On another day, on the advice of an altar boy who they had spoken to by chance in the Church of Mary Magdalene, after happening to find him in the sacristy listening to vinyl records, they went to a second-hand record shop nearby on the Santa Catarina canal. It had the yellowing air of an antique shop, broken up only by the black of one record or another being removed from its sleeve, a blackness that to her seemed as imperturbable a carbon star. A feature of the shop was that it had a recording studio; anybody could go along and record anything they wanted – a song as a keepsake, a speech sending birthday wishes to a grandmother, whatever it might be – and within a few minutes, having parted with a considerable sum of money, leave the shop with a 33rpm single-press vinyl under their arm. The standard recording procedure was used, the same as had been in operation since the early years of the phonographic industry, which is simple and has barely altered over time: you step inside the booth, where the vibrations of your voice and any instruments are sent through the microphones to a turntable very similar to the kind on a normal record player, but bearing a vinyl record that is totally smooth, virgin, and with a thicker needle, which vibrates with the electrically delivered sound. This vibration literally gouges the vinyl in real time, opening up the micro-groove, the sonic footprint we then see on the vinyls we listen to later on. Minutes earlier, on the way to the shop, he had already made a comment that related to all of this: ‘I find it strange that the trees in cities don’t leave grooves and micro-grooves on the buildings’ façades,’ he said. ‘When you see them moving in the wind, it’s as though they’re going to record their particular tree sound on the walls of the houses, but they never do, and neither does the grass in people’s gardens, which just keeps to its appointed sections.’ In the shop, they went their own ways. She browsed in a section containing hard-to-find American No Wave from the late seventies, becoming so absorbed that she lost track of time, until he came over to say he was bored with the classical section now, where he had been listening to some early Chopin recordings; in fact, he had bought one, a collector’s item, as he showed her, holding up the plastic bag. On the way back, snow began to fall, and they tried to go through St Mark’s Square but found it had been cordoned off: although nobody could explain why, it appeared that a great bubble of total soundlessness had installed itself in that part of the city. ‘When you enter the square, all sound disappears,’ said the policeman at the cordon, who was wearing a camouflage face mask, ‘it’s as though your ears have been emptied out, it’s never happened anywhere before, no one knows of anything like it – plus, as well as this total lack of sound, anyone who goes out into the middle gets an intense migraine.’ Annoyed by this, they had to make do with the view of the deserted square, along with the basilica, its ornamented façade still and white like a mountain of perpetual snow. They set off for the palazzo. At the last bridge along the way, he said: ‘Since we left the record shop, there’s something I haven’t been able to get out of my head.’ ‘What’s that?’ she said. ‘I’ve realized that all things have grooves in them. The asphalt we walk on and the clothes we wear, the stones in the forests and the roofs of houses, the designs on the leather of people’s shoes and dogs with their muzzles, they all have their own grooves and micro-grooves… I think everything must have its own sound and every object its own particular music. True, we don’t know what needle would be capable of extracting this soundtrack from the world, nor what it would sound like, but logic surely dictates that all these melodies should exist, don’t you think?’ She nodded, watching a group of seagulls flying low over the wake of boats and gondolas, the choppy, ceaseless water gradually eroding the buildings’ foundations. A few minutes later, back at the palazzo, the leopard came to mind – the stuffed specimen that had had such a hypnotizing effect on her husband a few days earlier, and as she hung up her coat in the entranceway, she said: ‘Hey, what’s “leopard” in Latin?’, to which he immediately responded: ‘Leopardus, which is leo, or lion, and pardus, or panther, joined together. The ancients thought it was a bastard animal, a weird vestige, the result of an unnatural union between a panther and a lion.’ They had a supper of rice with strips of beef, cooked by her, a meal she often made, this time adding some shredded, flash-fried cabbage. When she cut up the vegetable, with a single, sagittal slice, she spent several seconds observing the intricate forms of its leaves, each labyrinthinely enclosing the next. These cabbage leaves seemed like a fossil to her, a landscape being seen for the very first time.

