannot is that Venice has made peace with the waters. It is not merely pleasant that the sea flows through, grasping the city like the tendrils of a vine, and, depending upon the light, making alleys and avenues of emerald or sapphire, it is a brave acceptance of dissolution and an unflinching settlement with death. Though in Venice you may sit in courtyards of
stone, and your heels may click up marble stairs, you cannot move without riding upon or crossing the waters that someday will carry you in dissolution to the sea. To have made peace with their presence is the great achievement of Venice, and not what tourists come to see.

What Rosanna can do with her voice—the sublime elevation that is the province of artists, anyone can do in Venice if he knows what to look for and what to ignore. Should you concentrate there on the exquisite, or should you study too closely the monuments and museums, you will miss it, for it comes gently and without effort, and moves as slowly as the tide.

Despite the fact that you are more likely to feel this quality if you are not distracted by luxury, I registered at the Celestia. The streets near San Marco are far too crowded and not as interesting as those quieter areas on other islands and in other districts, and they have a deficit of greenery and sunlight. And the Celestia, with its 2,600-count linen and stage-lit suites, is the kind of luxury that removes one from the spirit of life, but I went there anyway almost as a way of spiting Rosanna, who was paying for it, and because that is where we always stayed in Venice, and I wanted to accumulate more hotel-stay points. In that I am compulsive. Once I start laying-in a store of a certain commodity, like money, I get very enthusiastic about building it up.

Also, I’m somewhat known in Venice, and were I to stay in a less than perfect hotel word might get out that either Rosanna or I were not doing as well as was expected, and in the public eye position is not half as important as direction of travel. People are clever, and just as they find comets and shooting stars more of interest than simple pinpoints of light, they wisely ignore the fixed points of a career in favor of its trajectory.

I arrived in the evening, swam for a kilometer in the indoor pool, bumping on occasion into an old lady who was shaped like a frog and kept wandering blindly into my lane, and then I had dinner in my suite. Because I’m unused to sleeping with the sound of air-conditioning and in curtain-drawn darkness—at home the light of the moon and stars filters through the trees as they rustle unevenly in the wind—I slept as if anesthetized, and the next morning, parted from my current life, I woke up as if the world was new to me, as it used to be every morning when I awoke when I was young.

Still, I look my age, which is right and proper, so when I walked to the Accademia to “check out” the Bellini I stopped feeling like a youth, because I was brought back by the registering glances of passersby, the deference, the treatment one receives instantly and with neither word nor touch from strangers on the street. Young people look at you only quickly, as they would a post or a gate, saving their more intense concentration for one another. This, for someone of my age, constitutes the kind of dismissal for which, not inexplicably, one can actually be grateful. And for someone of my age it is a pleasure when older people look at you knowingly—for what you have seen, what you have done, for the wars you have lived through, the pains you feel, the energy you lack, and your bittersweet knowledge that you are not young anymore.

So by the time I paid admission to the Accademia I was in a state of perfect balance, my youth fresh in feeling and memory, my age clearly in mind, my reconciliation of the years that had passed with the years that were to come much like the reconciliation in Venice of land and sea.

The first thing you do in the Accademia is go upstairs, and this I did, rising into the same kind of rarefied world into which Rosanna provides entrance with her voice, and into which she had sent me to see what had happened when the paintings had been made young again, how it had been done, and how their colors, liberated from the sadness and fatigue of centuries, shone through.

I
AM NOT A WELL EDUCATED MAN
except that I have educated myself, and, because I have educated myself, what I say will not stand up, for lack of recognized authority. This in turn leaves me free to say what I will, in the hope that, like those small forces that do not threaten empires and are thus not fully pursued, the things in which I believe can survive in some high and forgotten place until the power of empire subsides.

And although I know that few will listen to or credit this, I think we are in a lost age, in which holiness and charity have been traded for the victory and penetration of knowledge, though all the knowledge in the world has not brought us any further than where we can go without it even in the outermost halls of grace. I believe that more is to be known and apprehended
from the beauty of a face than in delving, no matter how deep, simply into how things work, no matter how marvelous that may be. The greatest substance of the world is immaterial, the province of the heart, and its study cannot be forced or reasoned. Merely to touch upon the edge of things in parsing their mechanics is to forswear their fullness, for the entry to this fullness lies not in science but in art. I cannot prove this, for it cannot be proven, but I claim, assert, and have seen it.

There in the Accademia, among so many magnificent paintings that their import was almost lost, was the girl who reminded me of my daughters when they were young. She was one of the two saints in Bellini’s
Madonna with Child Between Two Saints
, the one to the Madonna’s left. Sometimes in a simple sequence of notes a shaft is opened into precincts of pure and perfect light. Rosanna has this wonderful gift, but music is by nature sequential, and moves in time. In the painting, where I saw, among other things, the souls of my daughters in the face of a saint, the revelatory sequences coexisted: in the way the light fell; how their eyes were directed, focused, and drawn; in the position of their hands; the rendering of expression; the tint of flesh; depth of darkness; softness of air; and composition of the ineffable. More was to be found in that one painting, in the construction of faces and the action of light, than in all the ponderings of the world.

Only when I had been there for God knows how long, and people had come and gone in untold numbers, silently pulling up and gliding away like fish in an aquarium, did I fall back almost in exhaustion, and come to my senses. That was when I realized that I had been hearing music, and that it was not imagined. Music is my business. I can remember it and hear it almost as vividly in recollection—and, just before sleep and in dreams,
more
vividly—than when it is real. So I thought at first that I was simply remembering a great singer singing a great song.