Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi Read online

  In her day Julia had been famously beautiful, a sex symbol, as they used to say. A nostalgic glamour still attached to her even though there's actually nothing more tragic than these old howlers having to trade on looks that have given way years ago. Jeff had interviewed another of these crumbling beauties, on stage, as part of the Brighton Festival. What a fright! Smoking cigarettes, working through her gravel-voiced repertoire of classic anecdotes – the night she was on acid when Hendrix puked in her fireplace!; the time she asked George Best what he did for a living! – while the audience listened politely, united by a single unspoken thought: ugh! She didn't even have a memoir to promote. All she was publicizing was the astonishing fact of her continued existence. Pathetic. So what did that make Atman? Infinitely more pathetic, obviously, since his job was to provide cue lines for her greatest anecdotes, a gig for which he received travelling expenses and four complimentary drinks tickets. However much he despised other people, when he did the math and added things up, Atman always found himself more despicable still. Especially since he'd asked if he could interview another of the guests at the festival, Lorrie Moore, a writer he'd never met but whose work he loved – and was told that, unfortunately, that slot was already taken by someone else. The lesson was that he was good for tittle-tattle but unsuited for anything serious; moreFHM thanTLS. As often happened the act of reading had sent him off on an inner rumble of discontent. He flicked further through the press cuttings and lingered on pictures of Julia taken by – he had to check the caption – none other than David Bailey. No doubt about it, she had been sensationally gorgeous. Slinky as a panther, with outsize purple bangles round her wrists and what used to be called bedroom eyes. No one had bedroom eyes any more (the phrase was almost as obsolete as ‘a well-turned ankle’); they'd been rendered obsolete by the bedroom asses and bedroom thongs of theLoaded and Internet era. Jeff had no idea what she looked like now. She had not been photographed for years – hence the last and most despicable part of his assignment: he was meant somehow to sneak an intimate picture of her. So, on top of everything else, he was supposed to be a pap without the advantages of a telephoto lens, just his own little digital camera with its 4x optical zoom. The biggest joke of all – the thing that made him more depressed than anything – was that at a certain level he was considered successful. People envied his getting assignments like this. One of the people who envied his getting assignments like these was Jeff. He bitched and griped but he would have bitched and griped even more if he'd heard that some other hack had got this junket instead. The writing – a so-called ‘colour piece’ – was a bore, going to see this old has-been in her rented palazzo was a drag, but Venice for the Biennale – that was fun, that was unmissable.

  He crammed the cuttings back into his folder, read more ofVenice Observed , dozed, and was woken by the captain announcing that they were about to begin their descent into Venice Treviso. Nothing very noteworthy about that; but when he went on to announce the temperature in Venice – thirty-six degrees – a gasp of astonishment swept through the plane. Thirty-six degrees, that was – what? – ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit? That washot!

  Everyone assumed some kind of mistake had been made but as soon as they stepped onto the vibrating ladder down to the tarmac they realized how mistaken they'd been. It was like arriving in Jamaica in the middle of a heatwave. The heat immediately generated a kind of hysteria – a mixture of happiness and dread – among the British passengers. This was not what they had counted on. Some people on the plane must have received texts or calls from friends who'd arrived earlier, saying it was hot but this was … Jesus, this washot! The heat bounced off the tarmac. The air was rippling and roasting. It was difficult to imagine anywhere hotter on earth. Cairo couldn't have been as hot as this.

  As expected, Venice Treviso was nowhere near Venice – which made Jeff even more pleased to be one of the first people through immigration. He was ahead of the game, had stolen a march, was ready to go. Except getting his bags onto the plane turned out to have been a completely pointless bit of cunning. There was a bus waiting outside but it had been chartered specifically for their flight and would not depart until everyone had picked up their bags, cleared customs and boarded. He ended up spending a sweat-soaked hour pacing an arrivals lounge the size of a converted garden shed and the temperature of a sauna, before the bus, crammed with Biennale-goers, was ready to begin its crawl towards the city the plane had, nominally, flown into. Jeff was sat next to a red-haired woman he recognized but whose name he couldn't quite remember, a curator from the Barbican, who prodded her BlackBerry for the entire length of the journey. For reasons that were unclear even to him Jeff did not own a mobile phone, let alone a BlackBerry – which meant that he spent increasing chunks of his life in a state of suspended non-existence while other people took calls, checked messages and sent texts. It was impossible to read on the coach and there was nothing to see from the window. He had been longing for the flight to be over; now he was longing for the bus ride to be over. At what point would the longing for things to be over be over so that he could reside squarely in the present?

