In the first place, it was the wrong time. It was June, and starting in April, Venice is jammed. Petrarch, in his letters, described the Piazza San Marco as so crowded that if you dropped a grain of millet there it would never reach the pavement. The first time I went to Venice was in July, a disaster – nothing more than a glimpse of the city called La Serenissima. But the next time it was December. Then, I was just married. We stayed at the Hotel La Fenice and heard singers practising at the opera house through the window, which let in a tongue of cold.

In the second place, I did not want to go at all. My life had come to seem like a series of extravagances punctuated by episodes of extreme austerity. Over the past months, I had given my heart away to someone who immediately lost it, taken it back from someone who loved me, and set if off like a top in another direction and watched it teeter crazily. These things happened almost at once. The result was that I was going to Venice alone. I think I had known I would all along. The ostensible reason was to write a story for a magazine. The magazine ran a column in which writers wrote about a city they knew. This suited me, as I rarely go to new places but instead retrace my steps, looking for breadcrumbs I left long ago that were since eaten by birds. Venice was not on the list of cities and towns that others had chosen: Istanbul, Port-au-Prince, Reykjavík, Santa Monica. I could say anything I liked in one to two thousand words.

In any case, I had been thinking about going to Venice all winter. It was as if something I had lost, or was looking for, was there. I had just published a book about a life that now seemed like a long dream, in which a family of children grew up in a tall draughty house in an impractical neighbourhood, in which I often seemed to be addressing the tasks of daily life by trying to start a fire with two sticks. But now it was a few years later and my heart spun – often on evenings when it was meant to be elsewhere – inside an apartment vestibule above Seventy-Eighth Street, watching itself flash in the mirror, a little Carnevale. Six months before, I had fallen in love with an old friend, an acquaintance, really, a friend of friends, who sometimes had come to dinner with a woman to whom he was or wasn’t married, with whom he did or did not live. There was no end to the complications. Soon, a voice said, this will be over: you will not be able to walk on Seventy-Eighth Str