Through a Venetian Looking Glass: A Novel of Remembrances

By Hans Peter Braendlin

A ghost story, a swashbuckling romance, a puzzle… Jean-Pierre Petitfeu and his wife, Claire, have spent time each year in Venice, ever since they lost their ten-year-old son in a boating accident. Each year they take familiar walks and eat in their favorite restaurants, swept away again and again by the beauty and history of Venice. On the first day of their twelfth visit, Jean-Pierre discovers, hidden behind the cornice of a wall in their room, an old manuscript, the memoir of a man named Giovanni Pietro Pofoco, who lived in Venice at the turn of the sixteenth century. Rich with death and passion, Pofoco's memoir reads like an adventure story full of sex and violence, with idealism at war with the corrupt establishment. Presumably Pofoco died in the early fifteen hundreds, although as we read more of this remarkable story, we may come to doubt that he died at all. Lovers of Venice, of history, of complexity will delight in these repeated rambles across ancient waterways and down winding streets. The novel is an intriguing palimpsest in which several characters' journals provide layers of experience and inquiry.- , Sheila Ortiz Taylor, novelist Braendlin's Through a Venetian Looking Glass is an original and nuanced evocation of Venice populated with compelling characters that ricochet around one another over centuries. Read it, love it, bring it to Venice, read it again.-, William Luhr, Ph.D., Professor of English and Film, St. Peter's University

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel & Daniel Publishers
• Release date: Mar 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781564747792

Book preview

Through a Venetian

Looking Glass

A Novel of

Remembrances

Hans Peter Braendlin

2014 · Fithian Press, McKinleyville, California

Copyright © 2014 by Hans Peter Braendlin

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-1-56474-779-2

The interior design and the cover design of this book are intended for and limited to the publisher’s first print edition of the book and related marketing display purposes. All other use of those designs without the publisher’s permission is prohibited.

Published by Fithian Press

A division of Daniel and Daniel, Publishers, Inc.

Post Office Box 2790

McKinleyville, CA 95519

www.danielpublishing.com

Distributed by SCB Distributors [phone]

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Braendlin, Hans P.

Through a Venetian looking glass : a novel of remembrances / by Hans Peter Braendlin.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-56474-551-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Parents—Fiction. 2. Travel—Italy—Venice—Fiction. 3. Sons—Death—Fiction.

4. Memories—Fiction. 5. Italy—Venice—Fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

PS3602.R3438T47 2014

813’.6—dc23

2013042123

To Bonnie

Contents

Prologue

Day One

Day Two

Day Three

Day Four

Day Five

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Prologue

As I sit here, late in the evening, in the late evening of my life, pen in hand by the lights of the fire and a candle, I am overcome with a mighty rush of conflicting emotions. I have taken to the pen for the purpose of submitting to you, esteemed Readers, the account of my life. The decision to undertake that task fills me with both melancholy, swept along in the flood of bittersweet nostalgia, and a vigorous delight in the expectation of giving substance and shape to my remembrances. My heart is heavy and at the same time vibrant with exhilaration also because I have just returned from another occasion of taking lives, of undoing shapes of men, which gives substance to much of my life now. I do not want to kill, but I do when I must, and I then derive regretful pleasure from doing it. It is not as if I am in the throes of basest abjection, it being a condition in which the only power left to a human being is the power of killing. I kill when Death, the great equalizer, invites me to dance with her the dance of the balancing scales.

Earlier this evening I was roaming the streets of my Venice, as is my cherished custom, and it happened that I came upon a friend of many years, Filomeno Fausto. He had seen me from his window and had rushed out to meet me. He was greatly agitated.

I am in need of help, he cried out. I do not know what I shall do. A short while ago a man came to see me and Baucis, ­saying that he was sent by his master, who is the owner of our lodgings, to collect the rent. When I protested that I had paid it, showing him the receipt that his master had signed, he used threatening words, calling me a liar, a forger, and worse than a thief.

