Extract from the Journal Written at Night, translated by Ronald Strom.

Presented here by kind permission of Peter Owen Ltd, London.

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A Venetian Portrait

I read the following death notice in yesterday’s Corriere: "Countess Giuditta Terzan has died at the age of eighty-seven at her home in Calle San Barnaba in Venice. She went to her eternal rest at peace with God. This announcement of death is made by her sister Giovanna Olindo in Rome. Friends are requested not to disturb the deceased’s quiet departure with condolences."

I came across the death notice by chance last evening when I was looking for the television program listings. I never moved from my chair. How do distant memories suddenly come pouring back? Probably differently for each of us; in my case they come storming back in violent tumult. It was only the next day, after a night of restive dreamless sleep, that events, people’s faces, and dates fell into place the way a jigsaw puzzle does as the picture pattern is gradually reconstructed.


In the spring of 1946, as April turned to May, I went to Venice on business that was important for me (and for my superiors in the army office in Rome). I expected the trip would take two weeks at most, and that was how long I told my wife I would be away. I had to make a brief stop in Florence as well in connection with those matters.


Trains and long-distance buses were readily available by then, but those of us in uniform trusted only military transport. The drawback, if you were in a hurry, and the attraction, if you were tempted by sightseeing, were the frequent long stops. My errand was urgent, but not so urgent that it could not be extended on some pretext. The first jeep (American) took me to Orvieto, and there I spent the afternoon and night, after making arrangements with a British passenger truck (army excursion) for the next stage to Florence.


I regret that it is not possible in reminiscence-after so many years!-to recapture the atmosphere of my first encounters with the marvels of Italian architecture, painting, and landscape, the discoveries made by virgin eyes that are effaced by time or altered by successive encounters. All that I remember is the state of numbness and inner trembling, which had nothing to do with aesthetic experience, in which 1 spent several hours sitting and kneeling by turns in the Duomo, in the Chapel of the Last judgment, to be precise. Something about it seemed to cleanse away the war and all the experiences of the six years past, something like a voiceless prayer for grace. It is odd that Rome did not have that effect on me.


In the evening I got drunk on Orvieto wine in a tavern near the Duomo, after which, indifferent to the spring chill, I slept the night on the stone benches on the other side of the Cathedral Square, and every reawakening sated me and again lulled me to sleep with the slightly blurred contour of the front of the Duomo, a facade that in the vernal darkness looked like an enormous pipe organ in stone.


I quickly settled the personal and office business 1 had in Florence, walked around the monuments in the center of town, and, disheartened by the crowds of soldiers and tourists, fled to the Arno. And there in a dusty little used-book shop, I spent a pittance on a large format Album di ritratti. It was with this Portrait Album in my knapsack, after a night spent at an address I had from Rome, that I stood at the city gates at dawn waiting for a vehicle to Venice or thereabouts. The only ride that turned up was for Padua.

In Padua I ran into some Polish officers I knew, and with them I reached Venice about noon. The city military command post in a small street near St. Mark’s Square was already closed but reopened in the early evening. For the time being I had to forgo assigned lodgings, to which I was entitled, and was prepared to try one of the few non-requisitioned hotels. They were supposedly all full; supposedly – the truth was written in the unwelcoming looks of the desk clerks.


So I returned to the square, where by a lucky stroke 1 managed to get the last free table in a café facing the basilica. And 1 took the book out of my knapsack.


The Portrait Album was clearly a commercial enterprise of the thirties, without so much as a mention of a scholarly editor or art historian. But the selection was large, the reproductions were good, and the notes on the artists were taken from serious biographies and monographs.


In anthological publications of this sort the whole effort is to capture the substance of the main subject. In the case of the Album it was the presentation of the widest possible range of nuances in the art of portraiture. There is an extremely fine line separating the good conventional portrait from the portrait the artist intends to be read – for the character, psyche, mind, and accumulated experience of the sitter (or of the artist himself in the self-portrait). I would roughly distinguish three categories of portraits, aside from the conventional portrait, of course, where resemblance and attire are the main concern. (1) There are portraits in which the artist immediately captures the essence of the facial expression (for example, Holbein and Rembrandt), which is why, at least for me, there is no doubt that every meaningful and rightly observed face speaks in full voice from the first glance. (2) There are emotional-poetic portraits that are as revealing and intense as a good poem (Van Gogh, say). (3) And there are portraits that are explorations of psychology, where the approach to the face is highly individualized (Lorenzo Lotto), in contrast with Titian’s handling of facial types.

Lorenzo Lotto! There was the name of that long-familiar great painter from Venice-primarily a portraitist. I write the name with some chagrin. Will the reader believe-and I am anxious that he should-that at the very beginning of my journey (and my story) I immediately happened on a thread of such importance to the "Venetian Portrait." If the reader blinks in skepticism as he continues, I ask only that he remember it is not the author who is responsible for the way destinies capriciously and unexpectedly intersect and branch out every which way; the author is just as surprised by the hand that guides his own.


The note about Lotto in the Portrait Album, backed up by very authoritative references, described a life dogged by misfortune. Lotto was born in the late fifteenth century in Venice. Our century and the end of the last finally saw him as an artist who sometimes even surpassed his contemporaries-Titian, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Durer-but throughout his long life was barely noticed and never fully appreciated by patrons and connoisseurs. He painted a great deal but was not a success; he was a vagabond in constant pursuit of even modest commissions. He earned a pittance from churches and for his portraits. The best evidence of his character is the exclamation of the venomous Aretino: "as good as goodness itself, as virtuous as virtue!" Contemporary accounts refer to his "spiritual darkness" and "religious unrest," which aroused suspicions that he secretly favored Lutheranism. He passed for a student of Bellini (it is now known that his master was Alvise Vivarini). His frescoes on religious subjects suggested a connection with Coreggio, and in portraiture Lotto outshone Stendhal’s favorite. He never married, and his itinerant life deepened his penchant for solitude. He was said to be "rootless." He wanted to be buried in his native Venice, but he was too poor to go back before he died. He spent the last years of his life as an "oblate" in the sanctuary of Loreto, where he could count on a daily bowl of soup. And there he died in his eightieth year (or thereabouts). Twenty years after the publication of the Portrait Album Bernard Berenson wrote a major monograph about the artist. Berenson’s opinion was that never before or since Lorenzo Lotto had any artist captured so much inner life in his sitter’s face.

