"Ah, if only I am not overwhelmed by my own abundance, and if I can master the anxiety that suffocates me, Daniele!"
The two friends walked on and on, side by side, in exalted and confident mood, as if their friendship had taken on an added nobility.
"It seems as if the Adriatic had overthrown the Murazzi, in this tempest," said Daniele, pausing to look at the waves that had mounted even to the Piazza. "We must return."
"No, let us cross the ferry. Here is a boat. Look at the reflection of San Marco on the water!"
The boatman rowed them to the Torre dell' Orologio. The rising tide soon overflowed the Piazza, looking like a lake surrounded by porticoes, reflecting the greenish-yellow twilight sky.
"EN VERUS FORTIS QUI FREGIT VINCULA MORTIS," read Stelio on the curve of an arch, below a mosaic of the Resurrection. "Did you know that Richard Wagner held his first colloquy with Death in Venice, exactly twenty years ago, at the time he produced Tristan? Consumed by a hopeless passion, he came here to die in silence, and here he composed that wild second act, which is a hymn to eternal night. And now fate has led him back to the lagoons. Fate, it seems, has decreed that here he shall breathe his last, like Claudio Monteverde. Is not Venice full of musical desire, immense and indefinable? Every sound transforms itself into an expressive voice. Listen!"
The city of stone and water seemed indeed to have become as sonorous as a great organ. The hissing and moaning had changed to a sort of choral supplication, rising and falling in regular rhythm.
"Do you not hear the theme of a melody in that chorus of moans? Listen!"
They had debarked from the little boat, and had resumed their walk through the narrow streets.
"Listen!" Stelio repeated. "I can detect a melodic theme, which swells and decreases without power to develop itself. Do you hear it?"