Villanelle
There is a city surrounded by water with watery alleys that do for streets and roads and silted up back ways that only the rats can cross. Miss your way, which is easy to do, and you may find yourself staring at a hundred eyes guarding a filthy palace of sacks and bones. Find your way, which is easy to do, and you may meet an old woman in a doorway. She will tell your fortune, depending on your face.
This is the city of mazes. You may set off from the same place to the same place every day and never go by the same route. If you do so, it will be by mistake. Your bloodhound nose will not serve you here. Your course in compass reading will fail you. Your confident instructions to passers-by will send them to squares they have never heard of, over canals not listed in the notes.
Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead. No as the crow flies short cut will help you to reach the café just over the water. The short cuts are where the cats go, through the impossible gaps, round corners that seem to take you the opposite way. But here, in this mercurial city, it is required you do awake your faith.
With faith, all things are possible.
[...]
I love the night. In Venice, a long time ago, when we had our own calendar and stayed aloof from the world, we began the days at night. What use was the sun to us when our trade and our secrets and our diplomacy depended on darkness? In the dark you are in disguise and this is the city of disguises. In those days (I cannot place them in time because time is to do with daylight), in those days when the sun went down we opened our doors and slid along the eely waters with a hooded light in our prow. All our boats were black then and left no mark on the water where they sat. We were dealing in perfume and silk. Emeralds and diamonds. Affairs of State. We didn't build our bridges simply to avoid walking on water. Nothing so obvious. A bridge is a meeting place. A neutral place. A casual place. Enemies will choose to meet on a bridge and end their quarrel in that void. One will cross to the other side. The other will not return. For lovers, a bridge is a possibility, a metaphor of their chances. And for the traffic in whispered goods, where else but a bridge in the night?
We are a philosophical people, conversant with the nature of greed and desire, holding hands with the Devil and God. We would not wish to let go of either. This living bridge is tempting to all and you may lose your soul or find it here.
And our own souls?
They are Siamese.
Nowadays, the dark has more light than in the old days. There are flares everywhere and soldiers like to see the streets lit up, like to see some reflection on the canals. They don't trust our soft feet and thin knives. None the less, darkness can be found; in the under-used waterways or out on the lagoon. There's no dark like it. It's soft to the touch and heavy in the hands. You can open your mouth and let it sink into you till it makes a close ball in your belly. You can juggle with it, dodge it, swim in it. You can open it like a door.
The old Venetians had eyes like cats that cut the densest night and took them through impenetrable ways without stumbling. Even now, if you look at us closely you will find that some of us have slit eyes in the daylight.
I used to think that darkness and death were probably the same. That death was the absence of light. That death was nothing more than the shadow-lands where people bought and sold and loved as usual but with less conviction. The night seems more temporary than the day, especially to lovers, and it also seems more uncertain. In this way it sums up our lives, where are uncertain and temporary. We forget about that in the day. In the day we go on forever. This is the city of uncertainty, where routes and faces look alike and are not. Death will be like that. We will be forever recognising people we have never met.
But darkness and death are not the same.
The one is temporary, the other is not.
[...]
For myself, if I am to die, I would like to do it alone, far from the world. I would like to lie on the warm stone in May until my strength is gone, then drop gently into the canal. Such things are still possible in Venice.
[...]
I push on, under the Rialto, that strange half-bridge that can be drawn up to stop one half of this city warring with the other. They'll steal it eventually and we'll be brothers and mothers. But that will be the doom of paradox.
Bridges join but they also separate.
Out now, past the houses that lean into the water. Past the Casino itself. Past the money-lenders and the churches and the buildings of state. Out now into the lagoon with only the wind and the seagulls for company.
There is a certainty that comes with the oars, with the sense of generation after generation standing up like this and rowing like this with rhythm and ease. This city is littered with ghosts seeing to their own. No family would be complete without its ancestors.
Our ancestors. Our belonging. The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich. Thus the present is made whole. On the lagoon this morning, with the past at my elbow, rowing beside me, I see the future glittering on the water. I catch sight of myself in the water and see in the distortions of my face what I might become.
If I find her, how will my future be?
I will find her.
Somewhere between fear and sex passion is.
Passion is not so much an emotion as a destiny. What choice have I in the face of this wind but to put up sail and rest my oars?
Dawn breaks.
[...]
Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.
Her house was gracious, standing on a quiet waterway, fashionable but not vulgar. The drawing-room, enormous with great windows at either end and a fireplace that would have suited an idle wolfhound. It was simply furnished; an oval table and a chaise-longue. A few Chinese ornaments that she liked to collect when the ships came through. She had also a strange assortment of dead insects mounted in cases on the wall. I had never seen such things before and wondered about this enthusiasm.
She stood close to me as she took me through the house, pointing out certain pictures and books. Her hand guided my elbow at the stairs and when we sat down to eat she did not arrange us formally but put me beside her, the bottle in between.
We talked about the opera and the theatre and the visitors and the weather and ourselves. I told her that my real father had been a boatman and she laughed and asked could it be true that we had webbed feet?
'Of course,' I said and she laughed the more at this joke.
We had eaten. The bottle was empty. She said she had married late in life, had not expected to marry at all being stubborn and of independent means. Her husband dealt in rare books and manuscripts from the east. Ancient maps that showed the lairs of griffins and the haunts of whales. Treasure maps that claimed to know the whereabouts of the Holy Grail. He was a quiet and cultured man of whom she was fond.
He was away.