It was getting dark, so I could go to the city military command post.


My official authorization was unreservedly accepted at once. The British sergeant in the housing section asked if I wanted a room in a hotel or in a partially requisitioned private home. I chose the latter. He looked down the list with a sorrowful air. With relief he finally pointed his finger at one of the addresses on the list and said I could have the whole ground floor of a small house in Calle San Barnaba. "But I have to tell you honestly," he added, "that the place is terribly run-down and neglected; it belongs to a Venetian countess who occupies the whole upstairs. And she’s a bitch and a witch."


That evening I found the little house without much difficulty, although it was back behind a row of buildings and connected to the calle by a dirty narrow passageway. The Contessa (that is how everyone in the neighborhood referred to her, without using her name or surname) took the slip from my hands, looked me up and down with barely disguised repugnance and a spark of anger in her black eyes. She brightened slightly on learning that I was Polish, gave me the key to the entrance door, and told me in advance that she "did not do housekeeping." She took sheets and towels from a chest of drawers and threw them on the bed, warned me that the stove did not work, likewise the bathroom, so I could take only a cold shower. And coffee was served at the bar in Campo San Barnaba by the church. She told me that she was a picture restorer and copyist and often worked nights, so she appreciated peace and quiet. "It would be best if we just ignored each other’s existence. I would also ask you not to conduct your social life here" (a euphemistic way of describing the military habit of bringing prostitutes home).


The British sergeant was right: the two rooms on the ground floor with kitchen and bathroom were appallingly neglected; fortunately, in addition to the wide bed, there was also an armchair by a bookcase full of books and painting portfolios. The rest-a table, chairs, and a chest of drawers-was thick with dirt, rickety, and out of place, as if there had been some sort of commotion. The house itself was almost in ruins, there were holes left by fallen plaster, and an iron staircase fastened to the wall outside led to the upper story. (The inside stairs were evidently not often used, and they creaked alarmingly when the Contessa came down to open the door for me.) But it was obvious that someone had been living in the other room not very long before. There were photographs and reproductions of paintings on the walls, and near the now-blocked glazed doors leading to the outside staircase stood a large, stylish, locked clothes cupboard (with no key in the lock). As it turned out the next morning, three fluffy cats dozed on the outside iron staircase during the day and scared off the rats that used the passageway to get from the calle to the canal.

Years later, when I became an admirer of The Aspern Papers, I thought of the little house in Calle San Barnaba every time I read the Henry James novella. It was truly wretched in comparison with the home of the two heroines of The Aspern Papers, but there was a similar air about it-how describe it?-surely, secretly creeping dissolution. And notwithstanding the fact that my Contessa was a good-looking woman, she looked forty, while old Miss Bordereau, in her youth the mistress of the famous poet Aspern, standing jealous guard over her highly prized love letters, was on the verge of the grave.


I collapsed from fatigue on the bed, and when I awoke the clock said ten o’clock. I felt hungry. I went out of the dark passageway on to the calle; the Campo was nearby. The bar by the church was still open but empty (before the summer season, ten is a very late hour for Venice). I went into the little room at the back, where I was given something cold to eat and a bottle of wine. The owner lowered the shutters in the entrance, turned out the light in the bar, and sat down with me. He already knew I was staying at the Contessa’s.


He needed no urging to speak: an evening chat "after hours" with a glass of wine is every barista’s delight. The Contessa was not born a countess. As a young student at the Academy of Fine Arts she was seduced by an older man, Count Terzan. She got pregnant. Terzan agreed to give her and the child his name and title, but on condition that after the wedding she would never try to see him again. He

bought her the little house in Calle San Barnaba, which was still in good repair at the time, and he retired to his estate near Sondrio in the Valtellina. Nothing was ever seen of him again here; he did not even come for the boy’s first communion.


When the boy finished secondary school, he went to study architecture at the university. Alvise, he was called Alvi for short. The mother earned a living for the two of them by restoring old pictures and copying masterpieces in the Accademia to order for wealthy customers. She was in love with Alvi (and he with her), he was her whole world, yes, yes, a good boy and nice-looking. She lived alone, like a nun.


"You saw for yourself that she is still young and pretty. She neglects the house, she neglects herself. She can barely make ends meet-for nowadays who is interested in restoring old pictures and ordering expensive copies in the Accademia-she owes so much that the grocery stores have stopped giving her credit. I give her a cappuccino and cornetto in the morning, I put a good face on it, because she tells me to put it on her tab. Contessa! She’s the illegitimate daughter of a school Janitress (that janitress later got married and had a second daughter, who is now a rich woman in Rome), but she acts like a real countess.


For three years she had lived alone: her son was drafted in the army early in 1943, and after a year in the service he stopped writing. "Did you notice how she runs out morning and afternoon to her mailbox outside? Nothing, two years and not a word, everybody knows, and since the war ended a year ago, a lot of Venetian soldiers have come back to their families. You see, you can see for yourself- in the morning out to the mailbox, then to the Accademia, in the afternoon back to the mailbox, and in the evening and sometimes all night the lights blazing in her room. She certainly spends most of what she earns on light. She rarely leaves the house. Only to the antique dealers and the stores that sell canvas and paint, they say. One day that little house of hers is going to fall down. It will fall down, I swear, and bury the Contessa together with her pictures. Well, it’s time to close, it’s midnight already. I’ve given you all the gossip I could, but I thought you ought to know who you’re living with. I suspect that what little money the army pays for the room must be a big item in her budget. The catch is that it will hardly last her more than three or four days."