  In another of their walks during that first stay together in Venice, they passed a blind man; the uniform movement of his legs was the only physical clue to his condition. She said: ‘I’ve seen a lot of blind people these last couple of days.’ Barely minutes later, on their way to a restaurant, they walked past a woman with milky-white eyes; ‘White like the snow we’re walking on,’ said the writer. Over the days that followed, and perhaps because it had been pointed out to him, he too noticed blind people frequently crossing their path. That night, while he was watching television in the living room, she looked up from her book and said that the city was being taken over by the blind, that she was sure of it, and not the sort of blind people one used to get, but rather those who had lost their vision suddenly, so that they didn’t have time to access the special sensitivity that develops when one is blind from birth. This brought to mind an old story, the name of which escaped her, which she had read in a book by a French author, Boris Vian, nowadays virtually forgotten: ‘It’s about a city where, without the meteorologists having seen it coming, a dense fog moves in one day, so dense that the people in the city can see no more than a couple of centimetres ahead of them. At first, frightened both of the heavens and of their fellow humans, they go and huddle in the farthest, most hidden corners in their homes. It isn’t long, though, before they realize how little sense this makes: they’re no more hidden at the bottom of a deep hole that they are out in the middle of the widest of open spaces. The entire city is a continuous mass of milk-coloured cloud, which, in time, the people not only get used to, but causes them to lose all inhibitions. They start going out naked in the streets, helping themselves to whatever they want from shops without paying, they fornicate with the first person they bump into, that sort of thing. The happiness they experience is like the kind associated with the god Pan. Then one day, just like that, the fog clears. An unbearable feeling of shame takes hold of the people, followed by embarrassment at all the acts they’ve committed, and again they hide away, thinking never to come out; some even take their own lives. The situation becomes very alarming, and a citizen council is urgently convened. After days of heated debate, a swift return to that happy state of shared blindness is proposed: they decree that the entire populace must have their eyes put out. Boris Vian’s story ends there… Fine, so at this point, it seems to me beyond question that the city of Venice has begun a slow process that’s leading towards this kind of blindness… By the way, what’s “blind” in Latin?’ ‘Caecus,’ he said, ‘it’s caecus.’

  On a day during that first stay in Venice when it was too cold and windy to venture out, they decided to spend the morning listening to the Chopin record on the palazzo’s excellent sound system and cooking using ingredients and condiments beyond their usual round, raw materials they knew about from books on Marco Polo’s explorations and from the Meals of the World publications she had collected as a child and could almost claim to have memorized. While she picked out ingredients and he, sitting on the sofa, watched the blue pulsing coming from the small golden cylinder that was Alexa, the crazy idea came to him that the little machine was copying everything, that its mission was to register every single sound in the palazzo, every conversation and every noise coming in from outside too, but not to establish the patterns of people’s tastes and thereby enable the powers that be to control us emotionally, but quite the opposite, in order to forget us – with all this data in hand, to construct a parallel world elsewhere, a new version of nature that would leave humanity behind once and for all. An idea he found far more unsettling than the one about control. As if, rather than being a fount of all known information, Alexa were the creator of previously unimagined combinations of realities, a primitive quantum computer. They ended up making a simple rice dish with strips of beef; she knew by heart the ingredients of the dishes in Meals of the World, yes, but said she suddenly had no idea how to use them; inexplicably, when it came to it, her hands went into knots, wouldn’t move.

  On another day, during a late morning breakfast – her putting so much jam on her toast that it was like she wanted to drown it forever – he told her about his dream the night before: ‘I dreamed that the two of us were sleeping, here, in the bedroom, and that I was woken up by some noises. Since I’m not that familiar with this building, I thought it was the normal kind of creaking you get in old places, but it quickly turned into a sort of rattling in the front-door lock; someone was clearly trying to open the door. In the dream, I woke you up and the two of us lay there, completely still, frozen like two mice in a snow hole, transfixed as the noises became clearer, until we heard the door hinges. You jumped out of bed, I followed you and we walked hand in hand to the entranceway where, next to the big living-room table, there were three men in jumpsuits – in the darkness they looked blue – and they put down some cardboard boxes which were very big but, from the way they handled them, seemed extremely light, empty. They looked at us, and after a brief silence said they’d been coming to the house for years, looking for something, though they themselves didn’t know what. Then they just left – they closed the door but left the boxes. You and I, we didn’t so much as touch the boxes, but just went back to bed.’

