‘What they value is not always what the rest of us value,’ she said. ‘The Venetians built their first houses on stilts above the swampy delta islets which in those days were already inhabited by a race whose skills and appearance were not wholly human. The two species interbred. Some believe the Venetians are the only survivors of Atlantis. Their inhuman ancestors escaped the deluge which drowned that extraordinarily advanced civilisation. Venice is full of great cathedrals and churches, yet she is still as profoundly pagan as she is practical. Venice will survive any disaster and adapt herself to any changing conditions. She is a city whose principal trade is in illusion. For her, deception really is an art! And a saleable art, at that!’
Fiorello was familiar with her arguments. He dismissed them with good humour. ‘My darling Margherita, the only art Venetians have learned is the art of good living. Everything else is imported. They will trade with anyone. I offer you the real secret of their enduring supremacy. They honestly believe that making money is a moral pursuit, that gold has an ethical and spiritual value, that a man without profit is a man without honour. These aren’t the survivors of Atlantis, dear friends, but of Ur! They are the ancestors of all usurers and merchants. And good luck to them.’ He signed for her glass to be replenished.
‘Fiorello,’ she crooned, ’you tolerate everything and everyone.’ Her brunette waves tumbled fetchingly across her face.
‘That’s our great Italian virtue, my dear.’
‘The disease for which Fascism is the remedy.’ She was sardonic. Her lips pretended sternness she could not feel towards her lover. ‘At least, that’s what I hear you saying in public.’
‘One has to employ stronger, simpler language in public than one favours in private, Margherita. Fascism balances and moderates our natural tolerance. It binds all our qualities of manliness and femininity together in one strong bundle.’ I heard an equally obvious note of self-mockery in his voice when he made such pronouncements.
‘There does not,’ observed Signora Sarfatti drily, ‘appear to be a very strong element of femininity bound into our Duce’s bundle of faggots.’
‘You’d be surprised.’ That was all da Bazzanno would give us.
‘These things surely are all a matter of interpretation.’ Miss Butter’s Italian was not as good as her French but it was better than mine. We had agreed to use French as our common tongue. ‘What, after all, do the words “masculine” and “feminine” mean?’
Such abstractions were too much for us, so we changed to a different subject. We had Miss Butter inform us of her native Texas, its cowboys and wild Kiowa. She had little direct experience of either, she said, having been educated in Atlanta and raised in Galveston, on the coast. ‘Which has rather more to do with commerce and shipping.’
I thought it inappropriate to mention my old political connections in Houston. Miss Butter was at a naive stage in her own political development, full of generalised sentimentality towards lame ducks. Sometimes in private I laughed at her, telling her she could not nurse the whole world’s walking wounded. But I had no wish to revive arguments on subjects which still aroused my own passions. I wanted to put all my conflicts behind me and begin my career where the Bolshevists had cut it off some ten years earlier.
I reminded myself that I was not a politician but a scientist. Not an actor, but an inventor. In future my contribution to the human race would be thoroughly practical. I would no longer talk of ‘lifting the masses’ — I would lift them through my deeds, by example. I understood where my own idealism belonged. I think Miss Butter recognised this. Indeed, it was these qualities in me rather than my political opinions which she found attractive. Aside from my admiration of Mussolini, my fear that civil war must soon break out in France and Germany, a sense of the general causes of our European malaise and a notion of who the chief villains were, I expressed few opinions. What my friends wanted to hear from me was not what they already knew. They wanted my vision of tomorrow where flying cities and vast engineering works brought peace and prosperity to all. I described my notion of a huge airliner which was entirely comprised of wing — a massive flying wing, some thousand yards wide! My steam-car, I told Fiorello, on his enquiring, was now a reality in California. My light aircraft were flying in the air force of Marrakech’s Caïd. In France, at a secret hangar near St-Denis, my airship strained to be airborne but was grounded by the squabbling greed of her investors. I had built flying infantry for the Turks and designed a secret weapon for Petlyura in Ukraine. Other ideas of mine, such as the autogyro and ocean-based aeroplane staging platforms, were realities. My intention was never to get rich from these ideas.. My first goal was to ease the human burden. Any profit I made was incidental. Again and again Fiorello and Margherita assured me that I was just the type Mussolini wished to recruit for his great army of scholars, scientists, soldiers and engineers. His willingness to give such men as myself a chance was what made him so great.
