Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi Read online

  ‘What is here is also there, and what is there is also here.’

  - Katha Upanishad

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Geoff Dyer

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Toronto.

  ‘For every step, the footprint was already there.’

  - Roberto Calasso

  ‘Huge walls & towers & rocks & balconies – a prospect along the bend of the river like Venice along Grand Canal or seen from Judecca – finally to Manikarnika burning ghat…’

  - Allen Ginsberg,Indian Journals

  ‘Alas, the movie wasn't much to speak of; besides, I never liked the novel much either.’

  - Joseph Brodsky,Watermark

  ‘The deposed, the defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored, have seemed to find there something that no other place could give …’

  - Henry James

  ‘This is not the river, it's an explanation of the river that replaced the river.’

  – Dean Young

  ‘And to think that while I play with doubtful images

  the city I sing persists in a predestined place in the world,

  with its precise topography, peopled like a dream.’

  - Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Benares’

  Notes & acknowledgements

  For the record, my wife, Rebecca, and I attended three Biennales, in 2003, 2005 and 2007. Weather-wise, 2003 was the scorcher. The geography of both Venice and Varanasi in these pages is fairly reliable, I hope, but I have taken some liberties with the art, only one example of which was in the 2003 Biennale: the Africans selling knock-off bags near the Arsenale ticket office were actually part of Fred Wilson's installation at the American Pavilion, 2003. Other stuff mentioned in the Venice part of the book – Gilbert & George, Ed Ruscha, the red castle and the blue space of light – is from 2005; the rest is from 2007.

  In the Giardini the wall of dartboards(I, The World, Things, Life) was by Jacob Dahlgren, the video shower in the Russian Pavilion was by Alexander Ponomarev and Arseny Mescheryakov, and the trippy Swiss paintings were by Christine Streuli (all from 2007).

  In the Arsenale the bouncing-skull video was by Paolo Canevari, the photographs of academics were by Rainer Ganahl and the shadow-boxing video was by Sophie Whettnall (all 2007). Like Turrell'sRed Shift , the video of the woman standing by the river(Laundry Woman – Yamuna River, India by Kimsooja) was part of the wonderful exhibition ‘Artempo: Where Time Becomes Art’ at the Palazzo Fortuny, which, though running concurrently with the 2007 Biennale, was distinct from it.

  Needless to say, Jeff's opinions about art are not Geoff's, or not consistently at any rate. About the excellence of the Ganges View, however, there can be no debate. I am grateful to Shashank and all the staff for their endless hospitality and kindness when Rebecca and I stayed there in 2006-7. (That reminds me, Jeff's and Laura's hotels in Venice are both invented.)

  The miniature by Shivalal in Varanasi is on imaginative loan from the City Palace Museum, Udaipur, in Rajasthan. Dayanita Singh's photographs at the Kriti gallery are from the seriesGo Away Closer. The lines from Faiz were translated for me from the Hindi (having already been translated, anonymously, from the Urdu) by the photographer.

  There are some unacknowledged quotes in the text, most of which are too obvious to need acknowledging here. However, Jeff's idea (p. 154) that we don't need to be ‘bullied’ into paradise is derived from ‘Paradise Poem’ by Dean Young – his exact word is ‘threatened’ – in his collection Embryoyo (Believer Books). ‘People say it's not what happens etc …’ (p. 53); more precisely, John Lanchester says it inA Family Romance (Faber). The philosopher who asked where logic came from (p. 173) was Nietzsche, in The Gay Science. The sentence beginning ‘It was night still …’ on p. 262 is fromThe Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham. ‘Darkness was hidden by darkness’ (p. 244) is from The Rig Veda. The version of the Chekhov joke on p. 276 is followed by a few lines from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. ‘Cloud-swollen sky,’ ‘losing his bearings in [the] labyrinth of alleys, narrow waterways, bridges and little squares that all looked so much like each other,’ ‘returned to the hotel and took the lift up to his room,’ ‘inner disintegration,’ ‘confused network of streets,’ ‘attacked by waves of dizziness,’ ‘Nothing is stranger, more delicate, than the relationship between two people who know each other only by sight’ are all from Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, translated by David Luke.

  Two books about Varanasi were particularly helpful:Banaras: City of Light by Diana L. Eck (Penguin India) and Benares from Within by Richard Lannoy (Callisto).

  This is a work of fiction. The fact that certain figures from the art world – Fiona Banner, Richard Wentworth, Bruce Nauman, etc. – are mentioned by name or spotted at parties does not mean that they were actually in Venice in 2003 or any other time. With the exception of the charming Shashank in Varanasi, any resemblance between characters in the book and actual people is entirely coincidental.

  I would like to thank Ethan Nosowsky, Eric Simonoff, Dan Frank, Bill Hamilton, Victoria Hobbs, Lorraine McCann, Stephanie Gorton, Francis Bickmore and Jamie Byng for their advice and help.

