Original subtitles

I remember closing my eyes and

gliding over the

water and the mist and the cry of gulls.

Remember the spires and the campanile, the sensation of floating.

The white of the water, the white of the sky.

Remember the approach to the city walls, no golden gateway or bridge.

forming a mouth, swallowing the boat.

Instead, we secreted our way a side channel, a

sound reflecting off the walls and the water,

entering through the ears of the city, not the eyes.

Remember the people.

Just people doing people stuff.

Adding their own layers of life, paperwork, graffiti, derma to the

centuries of layers already there.

I remember the memories drifting in the water.

Faces I half recognized.

Form and dust.

the key, the steps and the slow burble of the engine idling.

I remember standing, assuming that when I stepped ashore, the city would bob up

and down like a pontoon.

And just as I touched dry land, I didn't wake

up.

I have friends back in England.

They all have babies.

And at that age, all my friends suddenly shift up a generation.

I don't know them.

I've actually caught some of my friends. These are people I grew up with, talking

to me about settling down.

Where? Where are you supposed to do that?

What happens to these people?

Is there a book?

It's a manual that tells you how to do this stuff.

Settle down.

You must have to feel that you belong somewhere.

And suddenly, that's it. You don't want to be anywhere else.

I've never felt like I belong anywhere in particular.

Except possibly here.

Every time I come here, I feel like I've always known this place.

Almost like a dream.

I've dreamed about this place.

I've had a life here already, so it's intimately familiar.

Except the tourist crap.

The gaudy baubles and the dust collectors.

They're not part of my dreams.

But then,

They've been around for such a short time, barely a blink.

And the older these walls and arches get, the more they are colored and

etched and infected by time and entropy.

The more beautiful they become.

I don't understand why people want to remember such a place with some plastic

thing that lasts about 15 minutes.

I think they're missing the point.

This city rewards attention.

The longer you look, the more you see.

There are two cities.

The positive city.

The city is a solid, real piece of cob stone.

Streets and bridges smoothed by centuries of soldiers, citizens,

touristers, mask makers and glass blowers teetering around the edges of

buildings.

And the water is a dream.

winding liquid mist through the streets, reflecting the life of the city,

melting the stone to ripples and shadows.

And there's the mirror image, the negative city,

with the water as it feels as you approach the island.

an immense, inevitable force, the blood of the world.

And sitting in my vaporetto, myself, a speck of life,

a germ carried into the veins of the city.

And the city as an organ, its histology etched into the walls and cavities,

decaying.

I don't want to carry this body metaphor too far, but you get the idea.

A child in a mask shop tries on a mask.

The child imagines herself as an animal.

The mask carries the years of craft of the mask maker.

The design of the mask has been refined and simplified over decades.

The mask assumes different meanings over the centuries.

The mask is that of a man, a Venetian with a pox.

These were real people.

The moment unfolds like an iris, filmed in stop motion,

exploding its petals, and then wilting from energy spent.

Huh? You still with me?

I'm sorry, this means a lot to me.

You see, I'm realizing slowly that the membrane that separates the positive

and the negative in this place is very thin.

Stretched and translucent at times and in places.

Only a vague texture of reason indicates that he's there at all.

I'll give you an image from my marriage.

I didn't tell you I was married.

It's well down the list of things that are mine.

The image from my marriage is a book.

I was on page 165 of my life.

Page 165-ish.

That's far enough through to get involved in the plot.

It's even far enough through to assume I'm going to finish the story.

But then the spine of the book began to crack.

The binding let in the elements.

Gaps appeared between the signatures.

I could see the pages I'd read, a merge of familiar words.

And more alarmingly, I could see the pages I had yet to read, rising to the

surface before my eyes, the same merge of words,

the same noise.

And I felt very frightened and alone.

When I closed the book, I left it behind.

And I think that's all I want to say about it.

Today I met an old friend I never knew I had.

I bumped into him at the Galleria dell'Accademia.

In a fraction of a second, during a particular minute of an evening hour, on

an overcast day in the year 1478, Giorgio da Castelfranco watched

my life enacted underneath his brush.

on a modest, squarish canvas panel.

La Tempesta.

A man, a compagno of the confraternity of the suck, specializing in amateur

dramatics, that's me.

A woman, a naked allegory, suckling a child Apollo or Corita.

or some other convenient deity.

Satis even imagined a bizarre reading as Adam and Eve, Adam ingeniously acquiring

a wardrobe, the serpent, a matter of camouflage, appearing to be a root.

But none of the traditional readings worked.

How could they know that Giorgione wasn't painting Dionysius or Ferragato?

He was painting me.

And you.

X-radiography reveals you, a painted female figure below the man,

only visible with invisible light.

There you are.

The man and the woman appear on the surface, separated by water.

The artifice of the city in the background, a painted set, illuminated

by the real star of the show,

the agent provocateur, freezing the moment in flat,

colorless light.

Crack of lightning.

Realization.

The pin sharp flash gun reality of the situation.

And the dull migraine rumble of consequence in the distance.

Dominoes fall.

Empires crumble.

Marriages collapse.

History buckles under the pressure.

I think this thing is taking its toll.

I think I'm becoming a climber.

Slowly.

The place I'm forced to live in between the time I share with you is

increasingly uncomfortable.

The air is thick and sticky.

It clings to me.

Like I'm walking through water.

sleepwalk one night.

Down the steps into the canal.

And I just hadn't realized that I'm walking on the streets of the reflection

of the city.

Walking around on a gently undulating image of the city.

The weight I feel on my skin.

Just surface tension.

I'm making very little sense at the moment.

I've been having a recurring dream since I came here all those years or minutes

ago.

No, I don't think it was a dream because it actually happened.

No, it couldn't be.

I can't see why I'm turning.

I'm standing at the end of a cul-de-sac.

I turn and there's nobody really there.

But that's... I thought that was the important bit.

But I realize sometime in the next few days that that's not the case.

The important bit is that it happens again.

You see, we all live in little pieces of our past.

We replay them endlessly, tell our friends about them, write novels about

them.

They are very important.

And I decided that the reason I haven't felt that I belong anywhere

Because I'm looking in the wrong places.

I don't think my place is spatial.

Although this city is as close as it's going to get.

I think my place is temporal.

I think we could be happy.

In a second of time.

It's not a big second.

It's all we really need.

To be happy.

heals most wounds.