Brodsky, Watermarks

p. 48-58
The palazzo had become the umpteenth's only recently, after nearly three centuries of legal battles fought by several branches of a family that had given the world a couple of Venetian admirals. Accordingly, two huge, splendidly carved aft-lanterns loomed in the two-story-high cave of the palazzo's courtyard, which was filled with all sorts of naval paraphernalia, dating from Renaissance days onward. The umpteenth himself, the last in the line, after decades and decades of waiting, had finally got it, to the great consternation of the other - apparently numerous - members of the family. He was no navy man; he was a bit of playwright and a bit of a painter. For the moment, though, the most obvious thing about this forty-year-old - a slim, short creature in a gray double-breasted suit of very good cut - was that he was quite sick. His skin looked post- hepatitis, parchment yellow - or perhaps it was just an ulcer. He ate nothing but consommé and boiled vegetables while his guests were gorging themselves on what would qualify as a separate chapter, if not a book.

So the party was celebrating the umpteenth's having come into his own, as well as his launching a press to produce books about Venetian art. It was already in full swing when the three of us - a fellow writer, her son, and I - arrived. There were a lot of people: local and faintly international luminaries, politicos, nobles, the theater crowd, beards and ascots, mistresses of varying degrees of flamboyance, a bicycle star, American academics. Also, a bunch of giggling, agile, homosexual youths inevitable these days whenever something mildly spectacular takes place. They were presided over by a rather distraught and spiteful middle-aged queen - very blond, very blue-eyed, very drunk: the premises' major domo, whose days here were over and who therefore loathed everyone. Rightly so, I would add, given his prospects.

As they were making quite a ruckus, the umpteenth politely offered to show the three of us the rest of the house. We readily agreed and went up by a small elevator. When we left its cabin, we left the twentieth, the nineteenth, and a large portion of the eighteenth century behind, or, more accurately, below: like sediment at the bottom of a narrow shaft.

We found ourselves in a long, poorly lit gallery with a convex ceiling swarming with putti. No light would have helped anyway, as he walls were covered with large, floor-to-ceiling, dark-brownish oil paintings, definitely tailored to this space and separated by barely discernible marble busts and pilasters. The pictures depicted, as far as one could make out, sea and land battles, ceremonies, scenes from mythology; the lightest hue was wine-red. It was a mine of heavy porphyry in a state of abandonment, in a state of perpetual evening, with oils obscuring its ores; the silence here was truly geological. You couldn't ask, What is this? Who is this by? because of the incongruity of your voice, belonging to a later and obviously irrelevant organism. Or else it felt like an underwater journey - we were like a school of fish passing through a sunken galleon loaded with treasure, but not opening our mouths, since water would rush in.

At the far end of the gallery or host flitted to the right, and we followed him into a room which appeared to be a cross between the library and the study of a seventeenth-century gentleman. Judging by the books behind the criss-crossed wire in the red, wardrobe-size wooden cabinet, the gentleman's century could even have been the sixteenth. There were about sixty fat, white, vellum-bound volumes, from Aesop to Zeno; just enough for a gentleman; more would turn hum into a penseur, with disastrous consequences either for his manners or for his estate. The light in it wasn't much better than in the gallery; I'd made out a desk and a large faded globe. Then our host turned a knob and I saw his silhouette framed by a door leading into an enfilade. I glanced at that enfilade and I shuddered: it looked like a vicious, viscous infinity. I swallowed air and stepped into it.

It was a long succession of empty rooms. Rationally I knew that it couldn't be longer than the gallery parallel to which it ran. Yet it was. I had the sense of walking not so much in standard perspective as in a horizontal spiral where the laws of optics were suspended. Each room meant your further disappearance, the next degree of your nonexistence. This had to do with three things: drapery, mirrors, and dust. Although in some cases you could tell a room's designation - dining room, salon, possibly a nursery - most were similar in their lack of apparent function. There were about the same in size, or at any rate, they didn't seem to differ much in that way from one another. And in each one of them windows were draped and two or three mirrors adorned the walls.