Filomeno is a fisherman, and since fishermen earn very little money, he and his wife Baucis are poor, the poor being at the mercy of those who have wealth and power.

Filomeno started to weep and proceeded to say, I find myself in a desperate situation. The man said that his master would come himself for the purpose of evicting us and taking our furniture. The man also said that his master would bring gentlemen of the night with him, as a means of persuading us to leave the premises with due haste.

To those among you, gentle Readers, who are not Venetian I explain that what we call gentlemen of the night are destitute noblemen whom the noble leaders of our Republic employ as cutthroats and thus specially designed force of men to pursue, in the dead of night, criminals to be discouraged or to be disposed of without inconvenient trial.

I advised Filomeno that I would see to the matter and that he and Baucis should spend the night with relatives or friends. After Filomeno and Baucis left, I went into their home, whence a good while later I saw, from the window, a man arriving on horseback. He was accompanied by two other men, who were on foot and had a large empty cart with them. Since these two men were carrying swords, I assumed that they were the promised gentlemen of the night. The clothing of their leader, whom I took to be the owner of the lodgings in dispute, indicated that he was of the wealthy nobility. This surprised me greatly, since men of his kind do not usually attend personally to matters such as this one. I surmised that he was exceptionally rigorous in gaining the utmost in spoils from his properties.

Upon entering, he commanded the men with him to remove the furniture. I approached and showed him the receipt, explaining, with choicest civility, that I was a friend of the Faustos and wished to defend their case. But it was clear that he was not inclined to pay heed to my argument, for he ignored the receipt and my words.

I beg of you to hear me out, I said. I admit that I said this with some firmness of voice.

The man responded, angrily and with great haughtiness in his bearing, How dare you speak to me in this manner! Do you not know that I am Alvise Casan?

For a moment I was taken aback by his words, not because of their intended weight, which was to inform me that I was in the presence of a high and powerful member of the community, but because I now knew the man to be an intimate foe of my early youth.

I collected myself and said, It is of no consequence to me who you may be. You are to honor the receipt.

My words caused Alvise to become exceedingly irate. He shouted to the other two, Rid me of this vermin!

The men drew their swords and attacked me. That was a grievous mistake on their part, boding them deadly ill, for I had my trusted means of combat with me, which I now carry at all times. It is a stick with the length of my body and it looks like a wanderer’s staff, suitable for supporting a person of advanced age or ill health, but it is not what it seems to be, for it contains a special device, which I had fashioned expediently with the crafts of carpentry and mechanics. The stick has a knob near its end, and pressing the knob causes a blade to leap forth that is otherwise hidden in a hollow space at the end. The activation of the device transforms my staff into a most efficient lance. The blade is thin and has the width of a woman’s little finger and half the length of a woman’s hand. Although it is small in size and dainty, yet it is quite suitable for cutting short a man’s life.

The weapon, proving to be reliable once more, and a sprightly agility that I still possess enabled me to cut the throats of the two gentlemen of the night, thus forwarding them to the everlasting night of their afterlives. It then became necessary for me to rely on the sweetness of my blade and the virtue of my skills in dispatching Alvise as well, by pricking his noble heart, since he foolishly came at me with a dagger. I did not tell him who was nudging him into taking his journey to the beyond, since my identity would be of scant interest to him at this his pressing moment of departure. Availing myself of the cart, which was undoubtedly intended for the removal of the furniture, I then removed the mortal remains to the lagoon some distance away, where I released them into the water. I thereupon cleaned the home of Filomeno and Baucis, washing the blood away. It did not take me much time to perform that task, for I am very proficient also in the art of cleaning.

The event of this evening rejuvenated me with most forceful energy because its circumstances brought before my eyes again, with vivid sharpness, the circumstances with which unyielding Fate had given direction to my life, from childhood long ago to the present, and the performance of the executions and the cleaning gave me the final spur for the performance of putting my memories to paper.