I settled the official business and my own in a couple of days, so 1 could actually have started looking for transportation back to Rome. But you do not come to Venice for the first time in your life only to say farewell as soon as you have said hello. So with a sense of lightheartedness and ever-increasing bedazzlement, I became a tourist. Besides, the day I originally expected to leave was still far off.

Venice was the third big Italian city I saw just after the war, after Naples and Rome; I omit Florence, because that was a lightning visit to the museum-city with no chance for a deeper look.


Each of the three cities came out of the war different. Naples wore a pained smile (but a smile nevertheless) and a foxy gleam in the eye, which befitted a city that had never in its history met a single invader or any foreign domination that it could not tolerate and overcome with the secret weapon of sly, derisive submission. Rome grimaced in desperate panic with the meek and dazed look of a wretch who has suddenly lost most of what he had and is ready to give up all the rest just for the chance of ordinary life. Venice (perhaps because a year had already gone by since the end of the war) had an incomparable elegance and dignity and the mysterious hauteur of the sacrosanct, a city so proud that no one would ever dare to raise a hand against it.


The hardest pitfall to avoid is trite repetition when you are trying to express wonderment. But it is like lovers’ confessions and declarations. What happens is something on the order of absolving yourself of banality, you stop noticing it, because-or so it would seem-the hackneyed shopworn words begin to shine with a new light and all by themselves start to transcend their ordinary meanings.


So it was as I started falling in love with Venice. I fell deeper in love every day with the city that, to quote a poet, is made of the stuff of dreams, a city I marvelled at for a particular connection that needs mentioning: the conjunction of dream with waking. That brief moment before waking while the evaporating dream is still present but is already being dispelled by the light of day. Such for me was the stuff of Venice. Is it still so? Still unreal? On the bridges over the canals I lingered long, very long, as if I expected the mirror of dark water to preserve the sight of things gone by, the reflected flux of time. In the streets and squares I listened intently to steps, going away or just coming? I did not use the boats, I had to go everywhere on foot. Gondolas seemed like ghosts to me. I knew, and I readily accepted the fact, that never, even if I lived there or returned again and again over the years, would I ever get to the heart of Venice, the way you do with other cities. Because it does not have one. There is no heart or core to Venice, it is too liquid and fleeting, palpable yet elusive. I did not like St. Mark’s Square and its overly haughty basilica, I did not like the Ducal Palace, I did not like the overly concrete city sustained by a shred of hard ground. I preferred the Venice balancing on an edge, because it proved that dreams were real. Even on the serpentine Canal Grande (which is how most visitors describe it), crammed, God only knows how, with palaces as brittle as fantasies, Venice was and was not. The mere idea of Venice towered over Europe and at the same time threatened to disappear, the city was crumbling.





That is what I loved about Venice with bitterness and simultaneously with rapture, as I trod every possible route through the city from dawn till dusk. But the truth, which I cannot deny, is that from the first moment the Venice I loved was also the woman in whose house I lived.





It was ordinary military practice for British and American soldiers to apply the term "bitch" to women generally, especially to women they knew only by sight or not at all; so it was a form of conventional insult like spitting on the ground. But when the British sergeant at the command post applied the term "witch" to the Contessa, whom he had met only briefly on business, he accidentally struck home, there was something of the witch about her. It also showed when anger flashed in her lustrous black eyes, which were such a contrast to her very fair long hair. Then she looked dangerous without losing the least of her good looks-nay, her rare beauty. But the next moment her face darkened to soft velvet, and the flame in her black eyes did not so much subside as go elsewhere far away, somewhere known only to her. Tall, slender, and willowy, she did not look her age, probably forty. She had the gift of lightning transformation, as if she relied on constant mutation to confuse the observer. She was conscious of her beauty but without a trace of vanity. And omitting the violent outbursts she occasionally voiced, she was angelically mild, languorous, and composed. She adored two things: her son and Venetian painting. (The subject of her son was taboo, but the terrain of Venetian painting was always open for conversation.) She asked no questions herself, and she parried the most circumspect attempts at inquiry with a pucker of her brows and a tightening of her lips. She seemed consciously and purposively to guard her enigmatic quality. This profile after the fact is drawn from the time when, at her invitation, I clambered upstairs in the evenings. A delirious thought soon took shape in my mind: somehow she was Venice personified, no, no, not in the sense that she was (as they say) a worthy daughter of the city on the lagoon, sharing in some of its attributes, but in the sense that she herself was Venice, the object of admiration wholly enveloped by the marvellous city, like the world captured forever in the mirror of the canals. She was a plebeian child, and the acquisition of an aristocratic patina turned the humbly born into a pure resonant alloy.

For several days I walked "far" and "wide" exploring the city, plumbing the twisting calles, floundering over canals, lingering in the sun in small campos, leaning on parapets and low-walled bridges until the time came for the paintings. I would return home late, exhausted, and before going to sleep I would stare at the photographs of the Contessa’s son. There were four of them, framed under glass, hanging one over the other on the wall: a baby picture, then a boy, and two as a young university student. There was only one word for them, cherub. The childish curls and coils of ringlets gave way to a luxuriant mop of hair, but the eyes, the plump and then oval face never lost their look of goodness and ineffable sweetness. The face in the last photograph was somewhat harder but not enough to mar the angelic expression. There was a slight resemblance to his mother in the girlish lineaments of the mouth.








I knew, as I walked to the Accademia, what I most wanted to see. I glanced absently at the pictures in the first rooms, I looked into the side rooms, and I was beginning to think my search would come to nought when, in a corner of the collection of Venetian masters, I spotted my landlady. She was copying Lorenzo Lotto’s portrait of a Giovane nel suo studio. She was so absorbed by her work that she did not notice that someone behind her to one side was carefully observing her punctilious embroidery on a canvas of the same size as the original. Ah, Lotto! The left hand turning the pages of a book, a beautiful counterpoint to a somewhat ascetic, sleekly brushed head that did not exactly fit the giovane in the portrait’s title. The youth was leaving, rather he had already left his youth behind. I came a little closer and looked over her shoulder to see how she was managing with that splendid hand turning the pages. It was only then that she turned her head and responded to my greeting. Leaning against the wall and ready for sale was a copy of Giorgione’s Tempest, startling in its precision and nuances of aged color, almost surpassing the original in the figure of the naked woman with the infant on her knees.

