5th January 1984

Cafés and cemeteries

Went to CafÉ Florian this morning.  One of those famous old cafés full of mahogany, dim oil paintings and tourists.  You sit there watching pigeons flap across the Piazza San Marco and trying to work out how many foreign languages you can hear.  A glass of water comes with a coffee, which makes it extremely expensive.  My fascination with these places is diminishing, I think.  I would never go to tea at Fortnum & Mason’s; why then should I go to Florian in Venice or Tomaselli in Salzburg?  I’m not enough of a snob to take the activity seriously, so why do I search these places out when I go to foreign cities, eager to be over-charged for a cup of coffee?  I could just as easily have one at a café 200 yards down the road. 

It is the patina of age I suppose.  I’m still hoping that some of it might rub off on me.  Florian’s publicity brochure, which I picked up on the way out, tells me that Casanova, Byron and Goethe all went to Florian.  A part of me still insists on finding the idea outrageously glamorous.  Even when I know that what I am buying with my money is pure snob satisfaction, the idea still appeals as if, for the price of an extremely ordinary but over-priced coffee, one might be able to buy one small portion of that mythical and ever-to-be-sought-after thing, café life.  What I am in fact buying is yet another slice of déjà vu to add to my collection – but then déjà vu has always fascinated me too. 

One has to visit the cemetery to get an impression of how densely populated Venice is.  Of course just walking through the city one realizes that its population density is extraordinarily high, but the cemetery adds the dimension of time, piling generation upon generation until the mind reels at the idea of the number of souls who have come to rest on this island of the dead.  The central section of the cemetery, where the ordinary graves are, gives somewhat the impression of a military cemetery, only all the graves are decked with flowers and all the headstones carry a picture of the deceased.  These pictures are eerie.  They are photographs transferred onto porcelain by the same process, I imagine, as that by which patterns are transferred onto cheap plates.  It is the best-tended cemetery I have ever seen.  If the Venetians paid as much attention to their city as to their cemetery then the whole place would not be rotting about their ears. 
Walking along the gravel paths, one sees face after face staring out at one in soft grey tones which are not quite black-and-white but still not sepia.  Even the recent ones look both nostalgic and indescribably cheap.  When the photographs have faded with the effect of the elements, the headstone looks terribly naked, as though the deceased were absent from his or her own grave.  Around the walls of the cemetery there are large tombstones, each belonging to a family.  On many of them there is yet space for the names of the members of the family still to die.  Many of these mini family trees stretch back to the latter half of the 19th century, but ordinary people seem to be doomed to a much shorter posterity. 

After a brief while in the cemetery, one becomes aware that all the graves in any particular section date from about the same period – the early 80s, the late 70s, the middle 70s and so on – and none seem to go back further than the early 60s.  For what the authorities do is to let the graves lie undisturbed for 12 years or so and then efface them so as to have space for more bodies.  I came across a large area where all the graves with 1966 as the final date had been cleared, the gravestones stacked together in a heap and the ground prepared for further burials.  It was as if the deceased died twice, once at his actual death and then again when his headstone was removed from the graveyard.  How many must have disappeared in that fashion.

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