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them, at home in many places, I might solidify my view of Venice. When
I explored churches, museums, palazzi, or crossed the expanse, great as a
bite, of the Piazza San Marco with Carlos, I had a cicerone who was,
at
once, an habitue and an erudite, curious foreigner. As for Jerzy
Kosinski, he seemed to belong here, everywhere and nowhere.
On our last evening in Venice, we dined at the Cipriani Hotel
where Carlos and Sylvia were staying. Distanced only by meters of water
from the main island, it was an opposite world, with neither romance
nor a past. A cheerful, luxurious, manicured resort, it had resisted the
infection of art and decomposition situated nearby. The swimming
pools, tennis courts, and flower gardens were well-tended, related to
their own type in very country. In the sumptuous dining room, one rich
international course followed the next, each dish covered with a shining
silver dome. We ate and drank heartily. Only Jerzy was abstemious,
barely wetting his thin lips on his champagne glass and nibbling on a
sliver of toast with smoked salmon. He required scant ordinary
nourishment; his electric vitality was fed by some other unknown source.
That night his discourse was sharp, abrasive, provocative, the ice-pellet
words freezing even the brilliant conversation of Carlos, who observed
Kosinski with the attentiveness of the novelist always on the lookout for
material that might, someday, be utilized for his works. Fuentes is very
much of this earth, but just as an avowed scientist also may be attuned to
the unproven dimension of the metaphysical, this writer often dips his
pen into the ink of the surreal.
On the dock, Kiki, Jerzy, my husband and I said goodbye to Carlos
and
Sylvia, promising to have a reunion soon, and we boarded the
va–
poretto
for the brief return transit. Kosinski reclined among the pillows
on
the deck, but he did not relax, his body was an arrow ready to
spring from a taut bow.
"The night has just begun for us," he said. "We usually hire a
gondola at this hour to explore the back
callies.
Along the way we pick
up
prostitutes here, sailors there, and they join us aboard. We amuse
ourselves in various ways."
I pictured this
Walpurgisnacht
orgy; Kiki, Amazonian and practical,
bent to her master's will. Now we were approaching Venice, its domes
and
towers rising abruptly out of the water. In the flickering light on
the
vaporetto,
Kosinski's face had a compelling, eerie beauty like a Satanic
mask, worn by an eighteenth-century reveler at a ball in a Renaissance
palazzo.
When we disembarked, Jerzy and Kiki moved off in one
direction, we in another. For no apparent reason, I looked back just as
Kosinski and his companion were disappearing through the door of their
hotel. The floating brothel - had it been only invented for our benefit,