We walked along the canal in front of the Accademia. It came as a surprise to her that I knew quite a bit about painting, especially about the art of portraiture. For her no one could compare with the Venetian portraitists, and she considered Lotto the finest. 1 might have raised a mild objection, but I had no wish to; I just gazed at her as if she were a living portrait. I nodded automatically, but she perceived that I was not giving my whole attention to the conversation. She smiled, and the barest trace of coquetry did not escape my notice when she said: "Do come upstairs this evening, I have to go back to my easel now."


Once my visits upstairs began, I would return evenings from my wandering around the city excited and impatient; actually I spent the whole day waiting only for the evening, and Venice became increasingly confused and perhaps identified with the Venetian woman. I hoisted myself up the creaking stairs with a bottle of whisky and canned food from the military store in Venice. What a pleasure it was to talk to her about painting after supper, with a glass of whisky in my hand! I forgot about Rome, about my wife, about my military duties. The "scheduled" two weeks of my stay in Venice went by, then a third week and a fourth. The mailbox, which the Contessa actually checked twice a day after the postman had come, now produced letters to me, reminders, summons, and reproaches. I replied with euphoric picture postcards but no word of explanation, like a drunk who does not hear what is said to him.


The upper floor was the same size, except that the partition between the workroom and the bedroom had been torn down, and the kitchen and bathroom on two sides had been widened. The whole floor was essentially one large workroom overwhelmed with canvases, sketchbooks, portfolios, and unbound reproductions everywhere, even the couch disappeared under their weight, so no cleverness was required to slip away to either of the wings. The actual workroom, which was also a little sitting room with two armchairs, was distinguished from the bedroom by the decoration of the walls. The walls of the bedroom were hung with photographs of her son, while the main wall of the workroom bore two very large, excellent, and duly framed Lotto reproductions: the Giovanetto in Milan’s Sforza Castle and the Triple Portrait in the gallery in Vienna. An easel stood by the window giving onto the passageway, which also had a view of the calle and the canal. There was a medium-size canvas on the easel covered by a Venetian patterned scarf Lotto had portrayed the Milan Youth, wearing an ornamented cap and a striped doublet and holding a book on his knees, in a position halfway between profile and full face; sitting sideways, he turned his ephebic face halfway to the observer. His features were remarkably regular, and his beauty was heightened by one large, deepset eye (the other eye was barely visible). The Vienna Triple Portrait looked like a jeu d’esprit on Lotto’s part. The man, perhaps thirty-five, has a wispy beard, one hand on his breast, weighed down by solemnity and the vicissitudes of life, and on each side his profile, the one to his right is sharper, the one to his left is not very expressive. The juxtaposition of the Milan portrait and the Vienna triple portrait on the same wall was striking: you might have thought the same person sat for the artist in early youth and in adulthood.

Was I in love with her? Could that fascination have been an illness, a beautiful illness? As far as I remember Stendhal’s tract De l’amour (I do not have it at hand), that great connoisseur of the human heart identified and described the position of collateral affections to the primary love, which is not expelled or imperiled by enchantment or fascination, what Italians (and Stendhal had total mastery of the Italian language of love), speaking about anyone so infatuated, express with the words è stato stregato, "he has been bewitched." What is clear is that an infatuation branching off the trunk of one’s feeling for another, truly beloved, likewise reaches what Stendhal calls "crystallization." In my case it was not so. It was blocked just before it was reached.


It was probably a month after I began paying my evening visits upstairs. (That morning I received an official letter from my military headquarters in Rome with the warning that further delay in Venice might be considered desertion; my office colleague added that my wife was beginning to "express serious concern.") About eleven o’clock, while we were talking and finishing a bottle together, the Contessa put her hand on my knee. I put my hand on hers. She did not withdraw hers; instead she closed her eyes. The next move was up to me; I felt my throat go dry, I knew that the nature of our relationship would change; that certainly was the "crystallization," ardent and prolonged. Suddenly someone called to her from the gateway, and the voice was clearly impatient. She broke away and went to the window: "Thank you, I’ll be right down, sorry." And to me: "I’ll be right back, there’s a telephone call for me at the neighbor’s." (Whether it was on principle" or concern for the expense, she did not want a telephone of her own.) She ran down the rickety steps, and from above I saw that she left the downstairs door open.

When I cooled down a bit, I was overcome by the temptation to uncover the canvas on the easel. It was not just a canvas. It was a picture in an old, worm-riddled gilt frame. There was the youth in Milan, already clearly outlined in half-profile, but with the face of a cherub; yes, it was Alvi’s face, I recognized it from his photographs. And to the right Alvi was seen full face, an even more striking image. The composition was conceived as a double portrait.


Just in time I threw the scarf back over the picture; I had heard the gate slam. The Contessa was trembling and all aflutter, she could barely speak. She finally managed to utter a few words, stammering slightly: "I beg you, please leave tomorrow, I need the downstairs flat, please, please, please."


I left early the next morning with my knapsack over my shoulder, but instead of rushing to the square by the station, I plunged one last time into Venice. Marvellous Venice, wonderful Venice, would I ever see you again? At dusk I realized that I still had the house keys in my pocket, and the Portrait Album was missing from my knapsack. In the evening I stole into Calle San Barnaba like a thief and noiselessly opened the door. I did not turn on the light in the room and gropingly tiptoed to the little table by the bed where the album lay. At that moment I heard steps on the gravel, and a tall man went up the iron steps wearing a military tunic and forage cap; the Contessa ran down the steps, threw her arms around him, and sobbed softly. I watched them without being seen. The man’s face was unshaven, and when he looked through the window into the room where I stood flattened against the wall, I caught a momentary glimpse of a hard, cruel face with two blazing little coals instead of eyes. That is my recollection of the "cherub’s" return from the war.


