Until 2 a.m. we luckily lost again. The bright arches and doors reflected the green waters of the canal. My daughter, Vivian, 16, and I were on a lion hunt in Venice, an annual occurrence for six years.
If I felt slightly silly coming to this ancient tourist trap every year, I was comforted that arguably the world’s coolest tourist, exiled Russian Nobel laureate poet Joseph Brodsky, did the same thing for 17 winters, leading many to consider as The Travel Bible, “Watermark”, published in 1992: 135 pages of vivid, deep, often funny impressionistic muscle in the city Brodsky calls “the greatest masterpiece our genre has ever produced.”
Brodsky’s fascination with Venice was colored by his childhood in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), another canal city, where he had lived in a shared apartment on a busy street lined with tsarist palaces. “I, too, once lived in a town where corn used to court clouds with statues,” he wrote.
My own attraction was shaped by a Danish childhood by the calm waters of the Baltic Sea. As for VIV? The city ride is the only endurance sport that we can participate as equals and where the setting sins her phone screen. A warrior princess is here.
Venice recently made headlines for charging a €5 admission fee to ward off the Disneyesque hordes of summer Fanny Packers. (The fee is supposed to double in April.) But on this night in March the city was as calm and evocative as an elaborate tomb. A whiff of frozen seaweed burst from the Adriatic. Viv mischievously pulled out her cell phone, but we only use map apps as a last resort. “Not yet,” I said, and she put it back in her pocket.
We climbed the steps of another of the city’s more than 450 bridges and I looked around the next alley that led to a block where, lighting up like a jump, was our lion.
The marble beast called the “Lion of Piraeus” was looted from the main port of Athens in 1687 and was familiar to Viv and I as the family dog. It has become a ton for many of our walks. The star of four errant lions guarding the male gate to the city’s ancient fleet, the ferocity of the beast was tempered by our knowledge that the garments had graffito on its sides with the Vikings – our relatives!
We ranked the usual desire to pull for the story of the 23rd century of the lion. Why kill intuitive beauty with data collected from tourist books? The real pleasure of wandering in Venice is to drown our egos in undefined grandeur. “The city is narcissistic enough to turn your mind into an amalgam without blasting it from its depths,” Brodsky wrote. “After a two-week stay—even at off-season rates—you become so broke and selfless, like a Buddhist monk.”
“The imperative of cold and short daylight”
Throughout the 1960s, Brodsky’s personality and lyrics landed him in hot water with the Soviet authorities, who subjected him to increasingly inappropriate prosecutions. The relatively unknown poet developed into an international cause célèbre until finally, in 1972, the Soviets threw him out of the country with little more than a small leather suitcase in which he packed two bottles of vodka.
He landed in Ann Arbor, Mich., at the University of Michigan, where he continued to write prolifically as poet-in-residence. When he won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1987, the charismatic author became a literary pop star, packing lecture halls around the world with his melodious readings.
“Watermark” opens with Brodsky first arriving at Venice Central Station in 1972, hoping to seduce a Russian acquaintance. She rejected him, but instead became seduced by the city whose smells, surfaces, moods and tastes she would describe in detail as tenderly as the lover. “Love is an affair between a reflection and its object,” wrote Brodsky. “That’s ultimately what brings one back to this city.”
He returned almost every winter when he could enjoy Venice without the tourists. “Tis the season low on color and high on the imperative of cold and short daylight,” he wrote. “Everything is harder and more intense.”
“Part liquid oxygen, part coffee and prayers”
In the bohemian Dorsoduro neighborhood on the south bank of the Grand Canal, where some bars display “No Tourist” signs, I met the American expatriate painter Robert Morgan, 82, to whom Brodsky dedicated “Watermark.” After half a century in Venice, Mr. Morgan still works in his studio every day, painting Sky Blue Cityscapes. He was introduced to Brodsky when both men were in their late 20s, creating a bond that lasted to the grave.