Whatever the original color and pattern of the drapes had been, they now looked pale yellow and very brittle. A touch of your finger, let alone a breeze, would mean sheed destruction to them, as the shards of fabric scattered nearby on the parquet suggested. They were shedding, those curtains, and some of their folds exposed broad, bald, threadbare patches, as though the fabric felt it had come full circle and was now reverting to its pre-loom state. Our breath was perhaps too great an intimacy also; still, it was better than fresh oxygen, which, like history, the drapes didn't need. This was neither decay nor decomposition; this was dissipation back into time, where color and texture don't matter, where perhaps having learned what may happen to them, they will regroup and return, here or elsewhere, in a different guise. "Sorry, "they seemed to say, "next time around we'll be more durable".

Then there were those mirrors, two or three in each room, of various sizes, but mostly rectangular. They all had delicate golden frames, with well-wrought floral garlands or idyllic scenes which called more attention to themselves than to their surface, since the amalgam was invariably in poor shape. In a sense, the frames were more coherent than their contents, straining, as it were, to keep them from spreading over the wall. Having grown unaccustomed over the centuries to reflecting anything but the wall opposite, the mirror were quite reluctant to return one's visage, out of either greed or impotence, and when they tried, one's features would come back incomplete. I thought, I begin to understand Régnier. From room to room, as we proceeded through the enfilade, I saw myself in those frames less and less, getting back more and more darkness. Gradual subtraction, I thought to myself; how is going to end? And it ended in the tenth or eleventh room. I stood by the door leading into the next chamber, staring at a largish, three-by-four-foot gilded rectangle, and instead of myself I saw pitch-black nothing. Deep and inviting, it seemed to contain a perspective of its own - perhaps another enfilade. For a moment I felt dizzy; but as I was no novelist, I skipped the option and took a doorway.

All along it had been reasonably ghostly; now it became unreasonably so. The host and my companions lagged somewhere behind; I was on my own. There was a great deal of dust everywhere; the hues and shapes of everything in sight were mitigated by its gray. Marble inlaid tables, porcelain figurines, sofas, chairs, the very parquet. Everything was powdered with it, and sometimes, as with figurines and busts, the effect was oddly beneficial, accentuating their features, their folds, the vivacity of a group. But usually its layers was thick and solid; what's more, it had an air of finality, as though no new dust could be added to it. Every surface craves dust, for dust is the flesh of time, as a poet sait, time's very flesh and blood; but here the craving seemed to be over. Now it will seep into the objects themselves, I thought, fuse with them, aid in the end replace them. It depends of course on the material; some of it quite durable. They may not even disintegrate; they'll simply become grayer, as time would have nothing against assuming their shapes, the way it already had in this succession of vacuum chambers in which it was overtaking matter.

The last of them was the master bedroom. A gigantic yet uncovered four-poster bed dominated its space: the admiral's revenge for the narrow cot aboard his ship, or perhaps his homage to the sea itself. The latter was more probable, given the monstrous stucco cloud of putti descending on the bed and playing the role of baldachin. In fact, it was more sculpture than putti. The cherubs' faces were terribly grotesque: they all had these corrupt, lecherous grins as they stared - very keenly - downward upon the bed. They reminded me of that stable of giggling youths downstairs; and then I noticed a portable TV set in the corner of this otherwise absolutely bare room. I pictured the major domo entertaining his choice in this chamber: a writhing island of naked flesh amid a sea of linen, under the scrutiny of the dust-covered gypsum masterpiece. Oddly enough, I felt no repulsion. On the contrary, I felt that from time's point of view such entertainment here could only seem appropriate, as it generated nothing. After all, for three centuries, nothing here reigned supreme. Wars, revolutions, great discoveries, geniuses, plagues never entered here due to a legal problem. Causality was canceled, since its human carriers strolled in this perspective only in a care-taker capacity, once in a few years, if that. So the little wriggling shoal in the linen sea was, in fact, in tune with the premises, since it couldn't in nature give birth to anything. At best, the major domo's island - or should I say volcano? - existed only in the eyes of the putti. On the mirror's map it didn't. Neither did I.