I was lucky. In the square next to the station a New Zealand military truck was getting ready for a night run to Rome with its freight of tarpaulin-covered crates. There was room in the wide cabin to wedge in a third passenger between the driver and his partner.


In Rome-what I didn’t have to listen to from my colleagues in the office and my wife at home!-an odd feeling overcame me, a cross between euphoria and disquiet. It was easy enough to attribute both to Venice. I had fallen in love with Venice, hence the euphoria of love; and doubt aroused disquiet, would I ever see her again, for the Polish army was already preparing to move from Italy to England.


That summer I went to Capri with my wife for a week’s leave.

There, on the beach, I found a discarded copy of Stars and Stripes, the American army newspaper, which I almost never looked at, since I saw the Polish 11 Corps newspaper as well as the Italian papers, which were particularly important for improving my Italian. Stars and Stripes had a whole spread on Venice with photographs, and I immediately recognized two blurry photographs of the Contessa and her son. For reasons which I still do not understand, the Italian papers (much less our modest Polish newspaper) had not a word about the events described in the American report. Perhaps the Italian journalists, despite their weakness for cronaca nera, considered the story an embarrassment in the atmosphere of postwar Italy.


The bare facts of the story went like this. In the last stages of the war, Count Alvise Terzan, son of the Countess Giuditta, joined a special detachment of the Fascist Republic of Salo, a unit that quickly distinguished itself for cruelty; the American report referred to it as "the torture unit," and the Italians stigmatized it as la squadrafascista degli aguzzint e dei boia. After the defeat Terzan went home to Venice, where his mother hid him in her house in Calle San Barnaba. They had the habit of going out for a walk late at night, well after midnight, when the city was totally deserted. The day before yesterday, July 27 (the correspondent was reporting from Venice), a masked man leaped from the doorway of a house on Campo San Barnaba, ran after the couple, and without a word shot the young count three times. After which he fled in the direction of the Canal Grande, where a motorboat was probably waiting for him. The reporter could not have "imagined" the final scene. One, there might be someone who actually saw what happened from a window on the campo. Two, it agrees with my imagination. Before the police appeared in response to a call, that is to say, for twenty minutes after the shooting, Giuditta first knelt in silence over her son’s corpse, and then she lay on top of it "as if it were her lover and not her son" (the reporter’s words). She did not move until the police arrived, and two strong men had their hands full to drag her away from the dead man.

Oddly enough, I did not want my wife, who was lying next to me on the beach, to read that issue of Stars and Stripes, so feigning absentmindedness I leaped into the sea with it in my hand and with brisk strokes I swam far from shore. The soaked newspaper gradually began to sink; I kept afloat on the surface without moving and stared at the two washed-out photographs.


"The torture and execution squad" was what the Italians called it was still too soon for any report or even proper information about it. But fragments, chaotic fragments, yes. Participants and witnesses of the battles in the north poured into Rome. They were not very talkative, the truth is that the final phase of the war fostered cruelties on both sides; fascist and partisan alike; the word most frequently used at the time was "escalation." Nevertheless, with some wine or a bottle of liquor, tongues sometimes loosened. Twice in my cautious inquiries I heard the young Count Terzan mentioned by name. Both times he was referred to as a belva, a "beast." But one man went farther: belva umana sounds even worse.

I thought about him all the time, about the "cherub" called Alvi, about him and not about his mother. The war was not sparing of examples of bestiality and hitherto unimaginable cruelty. Especially in my own country. Hearing tidings from countries conquered by Hitler’s armies, and likewise occupied (partially at first, and then more and more) by Soviet armies, we sometimes acquiesced in an instinctive, stupid, and egoistic reaction: "People can get used to anything." But the germ of totalitarian "re-education" lurked in that remark. It was a lie that poisoned the soul. I was sure of that as I walked around Rome, but I knew full well that the end of the war, which promised the revival of elementary human feelings, might make it hard for me not to relent. Besides it was all there in the face of Alvise Terzan. I remembered the soft boyish, almost girlish face of the photographs; as well as the face outside the windowpane, when he looked toward his room the evening he came home, a hard face clotted with undiluted hate. What had happened in the meantime? How did that astonishing change take place?


Obviously, the crumbs of information that came my way could not provide an answer to those questions. He was glimpsed but twice, and fiercely, in connection with the torture of "suspects," the shooting of children and old people, the rape of women, and the torching of the homes of people considered "enemies." His name aroused terror. Wherever his squad passed, few were left to mourn.

In the festive throng on the streets of Rome, or strolling nights along the Tiber (alone or with my wife), the face of evil always walked faithfully by my side. Born of need, the irresistible need to give pain.


The Polish army had already been transferred from Italy to England, except for soldiers who had decided to return to Poland or to remain in Italy for personal reasons. I was one of a small number of people obliged to extend their stay in Rome. The time eventually came for discharge, and the formalities were carried out in England. I was informed that I could not stay in Rome beyond the end of autumn 1947. I made arrangements for me and my wife to move at the beginning of October. In September I kept a promise to my wife to take her to Venice. And for me, it was presumably my farewell to Venice.


We went by train, for life in Italy quickly returned to normal after the war. The privileges of the recent "liberators" were now abrogated, so we had to find a place to stay for ourselves. I remembered from my first trip that what was once Ruskin’s home on the Zattere had been turned into a modest hotel. It was in rather pitiable shape after being requisitioned by the military, but the manager or owner, a slightly scatty old Englishwoman, warmed to us at first sight and arranged a decent room for us with a lovely view of the Giudecca island.


