The Passion
Over the water in that city of madmen they are preparing for Christmas and New Year. They don’t make much of Christmas apart from the Child, but they have a procession at New Year and the decorated boats are easy to see from my window. Their lights bob up and down and the water beneath shines like oil. I stay up the whole night, listening to the dead moan round the rock and watching the stars move across the sky.
At midnight the bells ring out from every one of their churches and they have a hundred and seven at least. I have tried to count, but it is a living city and no one really knows what buildings are there from one day to the next.
You don’t believe me?
Go and see for yourself.
We have a service here on San Servelo and a ghoulish business it is with most of the inmates in chains and the rest jabbering or fidgeting so much that for the few who care it’s impossible to hear the Mass. I don’t go now, it’s not a place to bask. I prefer to stay in my room and look out of the window. Last year Villanelle came by in her boat, as close as she could get, and let off fireworks. One exploded so high that I almost touched it and for a second I thought I might drop down after those falling rays and touch her too, once more. Once more, what difference could it make to be near her again? Only this. That if I start to cry I will never stop.
I re-read my notebook today and I found:
I say I’m in love with her, what does that mean?
It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling.I t is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly she explains me to myself; like genius she is ignorant of what she does.
I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.
There is a frost tonight that will brighten the ground and harden the stars. In the morning when I go into the garden I’ll find it webbed with nets of ice and cracked ice where I over-watered today. Only the garden freezes like that, the rest is too salty.
I can see the lights on the boats and Patrick, who is with me, can see into St Mark’s itself. His eye is still marvellous especially so since walls no longer get in the way. He describes to me the altar boys in red and the Bishop in his crimson and gold and on the roof the perpetual battle between good and evil. The painted roof that I love.
It’s more than twenty years since we went to church at Boulogne.
Out now, into the lagoon, the boats with their gilded prows and triumphant lights.A bright ribbon,a talisman for the New Year.
I will have red roses next year. A forest of red roses.
On this rock? In this climate?
I’m telling you stories. Trust me.