My earlier sense of urgency, which had enabled me to sustain myself in Morocco and given me a persuasive motive for returning to Europe, had been replaced by a quieter and, I believe, stronger emotion. I wished to take stock of myself as well as the country before I presented myself to Il Duce. What was more, I had fallen in love a little with the delicious Miss Butter. Soon I would be infatuated, head over heels, with the City of St Mark!
Together Miss Butter and I visited Venice’s museums and magnificent public buildings, gasping at her astonishing wonders and riches which we came upon often unexpectedly when rounding a corner of an alley and finding, for instance, the white marble church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. We entered her relatively austere portals to discover a wealth of gold, a feast of murals and pictures and a towering altar which seemed to draw you directly up to heaven. Every square had a character of its own, every bridge opened on to a picture, every garden displayed the orderly beauty of centuries of cultivation, nurtured and shaped to gladden the eye and the heart.
Da Bazzanno had been right. In the daylight, with her bustling business life, her babble of voices, her washing lines and murmuring touts, Venice was nothing but reality. Along the Grand Canal, where building after building spoke of a magnificent history, where Baroque and Gothic and Romanesque, Moorish and Byzantine styles stood shoulder to shoulder against any easy definition, there was a domestic ordinariness to the city. People came and went on a thousand different missions, crossing the bridges, taking the gondolas as others might take buses and taxis, striking bargains, chatting, quarrelling. Few bothered to sit in the little boats which plied constantly between the quays. To stand marked you as a Venetian. In my bones, I knew how at night these people transformed themselves into creatures resembling their inhuman ancestors. These same buildings and canals would be touched by Titania’s wand to become scenes from fairyland where sorcery and magic were concrete realities.
Sometimes I felt I crossed from one version of our world into another. I was discovering myself at the nativity of a modern Renaissance. I was privileged to live in the first years of a Golden Age. Then something went wrong. I could not in those days have predicted how the envious, venal and most banal forces of our century would force the world into a prolonged nightmare, a nightmare from which there now seems no chance of awakening. Perhaps Venice was actually a gateway from one potential reality to another? Perhaps unconsciously I stepped through that gateway and became a prisoner, longing for the just, safe and orderly world I had lost? But in those early weeks I had no such gloomy ideas. My infatuation with Miss Butter and with Venice remains among my happiest memories.
A city heavy with such unique history is arrogant but far too well bred to show it. She is narcissistic — infinitely reflected in her own waters - and she is vain. Venice is interested only in herself. She possesses the haughty charm of antique tradition and ancient wealth. Her condescending tolerance is based on the sublime understanding that she has no natural enemies and that the rest of the world shares an instinctive desire to serve and to please her.
Venice owns an elusive heart, a mysterious soul. Even in her silences or in the gay music of her many masques and concerts, in her theatrical performances, you can sometimes hear the beating of a powerful prehistoric organ, the whisper of ancient arteries, the pulsing of forgotten veins. Sometimes a faint drift of unnameable colour undulates across a square or passes you on one of the narrow canals. Shadows appear which owe nothing to the position of the sun or the moon.
Her past a mixture of glorious nobility and brutal greed, Venice is the crystallisation of the Mediterranean’s fears and needs. She offers all the satisfactions one ever desired and many which one never imagined. With da Bazzanno’s own brainchild, the Festival of Fascist Arts, the city had become the Mecca for bohemians, especially Italians who found the new Rome a little too austere for their tastes. Cafés and cabarets had sprung up for their entertainment, attracting performers from Berlin, New York and Athens, from Cairo and Paris.