I did not keep the story of my first stay in Venice a secret from my wife, omitting only that I was all but infatuated with the Contessa. Just like me now, her whole attention was concentrated on the tragedy of the son, which was so significant for the tempestuous years after the fall of fascism. We had arrived late in the evening, and the next day she went with me to pay a visit to the barman in Campo San Barnaba. He remembered me, to my surprise, and at midnight we invited him to our table in the empty bar. I should mention that the day we arrived, I rushed alone to the little house in Calle San Barnaba. I rang the doorbell several times to no response, after which I wrote a note on my knee and tossed it into her mailbox, realizing that nowadays, in all likelihood, the Contessa had stopped looking in it. It was probably one or maybe two o’clock when the barman motioned us to the front, where the lights were already out, and told us to stand by the window facing the campo. The Contessa was crossing the square with a regular, vigorous stride and then disappeared from sight for a quarter hour. She evidently had a fixed route for her nightly walk, because she came back across the campo at the same regular pace on her way home. I could not restrain myself; I rushed into the square and ran after her. She turned to me with a spent colorless look (where had her flashing eyes gone?) and said softly: "There must be some misunderstanding, I don’t know you. You shouldn’t bother a woman alone." I was speechless and stepped to one side.


She was all alone (according to the barman), she left her house in the morning to go to the Accademia and at night for a short walk, she no longer stopped at the bar for her morning coffee. She continued her copying in the Accademia and painted at home (the light in her room was on all night), and she sold some of her reproductions, not so much as a fine copyist but as the famed heroine of the previous years drama. It seems that on Sundays, very early and whatever the weather, she visited her son’s grave.

As I was polishing and correcting what I have written so far, the autobiographical weft of my story stood out in all its flagrancy. I am not sure if that is good or bad. As a rule I like first-person narratives, but they usually involve a narrator who only occasionally and tentatively might be identified with the author. But here the autobiographical element is glaring and indiscreet. Why? My writer’s instinct tells me it could not be otherwise, but at the same time I plainly feel it behooves me to make some explanation.





There are different kinds of events in our life. There are events that flow by us and attract our attention without drawing us directly into the mechanism of their "happening," as if they did not sufficiently touch the deeper levels of our sensitivity. That is the simplest kind, and the writer may or may not "enter" imaginatively into the course of occurrences. There are also intermediate encounters where the external distance fluctuates constantly and occasionally stops being a distance at all, and there is a degree of participation (then it is a matter of "empathy"). And finally it may happen, albeit rarely, that there is a strong sense of being a part of events that actually get under the skin, a peculiar and even absurd sense that our participation is much more meaningful than it might seem. That is when the autobiographical note can be heard louder and louder. And that is the case with the Venetian Portrait.





In November 1947 we moved to England. I will skip over the details of demobilization and the proceedings for settling in a foreign country and go at once to our dark room in an apartment building near the Gloucester Road Underground station. From the perspective of many bygone years, I associate that room with the idea of a deep well. Indeed, at that time-but not in our subsequent apartment near the beautiful old park-when I was not at work I would look down at the wall of the damp closed courtyard and fall victim to nostalgia and moon about Venice. How was that possible? How could I descry, or rather evoke, a picture of Venice on a shabby patch of dirty wall? I do not know, but what is certain is that the more our life in that dark room became a drowsing nightmare, the more often euphoric illusions flashed before my eyes. Later the phenomenon spread beyond our building, and I would succumb to similar fantasies on squalid little streets veneered with the yellow light of streetlamps. It was inconceivable how I could bring back fragments of the Venetian landscape and two faces, the woman and her son, and keep them alive in memory. (I would go so far as to say that they grew more vivid with every passing day.)

This mechanism of fleeting escape to Venice from the well of London functioned almost till the end of my five-year stay (albeit with long interruptions in the new apartment). The word "almost" spans a half-year period of gradual but irresistible descent to lower levels or deeper bottoms of the well of our life in London (how many there were!). Suddenly visions of Venice ebbed, and London was just London. We both thought that never again would we emerge from the thickening gloom into the light of day. After my wife’s death, I spent three years in Munich. I married a second time and settled in Italy.


A year after I moved to Naples, the newspapers were full of stories, not to mention specialist articles and reproductions, about the big Lorenzo Lotto exhibition at the Ducal Palace in Venice. The official inauguration was announced for the day after Christmas 1956 with the President of the Republic and members of the government in attendance. The exhibition was scheduled to run until May 1, the following year. And Berenson’s bulky tome Lotto appeared in the bookshops. The press devoted a lot of space to the mystery of the rather odd timing of the show. For a variety of reasons, foreign tourists usually skip Venice in the winter, which must have been why the organizers decided to offer the exhibition first to the Italian public and then, toward the end, to visitors from other countries. One journalist took flight on the wings of "poetic license" and toyed with an original explanation: since the "mysterious" Lotto was "unappreciated in his lifetime…... adopted in his poverty by the sanctuary of Loreto," and "ignored by his native Venice," he was obliged five centuries later to return home "in the clouds of Venetian winter fog." What the papers gave most attention was the painter’s neglect by most of his contemporaries ("the exquisite portraitist!"), his wanderings in search of work, his frequent hunger, and his loneliness. "Venice bows its head and beats its breast, the world has discovered the Master," was how the headline of one article put it.

All the reports had a few lines about an item of mystery: the highlight of the exhibition would be an unknown Lotto painting recently discovered in the garret of a house in Loreto, where centuries ago the city’s richest merchant had lived, a collezionista di oggetti preziosi, a collector of precious objects, and a benefactor of the painter. The picture was found by chance and purchased in 1954 by a Venetian antique dealer, Marini, and identified as a Lotto by a specialist, Countess Terzan, who also did the restoration work.


I went to Venice December 20 alone, because my second wife had to look after our baby son. I had been invited to spend Christmas Eve in Padua by a Polish friend from the army and his Italian wife, but my early arrival did not make it any easier to find a hotel room in Venice. The hotels were all full, booked at least a month in advance, because the clamor in the press had made Lotto the "cultural event of the year." In extremity I could have taken advantage of hospitality in Padua for a few days, but I was anxious not to be away from Venice for an instant (with the exception of Christmas Eve in Padua). I did not have high hopes when I tried the Ruskin House, but the old Englishwoman remembered me. She also remembered my first wife and made so much of our meeting after many years that she immediately packed me off to a cluttered room, our room from the postwar Venetian trip, that had been booked by a couple from Bologna only from the day the exhibition opened. I promised her that I would be taking the night train back to Naples as soon as I saw the exhibition and would leave my bag at the reception desk that morning.


