Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell Read Free Book Online

anatomical analogy. To their left, excluded from their intimacy, the long thin island of Giudecca stretches out alone, a parable in geography of the hazards of a partie a trois. For consolation, like a divine hot-water bottle, it has at its foot the little island of San Giorgio Maggiore.
    The church of San Giorgio, therefore, and a little afterwards that of the Salute, rising on the left at the entrance to the Grand Canal, are the first of the great religious buildings of Venice to offer themselves to the admiration of the tourist. That they are to the honour of exclusively Christian deities seems by no means certain: there is a too Eastern voluptuousness in their swelling domes, a too Athenian elegance in their Palladian facades. They seem designed for travellers who would wish, on setting forth, to murmur a prayer to Allah as well as to Saint George; or who, giving thanks for a safe home-coming on the wide steps of the Salute, would include a word or two to the goddess Aphrodite.
    With the palaces along the Grand Canal there is no such ambiguity. They, one does not doubt for a moment, were built entirely to the greater glory of their owners, in a single-minded spirit of keeping up with the Foscari. If one facade has two tiers of columns and carved stonework, the one next to it has three; the one opposite has columns even more delicate; the stonework of the next is pierced and drawn in a still more intricate embroidery. So that one almost expects, seeing them reflected in the water, to find there too some further embellishment.
    I experienced, as we travelled through this great corridor of mirrors, the emotion I had last felt during the transformation scene of the pantomime, when taken to it, at the age of seven, by my maternal grandmother. She took me again when I was eight, for my maternal grandmother was always very kind to me; but by then I was less easily impressed. The pleasure was one, therefore, that I had not looked to feel again.
    Turning off to the right somewhere after the Accademia Bridge, we disembarked at the landing stage of the Cytherea.
    “Signore, signori,” said Graziella, “dinner will be at eight o’clock. If you will come to see me before then in the reception area, I will explain to you about our excursions. You have plenty of time to wash and repose yourselves; but dress is quite informal.” She glanced at me, however, in a way which suggested that the management of the Cytherea, broad-minded though it might be, would prefer to draw the line at mud-stained trousers and a blood-spattered shirt.
    We retired, as instructed, to wash and repose ourselves. I directed my mind, while so engaged, to the subject of the beautiful young man, lamenting once more the absence of your own always admirable counsel. Deprived of it in fact, I sought it in hypothesis: “If Selena were here,” I asked myself, “what would she advise?”
    I answered without hesitation that you would recommend a pragmatic approach: not to base my plans on some theoretical first principle, but to examine the situation as it was and see what advantage could be taken of it.
    This naturally led me to think of canals. We were in a city full of canals. How could this circumstance be turned to my advantage? One possibility would be to fall into one and be rescued by the beautiful young man. That, I thought, would surely lead to something. There was, however, a flaw in this scheme: I might fall into a canal, but the young man might not rescue me.
    Another possibility would be for the young man to fall into one and be rescued by me. That seemed even more certain to lead to something. But I saw that this scheme also was by no means foolproof. The only way of ensuring that he fell into a canal would be to push him into it: unless this could be done with extraordinary discretion, the enterprise might well prove self-defeating. Nor was I entirely confident that once I had got him into the canal I would be able to get him out of it