Dearest Joseph (2019 - 2021) is an epistolary tale set in Venice. A dialogue between two languages – photography and prose – and a third interlocutor: Joseph Brodsky. It is a story tracing the end of a relationship, when love remains despite everything. A moment of sentimental mourning.
The after-time is never defined. Its edges are uncertain, malleable. Stretchmarks of the soul. A year lasts a day; four seasons become four years, four journeys. Twenty-four hours.
Dearest Joseph,
Venice is disappearing. Sometimes I wish I could as well.
My name is Vittoria Persi.
You do not know me, but you will come to do so, and most of all, forgive me for disturbing you.
If I were capable of establishing bonds, I would not write to you; I would be in the company of the woman I love and whom I do not know how to love. The one who says she desires me yet has no desire to see me. Just who is taking whom for a ride, perhaps we shall never know.
I’m writing to you, Joseph, because I need to speak to someone, and you are the only presence in this absence that I have to learn to live in.
A void cannot be filled for the sake of it. It is not something I am missing – it’s her. I don’t need a surrogate to fill the gap.
It is a question of jagged pieces: they have to fit together. To be harmonious. There are no scales to weigh up states of mind. How much does a loss weigh? A loss is a loss and its specific weight is subjective. Instead,
in my case my excessive love of solitude led me down the wrong path and made me choose the end of our relationship. Big mistake? I still do not know.
My relationship is with absence, and I feel sadly well in it.
There are those who do not know how to be alone and those who do not know how to be in company – they are both forms of fear. Yet I believe those who know how to be alone have the upper hand.
She would tell me I was crazy. I already knew that.
What does the gaze perceive when someone dear starts to drift away?
A separation, a distancing, a departure. An end. Everything slows down; solemnly, one observes, the eyes travel, letting nothing escape their gaze, the trails of movement. An emotional slo-mo. Everything seems clearer, but it isn’t in the slightest.
Memory is a muddled film, sometimes a silent one, with its ephemeral, evanescent images. They appear out of focus but they are in fact blurred; frames that overlap still do not match. The sad soul deconstructs the landscape. The city disappears. Yet from far away, for a little while longer, the edges remain sharp. The ghosts can be seen. Then everything dissolves.
“For in this city a man is more a silhouette than his unique features, and a silhouette can be improved.”
She had a photograph taken from the window of a speeding train. The blurred vegetation, the unsteady hand, the joy of getting lost. I do not know what story she felt lay behind that print. I saw it once by accident; she kept it wrapped in tissue paper between two pieces of card. There was no signature, no dedication. She did not want to talk about it.
I have no talents, although I would like to know how to draw, play an instrument or how to sew. If only I could photograph it, I would capture Venice from that speeding train window, where thoughts move faster than footsteps and gazes. And along with the gaze, the water moves flowingly. Of course, a hundred and twenty-fifth of a second would suffice, but it would be a disservice to both water and time. I would rather paint it with trembling eyes, hand and heart.
I miss her as if I had started missing her only yesterday, yet three years have gone by. I miss her like someone who might come back; I miss her like someone who will never return.
On awakening, I was embittered, saddened by this ability to replace, to substitute. To remove. Yes, to move on, but also by this emotional layer with no residues.
“An object, after all, is what makes infinity private”.
That dream is the underlying thought in which this letter and these four journeys to Venice are rooted, in order to try “painting this place’s likeness [...] at four seasons.”
I am going in order to make peace. You, Joseph, would say you need to try it “for divorces also – both in progress and already accomplished.”
My own, rather than a divorce, is a mourning. And so here I am, trying to accept this separation.
Too much love, too slow. I was not her world, and I would have never been able to become part of it. Not two pennies to rub together, chaotic and inconclusive. I’m all about getting lost, not prioritising objectives. Worlds apart from one another, not a part of one another.
Yet I was her language. For her, the norm; for me, the reconciling exception.