I spent the night without closing an eye, wrapped in a blanket (Ruskin House did not have central heating) and sitting at the window. I stared motionlessly at the dome of the church on the Giudecca, as if I expected someone to sit down next to me, the ghost of someone with whom years before I had shared that very same fragment of the nightscape of Venice; as if I were firmly convinced that the dead come back to life, in unmaterial form, if you can fix an image in which they once long sank their eyes.


The night was clear, chill, and windless, the sky shimmered with pale stars, and the dark canal puckered delicately like a length of velvet. Near dawn a mantle of fog fell all unawares over the city, dense and pervasive; all it took was a quarter of an hour for Venice to disappear so completely that you might have wondered if it had even existed a moment before. Boat horns resounded, and the cloud of white began to be slashed by lightninglike blades unsheathed somewhere from beacons and lanterns. The fog lasted my whole stay, occasionally clearing for a brief moment. But what those moments were like! Venice became a series of quick purloined pictures. Revealed to the eye only to disappear at once were portraits of passersby, yes, portraits, it was only then-as if in preparation for the Lotto exhibition-that I learned to descry in human faces their natural reflexive aptitude to "sitting for a portrait." Each of us is a living portrait, especially when the face momentarily emerges from the fog; such moments are the subject of the great portrait painters.


A long line crept slowly to the Ducal Palace, drawing shreds of fog behind it into the crowded hall where ticket counters and kiosks were set up. The exhibition rooms were beyond the row of ticket turnstiles. I walked at a brisk pace, glancing superficially at the Lotto pictures I knew from reproductions, and hurried on to the "jewel of the exhibition," to what the previous day’s newspapers called a "sensation.”

Finally, at a distance, in what seemed to be the last room, I saw a spotlighted alcove with a crowd of people standing in a semicircle in front of it. That was where I had to go, if my visit to the exhibition was to start from the new acquisition, from the hitherto unknown and miraculously discovered Lotto portrait.


I could see that both sides of the alcove were draped with dark red or purple cloth, perhaps brocade, spotlighted by stylized candleshaped lamps set horizontally above and below. There was a panel hanging from the upper light with a detailed description, but it was unreadable at a distance. I am allergic to crowds, so the only thing to do was wait. But I had miscalculated. Every time the semicircle around the alcove started to thin out, newcomers immediately replaced those who left. Like it or not, I had to forget my allergy, approach the throng, and watch for a sudden opening. The moment finally came when I could see the whole alcove, albeit between the heads and over the shoulders of the people in front.


The first thing I saw was the Contessa. She was sitting in a wheelchair, her legs wrapped in a blanket down to her feet. From the waist up she was still as beautiful as ever; her face had not grown older with the years, but it seemed darkened by a shadow of what might have been madness. Her eyes flashed as never before, indeed, the fire in her eyes seemed even brighter and a bit disquieting. "She is paralyzed," a man standing in front of me told his female companion. "She lost the use of her legs four years after her son was shot." She answered the questions of those who managed to get near her. I listened to her responses-the same soft, deep voice! Her replies were thorough and businesslike, and I noticed (perhaps the only one who did) a trace of pride in her voice. When I managed to get close enough to her that she could not but see me, she fixed her eyes on my face for one brief moment, and then, without a quiver of her noble features, she went back to answering the questions people asked her. I was absolutely sure that she recognized me, but she did not want to acknowledge it. More-she expected me to do the same.


Not without some effort, I elbowed my way forward and approached the portrait. I am anxious to avoid cheap dramatic effects, but, for the sake of exact description, 1 cannot omit the details of my first impression: it was like a sharp blow between the eyes, my heart suddenly palpitated, my knees went weak, and my face flushed as if struck by a hot blast from an open furnace, and I could not breathe. I recognized the composition of the picture, entitled Double Portrait and similar to the Vienna Triple Portrait, from the canvas on the easel in the Contessa’s workshop that I had intentionally unveiled. But only the composition. The time I removed the Venetian silk scarf from the canvas, I stood before a painting that had just been started but was clearly a portrait, full face and in profile, of the painter’s young son seen as a beautiful cherub. Now 1 stood in front of a Double Portrait of Alvi as he was back from the war, the Alvi 1 had fleetingly glimpsed (probably the only one who had) through the windowpane between his room and the outside stairs. It was a hard manly face with a bold and fearless look, yet there was no trace of that fiercely cruel expression in this young warrior’s face. It was beautiful (indeed it looked like the face of a warrior who had just won his spurs), how beautiful his double portrait was!

The panel on the upper light detailed the circumstances of the discovery of the painting, gave the year 1555 (with a question mark) s the probable date of the portrait, reported that it had been impossible to establish the identity of the sitter, and explained that it was in the "fully mature and perhaps even a bit overripe" (pienamente maturo e forse anche un po’ stagionato) style of Lotto’s portrait art, suggesting it was done a year or two at most before the artist’s death. How the Contessa had fathomed that art, in the nuances of color, in the set of head and arms! How her boundless love for the real sitter gave wing to her art!


When I pulled myself together, I passed by her wheelchair once again before proceeding to the remaining rooms of the exhibition. But I must have sensed that she was looking at me, and I did not glance in her direction.


Several years went by. I bought art magazines regularly, and more than once I was able to admire color reproductions of Lotto’s Double Portrait, with learned commentary by art historians and complimentary remarks en passant about the restoration done by Giuditta Terzan. When the picture was acquired by the Accademia in Venice, the prestigious quarterly Il Mondo dell’Arte published a lengthy interview with the Contessa, together with photographs of the restorer, her home, and her workshop. I marveled at the interview, and several times over I avidly read the Contessa’s adroit and intelligent balancing act and her expert reflections about the painting of the Venetian-Loretan Master, but most of all I marveled at her sangfroid. I knew the truth, perhaps the only person in the world besides the Venetian antique dealer Marini, and kept the secret deep in my heart. And I racked my brains wondering where that paralyzed woman found the strength to play with fire. For I never doubted that the forgery would not remain long undiscovered, however remarkable and near-great her hitherto hidden and suddenly revealed talent was. I was right, although I did not suppose it could last so long, until 1975. As to the source of the Contessa’s strength and astonishing composure in her awesome daring, the trial was to shed a fleeting light on something of it.

