Tours of the Black Clock

127

I GO WITH GIORGIO and his friends out to their island tonight. It takes about an hour to cross the lagoon. I’m in a state like that of the air before rain. The people of the island welcome me like a member of their family who’s returned home after half a lifetime. No ceiling covers the island, we walk along the streets under the stars and the lights of windows. The little houses are composed and tidy and painted with exuberant colors. Giorgio explains that the Germans have tried to cover the island, as well as the other surrounding islands, to no avail. The islanders sabotage their efforts, and when the Germans come to arrest them they only find a village as empty as the city I live in. It occurs to me when I hear this that perhaps my city isn’t empty at all, it’s only that its people, like the people of this island, will not be vanquished by those arrogant enough to presume history has dictated their triumph. To live with the people of this island is to be in a place and time where there’s no war at all; it isn’t as though the people pretend there isn’t a war, but rather it is that the war is truly insignificant to them. The Germans who rule them are objects of ridicule and mirth. The fishermen take me to a restaurant where the food and wine are already waiting. There’s another fisherman, a small man about half my size, with a golden tenor, whose name is also Giorgio, and after I’ve gone around to all of them and they’ve thrown their arms around me in welcome, it seems half of them are named Giorgio. There are also ten or twelve Brunos. The women are all named Maria. Maybe they were named something else before I began with the wine but after an hour they become Maria, warm and voluptuous and without a trace of mystery. After a while when we begin to eat the fish, the fishermen begin to sing gondolier songs celebrating the day’s catch. They sing about the lonely life on the water and the age of the city. They sing, Give me your kisses of fire. I can’t stand the beauty of it. I hold close into my lap my black hands that smell of the night’s work, but the Maria next to me wrests my hands away from me and brings them to her mouth. I’m appalled that her lips should kiss them, but she won’t let me draw my hands back. When I begin to cry none of them asks me what it is I cry for; my rain has begun. I’ve lived so far from life this true I’d forgotten its power. One song after another the fishermen sing, there in the small restaurant swept by the open wind of the Adriatic. The fishermen invite me to live with them on the island and never go back to the hidden sinking city. If I want to leave the lagoon forever, they tell me, I can do that too. They’ve been free so long I don’t think they understand how impossible it would be, that even if I wanted to go there’d be no way. The Germans, I try to tell them, they’d catch you too, and arrest you for helping me. How could you expect to elude them? The fishermen laugh and pour me some more wine and pour themselves some more wine and that’s when they explain about the regatta. They explain about the regatta and how there will be a thousand boats on the lagoon at once: How, says one Giorgio or another, are the Germans supposed to check a thousand boats? One or two, or ten or twelve perhaps, but not a thousand. After the wine is gone all of us stagger down to the dock and head back for the city; I lay on the bow of Giorgio’s boat flushed with the wine and the songs I’ve heard that seem to come out of the sea as though it’s filled with singing sea divers. Give me your kisses of fire. And it’s then, as though in response to their songs, I hear her first cry, the first strangled sound of her labor.