Julie & Veronica

Venice was made by refugees, whose old world had died, who escaped to these muddy islands in the lagoon. Legend has it that this city of waters was founded on 25th March 421, at midday exactly. Here is a place that is on the edge of the modern world and yet somewhere ‘other’ – no longer the zenith of commerce between East and West, it is a place of reincarnations, suggestions and dissolutions. At this hour, beyond midnight, you are unlikely to meet anyone or hear anything but your own muted footsteps or the movement of water against ancient stones. If there were to be a soundtrack to accompany this night walk it might well be Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, Songs on the Death of Children, seeping out from unrestored and bricked up facades, an echo that resounds through a constellation of calli, sottocalli, sottoportico, and drifts like a mist underneath the bridges. The bridges. Here, there and everywhere, connecting, guiding, misleading. Are there four hundred and sixty or four hundred and eighty? Who really knows how many?

And such names, which reveal to us there is a power in naming, and behind each name another story to be told. Cross the Bridge of Marvels or the Bridge of Fists, the Bridge of Courtesy, of Tits, of Rooms, of Merciful Hope, of Devils, of Rubbish or of the Dead. Walk on the Bridge of Bare Feet, of Spirits, of the Honest Woman, of Straw, of Humility. These are some I have remembered.

Walk across Campo Santa Margherita, past the little stone building standing on its own (it once housed the Guild of Fur-Makers) and go down past the Carmini Church to the Fondamenta Del Soccorso. Not far along here, on the other side of graffitied canal-side hoardings – which ask ‘VENEZIANI AVIDATÁ O SALVEZZA?’ – you might find, past the Armenian College, the bone-white building which was a home for reformed prostitutes in the 16th century, set up by Veronica Franco, a former courtesan acknowledged for the quality of her poetry and artistic salon.

Here are the ghosts of lost activities and forgotten souls, some of which we may recover this night. Go further, through Campo Angelo Raffaele, beyond the unpretentious and boarded up parish restaurant, its sign half missing and rusted over. Here was once a place of sheet metal works, cotton mills, furniture workshops, wax factories and boat builders, a working-class district. Here, on the other side of a police barracks, are remnants of the commercial port facing Guidecca canal, metal buttresses shoring up her banks in an area undergoing reclamation. Long brick warehouses, cleaned up, now house a branch of the Instituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia. Near here, bound on three sides by canals, is the Church of San Nicolo Dei Mendicoli, as good a destination as any at this empty hour. This church has remained almost unaltered for 800 years, built as it was in this poor area of fishermen, sailors, beggars (the mendicoli) and pizochere, the penitent ex-prostitutes. There were few rich merchants here willing to invest in this particular house of God. Nearby, along the Guidecca canal, the lights of the docked cruise ships send a warm orange glow across the waters.

This church, dark by night and dark by day, with its gilded wood statues and frescoes, sat below the level of the surrounding canals and depreciated and decayed over the centuries. Jan Morris described the interior, with the Virgin in a dark red velvet dress, as ‘weird, shadowy, barbaric, gleaming, candle-lit’. It was one of the first buildings chosen to be restored in the 1970s by the UK Venice In Peril Fund, its reclamation incorporated into the ‘dreamlike textures’ of Don’t Look Now, a film by Nic Roeg. Set in winter, it tells the story of a handsome couple, John and Laura, played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, both haunted by the death by drowning of their young daughter. They meet two elderly sisters, one of whom is a blind medium, who claims to see their lost child. Laura desperately wants to believe but John is derisive – then, after nightfall, he catches glimpses of a little figure dressed in red running alongside the shadowy canals, that red coat she was wearing that fatal day.

‘They say seeing is believing. But only a split second separates the past from the future. The present is crushed between them,’ spoke a voiceover on the movie’s original trailer (available on the DVD but not used here in this trailer). The film was voted Number 8 in the British Film Institute’s 100 Favourite British Films of the 20th Century. At the time of release in 1973, it drew some notoriety from a beautiful and intense depiction of love-making between the leads. When Don’t Look Now was first shown on television in 1979, the BBC entirely cut out the scene, but so many viewers rang in to complain – asking for it to be reinstated – that when it was shown again there were no cuts. In an interview decades later, Sutherland recalled: ‘What made the scene wonderful was the editing. Never staying on us for more than a few seconds and then cutting to the two of us getting dressed, back and forth, the audience never ended up being a voyeur, they watched a cinematic collage and were reminded of themselves. That’s what made it sexy and remembered; it was about them, the viewer, not about us, Julie and me. That’s why it seems so real to everyone. It was real in their imagination. It had happened. To them though, not to us, we were just a catalyst for their imagination.’

Now, from the driftwood of memory, a distant connection comes to my mind. At a college I attended in the 70s there was a lecturer in lithography whom I mostly saw propping up the local bar, part of a crowd intent on smoking and drinking heavily. Our peers said he had been some kind of hot-shot down in London back in the Sixties, though they never elaborated, and here we were in a provincial backwater. He was affable and charming, patient in explaining techniques, but the smiles seemed to mask an unhappiness. Once, I wandered into the empty print-making department (pub opening hours) and passed behind a blue curtain into his inner sanctum of inks and pastes and cleaning lubricants and the detritus of ages to find his broom cupboard size office. (Hideaway? Den? Depository of ancient wisdoms?) In the clutter of images and postcards, colour charts, stock orders, handwritten notes and invoices stuck to the wall was a yellowing newspaper cutting with an apparition of this man, leaner, so much younger and unlined – but the same haircut – in a dinner suit, arm in arm with an equally youthful and exquisite woman. The caption: ‘Miss Christie arrives at the premiere of…’but this last part is torn away, unknown. There is no background visible, just she and he captured in the glare of the flashbulb and reduced to halftone dots on newsprint.

He first met her at Christmas, 1962, delivering a letter to her door, working as a temporary postman while a Gold Medalist student at the Royal College of Art, she a little-known actress about to play in her first film, Billy Liar. This one cold frosty morning, a chance encounter, a fated moment. They fell in love, as these things go, and moved in together. Less than a year later she will be sharing a cigarette with Tom Courtney at Venice Film Festival, two unknown hopefuls promoting their kitchen sink drama. A revelation on screen, she is destined to win an Oscar in 1965 for her role alongside Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey in John Schlesinger’s Darling, an account of the amoral side of London in the Swinging Sixties. In the summer of 1965, with her star in the ascendant, Christie and her postman-artist lover became engaged in Spain, where she was filming Doctor Zhivago. He returned to London to find himself sacked from his part-time teaching job at St. Martins, allegedly because of the publicity over their affair, such was the double-edged morality of the time. This affair, however, peters out in the face of a new world defined by vanity and celebrity, as other star actors compete for her affections. He moves to the Midlands to another teaching post, to be alone, with a heart I suspect that will never heal. She is independently minded, wilful – capricious even – not one who will give her hand in marriage, for these are revolutionary times when behaviours and codes are questioned, revised and rejected.