Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi Read online

  For the first time since Jeff had been in Venice, inspectors came and checked everyone's tickets. Being in possession of properly validated, three-day passes suddenly seemed a significant achievement, something to be proud of.

  ‘We can spend all day on a vaporetto, if we want,’ Jeff said smugly.

  ‘Yes,’ Laura said. ‘Though if we did, we'd be (a), bored out of our fucking minds and (b), completely seasick.’

  They chugged under the Accademia Bridge, past the Gritti and the Guggenheim Collection and San Marco. Eventually they passed beyond Giardini and out into the lagoon, which may even have been the sea proper. Sky and sea opened up. Gulls wheeled overhead. The boat managed to keep fractionally ahead of the pursuing wake. Bits of a wave – the wake of another boat motoring by in the opposite direction – managed to splash aboard for a moment or two. There were various buoys or markers to indicate channels. Someone had dived from one of these: his feet could be seen as he plunged into the sea. At another marker a hand – bright red – emerged from the sea: artworks, of course, life-sized sculptures.

  From time to time Laura consulted the map. Eventually she said they should get off at the next stop.

  ‘What's here?’

  ‘San Michele,’ she said. ‘A cemetery.’ He could see it now: like Böcklin'sIsle of the Dead , but symmetrical and neat, and not at all foreboding.

  After so long on a boat, the land swayed like the sea. Laura put up her lemon parasol. With the sun so bright, it glowed as if illuminated. All the women, surely, wished they had a parasol, and all the men must have wished they were with the woman who had one. They walked through the gates, entered the curving walls of the island. Beyond this they found themselves in the larger grounds of the cemetery. It was crowded with graves, crammed with flowers. Laura said, ‘Diaghilev is buried here. And Stravinsky’

  The first sign they saw, though, was for Ezra Pound. Within the white arrow indicating the way to his grave, someone had written, in black felt tip: ‘J Brodsky.’ Strictly speaking it was graffiti, but it was very civic-minded too. Officially you were directed towards Pound, but someone had taken it upon themselves to update the canon through a bit of guerrilla action. Pound now led, inexorably, to Brodsky. Jeff had never read Brodsky, but knew he was a big deal, that there were growing numbers of people for whom he – Brodsky – was a bigger attraction than Pound. They came to another sign indicating Pound's grave. Once again, the same person had written ‘J Brodsky’ in felt pen on the arrow.

  It was Pound's grave they saw first, a flat tomb with his name in Roman characters: EZRA POVND. Quite a few flowers. Always good to see the grave of a celebrity, even if it's someone you aren't especially interested in – but it was difficult, these days, to imagine anyone except academics getting excited about Pound. Or maybe he'd got that wrong, maybe there were still kids in their bedrooms, all fired up with the promise of modernism, intent on making it new – whatever the ‘it’ was.

  Brodsky was nearby, within spitting distance: a headstone with his name in Russian and English and his dates: 1940-1996. It wasn't a mess exactly, but there was a touch of Jim Morrison and Père-Lachaise about the scene. There were a couple of tealights, empty except for a last smear of candle wax, and some postcards with messages. Laura picked up one of them. It showed the Grand Canal, but the writing on the back was too blurred by rain and faded by sun to read. A yellow Post-it had been almost completely wiped clean by the elements. It was impossible to say what language the vestiges of words were in, let alone what they had said. By the headstone itself was a little blue plastic bowl, half-full of Biros and pencils. Most of the pens were caked with mud; at a push one or two might have been usable – not to write a poem, but good enough to jot down a phone number.

  Laura rummaged in her bag and added a shiny new Biro to the pile. Now someone could write something longer. She even added a few pages from her notebook. The future was a blank page, ready for whoever came after Brodsky and wanted to have their say.

  ‘In India these kids are all the time running up to you,’ Laura said. ‘All they want and know how to say is “School pen?” They just say it as a question: “School pen?” It's the cutest thing. It's lovely, if you have a pen to give. If you haven't, you feel mean as Scrooge.’