  On another of those days they agreed to go out on a long excursion by gondola, something they had been wanting to do: to see the city not only from the water but at water level gives an idea of just how majestic the palaces and homes are; even the humblest of boat shacks grows immeasurably. Entranced by the gusts of wind and the water splashing up in their faces, they sailed around in silence; everything in this world seemed new-made. Looking at the gondola seat, the red velvet upholstery, he said: ‘Sometimes, when it’s night and you’re asleep, boats go by very slowly underneath the window, and I hear the slapping of the water on the canal, which never stops, I’ve been doing something that makes no sense: I get up and sit on the living-room sofa in the darkness, waiting for the men who, like in my dream, bring cardboard boxes in the middle of the night. I know it’s stupid, thinking a dream might actually happen, but still I do it. Do you think a dream can become reality?’ She did not answer, closed her eyes so she could focus on the weak rays of sunshine bathing her face. After the gondola ride, they consulted the map and saw that there was a shortcut back to the palazzo, and instantly decided to take it; it was growing dark and he said he was freezing cold. On one of the first streets they went down, they realized they had gone that way before: there in the distance was the white blouse with the black pearly buttons; it was still lying on the ground. There were no animals pulsing in its heart now. The ice had melted and the material, hard as a skeleton, lay directly on the stone. She was about to mention a leopard on an African mountain also waiting for the ice that covered it to thaw, but instead just picked up the blouse and put it in her bag, and they carried on. They arrived back at the palazzo, took the stairs, which looked more like a throat to them than ever, and as soon as they were inside she went to the bathroom, washed the blouse by hand, hung it out over the bath. She wore it the next day. During the rest of the trip, the only time she took it off was to wash it.

  On another day they stopped at a restaurant next to the Ponte dell’Accademia with good views out over a jetty. The menu claimed they had the cheesiest pizza in Venice. He ordered a glass of white wine; she had water. He took a slice of pizza in his hands; to her the long strands of melting cheese looked like lightning bolts. She said, ‘What’s “lightning” in Latin?’ ‘Fulgur,’ he said once he had managed to deal with all the cheese, ‘it’s fulgur, although etymologically it comes from late Latin, relamptare, which is “to shine”.’ Such was his knowledge of Latin. She had a gulp of water and there came a noise – a very loud noise – from inside her. As though her body were a drum, for a few brief seconds the rumbling noise occupied her entirely, all the way from her ears to her feet. She then looked in the direction of the windows overlooking the canal and for the second time saw the man who had that ambassadorial look about him; alone at a table, he had his eyes closed and was draining the last of a bottle of mineral water. At that moment, his body was also completely atremor.

  She remembered standing looking at souvenirs and postcards in a shop, and buying a black-and-white postcard, in which a shot of Venice from the air had the look of a mountain chain, with its snowy peaks, its rivers and its forests, and him breaking the silence to say: ‘The millions of tree trunks down in the mud beneath the city, holding it up while at the same time dragging it under, are all offerings of condolence. As if, at the moment it was founded, Venice sent itself millions of condolence messages for the future. A buried trunk for every inhabitant.’ It was starting to rain heavily when they reached the last bridge on the final stretch back to the palazzo. At the highest point on the arch, she looked back and had the sensation that they were sinking, subsiding into the earth, never to be seen again.

  On another of those days, they went to St Mark’s Square in the morning; they knew it was still cordoned off because of the unexplained sound-vacuum bubble, which was continuing to have a severe effect on anyone who dared cross it, but they only wanted to go and see it as it was now, not a single footprint marring the snow-covered, completely unpeopled space. They spent the later part of the day again trying to reach the gardens that held the Biennale, that prestigious exhibition in which numerous westernized countries had their own pavilions, built at some point in the previous century in accordance with patriotic styles and nationalistic cultural topics. The writer and her husband knew they would all be closed, the Biennale not being held that year, but neither of them minded; to them, seeing the constructions from outside was special enough. It was all set within a forest on the eastern edge of the city, not the most inviting place after nightfall, but in any case the couple miscalculated the distance and failed to even get close; no boats go that way after 7 p.m. in winter. Once they were back at the palazzo, he spent a few minutes sitting on the sofa contemplating the blue pulsations coming from Alexa’s heart – they were yet to use the device – when she, on the armchair, deep in their city guidebook, looked up and said, ‘Can you imagine Latin never having existed?’ ‘What?’ he said, not taking his eye off the blue pulsations. ‘Yes, the idea of Latin, the language you know so well, being an imaginary language, a language we’re heading towards – not the one we come from, but something painstakingly designed for the day when everyone comes to speak it.’

