Tours of the Black Clock

108

GIORGIO IS THE FISHERMAN who brought me the television. He’s fair like many northern Italians, and his very round face beams red like the twilight sun. He literally came up through my floor, in a tunnel the Germans don’t know about. The tunnel leads out to the edge of the city emerging on a deserted piazza that faces the lagoon. Apparently there are hundreds of these tunnels the Germans don’t know. The fishermen laugh at the Germans. The idea of the Germans ruling the world is preposterous to them, since the fishermen come and go in the lagoon as they choose, to the Germans’ general befuddlement. Giorgio and the others warmed up to me when they learned I’m an American. I can’t tell them what I’m doing here, and I won’t allow them to believe I’m a political prisoner; it would be more hypocritical than I could stand. Through this tunnel Giorgio and his friends have brought me food and televisions and company. They could easily take me out with them to the islands, there’d be nothing to it. I protest that the Germans would be sure to find me, and that Giorgio and his friends would suffer the consequences. I argue that the Germans would only move me somewhere else in the city where there’d be no tunnel coming up through the floor and I’d never see Giorgio and the fishermen again. Giorgio disagrees heatedly but also accepts my argument as some kind of inarguable sign of my nobility. It’s almost unbearable to let him attribute such a fine quality to me. I’m a man the Twentieth Century can’t redeem, I try to explain to him. The truth is that if I were to escape I wouldn’t know how to live free of her. Later, it’s the revenge that keeps me here. Still, I can’t resist the opportunity to go out with Giorgio and the fishermen on their boat, and at night sometimes I lower my old arthritic hugeness into the floor and follow them out to the deserted piazza where we sail the lagoon for thirty minutes, round and round in the black water under the stupid wandering searchlights of the Germans who never see anything. I sit on the front of the boat. There the amber lights of a hundred piers circling the lagoon surround me; I listen to the mosquitoes and the wind, and for a moment again own no memory. After a while we return to the room and that night in my sleep I’m laid out on the wet bow of the lagoon itself, in a place where memory owns me. I wake in the dark, a sailor marooned on his own life.