Despite much of this clientele, I was still attracted to these places. I had spent my youth in them. I received much of my education in them, thanks to Shura and my beloved friend Count Nikolai Feodorovitch Petroff, my Kolya. I was, I admit, addicted to them. Soon Miss Butter was seeing a wholly different side of Italian life from the great public ceremonies of Il Duce and the Vatican. Every kind of sexuality was represented and catered for. Every kind of music, from the sweet, old tunes of Vienna and Prague, to the neurotic modern concoctions of Mahler and his arch-collaborator Schoenberg, from the bitter-sweet accordion to the wailing saxophone, harsh Berlin syncopation and syrupy English vibrato; all of which, I was assured, was untypical of Venice. The city had once been notorious for its lack of public nightlife.
Responding to my curiosity, da Bazzanno informed me with attempted amusement that Venice has attracted another kind of adventurer: the arms trader. All the big people regularly came to the city. No week passed without at least two or three South American governments sending their representatives to shop for guns. The air of the restaurants and cabarets where such transactions took place was very different from the rest of the city and few of the local people welcomed it. The Italian authorities considered Venice a free port and turned a blind eye to these activities.
In the course of a single evening I overheard plans for arming various Balkan factions and part of a negotiation where an Algerian businessman openly bargained for a consignment of Martini rifles to be used against the French.
Miss Butter was writing several stories a day and mailing them back to her paper. She was afraid to wire them. I hinted that secrecy or urgency were not necessary, especially since her editor in Houston was not greatly interested in the intricate corruptions of modern Europe. He wanted more immediate scandals, with personalities and titles he had heard of.
Meanwhile, Maddy continued to interview me and had now decided to write a book about my exploits. ‘You are the model of the modern hero.’
One evening, in a cabaret called the Little Gigolo, where many foreign businessmen met but where the show was amusing and not too raucous, I attempted to dissuade her from this perception, but we were both too drunk and she refused to have any of it. She even suspected me of protecting other aristocrats, helping them get out of Russia. ‘If only I had the power. I have had no word from my mother in years. I pray for her. It is all I can do.’ I changed the subject. I began to speak of my dreams, of my scientific ideas.
She was listening with her usual doting attention when my voice was suddenly drowned by a discordant chorus of some Bavarian folk song shouted vigorously by a group of very drunken Germans who sat together in a corner near the stage. They were ex-military. They had been there all evening, engaged with one of the South Americans, and had been drinking heavily. By their manner and conversation several of them were clearly homosexual. They were openly kissing and cuddling, to the amusement, rather than the disgust, of the other patrons.
I looked up in annoyance as the Germans began the umpteenth verse of their song and saw that a newcomer had joined them. He was large and effeminate in a fur-collared black overcoat and a Homburg hat a size too small for his head. His back was towards me but was very familiar. I was trying to recall the man when I heard his voice raised in angry German which almost at once turned into near-hysterical Russian, then into Spanish, and eventually into broken Italian, all on the same note.
My heart sank. This was not an acquaintance I wished to renew! There was no mistaking Sergei Andreyovitch Tsipliakov or his familiar complaints. His friend of the same sexual persuasion had not turned up. The Germans were far too drunk and careless to help find him.
It was obvious Seryozha, whom I had originally met on the Kiev—Peter Express, was no longer with the ballet, unless as a choreographer. He was running to fat. His ruined face turned away from the Germans. His self-indulgent jowls emphasised his lugubrious dismay. I tried to escape his eye. Then he had seen me. His hand flew to his mouth. His expression changed to one of utter joy. His voice rang through the room. I shrank.
‘Dimka! Dimka, darling! Dear heart, they told me you had gone back to Peter and were working for the Okhrana! Are you really a secret policeman now, Dimka, darling? Were you one in Paris? Oh, the stories I’ve heard! What ever happened to you? Why did you abandon me? Dear heart, I was so good to you!’
