10 Things I Don't Know About You

In Venice there is magic.  I think the air is full of it, steeped in it.

But when the gondolas glide winged on water, and the dusk settles like music, They come.  They, who move like the tides - move with the tides.  Smathered in the remains of afternoon sunscreen.   Loud and crude and be-hatted.  It is a sacrilege, I think sometimes when I see them.  A sacrilege of magic.  They are eager-lipped, straining, moving in a silence not made for motion - all of them - all of them who come; and Venice shudders at the sound of them.  Their voices are guttural in our world; in our world where colours, tones, sounds, Beauty itself is muted, magic substance.

And I think they are all like that.  They - and the Flashes.  The Flashes have become a source of Fear to us.  They, like swords shifting light; moving silence; stilling magic, perhaps, when the evenings are ripe for it.  And in the nights the Flashes are the greatest; the tourists, loudest; and we, silent and shaken; and Venice, broken.

I swim out in the twilights; and find the island where the tourists do not go, because they say that the ghosts of the mermen and mermaids live there; and in the twilights they rise, white, shuddering like Venice, and one can hear them weeping.  Their tears smell like the dead roses in the gardens on the waterfront.  Smokily, duskily fragrant - and yet with a kind of golden scent, a smell of ripe deadness, around them.  We all know how to smell laughter; but I can smell tears, and I wish - I wish I did not know how to. 

I am not afraid of finding the island.  I am not afraid of hearing them cry, even though the smell of tears is like death; like the death of something beautiful; something like roses bleeding marigold and scent when they die, and apple-cheeked petals which don't have any more apple in them when the wind rips them in one of its tempers, and then tourists crush them with their large loose thongs, which squinch and squirm against the ground.  Like the boats which grumble and grind their way in, and out.  I am not afraid of anything; for I think the fathers, and the mothers, of our people see what Venice is; and I like to think that the island is still ours because of them. 

I am not afraid of anything.

And yet, I am afraid.

I am afraid that it will not last.

We are riding on a storm, and yet the sun smiles on us. 

 Smiles on a smathered spectacle; and on Venice sleek, tawny, langorous like a cat drunk on milk.