Against the Day (113 page)

   
“Eh,
enjoy it while you can, you’re still a kid.”

   
“I
wish I was
. . . .
”

Bria didn’t think too long about
opening her arms, and Dally was right there, sniffling. After a while, “Well,
come on, you don’t look a day over thirty.”

   
“Need
a cigarette’s what it is, you happen to, uh . . .”

   
“Comin
right up.”

   
“Say,
nice case there.”

   
“Swiss
insurance salesman. Wolf. No, Putzi.”

   
“Yeah,
Wolf’d be the one with the wife and kids.”

   
“Thanks.”
They lit up.

One day Hunter
showed up in sunglasses,
broadbrimmed straw hat, and fisherman’s smock. “Feel like getting out on the
water?”

   
“Let
me borrow a hat and I’ll be right there.”

Some
artist friends had a
topo
for the day. The water in the canals was an
opaque green. At the point of the Dogana, where the Grand Canal and the Lagoon
meet, the color became blue. “It never does that,” said Hunter.

   
“Today
it did,” said a fierce young man sitting at the tiller.

His
name was Andrea Tancredi. Hunter knew him, had run into him around town at the
fringes of Anarchist gatherings, in cafés at exhibitions of experimental
painting. After having been to Paris and seen the works of Seurat and Signac,
Tancredi had converted to Divisionism. He sympathized with Marinetti and those
around him who were beginning to describe themselves as “Futurists,” but failed
to share their attraction to the varieties of American brutalism. Americans, in
fact, seemed greatly to annoy him, particularly the millionaires lately
dedicated to coming over and looting Italian art. Dally decided not to mention
where she was from.

They
picnicked on Torcello in a deserted pomegranate orchard, drank primitivo, and
Dally found herself looking at Andrea Tancredi more than

she could account for, and when he happened to catch her
looking, he stared back, not angry but not what she’d have called fascinated
either. Coming back in the evening, sailing into the pealing of the bells, the
swept greenandlavender sky, the upsidedown city just beneath the waves, her
heart taken as always forever by this unexpected home, she was aware of
Tancredi next to her, scowling at Venice.

“Look
at it. Someday we’ll tear the place down, and use the rubble to fill in those
canals. Take apart the churches, salvage the gold, sell off what’s left to
collectors. The new religion will be public hygiene, whose temples will be
waterworks and sewagetreatment plants. The deadly sins will be cholera and
decadence.” She would have said something, likely harsh, but he had rushed on.
“All these islands will be linked by motorways. Electricity everywhere, anyone
who still wants Venetian moonlight will have to visit a museum. Colossal gates
out here, all around the Lagoon, for the wind, to keep out sirocco and bora
alike.”

“Oh
I don’t know.” Hunter, who had seen Dally in a temper, had slid quietly between
them. “I was always here for the ghosts, myself.”

   
“The
past,” sneered Tancredi. “San Michele.”

   
“Not
exactly.” Hunter found he could not explain.

Through
God’s blind mercy, as he told it to Dally a few days later, on their way over
to Tancredi’s studio in Cannareggio, after escapes from destruction and war in
places he could no longer remember clearly, he had found asylum in Venice, only
to happen one day upon these visions of Tancredi’s, and recognize the
futuristic vehicle which had borne him to safety from the devastated City so
long ago, and the subterranean counterCity it took him through, and the chill,
comfortless faith in science and rationality that had kept all his fellow
refugees then so steady in their flight, and his own desolate certainty of
having failed in his remit, one of those mascottes who had brought only bad
luck to those who trusted him, destined to end up in cheap rooms down at the
ends of suburban streets, eventually indifferent to their own fates, legends of
balefulness, banned from accompanying all but the most disreputable and
suicidal of voyagers. But lately—was it Venice? was it Dahlia?—he
was beginning to feel less comfortable as one of the lost.

   
So
Dally thought she ought to have a look.

Tancredi’s
paintings were
like
explosions. He favored the palette of fire and explosion. He worked quickly.
Preliminary
Studies Toward an Infernal

Machine.

   
“It
would actually work?” Dally wanted to know.

   
“Of
course,” Tancredi a bit impatiently.

“He’s
a sort of infernalmachine specialist,” Hunter pointed out. But Tancredi showed
a curious reluctance to speak of what the design might actually do. What chain
of events could lead to the “effect.”

“The
term ‘infernal’ is not applied lightly or even metaphorically. One must begin
by accepting Hell—by understanding that Hell is real and that there move
through this tidy surface world a silent army of operatives who have sworn
allegiance to it as to a beloved homeland.”

   
Dally
nodded. “Christers talk like this.”

“Oh,
the bornagain. Always with us. But what of the diedagain who have gone to Hell
from a condition of ordinary death, imagining that the worst has happened and
that nothing can now terrify them?”

   
“You’re
talking about an explosive device,
vero?
”

“Not
in Venice, never. Fire here would be suicidal insanity. I would not bring fire.
But I would bring Hell in a small bounded space.”

   
“And
. . .
that would be . . .”

