The Problems and Possibilities of Portraying a Figure

In Venice a cardinal is celebrating mass. In the cathedral gateway stands a broad-brimmed scarlet hat with ladder tassels, its triangles sprawling widely apart, like fish about to propagate, in the water. The cardinal is celebrating mass for a younger sister believed to be dead. Stairs, like a sodden book, slope up to the church. Only two gondolas are fixed in position, caught, as if out of water, by their proud-toothed prows. Like the rotary plates of capacitors in a tube radio, they may be able to select and air a dead girl’s soul.

Abruptly, a third gondola arrives. The water is so transparent that the boats seem like a mirage or monorail. It is easier to read the merchants’ numbers daubed on the bilge (X2. Com. Venez. and 112–33. Mun. Adr. Hydr.) than the lyrical names set on the prow: Nymph, Azure Bird, Anguilla. It is just when the water is most enchantingly clear that bureaucracy triumphs.

The new gondola is a skiff, an elongated line of coal and chalk pursuing a wave. Sometimes, though, when the water turns black, the long boathook becomes a desiccating wind, snow white, above it. At other times, the water becomes simply nothing, the skiff no more than a smugly untuned string. The profile of a numerator vanishes suddenly—this is a “zero position” of rational functions—without bringing the denominator along. A “pole” is where a denominator disappears while the numerator dips its nose into existence, that flickering canal. A masked muse of function algebra, the guest arrives between zero and the pole, neither on water nor on skiff, for the requiem mass.

The mouth of the church grips the skiff suddenly (precisely when it happens to exist) like an infinite flat hook, startling the other two boats. Gondoliers sitting on the canal bank mutter; a woman jumps out of the skiff and, in stepping onto the bank, pushes the craft away from the bank accidentally, whereupon it makes an immense swing, like a compass needle that’s been held by a finger from pointing north but, released, snaps back to its black N gateway. The chant and organ inside hum like a wind in the treetops. Here was the line between skiff and water: a drumstick dividing a glass plate, plus its shadow, two contiguous circles functioning in opposite hemispheres of the world.

The woman is pleased to think she is the cardinal’s sister. She has no idea that everyone believes the sister to be dead and is unaware that the requiem mass is intended for the person whom she believes herself to be. There are few people in the church; in alarm, the woman adjusts her body—like a pinky to the corresponding finger of a glove, it being mistakenly in the place of the ring finger—to a pose for devotions. She asks her neighbor whom the requiem is meant to honor and is told. “So she’s supposed to be dead?” she inquires of herself in surprise. Who or what is in the place of the real sister? What false schema does this unforeseen intersection of misconceptions signify? The cardinal believes that the madwoman is his sister, the woman herself thinks that she is; but, if so, then she must be dead. Is her death real or fantastic? Is the cardinal’s sibling present and mad, not present and dead?

Not long ago a man had built for himself opposite the church a luxury villa that detectives are now holding under observation. The police suspect the sister is not dead and are in touch with the man in connection with her disappearance. One of the windows has a garden view. Thick glass walls, white furniture, mercury-tinted statues and lamps, blond-colored plants, blond fishes; the brightness of the bars of light (not artificial light, but color whipped into foam) is like the brightness of gold in the jaws of a bank. The room testifies that ambient lighting by day is a more likely backdrop to crime than electric lighting by night. In...