“We took to each other because we were both in exile in love with this place,” Mr. Morgan. “We walked and talked, often all night, without any great purpose, although we tend to hit on a lot of women, cocktails and Cicchetti.”
Cicchetti is Venice’s version of Tapas, ridding Venice of two centuries of mediocre tourist restaurants. These snacks were also integral to Viv’s and my nightly eating routine, where instead of dining out, we wandered to the bar to munch on fresh cod, cotton candy sandwiches, veggies and other bites to tide us over until the next meal. point.
“Joseph joked that wherever he ate here, he knew he was eating better than the Soviet Council of People’s Commissars, who gave him so much trouble,” said Mr. Morgan.
Mr. Morgan invited me into his apartment, with its bright paintings and flowers, tended by his bubbly writer wife, Ewa, 52. Tea was served, gossip and stories shared. Brodsky’s playful spirit moved his family friend. “You could see him observing everything behind the cigarette smoke and Irish whiskey,” said Mr. Morgan. “Always making mental notes even when entertaining an entire table.”
I wandered 10 minutes east of the Morgans’ apartment into a dead-end street, Calle Querini, where, at No. 252, a salmon house was the setting for a provocative literary encounter in “Watermark.” A marble plaque above the narrow front door explained that this was where American poet Ezra Pound lived with his mistress, Olga Rudd, while broadcasting fascist propaganda to the United States during World War II. Brodsky wrote to push through that door in 1977, five years after Pound’s death, with his friend, the writer Susan Sontag, over tea with Rudge, guarded by a three-foot phallic bust of Pound.
Although Brodsky had translated the pound into Russian in his youth, Rudge’s pro-Mussolini statements and oppressive bust had Sontag and Brodsky hastily retreating back down this tiny street into the night. The bust is now in the National Gallery in Washington.
One morning after an overnight stay, Viv and I emerged into Piazza San Marco, Venice’s central square. The winter sun rose across the lagoon and the weak rays unexpectedly burst from the five domes of San Marco, turning them into beacons against the sky.
Brodsky described the winter mornings here as “Part Damp Oxygen, Part Coffee and Prayers,” and sure enough, the bells in the Campanile began to rung for morning mass, while waiters pulled out tables and chairs from the surrounding cafes. This was our last stop, as it usually was for Brodsky, who often ended up relaxing in these chairs with a cigarette and an espresso.
Venice, forever
Brodsky’s chain and lifelong ill health cut him off in New York at the age of 55. on the island of the cemetery of San Michele just north of Venice.
The funeral was not without one last drama in the life of this dramatic man. Mr. Morgan told me that he and Roberto Calasso, Brodsky’s Italian editor, went to the cemetery before the Cortege floated across the lagoon and discovered that the grave was next to none other than Pound’s. “Roberto and I told the Gravediggers that he couldn’t be buried there and they hurriedly found a spot a few meters away. They were still digging when the coffin arrived.”
On our last night, Viv and I jumped on a steamer and crossed to San Michele, whose cypress trees towered over the island’s walls like ghostly sails. “I knew what water feels like being caressed by water,” Brodsky wrote aesthetically about sailing on this island of death. He often ran here among the many exiled graves of Russians, notably composer Igor Stravinsky and ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev, where dancers still leave their worn slippers at his tombstone.
Viv and I wandered into the familiar rounded white marble plots at the edge of the Protestant section, where two Ukrainian women in mini tassels despite the cold received egoists. Brodsky seduced even from the grave.
San Michele closed at 6 p.m. and we headed back to the tiny pier beyond the cemetery gates as the night lights of Venice cast the medieval towers Aglow across the lagoon. The evening mist danced on the walls and around the cypresses like ballerinas. One of the San Michele cemetery cats approached Viv while we waited for the Vaporetto, which reminded me of a line from “Watermark”: “I’d like to live my next life in Venice. To be a cat there, anything , even a rat, but always in Venice.