We had eaten, the bottle was empty. There was nothing more that could be said without strain or repetition. I had been with her more than five hours already and it was time to leave. As we stood up and she moved to get something I stretched out my arm, that was all, and she turned back into my arms so that my hands were on her shoulder blades and hers along my spine. We stayed thus for a few moments until I had courage enough to kiss her neck very lightly. She did not pull away. I grew bolder and kissed her mouth, biting a little at the lower lip.
She kissed me.
'I can't make love to you,' she said.
Relief and despair.
'But I can kiss you.'
And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamours for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.
When I left her house some time later, I did not set off straight away, but watched her moving from room to room extinguishing the lights. Upwards she went, closing the dark behind her until there was only one light left and that was her own. She said she often read into the small hours while her husband was away. Tonight she did not read. She paused briefly at the window and then the house was black.
What was she thinking?
What was she feeling?
I walked slowly through the silent squares and across the Rialto, where the mist was brooding above the water. The boats were covered and empty apart from the cats that make their homes under the seat boards. There was no one, not even the beggars who fold themselves and their rags into any doorway.
How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?
Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.
[...]
Could a woman love a woman for more than a night?
I stepped out and in the morning they say a beggar was running round the Rialto talking about a young man who'd walked across the canal like it was solid.
I'm telling you stories. Trust me.
[...]
Does she do this often? Does she walk the streets, when her husband goes away, looking for someone like me? Everyone in Venice has their weakness and their vice. Perhaps not only in Venice. Does she invite them to supper and hold them with her eyes and explain, a little sadly, that she can't make love? Perhaps this is her passion. Passion out of passion's obstacles. And me? Every game threatens a wild card. The unpredictable, the out of control. Even with a steady hand and a crystal ball we couldn't rule the world the way we wanted it. There are storms at sea and there are other storms inland. Only the convent windows look serenely out on both.
[...]
The churches prepared for Christmas. Every Madonna was gilded and every Jesus re-painted. The priests took out their glorious golds and scarlets and the incense was especially sweet. I took to going to service twice a day to bask in the assurance of Our Lord. I've never had a conscience about basking. In summer I do it against the walls or I sit like the lizards of the Levant on top of our iron wells. I love the way wood holds heat, and if I can I take my boat and lie directly in the path of the sun for a day. My body loosens then, my mind floats away and I wonder if this is what holy men feel when they talk about their trances? I've seen holy men come from the eastern lands. We had an exhibit of them once to make up for the law prohibiting bull-baiting. Their bodies were loose but I have heard it's to do with the food they eat.
Basking can't be called holy, but if it achieves the same results will God mind? I don't think so. In the Old Testament the end always justified the means. We understand that in Venice, being a pragmatic people.
The sun is gone now and I must do my basking in other ways. Church basking is taking what's there and not paying for it. Taking the comfort and joy and ignoring the rest. Christmas but not Easter. I never bother with church at Easter. It's too gloomy, and besides the sun's out by then.
If I went to confession, what would I confess? That I cross-dress? So did Our Lord, so do the priests.
That I steal? So did Our Lord, so do the priests.
That I am in love?
The object of my love has gone away for Christmas. That's what they do at this time of year. He and she. I thought I'd mind, but since the first few days, when my stomach and chest were full of stones, I've been happy. Relieved almost. I've seen my old friends and walked by myself with almost the same sure-footedness that I used to. The relief comes from no more clandestine meetings. No more snatched hours. There was a particular week when she ate two breakfasts every day. One at home and one with me. One in the drawing-room and one in the Square. After that her lunches were a disaster.
She is much prone to going to the theatre, and because he does not enjoy the stage she goes alone. For a time she only saw one act of everything. In the interval she came to me.
Venice is full of urchins who will carry notes from one eager palm to another. In the hours we could not meet we sent messages of love and urgency. In the hours we could meet our passion was brief and fierce.
She dresses for me. I have never seen her in the same clothes twice.
Now, I am wholly given over to selfishness. I think about myself, I get up when I like, instead of at the crack of dawn just to watch her open the shutters. I flirt with waiters and gamblers and remember that I enjoy that. I sing to myself and I bask in churches. Is this freedom delicious because rare? Is any respite from love welcome because temporary? If she were gone for ever these days of mine would not be lit up. Is it because she will return that I take pleasure in being alone?
Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there. That gnaws away at the night-time hours desperate for a sign and appears at breakfast so self-composed. That longs for certainty, fidelity, compassion, and plays roulette with anything precious.
Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness.
We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not.
You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.
The Holy Child has been born. His mother is elevated. His father forgotten. The angels are singing in the choir stalls and God sits on the roof of each church and pours his blessing on to those below. What a wonder, joining yourself to God, pitting your wits against him, knowing that you win and lose simultaneously. Where else could you indulge without fear the exquisite masochism of the victim? Lie beneath his lances and close your eyes. Where else could you be so in control? Not in lover, certainly.
His need for you is greater than your need for him because he knows the consequences of not possessing you, whereas you, who know nothing, can throw your cap in the air and live another day. You paddle in the water and he never crosses your mind, but he is busy recording the precise force of the flood around your ankles.
Bask in it. In spite of what the monks say, you can meet God without getting up early. You can meet God lounging in the pew. The hardship is a man-made device because man cannot exist without passion. Religion is somewhere between fear and sex. And God? Truly? In his own right, without our voices speaking for him? Obsessed I think, but not passionate.
In our dreams we sometimes struggle from the oceans of desire up Jacob's ladder to that orderly place. Then human voices wake us and we drown.
[...]
