Alibis by André Aciman

Author:André Aciman [Aciman, André]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429995061
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Sea and Remembrance

I had hopes of heading off to the Lido by way of the Grand Canal this afternoon, but the water taxi I hired at the railway station has taken a strange turn. This will most likely spoil what I’ve been fantasizing about for months: taking in breathtaking views of all my favorite palazzi lining the city’s waterway on the Grand Canal, before passing St. Mark’s and then heading away from Venice at twice the speed toward the Lido. A long and narrow island some twenty minutes from the city, the Lido faces Venice and its lagoon on the western side; on the eastern side, where the Lido’s shoreline dips into the Adriatic Sea, are its magnificent beaches.

As we’re threading our intricate way through an unusually narrow canal not far from the train station, we keep slowing to negotiate rights of way—with another water taxi, with a gondola, and then with the large industrial barges stationed along the side of the canal that haul bags of cement, steel rods, and stone, even the rumbling debris of several buildings under renovation. I finally muster the courage to ask the driver how long he thinks our ride will take. But he is busy greeting friends on either side of a narrow bridge and doesn’t hear me. Not that he could if he tried: there’s too much going on—too many jackhammers, too much yelling. Venice is regentrifying before my eyes. “Molto trendy,” someone had told me in Rome. “Venice is very trendy.” The word trendy is trendy this year—Italians are using it constantly, sometimes in the superlative: trendissimo. “You’ll have to be patient,” my taxi driver answers me at last.

A few more turns and I find myself totally lost. To counter my driver’s grimace and show it doesn’t faze me in the least, I affect the weary nonchalance appropriate to jet-lagged travelers arriving too late to argue with underlings. Not a good beginning. I don’t want to let my exchange in the water taxi spoil my arrival, but it has already dispelled the glistening Turner-Ruskin-Monet-Whistler moment I had choreographed for myself. I am reminded of Gustav von Aschenbach, the stiff, fastidious, well-groomed, unbohemian writer in Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, who arrives in the city and is taken to the Lido not by vaporetto, as he had requested, but by gondola: a minor altercation ensues between the incensed German tourist and the headstrong gondolier, until the passenger is finally persuaded that there is really nothing to do but sit quietly and wait till he reaches his destination. In Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film adaptation of Mann’s novella, Aschenbach’s arrival in Venice is accompanied by Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which is ideally suited to the occasion. Tension and premonition are brewing beneath, but on the surface is only the most serene, unruffled strains of Mahler’s Adagietto strumming to Mann’s “splashing of the oar as the wave struck dull against the prow.”

Within moments, however, we’re on none other than the Grand Canal itself—which means that the lagoon is still quite a stretch away and we haven’t even reached St.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.