Tancredi
laughed grimly. “You’re American, you think you have to know everything. Others
would prefer not to know. Some define Hell as the absence of God, and that is
the least we may expect of the infernal machine— that the bourgeoisie be
deprived of what most sustains them, their personal problemsolver sitting at
his celestial bureau, correcting defects in the everyday world below
. . . .
But the finite space would rapidly
expand. To reveal the Future, we must get around the inertia of paint. Paint
wishes to remain as it is. We desire transformation. So this is not so much a
painting as a dialectical argument.”

   
“Do
you understand what he’s talking about?” she asked Hunter.

   
He
raised his eyebrows, angled his head as if in thought. “Sometimes.”

It
came to remind her in a way of Merle, and his brotherhood of crazy inventors
whose collegial mysteriesofscience discussions had escorted her to the doors of
sleep in lieu of lullabies.

“Of
course it’s to do with Time,” Tancredi frowning and intense, aroused despite
himself at the possibility that she might really have been thinking about the
subject, “everything that we imagine is real, living and still, thought and
hallucinated, is all on the way from being one thing to being another, from
past to Future, the challenge to us is to show as much of the passage as we
can, given the
damnable stillness
of paint. This is why—” Using
his thumb against a brushful of orpiment yellow, he aimed a controlled spatter
of paint at his canvas, followed by another brushful of scarlet vermilion and a
third of Nürnberg violet—the target patch seemed to light up like a
birthday cake, and before any of it could dry he was at it with an impossibly
narrow

brush, no more than a bristle or two, stabbing tiny dots
among larger ones. “The energies of motion, the grammatical tyrannies of
becoming, in
divisionismo
we discover how to break them apart into their
component frequencies
. . .
we define
a smallest picture element, a dot of color which becomes the basic unit of
reality
. . . .
”

“It isn’t Seurat,” it seemed to
Hunter, “none of that cool static calm, somehow you’ve got these dots behaving
dynamically, violent ensembles of energystates, Brownian movement
. . . .
”

And in fact the next time she visited
Tancredi, Dally thought she could see emerging from the glowing field of
particles, like towers from the
foschetta,
a city, a contraVenezia, the
almost previsual reality behind what everyone else was agreeing to define as
“Venice.”

“Not like Marinetti and his circle,”
Tancredi confessed. “I really love the old dump. Here.” He led her to a stack
of canvases in a corner she hadn’t noticed before. They were all nocturnes,
saturated with fog.

“In Venice we have a couple of
thousand words for fog—
nebbia, nebbietta, foschia, caligo, sfumato
—and
the speed of sound being a function of the density is different in each. In
Venice, space and time, being more dependent on hearing than sight, are actually
modulated by fog. So this is a related sequence here.
La Velocità del Suono.
What are you thinking?”

It was her first visit here without
Hunter. What she was thinking was that Tancredi had better kiss her, and soon.

mells like a tannery,” it seemed to Kit.

   
“Perhaps
. . .
because Göttingen a tannery
is.
”
Gottlob pointed out.
 
“
Particularly
the mathematics department,” added Humfried. “Remember, they have
preserved Gauss’s brain here. What, after all, is the cortex of anyone’s brain
but one more piece of animal hide?
Ja?
at Göttingen they will pickle
yours for you, stain it, process it into some altogether different form,
impervious to the wind, to carnal decay, to minor insults, both physical and
social. A cloak of immortality
. . .
a
future pursued in the present tense—” He stopped and gaped at the
doorway.
“
Heiliger Bimbam!
”

   
“Say
Humfried, you’re about to drop your monocle there.”

   
“It
is she, she!”

   
“Well,
‘
à la
mode
’ maybe, with that tortoiseshell rim
onto it, but—”

“Not
‘chichi,’ idiot,” said Gottlob. “He refers to our ‘Göttingen Kovalevskaia,’ who
has just now, however improbably, found this
degenerate swamp
of ours.
If you would ever sit facing the door, you would miss far fewer of these
wonderful events.”

   
“Look
at that, serene as a swan.”

   
“Something,
huh?”

   
“Even
in Russia this never occurs.”

   
“She’s
Russian?”

   
“That
is the rumor.”

   
“Those
eyes—”

   
“Those
legs.”

   
“How
can one know that?”

   
“Roentgenray
spectacles,
natürlich.
”

“Those curves are everywhere
continuous but nowhere differentiable,” sighed Humfried.
“
Noli me tangere,
don’t you
know. Held to stronger criteria, like a function of a complex variable.”

   
“She’s
complex, all right,” said Gottlob.

   
“And
variable.”

The lads collapsed into laughter,
before whose loudness and puerility any young woman of the day might have been
excused at least a dip in confidence. But not the selfpossessed beauty who now
approached. No, though being openly stared at—more in wonder, mind you,
than indignation—Yashmeen Halfcourt continued to glide, through the
Turkish smoke and beerfumes, directly toward them, in her bearing a suggestion
that she might, with or without a partner, begin to dance a polka. And that
hat! Draped velvet toques had always been Kit’s undoing.