  Not, it turned out, when the bus journey ended because he then had to struggle through the coach-crowded bus terminal, with his bags, in the baking heat. It was like being in the Italian version of an oily, hugely demoralizing art installation calledThis Vehicle Is Reversing. Once he got on a vaporetto at Piazzale Roma, though, he was in Venice proper. What fun it was, going everywhere by boat – even though the boat turned out to be as crowded as a rush-hour Tube in London. The difference was that this Tube was chugging down the Grand Canal, through the miracle of Venice at dusk! Venice in the grip of an insane heatwave! Venice the city that never disappointed and never surprised, the place that was exactly like it was meant to be (just hotter), exactly synonymous with every tourist's first impression of it. There was no real Venice: the real Venice was – and had always been – the Venice of postcards, photographs and films. Hardly a novel observation, that. It was what everyone always said, including Mary McCarthy. Except she'd taken it a stage further and said that the thing about Venice was that it was impossible to say anything about Venice that had not been said before,‘including this statement.’ Still, there was always the shock that such a place did actually exist, not just in books and pictures, but in real life, with all the accoutrements of Venice-ness crammed together: canals, palazzos, gondoliers, vaporetti and everything. A city built on water. What an impractical but wonderful idea. Jeff had read several accounts of how the city came to be built but it still didn't make sense. Better to think that it just appeared like this, fully formed and hundreds of years old in the instant it was founded.

  It was almost dark by the time he squeezed out of the vaporetto at Salute, the stop for his hotel (a five-minute walk, he'd been told), which turned out to be nowhere near the hotel – or at least the hotel, if it was nearby, was completely unfindable from this stop. If it hadn't been for the heat and the weight of the bags and a steadily mounting pressure in his bladder it would have been nice strolling around the neighbourhood, but the heat and the bags stopped it being a nice stroll and turned it into an exhausting yomp in a hundred-degree heat. Losing his bearings in the labyrinth of alleys, narrow waterways, bridges and little squares that all looked so much like each other, the five-minute walk took twenty minutes. The hotel, when he finally stumbled on it, was nowhere near where it was supposed to be and, at the same time, exactly where it was meant to be. Jeff produced his passport while the desk-clerk remarked on the incredible eat – eat that the bell-hop sought to counter by bringing, on a glinting silver tray, a glass of water so cold it made his teeth ache like metal.

  What a relief to finally get into his pleasingly over-priced room (booked and paid for byKulchur magazine). It was on the top floor and had a view of sorts – not of the lagoon or the Grand Canal, but of the roofs of buildings like the one he was looking out from. What a relief, too, that it was decorated in minimalist, boutique fashio
n – white sheets, blonde wood – not decked out in the rococo style of most Venetian rooms.What a relief! It was one of those phrases that buzzed around his head constantly, phrases that in music would have constituted the themes or motifs that wove in and out of a symphony, fading, disappearing for long intervals, but always eventually returning.

  In the way of boutique hotels – and was there a decent hotel in the world that did not designate itself boutique? – various books had been arranged in aesthetically-pleasing spots around the room. Naturally, they were all about Venice. The room was nicely air-conditioned, not something that he normally needed or used, but in these circumstances some kind of respite from the killing heat – the eat, as he now thought of it – was essential. Unfortunately, he was late for the dinner he was supposed to go to. It had been organized byModern Painters magazine and though it was usually a good idea to avoid these big sit-down dinners – they ate into one's evenings – this had seemed a perfect way of easing into the Biennale. Well, nothing to be done about that. If he went now he'd only be in time for dessert and would be unable to make the quick getaway he was counting on in order to go to the Iceland party (a much sought-after invite: Björk was going to be there, might even be DJing) near the Campo Manin. He called the editor on her cellphone, left a message, apologized, blamed the plane, the bus, the time difference. He stripped, showered, put on a fresh shirt, underwear and socks, left the hotel and ate quickly on his own – dreary salad, bread that might once have been fresh, home-made ravioli – at the trattoria a couple of doors away.

  The concierge had assured him that if he took a vaporetto one stop, across the Canal to Santa Maria di Giglio, Campo Manin would be only a short walk after that. And, amazingly, he was right. Jeff found the palazzo easily, arrived at the perfect time, just as the party was filling up. There was the thump of decent-sounding music from inside but, with temperatures still in the eighties, everyone was outside in the courtyard. He took a bellini from a waiter – his first of the Biennale, the first, in all probability, of very many – and drained it in a couple of gulps. Always awkward, arriving at these big parties, before you see people you know, so he traded the empty glass for a full one, the last of its kind on the tray. He'd almost guzzled that as well when he spotted Jessica Marchant, wearing a kind of Bridget Riley Op Art blouse. They clinked glasses. Jeff complimented her on the blouse and congratulated her on the novel she'd published a couple of months previously. Half the people Jeff knew had written books, most of which he'd not even attempted to read. The majority of the ones hehad started he'd not had the patience to finish but he'd whizzed through Jessica's in a state of constantly increasing admiration. It seemed a good omen, that the first person he'd encountered in Venice was someone on whom he could lavish praise. The problem was that doing so made Jessica look so distinctly uncomfortable – had he been too fawning? – that she immediately turned the tables, asking him about his long-awaited book.