I rowed by her house, softly lit, and hoped to catch sight of her shadow, her arm, any sign. She was not visible, but I could imagine her seated, reading, a glass of wine by her side. Her husband would be in his study, poring over some new and fabulous treasure. The whereabouts of the Cross or the secret tunnels that lead to the centre of the earth where the fire dragons are.
I stopped by her water-gate, and climbing up the railing looked in through the window. She was alone. Not reading but staring at the palms of her hands. We had compared hands once, mine are very lined and hers, though they have been longer in this world, have the innocence of a child. What was she trying to see? Her future? Another year? Or was she trying to make sense of her past? To understand how the past had led to the present. Was she searching for the line of her desire for me?
I was about to tap on the window when her husband entered the room, startling her. He kissed her forehead and she smiled. I watched them together and saw more in a moment than I could have pondered in another year. They did not live in the fiery furnace she and I inhabited, but they had a calm and a way that put a knife into my heart.
I shivered with cold, suddenly realising that I was two storeys in mid-air. Even a lover is occasionally afraid.
The great clock in the Piazza struck a quarter to twelve. I hurried to my boat and rowed without feeling my hands or feet into the lagoon. In that stillness, in that quiet, I thought of my own future and what future there could be in meeting in cafés and always dressing too soon. The heart is so easily mocked, believing that the sun can rise twice or that roses bloom because we want them to.
In this enchanted city all things seem possible. Time stops. Hearts beat. The laws of the real world are suspended. God sits in the rafters and makes fun of the Devil and the Devil pokes Our Lord with his tail. It has always been so. They say the boatmen have webbed feet and a beggar says he saw a young man walk on water.
If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away.
[...]
In between freezing and melting. In between love and despair. In between fear and sex, passion is.
[...]
I have always been a gambler. It's a skill that comes naturally to me like thieving and loving. What I didn't know by instinct I picked up from working the Casino, from watching others play and learning what it is that people value and therefore what it is they will risk. I learned how to put a challenge in such a way as to make it irresistible. We gamble with the hope of winning, but it's the thought of what we might lose that excites us.
How you play is a temperamental thing; cards, dice, dominoes, jacks, such preferences are frills merely. All gamblers sweat. I come from the city of chances, where everything is possible but where everything has a price. In this city great fortunes are won and lost overnight. It has always been so. Ships that carry silk and spices sink, the servant betrays the master, the secret is out and the bell tolls another accidental death. But penniless adventurers have always been welcome here too, they are good luck and very often their good luck rubs off on themselves. Some who come on foot leave on horseback and others who trumpeted their estate beg on the Rialto. It has alawys been so.
The astute gambler always keeps something back, something to play with another time; a pocket watch, a hunting dog. But the Devil's gambler keeps back something precious, something to gamble with only once in a lifetime. Behind the secret panel he keeps it, the valuable, fabulous thing that no one suspects he has.
[...]
I have said that behind the secret panel lies a valuable, fabulous thing. We are not always conscious of it, not always aware of what it is we hide from prying eyes or that those prying eyes may sometimes be our own.
There was a night, eight years ago, when a hand that took me by surprise slid the secret panel and showed me what it was I kept to myself.
My heart is a reliable organ, how could it be my heart? My everyday, work-hard heart that laughed at life and gave nothing away. I have seen dolls from the east that fold in one upon the other, the one concealing the other and so I know that the heart may conceal itself.
It was a game of chance I entered into and my heart was the wager. Such games can only be played once.
Such games are better not played at all.
It was a woman I loved and you will admit that is not the usual thing. I knew her for only five months. We had nine nights together and I never saw her again. You will admit that is not the usual thing.
I have always preferred the cards to the dice so it should have come as no surprise to me to have drawn a wild card.
The Queen of spades.
She lived simply and elegantly and her husband was sometimes called away to examine a new rarity (he dealth in books and maps); he was called away soon after we met. For nine days and nights we stayed in her house, never opening the door, never looking out of the window.
We were naked and not ashamed.
And we were happy.
On the ninth day I was left alone for a while because she had certain household affairs to attend to before her husband's return. On that day the rain splashed against the windows and filled up the canals below, churning the rubbish that lies under the surface, the rubbish that feeds the rats and the exiles in their dark mazes. It was early in the New Year. She had told me she loved me. I never doubted her word because I could feel how true it was. When she touched me I knew I was loved and with a passion I had not felt before. Not in another and not in myself.
Love is a fashion these days and in this fashionable city we know how to make light of love and how to keep our hearts at bay. I thought of myself as a civilised woman and I found I was a savage. When I thought of losing her I wanted to drown both of us in some lonely place rather than feel myself a beast that has no friend.
On the ninth night we ate and drank as usual alone in the house, the servants dismissed. She liked to cook omelettes with herbs and these we ate with hot radishes she had got from a merchant. Occasionally our conversation faltered and I saw tomorrow in her eyes. Tomorrow when we would part and resume our life of strange meetings in unfamiliar quarters. There was a café we usually went to, full of students from Padua and artists seeking inspiration. She was not known there. Her friends could not find her out. Thus we had met and met too in hours that did not belong to us, until this gift of nine nights.
I did not meet her sadness; it was too heavy.
There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance.
The gambler is led on in the hope of a win, thrilled with the fear of losing and when he wins he believes his luck is there, that he will win again.
If nine nights were possible why not ten?
So it goes and the weeks pass waiting for the tenth night, waiting to win again and all the time losing bit by bit that valuable fabulous thing that cannot be replaced.
Her husband dealt only in what was unique, he never bought a treasure someone else might have.
Would he buy my heart then and give it to her?
