‘And what courage he had. Many gondoliers are afraid of the water; a puff of wind or a drop of rain will send them scurrying for shelter. Storms get up very suddenly on the lagoon: we had many picnics there in exposed places miles from Venice; often we had to fight our way home against a head wind (for I rowed, too), and it took hours and was really a little dangerous, for a gondola is a most unseaworthy boat. But Antonio never minded that, or getting wet to the skin. He never reproached me with disregarding his warnings about the weather; he contented himself with saying that no other gondolier would do what he did; he was nothing if not boastful, but this at least was true. He had a great regard for appearances and perhaps he saw himself as Ajax defying the lightning. But in a humbler, less exhibitionistic way, he could be very devoted. Like a policeman, he hated having to run; it upset his dignity. Though amphibious, he was primarily a sea-creature, and though by no means awkward on dry land, he had a stiff-legged way of running—throwing his weight from one foot to the other as if he were reaching out to crush a beetle. He must have known it was inelegant, and it was particularly unsuitable to Venice, where an unguarded movement may easily knock someone over. But he would dash off to the station with my late letters and come back breathless but triumphant, saying “Ho fatto un corso!”—“I ran like the wind!”—and without making any complaint.

‘His dignity! It all came back to that. “Far figura”—how do you translate it? “Keeping up appearances”? Face-saving is at the root of the Italian character. He didn’t mind being a thief, but he didn’t like being called one. Among the popolo in Italy an insult is a thing in itself: un’ offesa, and whether it be well founded or not makes little difference to the gravity of the offence, perhaps none. By taking umbrage he was only acting according to his principles; a less dramatic course would have lowered him in his own esteem. How easy it would have been to treat the whole thing as a joke! And perhaps I could have, if he hadn’t wounded my own self-esteem by believing he could bamboozle me about the bottle—and all to satisfy his artistic sense! I had only to think of his stern accusing face—“What a lot of cognac you and Mr. Gretton drank last night, signore—what a lot, what a lot!” to feel myself getting hot under the collar. Of course I shouldn’t have minded so much if I hadn’t had all those things stolen from me in the war—all my trinkets, my cuff-links, my watch-chains, my travelling-clock—don’t laugh, Arthur!’

‘I wasn’t laughing,’ I said, though in fact I was on the verge of a nervous titter, such was his vehemence.

‘You looked as if you might be going to. Of course materially, it wasn’t serious, and yet in a way it was; before the war one bottle of brandy more or less didn’t matter, you could replace it; but how can you replace three thousand lire now, I ask you? And it was the principle of the thing. Somehow I should have minded less if he had had one redeeming virtue instead of one damning vice. His whole being seemed to be organized for deceit. But most Italians are that way, I fancy.’

‘I shouldn’t choose a gondolier as a touchstone of moral behaviour, either in Italy or elsewhere,’ I said, tired of his coat-trailing.

‘Oh, you wouldn’t, wouldn’t you?’ my friend said nastily. ‘Why not? Because he is a poor man, I suppose?’

‘No,’ I said, not wishing to be hoisted on the petard of social snobbery. ‘Because for centuries gondoliers have been dependent on the whims of well-to-do people like yourself, and have had to shape their conduct accordingly. With them it’s a matter of economics, not of morals.’

‘You would defend the Devil,’ he said violently. Then with a sudden change of mood he went on:

‘It was so ironical that during all the war years when we ought to have been wishing each other dead and so on, we hadn’t had an unkind thought about each other, and now, when our Governments had graciously announced we could be friends, we weren’t on speaking terms.

‘As soon as I could I wrote him a letter, in effect apologizing to him for having let him rob me and asking him to come back. I couldn’t bring myself to say that I had drunk the brandy myself or that Giuseppina had. I gave the letter to Giuseppina to post and never doubted it would do the trick. I’ve sometimes wondered whether she did post it, she hated him so much. Certainly he didn’t answer, or come back. Did I afterwards find out he wasn’t the real culprit? Unfortunately, no.

‘Lacking Antonio, Venice seemed an utterly strange place to me. For one thing I had never been ill in Venice before. I had always been particularly well—and, for me, active. The question was how to find time for all the things I wanted to do. And you know how, in that state, one doesn’t look about one very much. I won’t say I never looked at Venice, but I looked at it with the eye of health and hurry—any eye that doesn’t see much. Now I was a prisoner. My sphere of action was limited to one room and, as I got better, to two. I felt utterly cut off. In my old flat I had a telephone and Antonio to run errands for me: here I had no telephone, no Antonio, only Giuseppina as a link with the outside world: she had all the housework to do, as well as marketing and catering for me and, when I was ill, acting as my nurse: and I did not like to inflict any further duties on her, unless it was to ask her to post a letter.

‘And I didn’t want to write any letters. No! After Antonio’s defection my unwillingness to make myself known to my friends in Venice increased, until it amounted to a nervous inhibition. When I thought I was getting over it, I was really getting used to it. A feeling of snugness enfolded me; I was enclosed in my anonymity as in a cocoon, and I had no wish at all to break my bonds; indeed, every day I spun new ones, I didn’t want my convalescence to end and invented new symptoms which would keep me indoors. Giuseppina, with native shrewdness, was quick to discover this. “Si è impressionato,” she said, “you are frightening yourself”—and so I was, though not quite in the way she meant.

‘At the back of my mind was always the thought that Antonio, though absent as a friend was present as an enemy, and my dread of meeting him, if I went out, began to extend to all the inhabitants of Venice. So I was doubly a prisoner, a prisoner of myself and a prisoner of the flat; and when I got tired of the view of my own mind, I had the windows of my two rooms to look out of.

‘From my bedroom windows I enjoyed a roofscape. Domes and towers gave it grandeur and formal beauty, but what chiefly fascinated me was the roofs themselves. I came to know them as intimately as did the sparrows that hopped about on them: a sparrow on the house-tops, that’s what I was myself.

‘Low-pitched, almost flat, the roofs reminded me of shallow pyramids or squat pagodas—Venice has many forms and contours that suggest the East. Red-brown and weather-stained, the tiles lay along them like strings of broken flower-pots, on which, when the sun came out, the lizards basked and darted. (It didn’t come out very much: June had set in wet.) Instead of pots or cowls, the chimney-stacks had roofs on them like tables. Crowning some of the roofs, and higher than the chimney pots, were the altanas, platforms where the washing was hung out; flimsy-looking structures whose posts and palings made a pattern on the sky like Chinese Chippendale. Some of them had small hut-like attachments, bonnets or hoods to keep the weather out. There was something new every time one looked, some new arrangement of lines and surfaces; all, or nearly all, brown-pink and grey, with here and there the vivid green of a creeper, or the top of a cypress nodding against a wall.

‘This view had the slightly hypnotic effect on me that an abstract or a cubist picture might have. It took me out of myself, but not, as you will easily believe, towards anyone else. Except for a woman shaking a duster from a window or hanging washing out on an altana, it was a roofscape without figures—a geometrical world.