The Vertigo Game

3. Immobility

3. Immobility

I make myself listen to the colours just like I listen to the stones and skies of Venice: as relationships between undulations, vibrations … unchained from any symbolic link.

Luigi Nono, composer, writer and politician

Venice, 28 January 1924 – Venice, 8 May 1990

6 March.

It’s a foggy Venice evening, as often happens in autumn and winter. The air is so humid and heavy, it seems to walk on the bottom of the sea.

March is winter’s end, at times comprising of the most unstable, variable and fetid period, speaking in terms of the weather, as only certain parting shots from the uglier things in life can be, during the end of ends.

When atmospheric pressure is high, the humidity in the air is like it’d been crushed by an enormous disembodied dome and at times, visibility is reduced, almost disappearing completely. People are moving without looking where they’re going and, to move forward, they are forced to use their other senses: they’re mainly listening, smelling, even trying to touch whatever’s around them with their hands, going about like sleepwalkers.

In Venice, when the fog is particularly strong and treacherous, one goes as blind as a bat or an earthworm, and you understand how it feels to fly without seeing or to dig into the recesses of the subsoil with no particular place to go.

There’s almost nobody on the street.

On a bench on the banks of the San Basilio that flows into the Giudecca, an aged solitary gentleman sits with crossed legs, immersed in this hostile environment. The Giudecca canal, formerly called the Vigano, is one of the major canals – alongside the Grand Canal – to flow into the San Marco basin. It begins from the island of San Giorgio in Alga, extending for nearly two and a half miles. It’s a rather full canal, ranging from 244 to 450 metres in width, but not very deep at four to twelve metres maximum at the centre.

Outside the navigable canals, the depth of the lagoon is almost the same as a puddle: from a few dozen centimetres to a metre and a half, depending on the tide. That is to say, beyond the large poles tied three-by-three demarcating the navigable canals, it’s possible to walk about the lagoon on the seabed, because the water would struggle to reach chest height.

When it isn’t foggy on the banks of the San Basilio, you can see the island of Giudecca. On its shores in particular, you notice the imposing Stucky windmill, built at the end of the nineteenth century and once comprising of an industrial complex that once used to give work to one thousand five hundred people and from which a hotel and residential development were created. There’s also the Church of the Redeemer, one of the places of worship most frequented by Venetians designed by Andrea Palladio in 1577 after the Senate of the Republic of Venice voted to have a new church built under the name of Redentore. Every year on the third Sunday of July, the plague that struck the city in 1575 is commemorated here; in the following two years, one Venetian in three died, resulting in a death toll of fifty thousand. Thereafter, the end of the epidemic is celebrated with a procession that would reach the church over a bridge of boats, starting off a tradition that has lasted to the present day.

The man on the bench has his eyes wide open and seems to be staring intently at something. But whatever is he looking at? Nothing can be seen and, apart from the few radar-equipped boats who are still forced to move, nobody would dare navigate in this weather.

Better observing this man, some facts emerge: he’s completely motionless, his chest isn’t throbbing and in his hand is a small, empty bottle of whisky. Moreover, from under his winter jacket, between the panels of the wooden bench, there’s a constant yet slow flow of a viscous red liquid.

Not long before, a passer-by had noticed a thin person sitting near him, the hood of his sweatshirt over his head. It seemed to him the man was wearing some strange military tankman goggles over his entire forehead and eyes. From his figure, he gave the impression of being rather young, but as much isn’t said: often, people aren’t very observant and make superficial evaluations that aren’t much use.

How could one understand what age a man is – assuming it is one and not a woman – when he’s sitting down with his hoodie up, wearing tanker goggles and it’s foggy, changing all perceptions? The passer-by has also mentioned having suddenly heard a clean and very strong whistle coming from a certain distance away and having seen the man quickly get up and head off.

Was the man who made a run for it the killer? Did he shoot the man in the chest with a silenced pistol and was the accomplice’s whistling his signal at the right moment to run with the coast clear?

This is pure conjecture: when it’s foggy, navigating boats send out strong audio signals to warn of their presence, given they can’t be seen. These are sounds that can be heard from miles and seem to plunge into the waves.

The report from Ballistics revealed that the projectile wasn’t of the same calibre as the one used in the first murder, meaning that it has no compatibility with the weapon used in that instance. Does this mean that there’s another killer or even two others? Or is the killer perhaps the same person and they’ve used two different pistols and a nail gun? The autopsy confirmed that the man who’d been killed was completely sober. The killer, as a sign of affront and defiance, put the whisky bottle into his hand, having first emptied it. Why?

The only certainty is that three senior citizens – two men and a woman – have been murdered in the Venice area: two on the mainland and one in the old city. All the people were of advanced age, alone and isolated at the time of the murder and they were killed using different weapons. It’s very easy these days to secure all kinds of weapon, as easy as buying a box of biscuits.