Provoked in Venice: The Rider Quintet, vol. 3

Tell Me Why

TELL ME WHY /see no reason why the site of this excursus just had to be Venice. There are so many otherplacesyou might have chosen. If you had kept an open mind and usedyour noggin. Butyou always had a hardhead. In more ways than one. Oh hell, I wasin Venice,I stayed at the Gritti— / betthey wouldn't letyou into thebar. Then you did well on your Rabbi's salary. It wasa tour. 1saw more in three days thanyou'd see in three weeks. Venice is a tourist trap, and hideously expensive. You could do so wellfor half the money in or I like the mists and fog. Look out the window willyou man, Manhattan has enoughfog and mist for two ofyou. Haven't you often noted, losingyourself in meditation on the cross-town bus, that in weather like this, damp, warm, misty, that (utterly accessible) Central Park is like a primeval world, dense, dark, unfathomable? A place as appropriate to dinosaurs as toourselves. Yes. Then why Venice where, as thatpoet with the girl's middle name has it, by late autumn. .. 164 It doesn't drift like bait any more, this city, reeling in the days as they surface and flash. The harder you look the harder the glass palaces shake. The spent summer hangs from garden fronds, like puppets thrown in a pile, crumpled, beyond fatigue. . . . in lines scribbled downprior to Dachau if I still have my dates in order Long before, but I hadn't thought of those heaped puppets in just that way before. There's a lotyou haven't thought about. Even by May of 1912 there were too many tourists in Venice to satisfy Rilke's passionfor solitude. Don'tyou rememberthat one reasonyou chose to stay in the desert as long asyou could, given the limited decision makinypower o o f you had in those tenderyears— was to clearyour lungs, to sendyour asthma into hibernation to breathe — ? And in addition toyour mad wild inexhaustible love of open spaces, you used each occasion to drivefurther andfurther from the city limits,you rebelled againstboundaries. You and yourfriend, the one they nicknamedThe Phantom, werenever home. Except to chow down. The Phantom supplied the Corvair and I supplied the gas. 165 Andyou II rememberyourfather was the one with the east east east mantra who opposed your finishing high school in the desert while I—since I was the one who had to drag you to the doctors whenyou wheezed—went along withyour wishes. There was something alluring about the idea of all that nothing beyond the surrounding mountains. Andyetyou longedto return. AIL I have to do is say a word and you're back on the street again, vagabond ragamuffin. A day of cold rain is no obstacle; it is an enticement, even though I still get nervous when I detect a slight wheeze in my lungs. Last week's downpour of light—so dazzling I could hardly shield my eyes from the glare. Now I'm also grateful for this dark downpour, the thump of windshield wipers, the blur of traffic lights. I'm curious to see who's doing what, who resorts to umbrellas, who carries on, oblivious, lugging shopping bags on Broadway as the wet paper looks like it will soon detach from the handles and remain on the street while the carrier continues home, not empty-handed, but with nothing more to show than handles. The world rhythmically dying and flaring up again. You're lookingahead to New Year's Eve when fireworks light up Rome's seven hills. You're right. There are all the reasons in the world not to go to Venice. Maybe the fragility of its future provoked me into thinking differently about history. Here the devastation isso palpable. The drips and leaks. The rheumatic gutters. It's a place where extremities reveal themselves: where the extreme emotions stand in the foreground. The pendulum swings from gaiety to language. Where else but in Venice would you find a middle-aged couple, clearly on marriage 166 number two, three, or ... behaving this way, meandering hand and hand on the Zattere, dressed auspiciously in white, their light hair lit by flares. What would happen if you kept your eyes open beginning say, tomorrow morning, when you stop for a corn muffin and a cafe con leche at the Rosita beside StrausPark on wjth St. instead of the Rosati on the...