The first flash of the impending storm came in October 1975, an article by a Lotto expert in a major paper with the perfidious headline "La Contessa Van Meergeren?" No reference was made to the Venetian Double Portrait, and the Contessa was not mentioned by name. But the writer alluded to her under the name of the brilliant Vermeer forger (albeit with a question mark) and spoke in general terms about he particularly risky case of the unfortunate and destitute Lotto, "who scattered his masterpieces at random, without the slightest protection of his rights as a painter-easy for imitators (which is no felony) and forgers (which is a crime)."


I do not know if Giuditta Terzan’s letter to the newspaper was a mistake or rather a bold rational move. After all, she could have refrained from comment, for it was only her title that had been used and not her name, and not once in the text was the Double Portrait mentioned. Evidently she judged that the tactic of immediately dotting the i’s would pay off. "I surmise," she wrote in her letter, "that in his article Professor Salimbeni, a justly renowned connoisseur of Lotto’s painting, while preferring not to name names out of some consideration, had in mind the Double Portrait from the celebrated Venetian exhibition, of which I was the restorer. The very hint, or rather the hint of a hint, of insinuation is sufficient reason for me to demand a ruling from a commission of experts, including Professor Salimbeni of course."

Salimbeni’s reply was dry and matter-of-fact. Yes, out of some consideration (here a delicate allusion to the Contessa’s personal tragedy) he preferred to hedge around the subject rather than take the bull by the horns. The Countess Terzan’s letter freed his hands. Indeed he considered the Lotto Double Portrait a very skillful and in a certain sense even praiseworthy fake. Without a moment’s hesitation he agreed to calling a commission of experts and proposed a roster of six names, including his own. It was his opinion that the commission be appointed and operate as a representative of the law courts. Moreover, the Accademia, as owner of the portrait, had the right to have the courts subpoena Countess Terzan and the antique dealer Marini.


And that is what happened. However, before the matter went to trial in Venice, the six-member commission split in half. Three experts judged the portrait authentic, they believed the painting was Lotto’s work; three considered it an immensely skillful forgery. Their stance remained unchanged throughout the week-long trial. There would have been no sentence, that is to say, the Contessa and Marini could have walked out of the courtroom with heads held (half) high, and the portrait would have returned to a room or a vault in the Accademia, had it not been for the statement by Giuditta Terzan. The press gave a lot of space to wondering why she made it; for me, I must admit, it came as no surprise. She confessed to forgery and described the circumstances in exact detail, nor did she forgo the easy satisfaction of pointing to her half-success. When asked why she had done it, she said she had been tempted by substantial gain. "But that was not all," she added, and then her calm even voice broke slightly. "I also wanted to leave the world a lasting portrait of my lost beloved [amatissimo] son."


The Venetian antique dealer was sentenced to five years in prison without parole. So was she, but with the difference that as a cripple she was sent to a penal institution for invalids in the vicinity of Lake Como. The portrait, the corpus delicti, was confiscated by the court.

We sat by the open window on the fourth floor of a building on the Tiber. The sky was limpid and blue with a clear view across the bridge to the other side of the river and the monument to the master of sonnets in romanesco dialect, Gioacchino Belli, who scoffed at love’s excesses, a poet Gogol loved and tried to translate. The building was outside the old ghetto, at no great distance from the synagogue, and its tenants were wealthy people. Across from me sat Giovanna Olindo, the Contessa’s younger half-sister, several years a widow of an extremely rich builder. She resembled an old, plucked turkey: she blinked her eyes constantly, and every so often this wizened figure disgorged a comment, squeaky and sharp and plucked as bare as herself.


It was not easy to obtain that visit. I allowed myself a fib ("I was connected to your sister by something more than a fleeting wartime acquaintanceship"), of which I hereby make confession and likewise self-absolution: I saw no other way of getting to the one person who might have told me about the Contessa’s fate from her conviction until her death.


Giudi (she used her family nickname) served her full sentence in the penal institution for invalids. She was apathetic, as if her spirit were elsewhere, and had no wish to do anything, not even take advantage of the painting materials her sister sent. She expected only one thing of her sister: to pay lawyers for her ever-renewed efforts to ransom the picture the court had confiscated. All efforts proved vain; it was quite plain that the court feared a repeated attempt to exploit the fake. Constant refusal drove Giudi into deep neurasthenia. When she finished her sentence she was taken, at her sister’s expense, to an institution in the Aosta Valley for people with nervous disorders. She spent eight years there, "dead to the world" (as Signora Olindo put it). It was only the court’s decision to release the picture that lifted her from total prostration. She came back to life. She went to Venice at once, to the house that had been locked and abandoned for years. Her sister paid for her support and found her a permanent housekeeper, a distant relative of their mother, an iron-willed old spinster. The Contessa spent several years, until her death of a heart attack, bristling with suspicion and ever standing guard over her treasure.


So my intuition was not mistaken. The whole story was at least to some degree a modern version of Henry James’s Venetian novella The Aspern Papers. Down to the tiny detail of the Contessa’s relative, corresponding to the old spinster Tita, Miss Bordereau’s niece.

We went into the next room for tea. On the wall, under a small crucifix and untouched by the light of the sun, hung the Double Portrait by Giuditta Van Meergeren. I gazed at it so long that Signora Olindo had to remind me, with a note of irritation in her voice, that the tea was poured. The Venetian portrait was certainly a masterpiece; who knows if Lotto could have painted anything like it? The author of the forgery had painted two splendid, adamant, and captivatingly beautiful faces of evil.