My story is the story of a simple man, a man of the people, for that is who I am, and it is the story of Venice as I lived it. And being a man of the people, I speak to you with simple words, absent the intricacies of weighty thought and the flourishes of language with which refined men of letters adorn their pages. These my shortcomings notwithstanding, I dare to desire that my story hold your attention by providing you with a measure of instruction and entertainment that is worth your while.

In telling the story of my life, I desire to share its tears and its laughter with you. I say tears because I have suffered what is the lot of many, which is the sudden and tearing loss of loved ones, and I have had to submit to the loneliness that often comes with such loss. I have suffered the bitter anguish of deprivation that comes with poverty. I have shared with common people the lot of having to endure abuse by people in power. Indeed I have suffered torture and mutilation at the hands of people in power. I say laughter because I have, at other times, Fortuna willing, savored many pleasures of life that also simple people may enjoy, doing this freely and with warmth, despite the chill of our debasement. I have been deeply touched by gifts of affection and tenderness. I have known love and the sweet anguish of passion. I have delighted in the thrills of satisfaction that come with accomplishments in the execution of a craft. I say laughter also because I have savored many pleasures of death, as I have tasted the sweet elixir of life that comes with pricking the whoresons of injustice.

Not least, I desire to share with you the joy that comes from beholding the beauty of Venice. I will speak of the beauty that has made my island city justly famous, by which I mean her unequaled natural grace, and by which I mean the magnificence of her arts, though it often come forth from injustice, as it is witnessed above all else by the proud splendor of the grand palaces, those possessed by the people of fortune and might. But I must also speak of the beauty that comes forth from the houses of ill shape, they being the homes of the dispossessed and powerless, as I must speak of the beauty that comes forth from these the powerless, even from the ones whose lives have been ill-shaped by deprivation. Not only may the beautiful contain the misshapen, but the misshapen may be beautiful in itself.

These are the opening pages to the memoir of Giovanni Pietro ­Pofoco. Claire and I discovered the manuscript during this year’s stay in Venice. It’s a rare find for us. It tells of lives in Venice five centuries ago, of discord and love, violence and beauty, and it indeed tells of lives lived by common people, those whom history tends to erase and forget. Some of the story is strange and remote. But much of it isn’t, even though it’s grounded in a distant yesteryear and told with the voice of the invisible and muted other in society. Much of it speaks to Claire and me in a personal way.

We’ve been going to Venice for twelve years now. That spectacular city, resplendent, iridescent Daughter of Byzantium, overpowered us with her seductiveness on our first visit, and from then on we’ve surrendered ourselves to her every year for five days in May.

Each time with her has been an infinitely generous and invigorating gift of discovery and rediscovery, of seeing new things and seeing things in new ways. Venice is supremely special to Claire and me, separate, other than anything else. We’re drawn to her extraordinary physical beauty, certainly, but she exerts an unexpected power beyond her beauty that compels us to look into our own beings with new awareness. Alien and at the same time closely familiar, a city of passion and mystery for all ages, Venice offers herself to us with insistence, and with indirection, poetically as it were, from the recesses of perception. Her past and present have captured the imagination of both of us in the same manner and continue to cast a spell to which we cannot help but respond exclusively and intimately. The intimacy rings with the chords that this city’s lavish otherness strikes in us simultaneously.

Not that our encounter of Venice is all that exceptional; many other travelers captured by her have responded in a manner much like ours. And she has enticed a great many others to return to her, again and again, for a great many reasons.

Her pull on Claire and me is irresistible above all else because she lies at the center of a returning closeness between us.

Our marriage of thirty-five years has been a contract of love and strife, including a sharply wounding time of separation—nothing much out of the ordinary there, but then, thirteen years ago, we were tested by an inordinately dark instance, the sudden death by stormy water of our son Frederic when he was just ten years old. Our being at grievous odds with fate led to new, more harshly grievous doubts about our life together. Not coincidentally, it seems to us, we suffered the devastating shock of our personal loss at precisely a time when it had become shockingly clear that our society was profoundly sick, perhaps dying, and contaminating the rest of the world—the result of violence, not of nature’s kind but of humankind, not of the elements but of the will to power gone wild. It was the time when the backlash whipped up against the liberating movements in the 1960s and ’70s had led with the redoubled valuation of profit over human life from the ’80s on to the excessive enrichment of the few at the expense, too often deadly, of well-being for the many, to the headlong erosion of civil and individual rights, and to the widespread replacement of a social conscience with a hollow fundamentalism of standards.