  They walked on. It was hot under the parasol, but cooler than not being under it. Diaghilev and Stravinsky were next to each other. At Diaghilev's tomb a similar practice of appropriate tribute was in operation. Pens had been left at the poet's grave; here, people had left ballet shoes. There were three in total, three halves of three pairs, two left and one right. Lots of messages too. Stravinsky's tomb was bare. No one had left a violin or piano or anything.

  They waited on the quay for the vaporetto. When it came they squeezed to the back of the boat, watched the island of the dead slide away behind them. After a few minutes there was nothing to see except a thin line of land surrounded by sea and parched sky.

  They disembarked at Giudecca, just in time for lunch, minutes before the restaurant stopped serving. A waiter showed them to a table sheltered by an umbrella, right by the water's edge: the perfect setting for food of quite stunning mediocrity. The salad was a bit of condemned lettuce, bright tomato halves and grated carrot. The penne with tomato sauce was the kind of thing you could knock up in ten minutes, slightly better than the Heinz stuff Jeff had eaten as a kid. A more basic meal was hard to imagine.

  A barge went by, carrying cement mixers and a big crane. It was followed, as they settled the bill, by a ferry the size of a recently spruced up council block, big enough to completely blot out the view of mainland Venice. A vessel of the high seas, it was out of all proportion to everything around. It simply could not have been any bigger. There were cars, vans, trucks onboard. People too – a whole floating city. The letters on the side – MINOAN LINES – were big enough to be seen from space.

  The wake generated by the passage of this monster ferry flung itself at the quayside as they walked, hand in hand, past the men who were fishing nearby. Nothing about their posture suggested any hope of ever catching anything. In some vaguely oriental way Jeff wondered if you only ever became a proper fisherman when the idea of the catch became wholly irrelevant. Or was that the moment you were reincarnated as a cod or, if you were lucky, a dolphin – ideally, the one on Laura's ass? The water, as they walked, was pure glitteringness. Whoever said that all that glitters is not gold was right because the water, golden in the sunlight, glittered, so much so that one might have thought it did nothing but glitter – but it did, of course; it swayed and rocked, actions which produced the glitter. While they waited for a vaporetto across to the mainland, Jeff remembered he had his camera with him.

  ‘Can I take your picture?’ he said.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I forgot I had it with me. I should have taken one of you at Brodsky's grave.’

  Laura was standing by the water's edge, not using the parasol.

  ‘Make, I don't know, some kind of gesture.’

  ‘How about like this?’

  ‘Just standing there does not constitute a gesture.’ Or maybe it did.

  ‘Like this?’ She did not move a muscle.

  ‘Perfect.’ He pressed the button, took the picture. She was standing there, in her blue dress, next to the blue water. He held the camera so she could see the digital image of herself. She looked quickly, without interest.

  ‘You don't like having your picture taken?’

  ‘I had a boyfriend who was always filming and photographing me,’ she said. ‘It was so boring.’

  At the mention of this boyfriend, Jeff felt a stab of jealousy. Still, he would have liked to take a peek at the pictures this photographer-boyfriend had taken. Seeing a man walking by with an expensive-looking camera round his neck – it had a large lens and the wide yellow strap supporting it had the word CANON written in clear letters – Jeff asked if he'd take a picture of the two of them together with his own, more modest device. They took off their sungla
sses and stood with their arms around each other, smiling while the photographer composed the shot with more care than was necessary. Birds skittered by. The shutter whirred. Jeff thanked the photographer and took back his camera. It was an ordinary photograph, a snap of a couple in Venice, water and sky in the background, holding their sunglasses, smiling: proof, if nothing else, that they looked like this, had been here together.

  Back on the mainland, Laura said they should go for a drink at the Gritti. As they made their way there, Jeff became conscious of something which had previously escaped him: the omnipresence of Vivaldi.The Four Seasons was being played in a church. A busker was playingThe Four Seasons. It was impossible to go more than a few hundred yards without hearing one ofThe Four Seasons.

  ‘Is Vivaldifrom Venice or something?’ he asked.

  ‘If he isn't, they're certainly making up for it.’

  ‘It makes you really hate Vivaldi, doesn't it?’

  ‘It makes you really hate Venice.’