  Chapter 1

  He got off the vaporetto at Salute, returned to the hotel and took the lift up to his room. He spent five minutes under an almost cold shower and lay on the bed in a thick, eminently stealable robe. Feeling only the faintest aftermath of stoned-ness – what a relief! – he looked through one of the Venice books provided by the hotel: a lavish edition of Turner's pictures of the city. They were all full of light dissolving into itself, water and light, melting into each other, colour becoming light, sunlight going down in flames, over the water. Some were so diluted as to be just washes of almost-colour.

  Although the city was instantly recognizable, the idea of Venice being insubstantial, a shimmering dissolution of light and water with everything turning into air, was at odds with Jeff's experience of being here. The thing that struck him about Venice was how substantial it was. And not just the place, but the people. This wasn't a town where, over time, generations had been born, lived and died. No, there was the same set of characters there had always been, a constant and unchanging population who simply changed their clothes according to the epoch they were living through. Each individual remained stuck at a particular occupation and age till the end of time. The old guy running the grocer's next door – Jeff had stopped in there to buy bottles of water three times the size and a fraction of the price of the ones in the hotel mini-bar – had been the old guy running the grocer's for thousands of years. The chamber maid had been a chamber maid forever. They were just there. And so, evidently, was the city they inhabited.

  It was the most there place on earth, and had been since time began, since long before it allegedly came into existence. Maybe the lost city of Atlantis didn't disappear beneath the waves so much as reappear above them, morphing into Venice as it did so. OK, there was the water, that was liquidy and aquatic, obviously, an agent of dilution and dissolution, but the main effect of the water was to make the buildings seem, by contrast, extremely tangible. Not only did Venice look like it had been around forever, but – despite all the stories about how the city was sinking by however many centimetres a year – it gave the impression that it would be around for ever, that it might be the only place standing after a nuclear strike Turnered the rest of the world into a blazin
g melt of frying water and scorched air.

  * * *

  It was an unusual night in that there was no dinner for Ed Ruscha. The reason there was no dinner for Ed Ruscha was because there was a party for Ed Ruscha. Jeff only realized this – that the party at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection was actually in honour of Ed Ruscha – as he checked the thick, heavily embossed invite on his way over. By the time he arrived there must have been a thousand people stuffed into the garden and hundreds more – the great uninvited – trying to get in. It was as if the government of Venice had fallen and the last helicopters were about to take off from the Guggenheim before the victorious armies of Florence or Rome occupied the city. Invite in hand, he was ushered through the gates by the scrupulously polite security. Inside, everyone was belting back bellinis as usual. The waiters were struggling to cope with the insatiable demand for bellinis. There was barely room to move and around the drinks tables it was mayhem. Jeff had got it into his head that risotto had been promised. He assumed he'd got this idea from the invite, but there was no mention of it there and, at present, no risotto was in evidence. In view of the numbers, producing risotto was an absurdly ambitious and labour-intensive undertaking, but it seemed that Jeff was not alone in expecting risotto. The risotto and its potential non-appearance was, in fact, the chief topic of conversation in the garden. People were counting on risotto to line their stomachs; a lack of risotto would have a significant impact on their ability to belt back bellinis.

  From the balcony of the gallery itself a bearded American ambassador or cultural attaché was pleading for calm, or at least trying to get everyone to quieten down for a few minutes so he could give a speech. When the hubbub subsided, the bearded dignitary welcomed Ed Ruscha, praising him to the skies, explaining what an honour it was to have him here and what an important artist he was. At the end he asked everyone to raise a glass to Ed Ruscha, which, though fair enough, was pretty superfluous since the only time during his speech people had stopped raising their glasses was while getting them refilled by the much put-upon bar staff. And then the doors to the gallery itself opened. This was it! The risotto, obviously, was now being served. There was an amazing stampede as people seized on the idea that the risotto moment was imminent. Jeff was perfectly placed. He surged up the steps and found himself in the galleries, confronted not by vats of creamy risotto but art, paintings and sculptures from the glorious heyday of modernism – Duchamp, Max Ernst, Picasso, Brancusi – when it was impossible to believe that there would come a time when all people cared about was free risotto to mop up all the free bellinis they'd been swilling in the garden. Like a flood, the crowd of people kept finding new levels within the building. Suddenly Jeff was out on the terrace, faced with the back of Marino Marini's statue of a guy on a horse – or some kind of creature anyway – with a kind of turd-tail sticking out of its bronze bottom.

  The rider's arms were stretched out horizontally, crucified by air or, perhaps, by the splendour of the view of the Grand Canal. As Jeff squeezed past he saw that, just as his mount had this stiff little tail at the back, so the rider had a stiff little dick sticking out at the front. He had no opportunity to ponder the significance of these details. Such was the intensity of the search for risotto that, within minutes, the terrace was jammed solid. Drinks were being served out here too, and so were some appalling bits of pastry, dried up old things, like samosas but not as spicy. Jeff manoeuvred his way to the drinks table, where he spotted Ben.

  ‘Any sign of the risotto?’ he asked.