Time heals all wounds, they say. For Claire and me the healing is in the recurring invocation to recognition and reflection in our returns to Venice. She isn’t just a source of consolation for us. Consolation is for a passive state of mind, a luxury we cannot afford. In drawing Claire and me together the spell of Venice takes hold of and drives our desires to affirm other obligations as well: it enables us to give redeeming shape to the memory of Frederic, to recondition our life together also by reconditioning his against its unconditional negation; it enables us to escape paralysis over the rot in our society and to recondition a commitment to what is still beautiful and good in it.

We’ve asked ourselves if our reprieve could have happened—if we could have willed it to happen—in an elsewhere other than Venice, or if an elsewhere was at all necessary for it. Maybe, but we’ll never know the answers to these questions. Once Venice happened to us, we willed ourselves to be possessed by her. She engages us to possess ourselves again.

Finding the memoir was the high point of our Venetian wayfaring. As Venice holds up a magical mirror to Claire and me, reanimating our features by estranging them to us, Pofoco’s remembrances make us see ourselves and our desires no less magically from an elsewhere in time as well as space, diversifying yet further, and sharpening, the images in our Venetian looking glass, adding quickening texture and sound to what we see.

It’s Claire, not I, who should be telling this story of Venice and us. Soon after our infinite loss she had started a journal, writing down her thoughts and feelings as a sort of ongoing talking cure, with herself and imagined others as respondents. The reiteration clarified matters for her, initially at home, thirteen years ago, then increasingly in the subsequent repetition of Venice. Born of profound anguish, the journal is a masterly work of art, poetry, a thing of beauty, lucidly expressive, and intricate. Leaving no loose strands as she intertwines the entries, Claire braids her remembrances with meticulous and delicate care.

The writing of the journal was to be her private journey, but knowing of my needs, she soon opened her thoughts and feelings to me. They enable me, enfolding and giving shape to my own thoughts and feelings about our shared pain and its gradual relief. They also clarify for me the task of giving some sort of pattern to the mosaic pieces of my own, separate memories. Some of them are about Claire and what she means to me. Others are about myself, about good moments but mainly about revisions of failures I alone am guilty of, failures among which grave ones loomed large again with Frederic’s death. My own talking cure. That’s why Claire’s voice, though ever present in mine, is for the most part mute in this story, why it isn’t her journal (an art much greater than mine) that tells it. For that gift I cherish her all the more.

We discovered Venice for ourselves by accident, literally.

Because we were running the risk of an irreversible rift between us in the wake of our son’s drowning, of becoming islands apart from one another, we had decided to take a long trip together.

The decision had been initiated by Frankie. She’s our daughter. Frankie prevails. Frankie’s an essential part of what’s still beautiful and good.

The trip was to be a journey by car through parts of western and eastern Europe, for four months from the beginning of May to the end of August. Time had been no obstacle. Claire has been teaching English, the last twenty years at a university in Southern California, and is free from her academic duties during the summer. My time is my own entirely; I’m a painter (of canvases, not particularly successful at it, but I keep myself afloat).

Starting in Geneva, where I was born, we had driven through the South of France, a bit of Spain, and a bit more of Italy. On the way from Bologna to Trieste—for some now unfathomable reason we had omitted Venice from our itinerary—the car had been rear-ended near Mestre. We had been informed by the rental company that it would take two days to have a replacement ready, and Claire had suggested, by a supremely happy instinct, that we spend the waiting time in Venice. One reaches her with a long hop, skip, and a jump across a bridge away from Mestre.