  At the Gritti a table had just been vacated and they assumed their place on the terrace. The view was magnificent, especially of the various boats going by, full of people taking pictures of the privileged few – men chewing on cigars, women muttoned up in Prada – fortunate enough to be drinking on the terrace of the Gritti. There were also a few younger, less affluent-looking people, here for just one supremely expensive drink and all the nuts they could scoff. Jeff thought of having a Campari and soda and then, as usual, changed to a beer. The drinks came with small plates of large green olives, hazelnuts, a few cheesy whotsits and three exotic canapés: sashimi and blueberries, tomato and mozzarella (not so exotic) and cucumber and caviar, all on little discs of catholic bread. Every few minutes a taxi pulled up at the jetty and people stepped, regally, onto the terrace before disappearing inside. This was sophistication of the tried and tested, oldscuola. Conversation, in such circumstances, defaulted to a pleasant sequence of murmur and assent. Just as you had to raise your voice to make yourself heard above loud music so, here, you had to come down to the level of the jazzy jazz being played very quietly on the hotel's ‘sound system,’ as faintly as an insect in the vicinity of your ear. Still, it was pleasant being here, looking across at the terrace of the Guggenheim, where, two nights earlier, they'd been swilling bellinis, looking at the terrace of the Gritti. After all the party-going it felt quite novel to be sitting in a bar where you had to pay for drinks – especially when they could be claimed back on expenses.

  ‘Don't look now,’ said Laura, pausing for effect. ‘But Jay Jopling and Damien Hirst have just arrived.’ Jeff waited a few discretionary seconds before turning round to see this all-powerful pair step out onto the terrace and then go inside. Less grandly, a man came rowing along the canal in asandolo , standing up and rowing at the same time. Jeff knew it was asandolo because Jan Morris, in her book, had helpfully provided a list of the different types of craft ploughing the waters of Venice. Laura said it was the kind of thing you expected to see on the Ganges – an impression heightened by the rower's shaved head, tanned skin and loose, all-white outfit. He made slow but certain progress, unperturbed by the larger craft speeding past him in both directions. Even so, the lack of a seat seemed an absurd oversight. It was difficult to see how the provision of a seat could have done anything except improve his lot.

  Hoping for another glimpse of Hirst and Jopling (who were nowhere to be seen), they paid and left, began walking back towards Jeff's hotel. On the way they bought a bunch of bananas and ate them, two each, sitting on a low wall by the side of an unknown canal. The bananas were cool inside, in spite of the incredible heat.

  ‘You look like a monkey,’ Laura said, watching him eat.

  * * *

  Back at the hotel Laura brushed her teeth with the disposable brush that she had used before, the first night they had spent together. Jeff lay on the bed. The red message light was flashing on the phone.

  ‘You know,’ Laura said, emerging from the bathroom, ‘we still have the coke that Martin gave me. Shall we have some?’

  ‘Sure, let's.’

  She rummaged again in her Freitag bag and chopped up two lines on the pale chest of drawers. Jeff could see her face in the mirror above the chest and, unreflected, the back of her head, her hair, her back, her ass, her legs. She moved aside and gestured to him to help himself. He snorted up one of the thin lines and sat down on the bed again, watching as she leaned forward, enough to stretch the fabric of her dress tight around her ass.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ she said, straightening up.

  ‘In a word, you. In two … ’ he hesitated.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Your ass.’

  She leaned forward, sniffing. He looked up and met her eyes in the mirror. The combination – of coke and conversation – was making his heart beat hard. A spectrum wobbled in the mirror's bevelled edge.

  ‘And what were you thinking while you looked?’ she said. It was the mirror that was enabling them to have this conversation. It was not them talking, it was these two reflections, leading an autonomous life of their own.

  ‘I was thinking that I would like to walk towards you and put my hands on either side of your dress, on the hem.’ He stood up, walked towards her, placed his hands on either side of her dress. He pressed his prick against her. She pressed back against him slightly. ‘And then I would pull your dress up, slowly. Very slowly.’ Inch by inch a little more of her tanned skin was revealed. ‘Until I could see the first glimpse of your underwear.’ As her dress rode up over her hips, he saw the blue cotton of her underwear. They stood exactly as they were, silently, not moving. He looked up once and saw her looking at his eyes, which immediately focused again on the little triangle of dark blue disappearing between her buttocks. He bent down slightly so that he could stroke the back of one of her legs.