  ‘I was hoping everyone had forgotten about that. Including the publishers. I just never did it.’ This was every bit as honest as his admiration for Jessica. Write journalism for long enough and a publisher will eventually suspect that some article that you've written contains the seed of a possible book. A letter forwarded byEsquire had led to a phone call, which had led to a lunch, which had led to a contract to write a book on … He pushed the thought from his mind. Even back then he'd had no desire to write such a book but had hoped that the contract and advance – minuscule though it was – would impel him to do so. And it had. For about a month. There then followed six months of fretting before he more or less abandoned the book and went back to writing nonsense for magazines. When he heard that his editor was leaving, Jeff congratulated himself on having, effectively, gained a small amount of money for nothing. Except for a brief call from his editor's replacement, no one at the publishers seemed to expect anything from him. And he'd not even had to pay back the advance. Perfect. The only mistake he'd made, in that first flush of enthusiasm, was to tell people he was doing the book. Hence the current conversation. He explained that he had given up, abandoned it.

  ‘I don't blame you,’ Jessica said. ‘It's hell writing a book.’ So many people ended up, inadvertently or deliberately, making you feel bad about yourself (many people thought Jeff was one of those people) but Jessica always made you feel OK, normal. It was as if she had put her arm round him and said that they were in the same boat.

  ‘It really is, isn't it?’ he said. ‘I don't know why everyone seems to be doing it. But what about you and here? Are you writing about the Biennale for someone?’

  ‘ForVogue,’ she said. Well, that was one of the reasons for writing books. You got offered gigs like this. As happened, Jeff's admiration immediately became tinged with jealousy even though, aside from a few details – accommodation, fee, and the nature of the article – they were here for the same purpose, were having the same experience. That was the thing about the Biennale: it was a definitive experience, absolutely fixed, subject only to insignificant individual variation. You came to Venice, you saw a ton of art, you went to parties, you drank up a storm, you talked bollocks for hours on end and went back to London with a cumulative hangover, liver damage, a notebook almost devoid of notes and the first tingle of a cold sore.

  They were joined by David Kaiser, a film-maker (i.e., someone who made telly programmes), and Mike Adams, an editor atFrieze. Jessica knew them both too. The Kaiser was just back from Saudi Arabia, ‘a truly vile country, worth visiting if only to have an experience of unsurpassable vileness.’ The experience of going without alcohol for a week had had a profound effect on him.

  ‘It was like being in the desert and seeing a mirage,’ he said. ‘Every few seconds, whatever I was doing, whoever I was talking to, I'd zone out. All I could see was a pint of beer. The climate is very conducive to drinking, obviously, and you can't do it.’ Mike and Jeff shook their heads in disgust, nodded in sympathy. This was a story, evidently, with a strong human-interest angle, even though it wasn't the main point of the story. The main point of the story was how the Kaiser had discovered he was a Muslim. ‘I was confronted by a member of the police or the committee to promote virtue. He didn't say anything, no“Salaam ali Kuhn” or anything like that, just “Have you read the Qu'ran?” I said, “Yes, I have.” He said, “Did you read it properly?” I said I thought I had, yes. He said, “Then you are a Muslim. Good.” End of conversation. Implacable logic’

  ‘And all the time he's speaking to you,’ said Mike, ‘all you're thinking about and seeing is this big, chilled Heineken in a frosted glass, right?’

  ‘Not necessarily a Heineken. Sometimes a Budvar.’

  ‘But always a lager? Never a real ale?’

  ‘It was too hot for real ale. But let's not get bogged down in specifics,’ he said. ‘There's a larger point here.’

  ‘I thought we were already in receipt of the lager point,’ Jeff quipped. ‘How much bigger can this story get?’

  ‘The point is that it took this trip to Saudi to make me realize that, all things considered, for the last thirty years, I have loved beer, if not more intensely, then certainly more constantly than anything else in my life.’

  The Kaiser was forty-six so that sounded about right. There was no opportunity to dwell on this expression of faith, however. In accordance with the laws of social physics the group of four had begun to draw others into its conversational orbit: Melanie Richardson from the ICA, Nathalie Porter who worked atArt Review , and Scott Thomson, whom Jeff had known, off and on, for more than a decade. During that time, while other people changed jobs and advanced their careers, Scott had continued working at the same undemanding job (interrupted by lengthy periods spent travelling) as a sub at theObserver. That was how he earned his living but his true vocation was to be a perpetual convert, every few years embracing a new enthusiasm so wholeheartedly that it completely cancelled out whatever he'd previously set so much store by. His latest craze, though, was the same one he'd been e
vangelizing eight months ago: Burning Man, the big freak-out in the Nevada desert. He'd been for the first time a couple of years ago and was going again in August. It was, he said now, ‘a life-changing experience.’ Scott had said exactly the same thing the last time Jeff had seen him, at a party for the Frieze Art Fair, and he was happy to take his word for it. Not Mike, though.

  ‘In my experience,’ he said, ‘the thing about life-changing experiences is that they wear off surprisingly quickly so that after a few weeks you emerge from them pretty much unchanged. Nine times out of ten, in fact, it's precisely the life-changing experience that enables you to come to terms with theun changingness of your own life. That's why those novels are so popular, you know, the ones that culminate in a day or an event that will “change all of their lives forever.” It's a fiction.’

  ‘God,you don't change, do you, dude? Cynical as ever.’ Credit where it's due: Scott (who was always calling people ‘dude’) had not taken offence; in fact, he was laughing as he said this whereas Mike, while not being aggressive exactly, had spoken somewhat severely.