I had already wagered it for nine nights. In the morning when I left I did not say I would not see her again. I simply made no arrangement. She did not press me to do so, she had often said that as she got older she took what she could of life but expected little.
Then I was gone.
Every time I was tempted to go to her I went to the Casino instead and watched some fool humiliating himself at the tables. I could gamble on another night, reduce myself a little more, but after the tenth night would come the eleventh and the twelfth and so on into the silent space that is the pain of never having enough. The silent space full of starving children. She loved her husband.
[...]
The city I come from is a changeable city. It is not always the same size. Streets appear and disappear overnight, new waterways force themselves over dry land. There are days when you cannot walk from one end to the other, so far is the journey, and there are days when a stroll will take you round your kingdom like a tin-pot Prince.
I had begun to feel that this city contained only two people who sensed each other and never met. Whenever I went out I hoped and dreaded to see the other. In the faces of strangers I saw one face and in the mirror I saw my own.
The world.
The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.
[...]
More than eight years had passed, but when I knocked on her door I didn't feel like an heiress who had walked from Moscow and seen her husband murdered. I felt like a Casino girl in a borrowed uniform. Instinctively, I put my hand to my heart. 'You've grown up,' she said.
She was the same, though she had let the grey show in her hair, something she had been particularly vain about when I knew her. We ate at the oval table and she seated us side by side again with the bottle in between. It wasn't easy to talk. It never had been, we were either too busy making love or afraid of being overheard. Why did I imagine things would be different simply because time had passed?
Where was her husband this evening?
He had left her.
Not for another woman. He didn't notice other women. He had left her quite recently to go on a voyage to find the Holy Grail. He believed his map to be definitive. He believed the treasure to be absolute.
'Will he come back?'
'He may, he may not.'
The wild card. The unpredictable wild card that never comes when it should. Had it fallen earlier; years earlier, what would have happened to me? I looked at my palms trying to see the other life, the parallel life. The point at which my selves broke away and one married a fat man and the other stayed here, in this elegant house to eat dinner night after night from an oval table.
Is this the explanation then when we meet someone we do not know and feel straight away that we have always known them? That their habits will not be a surprise. Perhaps our lives spread out around us like a fan and we can only know one life, but by mistake sense others.
When I met her I felt she was my destiny and that feeling has not altered, even though it remains invisible. Though I have taken myself to the wastes of the world and loved again, I cannot truly say that I ever left her. Sometimes, drinking coffee with friends or walking alone by the too salt sea, I have caught myself in that other life, touched it, seen it to be as real as my own. And if she had lived alone in that elegant house when I first met her? Perhaps I would never have sensed other lives of mine, having no need of them.
'Will you stay?' she said.
No, not in this life. Not now. Passion will not be commanded. It is no genie to grant us three wishes when we let it loose. It commands us and very rarely in the way we would choose.
I was angry. Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can't be logical about. It may be that you are settled in another place, it may be that you are happy, but the one who took your heart wields final power.
I was angrey because she had wanted me and made me want her and been afraid to accept what that meant; it meant more than brief meetings in public plances and nights borrowed from someone else. Passion will work in the fields for seven years for the beloved and on being cheated work for seven more, but passion, because it is noble, will not long accept another's left-overs.
I have had affairs. I will have more, but passion is for the single-minded.
She said again, 'Will you stay?'
When passion comes late in life for the first time, it is harder to give up. And those who meet this beast late in life are offered only devilish choices. Will they say goodbye to what they know and set sail on an unknown sea with no certainty of land again? Will they dismiss those everyday things that have made life tolerable and put aside the feelings of old friends, a lover even? In short, will they behave as if they are twenty years younger with Canaan just over the ridge?
Not usually.
And if they do, you will have to strap them to the mast as the boat pulls away because the siren calls are terrible to hear and they may go mad at the thought of what they have lost.
That is one choice.
Another is to learn to juggle; to do as we did for nine nights. This soon tires the hands if not the heart.
Two choices.
The third is to refuse the passion as one might sensibly refuse a leopard in the house, however tame it might seem at first. You might reason that you can easily feed a leopard and that your garden is big enough, but you will know in your dreams at least that no leopard is ever satisfied with what it's given. After nine nights must come ten and every desperate meeting only leaves you desperate for another. There is never enough to eat, never enough garden for your love.
So you refuse and then you discover that your house is haunted by the ghost of a leopard.
When passion comes late in life it is hard to bear.
One more night. How tempting. How innocent. I could stay tonight surely? What difference could it make, one more night? No. If I smell her skin, find the mute curves of her nakedness, she will reach in her hand and withdraw my heart like a bird's egg. I have not had time to cover my heart in barnacles to elude her. If I give in to this passion, my real life, the most solid, the best known, will disappear and I will feed on shadows again like those sad spirits whom Orpheus fled.
I wished her goodnight, touching her hand only and thankful for the dark that hid her eyes. I did not sleep that night, but wandered the unlit alleys, taking my comfort from the cool of the walls and the regular smack of the water. In the morning I shut up my house and never went there again.
[...]
I don't dress up any more. No borrowed uniforms. Only occasionally do I feel the touch of that other life, the one in the shadows where I do not choose to live.
This is the city of disguises. What you are one day will not constrain you on the next. You may explore yourself freely and, if you have wit or wealth, no one will stand in your way. This city was built on wit and wealth and we have a fondness for both, though they do not have to appear in tandem.
I take my boat out on the lagoon and listen to the seagulls cry and wonder where I will be in eight years, say. In the soft darkness that hides the future from the over-curious, I content myself with this; that where I will be will not be where I am. The cities of the interior are vast, do not lie on any map.