  Then the day came when he confessed that something was troubling him, something he had not told her about and that was gnawing away at him, which had happened on their visit to the record shop: ‘While you were looking at the American No Wave records, I’d almost finished in the classical section when, without knowing it – I was still immersed in the cover of the Chopin record – I found myself at the back of the shop, and there was a man there, tall, elegantly turned out, blue suit, silvery hair, and he said to me to go through, not to be afraid, and then he asked if I wanted to record something, but not the usual kind of thing, something genuinely unique, and said there was another room where he had everything you needed to record special records like that – that was how he put it, special records. I didn’t know what to say – I went with him. We crossed an interior courtyard full of plants and caged birds, pigeons, seagulls, everyday birds like that – it made me think of Noah’s Ark – and then we went into a hut with some steps inside which led down to an underground room: the walls were blue, and it was brightly lit and had a welcoming feel to it, and there were microphones hanging down everywhere from the ceiling. On one side there was a floor-to-ceiling glass panel looking through to the control room, which had nobody in it. And the man said to me to go and stand in the middle of the room, under the cloud of microphones, and then he came and stood next to me, and took my hand, squeezing it gently but at the same time with a firmness, and told me to say something, go on, he said, say something, before all the sounds on earth are erased, time’s running out, he said, and I laughed, and he closed his eyes and squeezed my hand harder and again said, “Time’s running out, time’s running out,” and I was starting to feel very jumpy now and I said something but I actually don’t even know what because from that moment on there’s a blank in my memory, a total blank, until the moment I found myself in the other room, the control room on the other side of the glass, and the man, who throughout all of this was extremely polite with me, and at this point still not having let go of my hand, showed me something, an object on a table, I couldn’t tell what it was at first, a black sphere the size of a basketball made of a very tough-looking material: it glinted in the artificial light. And he said, “You can touch it, don’t be afraid,” and I let go of his hand and went over to the sphere, but it was giving off heat, a lot of heat, a wet sort of heat, as though there was something alive and sweating inside it, so I didn’t touch it. “It’s vinyl,” he said, “a perfect vinyl sphere, it’s just come out of the oven.” And indeed, it smelled like it had just been made; if everything new-made briefly has an unfamiliar smell about it, imagine what this thing was like. And then he said: “Open it.” “What do you mean, open it?” “Just that,” he said, “open it.” But I wasn’t going near it, so he put his hand on it and it literally just fell apart, into a multitude of slices, which he quickly cupped in his hands around so that they wouldn’t fall apart entirely; he pressed it back together, into its original spherical shape again. “As you’ll have guessed by now,” he said, “it’s a sphere made up of thousands of vinyl records, as though, starting from the North Pole, someone had cut the Earth up into millions of slices, until they reached the South Pole. There are so many slices of vinyl in this sphere that we don’t even try to find out how many; each of them is a record in which the grooves on the A-side fit perfectly with those of the next record’s B-side, as though they were each other’s negatives, and it goes on like that until they make up a perfect sphericity of sounds.” Completely perplexed, I looked at the thing. The records, logically enough, were wider the closer you went to the Equator, thinner closer to the North and South Poles, so thin that I thought they must only be able to hold a single sound at most, a simple phoneme or a single piano note in the case that it was music which had been recorded. When you joined all the records, the surfaces of the grooves indeed fitted together like they were moulds for a perfect cosmos, and you felt that there was a force inside them, a real and inexplicable tension, “It encloses an infinite three-dimensional sound,” said the man, while I, still feeling quite uneasy and not having said anything, simply looked at him. “There’s a whole world in there,” he went on, “surely you can feel it? We call it the spherical record, or simply The Sphere; the sonic richness it contains and the storage capacity is absolute. Look how beautiful each of the spiralling grooves is, the way the needle must advance, irremediably, towards the centre of each record, an advance like the spirals on snail shells or sea conches, like those on stairways in people’s dreams and inside our ear canals. The spiral is the only thing that, each time it comes around, returns to the same place without ever returning to the same place.” Then he brought over a kind of microscope, and, taking one of the records from the sphere at random, put it under the lens and beckoned me to have a look. I couldn’t help but exclaim – its surface looked like the Himalayas seen from the air, the vision revealed a hugely rich landscape of troughs and peaks, and of what appeared to be rivers, too, and vegetation and different colours, colours above all, which truly left me so bewildered I thought it had to be a joke, a magic trick, something he amused himself with, fooling unsuspecting customers like me. “Lovely, isn’t it?” he said. “The thing is, everything you see down there is your voice, everything contained in this sphere is what you, with the two of us holding hands, have just recorded in the booth. It took you no more than five minutes to record it and yet a whole lifetime wouldn’t be enough to listen to it back.” And then I suddenly felt afraid, very afraid, and I rushed out of there, came up from that subterranean complex and went and found you – you were still busy in the No Wave section – though first of all, I heard that man say from behind me, “Come back for the sphere whenever you want, it’s yours, we’ll keep it here for you.” Naturally, I haven’t.’

 

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