Venice as home and belonging

Venice as home and belonging is a bond Richard Cantwell understands as earned through defending the city when he was young, even though he did not enter it then. On his return, the distant view, the working boats, and the streets he imagines walking make the city intimate rather than merely beautiful. His affection carries an unresolved tension: Venice feels like his own, yet he wonders whether its people welcome him because of his service or because he belongs to the victorious side.

The City Across the Water

As the car approaches the canal road’s junction with the highway, Cantwell watches for the view of Venice. Across the winter-brown marshes, reeds bent by the north wind, he sees the squared church tower on Torcello and Burano’s high campanile; twelve sailing barges travel toward Venice across a slate-blue sea. The landscape offers a view, but not yet the clear sight he wants. He expects to see the city perfectly only after crossing the Dese River above Noghera.

That prospect opens onto an earlier memory of fighting along the canal in winter to defend Venice without seeing the city itself. On another clear, cold day, Cantwell had returned as far as Noghera and seen it across the water, but still had not entered. The gap between fighting for Venice and reaching it gives his claim its particular character: he remembers the defense not as possession of the place, but as service to a place that remained beyond his grasp. He nevertheless regards it as his city, because he fought for it as a boy and, now about fifty, is known there for having done so.

A Claim That Must Be Examined

Cantwell connects his wartime service with the favorable treatment he receives in Venice, then questions that explanation. Perhaps people treat him well because he is a colonel on the winning side, he considers; he hopes that is not the reason. The thought complicates his sense of belonging without canceling it. Recognition may honor what he did, or it may reflect the political outcome of the war. He cannot settle which, and does not present gratitude as proof that the welcome is unconditional.

His comparison with France sharpens the distinction. Cantwell reflects bitterly on the military experience of entering a city one loves while taking care not to damage it, and then avoiding a return where military figures might resent the way one entered. But he checks his own generalizations: simplifying makes a person unjust, and memories of the Resistance, Foch, good friends, and the dead qualify his anger. The moment matters to his attachment to Venice because he does not treat love of a city as permission to flatter himself or condemn others without exception. He interrupts the digression and reminds himself that this is a pleasure trip.

Belonging in Ordinary Details

The approach to Mestre turns anticipation into recognition. The sight recalls New York as it had appeared in earlier days, shining, white, and beautiful; Cantwell recognizes that comparison as borrowed, then immediately returns to his own feeling that he is coming into his town. The town’s familiar beauty is not an abstraction. Fishing boats are tied along the canal, their brown nets and wicker fish traps visible beside the boats’ clean lines. Cantwell rejects the idea that their appeal is merely picturesque: their beauty matters precisely as something real and particular to the place.

The slow canal carries water from the Brenta, and the passing boats lead his thoughts toward the river’s villas, lawns, gardens, plane trees, and cypresses. There he imagines being buried. The wish makes belonging more than a claim about the past: he pictures his own death taking place in a landscape he knows well. Yet the idea remains tentative. He is unsure whether burial there could be arranged and thinks he might ask Alberto, while recognizing that Alberto might consider the request morbid. The imagined resting place gives the city and its surroundings the intimacy of a possible final home without turning that possibility into a settled plan.

Home Imagined, Not Possessed

Cantwell also sketches a practical life in Venice on retirement pay. He would not need the Gritti Palace: he could rent a room in a house beside the passing tides and boats, read in the mornings, walk through town before lunch, and visit the Tintorettos at the Accademia and the Scuola San Rocco. He imagines eating in inexpensive places behind the market or having the woman who runs the house cook in the evenings. The modest scale of this imagined routine makes his attachment concrete. He wants not simply to admire Venice but to inhabit its daily rhythms.

Walking is central to that imagined life. Cantwell considers the city tricky to navigate, and walking from one part to another a challenge comparable to working crossword puzzles. He values both the difficulty and the pleasure: he has never walked in Venice without enjoying it, and thinks that learning the city thoroughly would give him something lasting. His description of Venice as a place that was not bombed by his side, and whose people respected it, links its survival to restraint as well as military defense. His final declaration of love returns to the earlier winter: he was happy to have helped defend the city as a young man with insufficient command of the language, and remembers first seeing Venice rise from the sea on a clear day when he had gone back to have a small wound dressed. For him, belonging rests in the conjunction of that imperfect service, the delayed first sight, and the city he now knows how to walk.