Incompatible. We could not share; she could not see me close up. If I wanted the shade, she forced me to lie in the sun, and if I wanted the sun, she would choose the spot where the shade would creep in soonest. And yet there were two benches, not far from one another, where we could be fairly close yet far enough to look, to smile at one another. From the shade, I would imagine courting her, falling in love with her. Going back home together, making fun of one another. No, I had to suffer in the sun.
I continue to imaging her without seeing her, with no happy ending.
Intermittent anxiety, I pace nervously up and down the kitchen, shallow breathing. I have to go. I’m not late but I feel as if I were. Luckily, I’m alone: I would be volatile and destructive and she would foment it.
Today I would be able to look into her eyes and see love, beyond my thorny character. My legs are shaking; I cannot reach the station by public transport. I concede myself a taxi. The driver is from Arles. We talk about lavender and pink salt flats. He tells me about the French foreign legion. He sings Edith Piaf.
I arrive at the station; the crowd confuses me.
I wish she were here, getting on my nerves or making me want to take her hand, to question her gaze, pull her hair back and kiss her neck.
The train is about to leave.
Water, chatter, embarrassment, joy and annoyance await me. I will be irritated by the excessive enthusiasm of others, to the point I could be taken to task for my pent-up powers of expression.
The happy days are the ones when I miss her the most. Off I go.
Fixing up an absent space. Starting a new relationship. Letting the emptiness of environments gets to know me. Preplanning, even if the result is not yet clear. Enhancing surfaces. Occupying them well, with harmony. New visions, new journeys on the spot. The perception of the place. Definitions are boundaries for the imagination. She needed to feel like she was in the province; she could do so as long as she didn’t see the “block letters saying VENICE.”
Wandering around and improvising, knowing that no one is waiting for me is what makes me feel free. That is another reason why it did not work and will never work with anyone.
I buy tickets for the vaporetto to Sain Michele Island; the ticket seller asks me for twenty euro. I’m not good at maths, but I understand she wants double what I am supposed to give her. I ask her why; it’s just me and her there. She says: “Five euro each way, returns for two people is twenty euro.”
“But I’m alone.”
“Then it’s ten.”
Apparently, one doesn’t go to Venice alone. It is not allowed. Instead, I
find seeing it alone as a privilege. It does not “worsen one’s complexes and insecurities”; on the contrary, like in the immense vastness of nature, I do not feel small – I feel good, relishing in my own gaze. Those moments in which I perceive happiness to the point of wanting to say it out loud: I am happy.
I’m coming back, Joseph. I’m leaving in the evening and I’ll be sleeping in Venice.
It’s cold, and if I were to rent a room in a flat, I would run the risk of not finding adequate heating or a decent water heater. For that “selflessness [...] imperative,” this time I have booked a room in a hotel, one of the few open in Autumn at reasonable rates. Not least because there are now more flats to rent than hotel rooms.
It is not actually that cold; it’s damp. I cross the Ponte degli Scalzi; there is a trace of fog. The siren sounds, announcing the eminent arrival of high water.
This Autumn is bright at times with the highest tides in history - one hundred and eighty-seven centimetres – much taller than me.
I guess the direction and set off. Every now and then I check the time;
I do not want to be late to check-in, but I know I’m expected. I wander; sometimes I take a wrong turn, bumping into a dead end, and then suddenly the water opens up before me.
My backpack and scarf make me sweat, so I unzip my jacket. I’m holding a bag with Wellington boots in it.
Once we had arrived in the room, with its warm red fabrics, laden with the fatigue of walking and humidity, we would have made love. Slipping over her body, pressing against every part of it, leaving her smell on my face for
a while and smiling when it remerged. Then we would have looked for food, red-faced, dishevelled and thoroughly pleased with ourselves.
One of those heart-warming moments when we would have not argued because she had to work and I wanted to go for a walk. In Venice, there were no exhausting negotiations to reach a compromise for our leisure time: “Yes, but let’s make it quick.” Our happiness was quick.
sit down to drink wine and eat tramezzini. The water is level with the canal, though when it hits against the quayside, it splashes up. The bar inside is full, the windows all fogged up: there is humidity inside too, from damp to damp.