We stayed for three months, that first time.

To those who don’t know her yet: Venice is an island city in a luxurious lagoon, an island dominating smaller sister islands in her lagoon, not a city on an island but a city as an island, stones rising from water as in a fantasy tale.

The charisma of the city’s island personality is immediate in her visual features. They exert their power on us at once when we arrive—whether by plane on the mainland near Mestre and then by boat or bus, or by train or car through northern Italy and then over the bridge—and we are utterly captivated again and again by the apartness of that city rising from water. This perception is reinforced for us every year when we pursue, as we must, the aerial views from the campaniles of the Piazza San Marco and of the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, the eye-level views from the boats that take us through the Grand Canal or around the island, and proceeding inward the views from inside the city, where we’re on foot but never unaware of the lagoon’s encircling presence. Among the pathways inside her borders Venice provides a profusion of waterways crisscrossing the city; the indelible sight includes beside a few larger canals a myriad of smaller ones, the rios. The island of Venice was formed by the linking together of numerous islets, connected by a myriad of bridges, and the canals and rios run with the lagoon waters that once isolated the pieces of land.

The containment of Venice by the available islets has forced her to grow small since her birth as a city, in the ninth century. We can walk most of the city in a day. And we walk mostly narrow streets that, like the canals and rios, intersect the city in haphazard directions. Many of the streets make sudden turns, at various angles, and many others are dead-ends, cut short by transverse waterways or buildings. Walking in Venice grants us the immediacy of an intimate labyrinth, of an entangled but intelligibly close sphere of involvement. In some of the streets our hands can trace the walls and doors of the houses on either side simultaneously. The admixture of touch to vision in the dim narrowness inside this water-bound city heightens our sense of both disorientation and comprehension.

Jean-Pierre takes walks with me here, and speaks to me freely. We even hold hands now and then. What’s that about? It must be true that sometimes the unexpected is the richest reward of expectations, a found object you need to cherish and foster with special care.

At home he dismisses the suggestion of taking a walk. He prefers the treadmill at the Y. I can give free rein to my thoughts when I’m on that thing—no distractions, he says.

The need for quiet and self-collection has long been part of his being. His mother once told me with amusement, tinged with pride, that when he was five and his father wanted him to look at the mountains from the train, he said, Leave me alone! I’m thinking.

The mountains. They soon had claimed him. They became a necessity for him, long before I knew him. Their distance and silence became his distance and silence. And then the disfigurement, also acquired before I knew him, that added to the imprisoning necessity of his withdrawal.

An angry scar, the result of a knife wound, runs down the left side of my face. It’s been ineradicably part of me.

After we met it soon became difficult, then agonizingly impossible, to reach through that reluctance to touch, that reluctance to talk, that relentless reserve.

They’re not my only weaknesses, but they, more than anything else, gave shape to my own shadowscapes.

Then my betrayal of him, when I left him.

She had to escape. From my distance and silence, soon abusive—the jungle tiger, crouching in the dark, then lunging.

We found ways that led us together again.

It was good.

Then the sea storm that came Frederic’s way, that brought the new distance and silence in its wake.

But now the unexpected. These wondrous elsewhere days of Venice. Our vigilant wanderings, the thrills of seeing and touching her exacting beauty, of complying with her commands, are pulling him off his treadmill, breaking down his reserve, tearing off his protective mask. These wondrous ways of Venice are ways of dissipating the pain. It’s clear we have to come here every year from now on and bind to us what we find.

In the possessive urgency with which we capture our impressions of the city every visit, year after year, they’ve become comprehensive to us, blended in the mind’s eye. The comprehension deepens with the photographs we’ve taken, panorama or regular shots from the campaniles, from the boats, and inside the city. We’ve kept over two hundred. At all times about twenty of them hang on a wall of our living room. They and family pictures surround Venetian masks we’ve also brought home with us. We frequently replace the pictures of Venice on the wall with selections from the others we keep in boxes. The exchanges make for a kaleidoscopic remembrance, which helps us to link the images lingering in our memories, and which heightens our need and desire to go back again and again.