And the valuable, fabulous thing?
Now that I have it back? Now that I have been given a reprieve such as only the stories offer?
Will I gamble it again?
Yes.
--Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (1987)
This is the city of mazes. You may set off from the same place to the same place every day and never go by the same route. If you do so, it will be by mistake. Your bloodhound nose will not serve you here. Your course in compass reading will fail you. Your confident instructions to passers-by will send them to squares they have never heard of, over canals not listed in the notes.
Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead. No as the crow flies short cut will help you to reach the café just over the water. The short cuts are where the cats go, through the impossible gaps, round corners that seem to take you the opposite way. But here, in this mercurial city, it is required you do awake your faith.
With faith, all things are possible.
[...]
I love the night. In Venice, a long time ago, when we had our own calendar and stayed aloof from the world, we began the days at night. What use was the sun to us when our trade and our secrets and our diplomacy depended on darkness? In the dark you are in disguise and this is the city of disguises. In those days (I cannot place them in time because time is to do with daylight), in those days when the sun went down we opened our doors and slid along the eely waters with a hooded light in our prow. All our boats were black then and left no mark on the water where they sat. We were dealing in perfume and silk. Emeralds and diamonds. Affairs of State. We didn't build our bridges simply to avoid walking on water. Nothing so obvious. A bridge is a meeting place. A neutral place. A casual place. Enemies will choose to meet on a bridge and end their quarrel in that void. One will cross to the other side. The other will not return. For lovers, a bridge is a possibility, a metaphor of their chances. And for the traffic in whispered goods, where else but a bridge in the night?
We are a philosophical people, conversant with the nature of greed and desire, holding hands with the Devil and God. We would not wish to let go of either. This living bridge is tempting to all and you may lose your soul or find it here.
And our own souls?
They are Siamese.
Nowadays, the dark has more light than in the old days. There are flares everywhere and soldiers like to see the streets lit up, like to see some reflection on the canals. They don't trust our soft feet and thin knives. None the less, darkness can be found; in the under-used waterways or out on the lagoon. There's no dark like it. It's soft to the touch and heavy in the hands. You can open your mouth and let it sink into you till it makes a close ball in your belly. You can juggle with it, dodge it, swim in it. You can open it like a door.
The old Venetians had eyes like cats that cut the densest night and took them through impenetrable ways without stumbling. Even now, if you look at us closely you will find that some of us have slit eyes in the daylight.
I used to think that darkness and death were probably the same. That death was the absence of light. That death was nothing more than the shadow-lands where people bought and sold and loved as usual but with less conviction. The night seems more temporary than the day, especially to lovers, and it also seems more uncertain. In this way it sums up our lives, where are uncertain and temporary. We forget about that in the day. In the day we go on forever. This is the city of uncertainty, where routes and faces look alike and are not. Death will be like that. We will be forever recognising people we have never met.
But darkness and death are not the same.
The one is temporary, the other is not.
[...]
For myself, if I am to die, I would like to do it alone, far from the world. I would like to lie on the warm stone in May until my strength is gone, then drop gently into the canal. Such things are still possible in Venice.
[...]
I push on, under the Rialto, that strange half-bridge that can be drawn up to stop one half of this city warring with the other. They'll steal it eventually and we'll be brothers and mothers. But that will be the doom of paradox.
Bridges join but they also separate.
Out now, past the houses that lean into the water. Past the Casino itself. Past the money-lenders and the churches and the buildings of state. Out now into the lagoon with only the wind and the seagulls for company.
There is a certainty that comes with the oars, with the sense of generation after generation standing up like this and rowing like this with rhythm and ease. This city is littered with ghosts seeing to their own. No family would be complete without its ancestors.
Our ancestors. Our belonging. The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich. Thus the present is made whole. On the lagoon this morning, with the past at my elbow, rowing beside me, I see the future glittering on the water. I catch sight of myself in the water and see in the distortions of my face what I might become.
If I find her, how will my future be?
I will find her.
Somewhere between fear and sex passion is.
Passion is not so much an emotion as a destiny. What choice have I in the face of this wind but to put up sail and rest my oars?
Dawn breaks.
[...]
Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.
Her house was gracious, standing on a quiet waterway, fashionable but not vulgar. The drawing-room, enormous with great windows at either end and a fireplace that would have suited an idle wolfhound. It was simply furnished; an oval table and a chaise-longue. A few Chinese ornaments that she liked to collect when the ships came through. She had also a strange assortment of dead insects mounted in cases on the wall. I had never seen such things before and wondered about this enthusiasm.
She stood close to me as she took me through the house, pointing out certain pictures and books. Her hand guided my elbow at the stairs and when we sat down to eat she did not arrange us formally but put me beside her, the bottle in between.
We talked about the opera and the theatre and the visitors and the weather and ourselves. I told her that my real father had been a boatman and she laughed and asked could it be true that we had webbed feet?
'Of course,' I said and she laughed the more at this joke.
We had eaten. The bottle was empty. She said she had married late in life, had not expected to marry at all being stubborn and of independent means. Her husband dealt in rare books and manuscripts from the east. Ancient maps that showed the lairs of griffins and the haunts of whales. Treasure maps that claimed to know the whereabouts of the Holy Grail. He was a quiet and cultured man of whom she was fond.
He was away.
We had eaten, the bottle was empty. There was nothing more that could be said without strain or repetition. I had been with her more than five hours already and it was time to leave. As we stood up and she moved to get something I stretched out my arm, that was all, and she turned back into my arms so that my hands were on her shoulder blades and hers along my spine. We stayed thus for a few moments until I had courage enough to kiss her neck very lightly. She did not pull away. I grew bolder and kissed her mouth, biting a little at the lower lip.