My only consolation was that he spoke in Russian, one of the few languages Miss Butter did not understand.
He engulfed me. His wet lips met mine. A small-time Judas.
* * * *
EIGHT
Naturally I was embarrassed. Yet I could only see this further coincidence as destined. Events were moving towards some vast and significant conjunction. Everyone was being drawn to Italy and her charismatic leader.
To Miss Butter I introduced Seryozha as an acquaintance from my days in St Petersburg where he had been with the Ballet Foline. To change the subject as quickly as possible I asked him in German if he was appearing at the Arts Festival. This question encouraged a great gust of miserable laughter. ’If only that were true, Dimka sweetheart. Sadly, I’m on very different business!’
When I asked him what his business was he admitted that he was sworn to silence on the matter, which was of international importance. A little afraid that he might attempt to blackmail me and wishing to insure myself, I told him swiftly in Russian that I too was on secret business, travelling as Prince Maxim Pyatnitski. The American woman was suspected of being a Bolshevik agent. He must be unusually discreet.
Of course, Seryozha’s discretion was typical. After offering me a wink and a half-conspiratorial leer, he declared loudly in broken English that he had not seen his old comrade-in-arms ‘Prince Pyanisski’ since we fought side by side together in the war against the forces of reaction. Happily he was already so drunk that his mistake went unnoticed, and as he breathed gin over Miss Butter’s little pink hand he steadied himself by leaning heavily on our table. ‘You’re the prettiest agent I’ve seen in years!’
She explained that she was not an agent but a journalist and asked him if he knew Diaghilev. Seryozha, declaring that the famous ballet master was a charlatan, a philistine, a sensationalist, a rogue and a plagiarist, admitted that he had met him twice in Paris. ‘You were with me, Dimka, I’m sure. In the Café Pantin? I told him what I thought of his cacophonic eyesores and we were thrown out. That was you, wasn’t it, Dimka?’
In an aside I explained to Miss Butter that ‘Dimka’ was a nickname I’d earned in Petersburg’s cafe society. I could not quite remember how I had come by it. She was showing far more interest in Sergei A. Tsipliakov than he deserved. He had grown even more irritating and foolish. I began to feel that I was embroiled in some primitive and farcical commedia dell’ arte sketch, the kind of thing on which the Jew Chaplin based so many of his ‘original’ routines. In Russian Seryozha explained to Miss Butter that I was the greatest engineer he had ever known. In English he added affectionately that we had been special chums in Petersburg. We had met, he said, while sharing a sleeping car t
ogether. Did I, he enquired loudly, still use cocaine? He was desperate for some.
In murmured Russian I promised him some superb cocaine, but he must keep quiet. His friends at the other table were frowning and showing signs of impatience, even nervousness. I said that I thought he was wanted back with his comrades.
‘They’re not comrades! They’re gun-runners, Dimka. I came all the way from Manchuria to meet them. Well, more or less. But I did come all the way from Manchuria. And I know it’s to do with guns. They won’t tell me anything. I’m just a damned dogsbody, really, dear. I had to get out of Bolivia. I can’t tell you what I had to do to leave La Paz.’
‘What were you doing in Manchuria, Mr Tsipliakov?’ enquired Miss Butter with that direct, polite innocence only Americans command. I expected Seryozha to become coy, but he answered quickly.
‘They have an absolutely huge Russian community. All forced out by the Reds, of course, and wretchedly hungry for any kind of art. The old story, ma’mselle. An emissary arrived in Paris. He knew of me and came with an absolutely splendid, unrefusable offer - and the chance to be chief star and choreographer of the Ballet Manchurienne. A marvellous opportunity. The Russians were longing to hear Tchaikovsky performed by genuine Slavs and to watch some decent dancing. Of course, I agreed. My heart was touched, you know. I am too soft, as all my friends tell me.’ He fixed a large, self-loving eye upon Miss Butter.