Beauty It happens – it happens to many people – to fall in love with Venice immediately, as soon as you get to know it, and to remain unconditionally bound to that vision forever. And it happens – it happens to many people – to be fascinated by its beauty, to be possessed, almost thunderstruck by it. The two things are not identical, they are not just one perception, since beauty and the fascination it gives off can also be irritating, they can be an engagement that one cannot or does not want to carry on. To Iosif Brodskij happened both things: love, that he preserved and cultivated for many many years, and fascination for beauty, with its heavy burden of responsibility. “Sack this village”, “This city does not deserve any mercy”, are the words coming to his mind at the end of his book Fondamenta degli Incurabili (Quayside of the Incurables). In the beginning, he said that anyone arriving to Venice goes immediately into some clothes’shop, tries to adapt his aspect to the environment, because beauty demands harmony, it is impossible to compete with it, it is too big and the struggle is too uneven, so if you cannot win it, then it is better to make friends with it. But all this respect demanded by beauty does not necessarily mean love, sometimes it means even hate, desire of decay and destruction: that is why “this city does not deserve any mercy”.

Water. With beauty being so high, so great, so compelling, the other difficult presence is water: «water-alias-time», is how Brodskij calls it, because water contains, besides the reflexion which doubles beauty, the perception of an eternally present time, that answers to beauty: «it wrings it, rewrings it, beats, crumbles, but at the end it takes to the open sea». «Time-alias-water»…, and one imagines a river’s uninterrupted flow, a water that runs continuously and takes everything away, but still if you look at canals inVenice everything seems to be motionless, static, ending in a few metres’space. Or at the most, in some places and in some moments, one sees the obstinacy of the wave, that comes back and asks for space. It is exactly for this reason that water in Venice resembles time: because it flows silently, it moves but remains identical, equal to itself, even if it has one hour, one day, one year more each year, going on for centuries. Compared to this eternally present time, a man’life appears as declining, always precarious, always insufficient. One understands it in lightings, apparitions, like the cardiopatic narrator of the book, that escapes to Paris crisis-stricken, in order to follow a treatment far from this decay, for that dead friend that once borrowed him a book on Venice and, finally, for the dust.

Dust. Walking between the calli of Venice for the first time, you ask yourself what is there beyond the walls, beyond the «vertical lace of the façades» of those palaces, those houses so close to each other, so clinging to each other that the promiscuity of the neighbourhood becomes cohabitation more than indiscretion. You aren’t satisfied with partial answers, attempts to imagine one house like another one, similar to many other houses, all the same in all the world, because the marble lacework of the façades and the falling off of the walls corroded by dumpness call to mind complex fantasies, inhabited by dark figures and unheard-of beauties. And so you let Brodskij hold your hand and take you to the halls of a palace of a friend’s friend’s friend’s aquaintance: «We found ourselves in a dimly illuminated gallery, with a convex ceiling, bristling with putti». And after the galleries come many rooms, then putti, curtains, marbles, mirrors, frames, and after all, finally comes dust, like the unmistakable and inevitable presence of time. It is then, when the morbid exploration of the unfathomable maze of rooms reachs its climax, that the vision becomes real: «I imagined the butler, entertaining his favourite there, in that room: a shivering island of naked flesh struggling in the middle of a linen sea, under the implacable eyes of that plaster masterpiece covered in dust». Whilst dust is time layering on plaster, the human composition of beauty and stench is a relationship without future, without procreation because it is homosexual, without the eternity of time and mankind. Because human beings, in Venice, have to endure the city, that proves their inferiority.

Incurability. Man, person, individual, me, you, all of us against beauty, water, dust, time. It is a struggle, a fornication, an unceasing invective, requesting an unceasing effort, an unceasingly armed hand, the look always ready to seduce. Not everybody gets along with it, not everyone is able to cope with the comparison. Then there is someone who preferes to wear a mask – the mask, the Carnival, the symbol of Venice – to hide their inability. One tries to deny time, that is everywhere, that is continuously saying the truth, but weakness and hope make one deny also evidence, like Olga Rudge, partner of Ezra Pound, who denies with childlike naivety the poet’s fascist ideas, his crazy extremism. It is a dialogue full of tenderness, weakness, pity and cynicism, that ends simply so: «We went out, turned left and in two minutes we were at the Quayside of the Incurables». The Incurables, in Venice, are the mentally disturbed, the ones who cannot bear the comparison with beauty and time, those who give up, who renounce, the ones you meet on the street, scolding at houses, canals, people.

A tear. Who does not go so far, who does not succumb to madness, drops a tear anyhow in front of such a great beauty: «In this city, you can drop a tear in several occasions. Given that beauty is a particular distribution of light, the one that more suits the retina, a tear is the way in which the retina – like the tear itself – admits its unability to hold beauty. […] In the world we are living, this city is the eye’s great love. After that, everything is disappointing. A tear anticipates what the future of the eye will be». A tear, for the ones who love this city, and for the ones who are fascinated by its beauty, can gush out also reading this lucid and passionate book. «I was wrong not to be born here», is then what everybody think, echoing Brodskij’s thought.