She kissed me.
'I can't make love to you,' she said.
Relief and despair.
'But I can kiss you.'
And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamours for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.
When I left her house some time later, I did not set off straight away, but watched her moving from room to room extinguishing the lights. Upwards she went, closing the dark behind her until there was only one light left and that was her own. She said she often read into the small hours while her husband was away. Tonight she did not read. She paused briefly at the window and then the house was black.
What was she thinking?
What was she feeling?
I walked slowly through the silent squares and across the Rialto, where the mist was brooding above the water. The boats were covered and empty apart from the cats that make their homes under the seat boards. There was no one, not even the beggars who fold themselves and their rags into any doorway.
How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?
Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.
[...]
Could a woman love a woman for more than a night?
I stepped out and in the morning they say a beggar was running round the Rialto talking about a young man who'd walked across the canal like it was solid.
I'm telling you stories. Trust me.
[...]
Does she do this often? Does she walk the streets, when her husband goes away, looking for someone like me? Everyone in Venice has their weakness and their vice. Perhaps not only in Venice. Does she invite them to supper and hold them with her eyes and explain, a little sadly, that she can't make love? Perhaps this is her passion. Passion out of passion's obstacles. And me? Every game threatens a wild card. The unpredictable, the out of control. Even with a steady hand and a crystal ball we couldn't rule the world the way we wanted it. There are storms at sea and there are other storms inland. Only the convent windows look serenely out on both.
[...]
The churches prepared for Christmas. Every Madonna was gilded and every Jesus re-painted. The priests took out their glorious golds and scarlets and the incense was especially sweet. I took to going to service twice a day to bask in the assurance of Our Lord. I've never had a conscience about basking. In summer I do it against the walls or I sit like the lizards of the Levant on top of our iron wells. I love the way wood holds heat, and if I can I take my boat and lie directly in the path of the sun for a day. My body loosens then, my mind floats away and I wonder if this is what holy men feel when they talk about their trances? I've seen holy men come from the eastern lands. We had an exhibit of them once to make up for the law prohibiting bull-baiting. Their bodies were loose but I have heard it's to do with the food they eat.
Basking can't be called holy, but if it achieves the same results will God mind? I don't think so. In the Old Testament the end always justified the means. We understand that in Venice, being a pragmatic people.
The sun is gone now and I must do my basking in other ways. Church basking is taking what's there and not paying for it. Taking the comfort and joy and ignoring the rest. Christmas but not Easter. I never bother with church at Easter. It's too gloomy, and besides the sun's out by then.
If I went to confession, what would I confess? That I cross-dress? So did Our Lord, so do the priests.
That I steal? So did Our Lord, so do the priests.
That I am in love?
The object of my love has gone away for Christmas. That's what they do at this time of year. He and she. I thought I'd mind, but since the first few days, when my stomach and chest were full of stones, I've been happy. Relieved almost. I've seen my old friends and walked by myself with almost the same sure-footedness that I used to. The relief comes from no more clandestine meetings. No more snatched hours. There was a particular week when she ate two breakfasts every day. One at home and one with me. One in the drawing-room and one in the Square. After that her lunches were a disaster.
She is much prone to going to the theatre, and because he does not enjoy the stage she goes alone. For a time she only saw one act of everything. In the interval she came to me.
Venice is full of urchins who will carry notes from one eager palm to another. In the hours we could not meet we sent messages of love and urgency. In the hours we could meet our passion was brief and fierce.
She dresses for me. I have never seen her in the same clothes twice.
Now, I am wholly given over to selfishness. I think about myself, I get up when I like, instead of at the crack of dawn just to watch her open the shutters. I flirt with waiters and gamblers and remember that I enjoy that. I sing to myself and I bask in churches. Is this freedom delicious because rare? Is any respite from love welcome because temporary? If she were gone for ever these days of mine would not be lit up. Is it because she will return that I take pleasure in being alone?
Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there. That gnaws away at the night-time hours desperate for a sign and appears at breakfast so self-composed. That longs for certainty, fidelity, compassion, and plays roulette with anything precious.
Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness.
We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not.
You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.
The Holy Child has been born. His mother is elevated. His father forgotten. The angels are singing in the choir stalls and God sits on the roof of each church and pours his blessing on to those below. What a wonder, joining yourself to God, pitting your wits against him, knowing that you win and lose simultaneously. Where else could you indulge without fear the exquisite masochism of the victim? Lie beneath his lances and close your eyes. Where else could you be so in control? Not in lover, certainly.
His need for you is greater than your need for him because he knows the consequences of not possessing you, whereas you, who know nothing, can throw your cap in the air and live another day. You paddle in the water and he never crosses your mind, but he is busy recording the precise force of the flood around your ankles.
Bask in it. In spite of what the monks say, you can meet God without getting up early. You can meet God lounging in the pew. The hardship is a man-made device because man cannot exist without passion. Religion is somewhere between fear and sex. And God? Truly? In his own right, without our voices speaking for him? Obsessed I think, but not passionate.
In our dreams we sometimes struggle from the oceans of desire up Jacob's ladder to that orderly place. Then human voices wake us and we drown.
[...]
I rowed by her house, softly lit, and hoped to catch sight of her shadow, her arm, any sign. She was not visible, but I could imagine her seated, reading, a glass of wine by her side. Her husband would be in his study, poring over some new and fabulous treasure. The whereabouts of the Cross or the secret tunnels that lead to the centre of the earth where the fire dragons are.
