Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (4 page)

He is making the statement as much for the entourage as for me, but it genuinely makes me laugh.

“Perhaps
that's
why I avoid you,” I say. “I'm too old and too tired to get involved with men who want to destroy me. At twenty, I'd have found you irresistible.”

“You can't be more than twenty now—Jessichka, my Dzark Ladzy of the Sonnets…” And he begins to quote what seems to be Shakespeare in Russian—a mellifluous sound that quite undoes me, though I know no Russian but
da
and
nyet.

“Did you send the roses, Grigory?” I ask.

“Call me Grisha,” he says. “No—but I shall do it at once if I may lie at your breast with them…But watch out—I have thorns.
Big
thorns!”

Has nobody
told
the Russians that this style of male braggadocio has been out of fashion for twenty years? Apparently not. This is no postfeminist machismo—this is just plain old male-chauvinist pigism of the old days. I find it almost endearingly quaint.

We parade the short distance from the Excelsior to the Palazzo del Cinema, followed by the press. Besides Grigory—or Grisha—Krylov, who has staked me out as his prey, and Carlos Armada, whose dishy Italian girlfriend is along for the walk, there are Walter Wildhonig, the bristling German playwright; Benjamin Gabriel Gimpel, the pale, shrunken Nobel laureate; Pierre de Houbigant, the vague aristocratic painter; Leonardo da Leone, the twitching intellectual film director who is the chairman of the
giuria;
and Gaetano Manuzio, the anti-intellectual film director who has no tic and is accompanied by his actress-wife Elisabetta Grillo and his actress-mistress Barbara da Ponte. Also, there is Per Erlanger, the Swedish actor who is set to play Shylock in
Serenissima
. Like his character, he is a lugubrious and bittersweet Jew.

The Lido sun is very bright as we march to the theater, trailed by
paparazzi
, attracting swarms of
bambini
seeking autographs.

Motorcycles roar by. Taxis barely miss us—for the Lido is not truly Venice, that city without wheels, but a spiritual (if not physical) extension of the mainland. At the Palazzo del Cinema, we are brought upstairs to an office and photographed yet again, this time for our badges. Each of us is given a little golden tag with L
A
B
IENNALE
and M
OSTRA
I
NTERNAZIONALE DEL
C
INEMA
printed on the back and our names and G
IURIA
printed on the front beneath our pictures. These badges will be our tickets of entry into the films, the prize ceremonies, and all the major events of the next several days.

When our photos have been taken, we are ushered down to the stage.

“Ladies accompanying, please within,” says a functionary, assuming I am just a chickie, because of my gender.

“She's a member of the jury,” says Grigory, taking a proprietary interest in me. “See, Jessichka, the smiling American needs the non-smiling Russian.”

Grigory is famous for being a survivor, an artful dodger, and (some say) KGB man. The only Soviet poet—except, of course, for Yevtushenko—who has managed to stay in the Soviet Union while still writing anti-Soviet poems, he is the Kremlin's token rebel, the writer they send out into the world to demonstrate Soviet freedom of speech. Consequently, he is suspected of hypocrisy by everyone. Dissident Russians detest him, American writers suspect him despite his charm, and the PEN club welcomes him but not without a subtext of whispers. It is said that he lives in a glorious dacha outside Moscow; is attended by students, servants, and mistresses; drives in a chauffeured car; and shops in those special stores reserved for the Soviet elite. That he travels all over the world I surely know, because I have met him several times at gigs like these—that eternal round of prize-givings, festivals, free cruises, and rubber chicken dinners that are the price, and the dubious booty, of fame.

I keep walking away from Grigory, but he keeps catching up with me. When we are led to our seats on the stage, Grigory takes the one next to me. Resigned to him as my shadow, I decide to make conversation.

“Do you like Venice?” I ask.

“Don't ask empty questions,” he snaps.

(But for me it is not an empty question, since Venice is the city of my heart.)

“How Russian and judgmental you are,” I whisper.

“How American and trivial you are, Jessichka.”

“Is this the Russian way of flirting—abuse and insult?”

