Harry's Bar is one of Richard Cantwell's recurring places of refuge in Venice: a destination he can reach through pain, a meeting point for old companions, and an imagined setting for time with Renata. Its meaning is deliberately double. It is familiar enough to feel like home, yet the bar's association with friends and pleasure cannot guarantee happiness or keep a farewell at bay.

A Venetian destination

When Richard Cantwell is told that the Contessa is not at home, the waiter suggests that she might be found at Harry's Bar. Richard asks for the bar to be called and, if she is not there, for the house to be called again. The exchange makes Harry's a practical point of contact in the city: a place where someone might be reached, rather than merely a name in a tourist's itinerary. The waiter's dry qualification—that one can find almost anything there except, perhaps, happiness—sets a note of irony against the bar's promise of connection.

Before setting out, Richard takes a drink prepared by Arnaldo, the glass-eyed waiter, although he does not want it and knows it is bad for him. His stubbornness is part of the scene's physical texture. He moves to the open window and looks across the Grand Canal as the view turns grey, then makes his way toward Harry's. The bar is thus approached from a room framed by the cold north wind and the canal, not as an abstract symbol but as a destination he must physically reach.

The effort of arrival

The walk is not effortless. On a bridge Richard feels twinges, and he notices two young women climbing ahead of him. He redirects his attention from looking along the street to the route he needs to take: the next bridge, two squares, then a right turn. He continues with his old stride, quickly registering the people he passes, and breathes deeply into the wind. His arrival is presented as a small achievement against bodily discomfort. When he opens the door and enters Harry's, the narrative makes the destination feel like a return: he has made it again, and he is at home.

That arrival leads directly to a meeting with Count Andrea. The tall, blue-eyed man greets Richard with affectionate familiarity, and the two embrace. Richard feels the rough texture of Count Andrea's handsome tweed coat, which looks to have been worn for nearly twenty years. The detail gives their reunion a material, lived-in quality: the bar brings together old friends, and the worn coat makes duration visible within the embrace. Harry's is not simply a place where Richard might encounter someone; it is where an existing bond can resume without ceremony.

A place imagined in company

Harry's also appears in Richard's plans with Renata. He tells her to go there before lunch while he is away, placing the bar among the ordinary pleasures and routines he hopes she will continue. Later, as he imagines the time before his departure, he pictures them having a drink at Harry's and seeing whichever of their friends might be about. The imagined visit belongs to a tender sequence of shared possibilities, but it is shadowed by his expectation that they may never see one another again after he leaves Venice with Ronald Jackson.

That contrast gives the bar a particular role in the novel's treatment of departure. It can stand for the social life Richard and Renata might share—lunch, a drink, friends, and a familiar public room—while remaining inside a future that Richard fears may be cut short. Harry's offers a scene of companionship, not a promise that companionship will last. Its ordinary pleasures matter precisely because they are set against his awareness of leaving.

Return, avoidance, and repetition

After a parting with Renata, Richard considers going to Harry's or to some other place, but decides instead to go home. The alternative matters: Harry's is available to him as a possible refuge, yet he does not always take it. The bar's pull is therefore not automatic. Its familiarity can offer company, but it cannot remove the loneliness of the moment or determine what Richard chooses to do with it.

When Richard and Renata meet again after a kiss, she breaks away and proposes that they go to Harry's. He agrees, and they begin playing at being historical personages, with each simply taking the role of themselves. At the bar, however, there are no close friends waiting: only early-morning drinkers Richard does not know and two men conducting business at the back. He reflects that the familiar crowd arrives with the regularity of a tide at Mont St. Michel, while Harry's own hours seem as fixed as the Greenwich Meridian, the standard metre in Paris, or the French military's opinion of itself. The comparison turns routine into a measure of stability, but the scene also distinguishes the bar's dependable rhythm from the unpredictable presence of particular friends. Across these visits, Harry's remains a place Richard can return to; what it contains—reunion, strangers, imagined happiness, or the thought of going home—changes with the moment.