I stopped by her water-gate, and climbing up the railing looked in through the window. She was alone. Not reading but staring at the palms of her hands. We had compared hands once, mine are very lined and hers, though they have been longer in this world, have the innocence of a child. What was she trying to see? Her future? Another year? Or was she trying to make sense of her past? To understand how the past had led to the present. Was she searching for the line of her desire for me?
I was about to tap on the window when her husband entered the room, startling her. He kissed her forehead and she smiled. I watched them together and saw more in a moment than I could have pondered in another year. They did not live in the fiery furnace she and I inhabited, but they had a calm and a way that put a knife into my heart.
I shivered with cold, suddenly realising that I was two storeys in mid-air. Even a lover is occasionally afraid.
The great clock in the Piazza struck a quarter to twelve. I hurried to my boat and rowed without feeling my hands or feet into the lagoon. In that stillness, in that quiet, I thought of my own future and what future there could be in meeting in cafés and always dressing too soon. The heart is so easily mocked, believing that the sun can rise twice or that roses bloom because we want them to.
In this enchanted city all things seem possible. Time stops. Hearts beat. The laws of the real world are suspended. God sits in the rafters and makes fun of the Devil and the Devil pokes Our Lord with his tail. It has always been so. They say the boatmen have webbed feet and a beggar says he saw a young man walk on water.
If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away.
[...]
In between freezing and melting. In between love and despair. In between fear and sex, passion is.
[...]
I have always been a gambler. It's a skill that comes naturally to me like thieving and loving. What I didn't know by instinct I picked up from working the Casino, from watching others play and learning what it is that people value and therefore what it is they will risk. I learned how to put a challenge in such a way as to make it irresistible. We gamble with the hope of winning, but it's the thought of what we might lose that excites us.
How you play is a temperamental thing; cards, dice, dominoes, jacks, such preferences are frills merely. All gamblers sweat. I come from the city of chances, where everything is possible but where everything has a price. In this city great fortunes are won and lost overnight. It has always been so. Ships that carry silk and spices sink, the servant betrays the master, the secret is out and the bell tolls another accidental death. But penniless adventurers have always been welcome here too, they are good luck and very often their good luck rubs off on themselves. Some who come on foot leave on horseback and others who trumpeted their estate beg on the Rialto. It has alawys been so.
The astute gambler always keeps something back, something to play with another time; a pocket watch, a hunting dog. But the Devil's gambler keeps back something precious, something to gamble with only once in a lifetime. Behind the secret panel he keeps it, the valuable, fabulous thing that no one suspects he has.
[...]
I have said that behind the secret panel lies a valuable, fabulous thing. We are not always conscious of it, not always aware of what it is we hide from prying eyes or that those prying eyes may sometimes be our own.
There was a night, eight years ago, when a hand that took me by surprise slid the secret panel and showed me what it was I kept to myself.
My heart is a reliable organ, how could it be my heart? My everyday, work-hard heart that laughed at life and gave nothing away. I have seen dolls from the east that fold in one upon the other, the one concealing the other and so I know that the heart may conceal itself.
It was a game of chance I entered into and my heart was the wager. Such games can only be played once.
Such games are better not played at all.
It was a woman I loved and you will admit that is not the usual thing. I knew her for only five months. We had nine nights together and I never saw her again. You will admit that is not the usual thing.
I have always preferred the cards to the dice so it should have come as no surprise to me to have drawn a wild card.
The Queen of spades.
She lived simply and elegantly and her husband was sometimes called away to examine a new rarity (he dealth in books and maps); he was called away soon after we met. For nine days and nights we stayed in her house, never opening the door, never looking out of the window.
We were naked and not ashamed.
And we were happy.
On the ninth day I was left alone for a while because she had certain household affairs to attend to before her husband's return. On that day the rain splashed against the windows and filled up the canals below, churning the rubbish that lies under the surface, the rubbish that feeds the rats and the exiles in their dark mazes. It was early in the New Year. She had told me she loved me. I never doubted her word because I could feel how true it was. When she touched me I knew I was loved and with a passion I had not felt before. Not in another and not in myself.
Love is a fashion these days and in this fashionable city we know how to make light of love and how to keep our hearts at bay. I thought of myself as a civilised woman and I found I was a savage. When I thought of losing her I wanted to drown both of us in some lonely place rather than feel myself a beast that has no friend.
On the ninth night we ate and drank as usual alone in the house, the servants dismissed. She liked to cook omelettes with herbs and these we ate with hot radishes she had got from a merchant. Occasionally our conversation faltered and I saw tomorrow in her eyes. Tomorrow when we would part and resume our life of strange meetings in unfamiliar quarters. There was a café we usually went to, full of students from Padua and artists seeking inspiration. She was not known there. Her friends could not find her out. Thus we had met and met too in hours that did not belong to us, until this gift of nine nights.
I did not meet her sadness; it was too heavy.
There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance.
The gambler is led on in the hope of a win, thrilled with the fear of losing and when he wins he believes his luck is there, that he will win again.
If nine nights were possible why not ten?
So it goes and the weeks pass waiting for the tenth night, waiting to win again and all the time losing bit by bit that valuable fabulous thing that cannot be replaced.
Her husband dealt only in what was unique, he never bought a treasure someone else might have.
Would he buy my heart then and give it to her?
I had already wagered it for nine nights. In the morning when I left I did not say I would not see her again. I simply made no arrangement. She did not press me to do so, she had often said that as she got older she took what she could of life but expected little.
Then I was gone.