“Yes. And then I drag you to my cave.”

He smiles for the cameras, striking his best angle. Grigory is movie-star handsome (high, Slavic cheekbones, retroussé nose) and movie-star vain, but the creases in his pale brow (and the darting blue eyes beneath) betray the price he has paid for being a survivor in a country where artists are either silenced in Siberia or speak with forked tongue all over the world.

But then I am a survivor, too; survivor of a system just as brutal to artists in its own way. I have paid for my passion for Shakespeare with movie and television roles so silly that sometimes I wanted to giggle (or weep) when I first read the script. I have been murdered again and again, seduced and abandoned again and again, and now that I am in my “middle years” (though just how middle, I do not say) I sometimes play the
mother
of the girl who gets murdered or seduced, or seduced and murdered. The whole women's movement came and went without murder and seduction ceasing to be the principal fate of woman on film. Which is why I am happy to be working again with Björn. At least his women are subject to fates more complex—if no less brutal.

I cross my legs. A hundred cameras with flash attachments are at knee level. We are on the stage and the photographers are crouched directly below the footlights. The president of the Biennale makes a long speech full of words like
artisticamente
,
belle arti
,
cinema come arte
. When people talk about art, I reach for my gun. Every scoundrel with a sinecure prates of art. We who attempt to
do
it (however imperfectly) know that sometimes one has to be murdered on film to pay the rent, and sometimes one works for love—though love doesn't pay for Vuitton luggage nor for the kinds of clothes you need when crossing your legs before a hundred photographers.

I am wearing a purple silk dress full of odd-shaped patches of purple print, gold lamé, and silver lamé—a Koos van den Akker collage. On my feet are golden gladiator sandals; on my toenails, golden polish. I take my sunglasses off and put them on, aware that merely sitting here is part of my performance. I wet my lips with my tongue. From time to time Grigory, also an actor in his way, gives my shoulder a squeeze and smiles at the press. The flashbulbs accelerate dramatically.

The president of the Biennale is followed by the mayor of Venice, who is followed by the president of the film festival, who is followed by some unknown cultural
capo
, who is followed by the president of the jury. As the speeches go on and on, I drift away into another world…the movie I would write if I dared write anywhere except in my journal, my own little filmic fantasy of Venice…

Two young men are arriving in the Serenissima. They are Elizabethan dandies, men of the world, and they have sailed from London to Southampton, Southampton to Lisbon, Lisbon to Cadiz, Cadiz to the Balearic Islands, the Balearic Islands to Palermo, Palermo to Messina, Messina to Corfu, then up the Adriatic coast to Zara, Trieste, and Venice. The journey has been long, the rations at sea half rotten and wormy, and the ports along the way teeming with slaves and prostitutes, escaped criminals, and all the wretched refuse of the earth. They have sailed in a Venetian galley—the galley of Flanders, say, that plied the Atlantic route to Bruges and Antwerp, with stops at Southampton and London. This great, wide-beamed merchant ship sailed the seas in a convoy of three or four other such vessels, great galleys with lateen sails, and nearly two hundred oarsmen as well…An astounding ship for its size and height, at times it was so swift it could make the journey from Southampton to Venice in as few as thirty-one days, except that on this occasion there were all sorts of uncontemplated delays—delays of a sort that a young poet and his still younger noble patron would delight in at first as fit meat for future poesy, but then grow tired of as the delays multiplied and the meat grew less fit…

Many of their fellow travelers do not have Venice as their final destination but are going onward in summer in the galley of Beirut toward Corfu, Crete, Rhodes, Cypress, Palestine, and the holy shrines…The Venetians will accommodate all these travelers, who, along with spice and silks, silver and gold, constitute, even then, the wealth of the Serenissima. But our two travelers are men of the Quill, men of the playhouse, and they are stopping in Venice in part to see those marvels unguessed as yet in London—women players, as famed in the Serenissima as her golden-haired cortigiane (who write poetry), her masked balls and carnivals, her state celebrations upon the waters, and her great regattas.