  ‘Then,’ he said, stroking the inside of her thighs, first with one hand and then with the other, going close to but not quite touching the blue fabric between her legs, ‘then I would kneel down between your legs so that my face was level with your ass.’ He knelt down, his face inches from her. He reached up and felt her knickers, wet. Hooking his finger through them, he pulled them to one side. She leaned further forward. He pulled her buttocks apart slightly with both his hands. The sight of her asshole – neat, almost hairless – made his cock harder still. He licked her ass several times and then pulled her buttocks apart and pushed his tongue inside, feeling it throb. She pushed back against him. He held her hips, pushing his face into her, pushing his tongue into her. Her asshole tasted of nothing. She reached down and began touching her cunt. He unzipped his trousers, heard her say, ‘Fuck me like this.’

  She stepped out of her dress. He stood up, saw her face and breasts in the mirror again. His prick slid inside her. When she bent further forward he could no longer see the reflection of her face, only the downpour of her hair, her long back. She spread her feet further apart, reached her hand between her legs again. He rubbed a finger around her wet asshole. She pressed back against him more strongly. He eased his finger inside her, her ass pulsing tightly as she came, as he came.

  They stood still for a while. He opened his eyes. Her face swam into view again in the mirrror, saying, ‘Let's lie down.’

  They collapsed onto the bed, calm from sex, jazzed up from coke. It was difficult to know what to do now. Under normal circumstances they might have dozed, but that was out of the question so they just lay there. Then Laura got up, said she would take a bath, which seemed like a great idea. While it was running, she opened the mini-bar.

  ‘There's a little bottle of white wine in here,’ she said. ‘Shall we have some?’ That seemed like a great idea too. She opened the bottle and poured two glasses. She was naked still. His eyes moved over her.

  ‘It's a shame we haven't got our special glasses,’ he said, but they clinked the ones they did have.

  ‘I know. It's like drinking out of a jam jar,’ said Laura, heading for the bath
room.

  Jeff got up from the bed, seized by an urge to write a bit of his article on the Biennale. This impulse evaporated almost as soon as he sat down at the desk and opened his laptop. His head was full of excited feelings, but his brain was completely empty, devoid of the thoughts that were racing through it, all except one: Laura's ass. What was it about women's assholes? Where did it come from, this irresistible desire to stick one's fingers, cock and tongue up them? Shit was horrible, revolting stuff, but women's assholes … Maybe he should do a five-hundred-word op-ed piece on that, how the only thing in life contemporary man loves more than eating pussy is licking ass. He felt like a Roman emperor in the age of room service. He wanted to beat his chest Tarzan-style but, in the circumstances, there was nothing to do except turn on the TV. This was the unique freedom, the supreme indulgence of the hotel room: not the opportunities for afternoon sex, for snorting coke and licking ass, but the freedom to put the telly on at any time of day, to watch anything (basically nothing) without shame or guilt. If he spent more time in hotel rooms, he would never read another book. If the whole world lived in hotels, no one would read anything more demanding than the in-room dining menu. He channel-hopped until he came to a compilation of footage of sporting disasters: skiers tumbling down slopes, matadors getting tossed by bulls, motorcyclists cartwheeling through the air. It wasn't seeing people gethurt that made it so compelling. No, the hurting part was awful, but there was something idyllic about the mid-air interlude, before they landed and messed themselves up. If the earth hadn't been so hard, or gravity a less potent force, it would have been fun to get thrown twenty feet into the air as a result of a mistake on the piste or track … Even the telly, which was what you resorted to when you had no ability to concentrate, could not hold his attention. He got up, gazed out at the scorched roofs, the invisible gravity of sky. Laura was calling from the bathroom, asking what time it was, what time they had to go out. Shit, it was six already. They ought to be going in half an hour, he called back. So far today it had been as if they were in Venice on holiday, for their honeymoon, even. They had gone sightseeing, had not run into anyone they knew; now, suddenly, they had to be back in Biennale mode. There were parties to go to, friends to see, bellinis to be drunk – and, gallingly, the phone was ringing.