Every time I was tempted to go to her I went to the Casino instead and watched some fool humiliating himself at the tables. I could gamble on another night, reduce myself a little more, but after the tenth night would come the eleventh and the twelfth and so on into the silent space that is the pain of never having enough. The silent space full of starving children. She loved her husband.
[...]
The city I come from is a changeable city. It is not always the same size. Streets appear and disappear overnight, new waterways force themselves over dry land. There are days when you cannot walk from one end to the other, so far is the journey, and there are days when a stroll will take you round your kingdom like a tin-pot Prince.
I had begun to feel that this city contained only two people who sensed each other and never met. Whenever I went out I hoped and dreaded to see the other. In the faces of strangers I saw one face and in the mirror I saw my own.
The world.
The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.
[...]
More than eight years had passed, but when I knocked on her door I didn't feel like an heiress who had walked from Moscow and seen her husband murdered. I felt like a Casino girl in a borrowed uniform. Instinctively, I put my hand to my heart. 'You've grown up,' she said.
She was the same, though she had let the grey show in her hair, something she had been particularly vain about when I knew her. We ate at the oval table and she seated us side by side again with the bottle in between. It wasn't easy to talk. It never had been, we were either too busy making love or afraid of being overheard. Why did I imagine things would be different simply because time had passed?
Where was her husband this evening?
He had left her.
Not for another woman. He didn't notice other women. He had left her quite recently to go on a voyage to find the Holy Grail. He believed his map to be definitive. He believed the treasure to be absolute.
'Will he come back?'
'He may, he may not.'
The wild card. The unpredictable wild card that never comes when it should. Had it fallen earlier; years earlier, what would have happened to me? I looked at my palms trying to see the other life, the parallel life. The point at which my selves broke away and one married a fat man and the other stayed here, in this elegant house to eat dinner night after night from an oval table.
Is this the explanation then when we meet someone we do not know and feel straight away that we have always known them? That their habits will not be a surprise. Perhaps our lives spread out around us like a fan and we can only know one life, but by mistake sense others.
When I met her I felt she was my destiny and that feeling has not altered, even though it remains invisible. Though I have taken myself to the wastes of the world and loved again, I cannot truly say that I ever left her. Sometimes, drinking coffee with friends or walking alone by the too salt sea, I have caught myself in that other life, touched it, seen it to be as real as my own. And if she had lived alone in that elegant house when I first met her? Perhaps I would never have sensed other lives of mine, having no need of them.
'Will you stay?' she said.
No, not in this life. Not now. Passion will not be commanded. It is no genie to grant us three wishes when we let it loose. It commands us and very rarely in the way we would choose.
I was angry. Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can't be logical about. It may be that you are settled in another place, it may be that you are happy, but the one who took your heart wields final power.
I was angrey because she had wanted me and made me want her and been afraid to accept what that meant; it meant more than brief meetings in public plances and nights borrowed from someone else. Passion will work in the fields for seven years for the beloved and on being cheated work for seven more, but passion, because it is noble, will not long accept another's left-overs.
I have had affairs. I will have more, but passion is for the single-minded.
She said again, 'Will you stay?'
When passion comes late in life for the first time, it is harder to give up. And those who meet this beast late in life are offered only devilish choices. Will they say goodbye to what they know and set sail on an unknown sea with no certainty of land again? Will they dismiss those everyday things that have made life tolerable and put aside the feelings of old friends, a lover even? In short, will they behave as if they are twenty years younger with Canaan just over the ridge?
Not usually.
And if they do, you will have to strap them to the mast as the boat pulls away because the siren calls are terrible to hear and they may go mad at the thought of what they have lost.
That is one choice.
Another is to learn to juggle; to do as we did for nine nights. This soon tires the hands if not the heart.
Two choices.
The third is to refuse the passion as one might sensibly refuse a leopard in the house, however tame it might seem at first. You might reason that you can easily feed a leopard and that your garden is big enough, but you will know in your dreams at least that no leopard is ever satisfied with what it's given. After nine nights must come ten and every desperate meeting only leaves you desperate for another. There is never enough to eat, never enough garden for your love.
So you refuse and then you discover that your house is haunted by the ghost of a leopard.
When passion comes late in life it is hard to bear.
One more night. How tempting. How innocent. I could stay tonight surely? What difference could it make, one more night? No. If I smell her skin, find the mute curves of her nakedness, she will reach in her hand and withdraw my heart like a bird's egg. I have not had time to cover my heart in barnacles to elude her. If I give in to this passion, my real life, the most solid, the best known, will disappear and I will feed on shadows again like those sad spirits whom Orpheus fled.
I wished her goodnight, touching her hand only and thankful for the dark that hid her eyes. I did not sleep that night, but wandered the unlit alleys, taking my comfort from the cool of the walls and the regular smack of the water. In the morning I shut up my house and never went there again.
[...]
I don't dress up any more. No borrowed uniforms. Only occasionally do I feel the touch of that other life, the one in the shadows where I do not choose to live.
This is the city of disguises. What you are one day will not constrain you on the next. You may explore yourself freely and, if you have wit or wealth, no one will stand in your way. This city was built on wit and wealth and we have a fondness for both, though they do not have to appear in tandem.
I take my boat out on the lagoon and listen to the seagulls cry and wonder where I will be in eight years, say. In the soft darkness that hides the future from the over-curious, I content myself with this; that where I will be will not be where I am. The cities of the interior are vast, do not lie on any map.
And the valuable, fabulous thing?
Now that I have it back? Now that I have been given a reprieve such as only the stories offer?
Will I gamble it again?
Yes.
--Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (1987)