The face of Venice does have shadows, other than those of her narrow streets, but they’re no less vivid and compelling than her lucent features.

The city’s character derives its form in part from a long period of independence, from the tenth century to the eighteenth, when she was a self-contained republic. Her island nature, the protective isolation by the lagoon, contributed greatly to that freedom from others. Her history during that time is not altogether pretty, however. It was for the most part a time when she was a colonialist power herself, denying freedom and self-determination to others, and guilty of internal repression. The many displays of one-time wealth, prominent among them the world-famous palaces and churches emerging so loftily from the Grand Canal, are grounded in the blood and tears shed by thousands upon thousands. History, including the stories of current graft and corruption, implicates Venice no less than it does the rest of what we call civilization.

The water, essential to the city’s visual allure and distinctive individuality, is hostile, too. Centuries of being visited again and again by plagues, carried across and in the water, by ships and by rats, have been followed by a protracted period of a new calamity: some of the waterfronts are sinking, very slowly but continuously; the supports of the city’s edges here and there are yielding to the water’s steady pressure, which is reinforced by the wakes of the myriad of motorized boats and now and then by flooding in the wakes of high tides. Many first floors have been abandoned, including conspicuously some on the celebrated Grand Canal. The current and planned use of outlandishly expensive technology to stem the onslaught of the water is evidence that Venice finds herself in a perilous fight against disintegration.

The force of nature that endangers Venice now doesn’t bring human death with it, in contrast to the past epidemics in the city and in contrast to the deadly devastations wrought elsewhere by tidal cataclysms such as hurricanes and tsunamis—in terms of human lives the current plight of Venice pales by comparison—but the water does threaten the beauty of the city and her life as we know them, portending possible exile for many of her people, not with sudden harm but bit by infinitesimal bit, relentlessly.

Yielding to the immense charm that Venice radiates involves both a suspension of disaffection for past and present inequities and a nostalgic fascination and passion induced by the water’s two-edged visible effect on the city: an overwhelming grace and its incremental erosion.

Venice, magnificent city island, nonpareil, complicates the question of beauty in a singular way.

Claire and I suffer erosions too, general ailments that come with age, but also incisively specific ones, these after the drowning: once an accomplished sailor, Claire had become prone to seasickness, which she has to endure also on the boats of Venice; once the committed mountain climber, with ropes and all, I’ve been having serious difficulties with heights, and going up the campaniles is no small feat for me.

The afflictions don’t deter us. One might say we’re fools, allowing ourselves to be pursued by the hobgoblin of our persistence. But we understand the fascination taking hold of dope ­addicts; we understand what drives them to seek their private trips. The primal needs for the stimulants of Venice and for the passion of sharing them with each other have become greater than our fears. We guess it’s because we’re no spring chickens anymore. If the city’s radiance stuns us year upon year with increasing forcefulness, it’s probably because we find ourselves increasingly on the reflective side of middle age.

With the passage of time we’ve become progressively receptive to Venice’s past. Like all respectful visitors, we’ve been properly driven to acquaint ourselves with the rich and engaging history of her art and architecture as well as her past political and social landscapes. Our repeated explorations have, however, instilled a yet stronger desire in us: to get a feel for the lives led by earlier Venetians. This desire comes close to being met when we take walks in quieter areas at night, when the streets are empty and the buildings dark, giving us the impression of a city devoid of life. The emptiness allows a sense of timelessness, freeing our minds to suspend the present and to conjure up ghosts out of bygone times, ghosts of the people who once lived in the houses of Venice, took to her boats, and walked her streets and bridges.

Our ghosts of Venice past are those of her common people, those one knows very little about, relegated, as the common people are everywhere, to the shadowy spaces of disregard, then even more than now. The known histories of early Venice, including diaries, center on the lives and achievements of the political and cultural leaders, on the thoughts and activities of the prominent few, as if the simple people, the overwhelming majority,