The poet is of humble origin, auburn-haired, with luminous, dark brown eyes and one golden earring glinting in his left ear. He's a simple glover's son from Stratford, but his young friend with the flaxen ringlets is a Lord of the Realm, the Earl of Southampton. “Harry” he is called to his friend's simple “Will.” The Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, being well connected, has no need to lodge at the White Lion Inn but is invited to sojourn with a family of Venetian aristocrats in a palazzo on the Grand Canal…Thus, like many young men for centuries to come, these two Elizabethan dandies, in their hose and doublets, daggers and pistols, set foot In the lagoon city, their heads ablaze with fancies of the sights and sins, the sins and sights of Venice, that capital city of dream and intrigue, that double city (one above and seemingly solid, one below, wavering and reflected in the waters), which never disappoints…

They have fled England—these two—because the plague has closed the playhouses, and the young player-poet earns his living on the stage. His patron finds this a rather mean and low occupation and prefers that his friend write sonnets, at which he is unparalleled, or epics on mythological themes, with which he is on the verge of making a gaudy reputation—but young Will persists in believing that only on the stage is the word made flesh, and if the London playhouses are closed then he will repair to Venice, where plays still flourish and where Englishmen may learn Italian ways…

The speeches cease. The lights come up. Suddenly we are all being herded toward the wings where yet more photographers wait. My two Elizabethan dandies have vanished and I am back at the film festival again, playing Jessica, playing myself.

Grigory Krylov puts a possessive arm around my shoulders, beams at the world press, and in a volley of flashbulbs we go to lunch.

Being a member of the jury at the film festival proves to be no boondoggle. It reminds me of touring Southern penitentiaries in a desperate road show of
Medea
. (I did this once and it remains for me the very nadir of an actor's life.) So it is with film festivals. The screenings begin at ten
A.M.
and go on all day until six, excepting three hours for the sacred Italian lunch break, then more films follow in the evening. Dinner is gulped in the half hour between the end of the eight o'clock film and the start of the ten-thirty film, and sometimes there are midnight screenings as well.

Watching so many films, I begin to feel, is like being immersed in someone else's bad dreams. I seem to slide into the third person or into other lives not my own, the fitful dreams of dozens of mediocre poets. I would rather be a character in Shakespeare's dream, I think. I would rather be making
The Merchant of Venice—
for I am yearning to work again. But no: I am stuck in some endless replay of the Second World War. If the Second World War did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

And so we have. A ceaseless battle between good and evil goes on, embodied by the stock comic book figures of good American (or good Russian) and bad Nazi. There are American films about the Second World War, Russian films about the Second World War, Polish films about the Second World War, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, and Czech films about the Second World War. In one of these—a Russian one, it appears—a man goes back to Germany to revisit the town where he first became a man. As a young soldier he invaded this town, fell in love there, and first knew the terrible dichotomy between love and war. His German
Mädchen
still awaits him, now become a stout blonde matron of forty, widowed by her good German burgher (formerly a captain in the SS).

They whirl on the dance floor, and the bombed-out town regrows its bricks and beams as though they were shrubs and trees. Time stops. The couple freezes on the dance floor. Their youth and the Second World War are one. Man's need to plunder and woman's need to cling are embodied in this myth of the Second World War, and so on it goes, eternally played on the screens of our retinas. When will this war be over? The “good war,” the war of my parents' generation, has an independent existence, independent of history itself. We keep it alive because it is needed, because we need a myth of good battling evil and triumphing. Our generation has no such myth. Our generation knows that when evil battles good, it's often no contest—or a draw. Or else life is too complicated to be characterized in those terms. That's the tragedy of our generation—we haven't even
got
a myth of good battling evil. We are mythed out. Except for Shakespeare. And who reads Shakespeare anymore but actors and poets?

Ah, little girls at private schools in New York read Shakespeare. My ten-year-old Antonia has already memorized a few sonnets, having inherited her mother's memory for lines of verse. I cannot think of my daughter without pain—though I know she is well taken care of, physically if not emotionally. An only daughter is a needle in the heart, some fluent Irishman once said. And it is true. In the dreamlike, womblike screening room, I think of her and ache; she is with me always.