  ‘You know, I don't think there's going to be any risotto,’ said Ben. He looked really cast down. Jeff could empathize with that. He was pretty devastated himself, even though he had taken the precaution of eating several slices of pizza on the way over.

  ‘They lure you here with the promise of risotto,’ he said, ‘and there's no fucking risotto.’

  ‘It's not even like there's a limited quantity, available on a first-come, first-served basis.’

  ‘There's absolutely none.’

  ‘All there is are a few miserable bellinis.’

  ‘Rather a lot of bellinis, in fairness. In fact, you've got two in your hands.’

  ‘They go down a treat, don't they?’

  ‘They slip down,’ said Jeff, finishing his. Since they were pressed right up against the drinks table, he scooped up a couple more.

  A glass in each hand, Ben and Jeff made their way to the edge of the terrace, taking in the commanding view of the Grand Canal. The sun was sinking Turnerishly, about to disappear behind the buildings on the other side of the Canal. The vapour trails of planes converged there too. Almost directly across from them was the Gritti. It looked a bit boring, being there, compared with being here. People on vaporetti were looking up, wishing they were either up here, chucking free bellinis down their throats, or sitting on the terrace of the Gritti, paying for them through the nose.

  ‘The thing about a bellini,’ Jeff said to Ben, ‘is that it's actually an extremely refreshing drink.’

  ‘In these conditions one couldn't wish for a better drink.’ It was the Kaiser who said this, so there were three of them now, with six drinks between them. The problem was that they went down such a treat that in no time at all it would be necessary to start barging back to the drinks table for refills.

  ‘I just wish they came in a bigger glass,’ said Ben.

  ‘Good point,’ said Jeff. ‘It's so stingy, serving them in these little fuckers.’ He had said it as a joke, or at least that's how he'd begun saying it, but by the time he'd completed this remark its truth was so glaring that he felt genuinely annoyed. Especially since the poxy little glasses were empty. He was girding his loins, preparing to head back to the drinks table, when, in one of those magical Venice moments, a waiter appeared with a jug of bellinis. The three of them stuck their hands out, watched as the waiter filled their greedy pairs of glasses.

  ‘Didn't the Buddha say that you should take whatever was put in your begging bowl?’ said Ben.

  ‘Wise words!’ Moved by the serendipity of the moment, they clinked their begging bowls and sipped their drinks, sipped in the sense of gulped. Although a bellini was, as Jeff had claimed, a refreshing drink, the heat was stifling, impossible to keep at bay. A kind of mania was in the air. Atman closed his eyes and gave himself over to the noise around him, the din of voices, the pandemonium of conversation and laughter, the remarks and questions in several languages, the popping of prosecco bottles and the clinking of glasses, the jokes and the laughter sprinkled over everything. It was a representative sample of what people having a good time sounded like. They could have recorded it and sent it off to some distant part of the solar system to sonically illustrate what social life on Earth – or high-quality freeloading, at least – sounded like. Jeff opened his eyes and there he was, gazing out over the Grand Canal. It was like waking up and finding yourself in a more wonderful dream than any you'd had while sleeping. What a city, what an utterly sensational place! Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned round.

  It was her. Laura. The same person. But dressed differently.

  Of course she was dressed differently. There was so much to see. Her hair, her face, her dress and the small yellow badge – with words too small to read – pinned to her dress. The overwhelming happiness of the moment made him suddenly confident, freeing him to say,

  ‘You found me! You see. I said you would.’

  ‘Weren't you meant to be looking for me?’

  ‘I realized the only way to do that was to letyou findme , to stop looking. But at some level I never stopped looking. I was looking out for you just now in fact – but in the wrong direction.’

  Now was the time to bend and kiss her. On the lips. He didn't feel nervous about it at all.

  ‘I'm glad I found you,’ he said.

  ‘So am I.’ Up close like this he could read the words on her badge:MY SAFE WORD IS OUCH.

  ‘Have you been having a good time?’

  ‘Yes.
What about you?’

  ‘I've got to say, everything has worked out perfectly.’

  ‘Did you go to the Giardini?’

  ‘Yes. But what time wereyou there? That's the interesting thing.’

  ‘I guess I got there at about one-thirty.’

  ‘What about on the bridge of the Accademia, at about six?’

  ‘Yes, I think I was there about then. Why didn't you come up?’

  ‘You were talking to someone. And there wasn't time to get off the vaporetto. Also, you know I was doing that interview with Julia Berman? I ended up getting stoned with her, so it was all a bit strange. I was a bit discombobulated.’

  ‘You got stoned?’

  ‘And as a result of that, I forgot to get the drawing. Oh, it's a long story. Did I tell you about the picture last night?’

  ‘You mentioned it. But the interview was more important, no?’

  ‘I don't know. Maybe. I saw the drawing Morison did of her, but she wouldn't give it to me.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  Had he unconsciously arranged the conversation so that he would be able to say that it was of a woman, naked, her legs open? Or was there nothingun conscious about it?