Everything looks very nice. I quickly order and get out; I need to
breathe. My feet sink into the water and I let my gaze wander. I look at the Fondamenta Zattere from afar; I see her walking around, her neck nestled in her coat. Joseph, I am in her watercolour. She is sitting with me; she smiles at me through her wrinkles. We are old, we drink wine and make fun of each other as only old people who still love each other can do. We get up and walk arm in arm, spying on people through the shop windows.
I pass by the flat, Joseph, and off I go. Third trip. I can stay three days and two nights, no more.
Here I am, once again, during her season, her month: January. It has a certain sacredness. Although this letter seems even more inappropriate and presumptuous to me.
During the journey I re-read Watermark: An Essay on Venice, for the fourth or fifth time. Despite your words, Joseph, are the same, I am no longer the same person, and my attention falls in a different direction each time. This is the outward journey, though it might be the second-to-last.
For this idea of ‘painting’ Venice in the four seasons, after Winter I would be lacking Spring only. I do not know what to expect. Whether it is a healing from myself or from her. If not an unchanged situation, a greater degree of awareness, of serenity. Openness, resignation. Waiting. I don’t know, maybe I will understand in some time, then I will send you a postcard: just a picture and a few lines, I promise.
I wanted a postcard from China.
The borderline between hope and resignation. Trust and defeat. Perseverance and abandonment.
I get off, exalted, suspended in a smile on the steps of the station: not even the church of San Simeon Piccolo can be seen. I hop lightly. I cross Campo San Geremia; I go along Rio di Cannaregio, as far as the Fondamenta San Giobbe. Everything is shrouded in caìgo.
If you don’t turn around and concentrate on what is in front of you, you feel like you’re abandoning yourself – one leap and you disappear into nothingness, lightweight, forever.
It is not necessarily a sad thought, it is more of a sense of liberation than of ending. It is a little rush that comes over me every time I start to lean towards the void.
And I do not know whether you make me believe that “it’s not over for [me] yet” or if it is not perhaps a desire for ending. Suffice to say it “renders [...] more extemporal” and makes me invisible.
Spring.
Let’s go, dearest Joseph – we might manage to avoid the rain.
The last season, the last journey, the last embrace.
A year has gone by. What has changed? Maybe nothing, sometimes a slightly more stable peace of mind.
Arriving by car is different: first you smell it, then you see the lagoon.
I get lost a couple of times before ending up in Rome Square. I had already come to Venice by car, when I was scarcely ten years old. I remembered it bigger. Those childhood journeys, which more than a ‘learning experience’ were an honorary degree in “self-disgust and insecurity.”
“The city abandoning the pupil,” and still I carry the blue in my eyes. If I close them, I can still see Venice. For a few days, I can still feel myself there: land sickness. Surrounded by water.
Of course, Joseph, “a sojourn here is the best therapy” and “this city improves time’s clock, beautifies the future.”
I tried to grasp beauty, or failing that, to adjust myself “to perceive virtue in [my] ugliness.”
I already knew it. I had seen it, I had felt deeply sad, but I had not told her. I could not have explained it. I have a photo of that moment, or rather, the moment before I processed the thought. One of those times when she seemed beautiful and I was at peace. I was on the balcony, looking in from the outside, she was cooking and drinking wine. I took photos of her without her noticing, then she smiled at me. How much beauty there is in simplicity, in the protection afforded by habit. I keep a few other episodes in which I believe if it had been just us, we would have been wonderful, forever.
I came back: an epiphany. I am “an easy target for oblivion.” The day would come when she would forget me. Removed with great skill, as if I had never existed. Vittoria who?
I am the dead one. With no mourning, no memory.
“Yet I suppose a case could be made for fidelity when one returns to the place of one’s love, year after year, in the wrong season, with no guarantee of being loved back. For, like every virtue, fidelity is of value only so long as it is instinctive or idiosyncratic, rather than rational. Besides, at a certain age, and in a certain line of work at that, to be loved back is not exactly imperative. Love is a selfless sentiment, a one-way street.”
Thank you, Joseph.
Your company and your listening have been invaluable.
Vittoria Persi
© serena guerra