The city of the Doges, Philippe Sollers reminds us in his Dictionary of love of Veniceis a place of levitation where contemplation is interrupted only, perhaps, by the gurgling of vaporettos and the sound of bells. A space, above all, where the islands take up all the space: “The radiant force of Venice is in this dispersion, this swarm of water-eaten plots, these flat steles, these sentinels.”
It is in this city on borrowed time where beauty emerges from everywhere that Jessica, a young French woman in her twenties, protagonist of the Torcello Gardensthe thirteenth novel by French author Claudie Gallay, has come to run aground. To distance herself from the tragic death of her lover, but also to get away from the too narrow destiny that has been promised to her — to work at the small hotel that her mother owns, “to act as a maid” for others.
In the heart of the Serenissima, chance allowed her to settle into an acquaintance’s apartment without paying rent, while the owner organizes the sale. To survive, an improvised guide, the young woman offers tours to tourists. Then she will meet Maxence, who will very quickly fascinate her.
A 60-year-old criminal lawyer preparing for retirement, a half-French homosexual in a relationship with an Italian, Maxence owns a house on the island of Torcello, whose gardens he has undertaken to recreate—vineyard, orchard, vegetable garden—following plans four centuries old, sinking all his savings into them. For the future and for future generations. For the beauty of things.
Almost uninhabited, Torcello is the last island in the lagoon: a few houses, a basilica, marshes, lots of birds. “It’s a world apart here,” she thinks. “A sort of tense face-off then begins between several rather complex characters who all drag their pasts around.
Jess, whose real first name is Louise (which she considers “old-fashioned”), thinks of her friends who stayed in the village and pushes back the prospect of “going home and doing what she was born to do”. In the meantime, like a bird of passage, she walks, works for Maxence whom she tries to tame, opens her eyes and ears, takes notes in a notebook, so as not to forget.
“She wants to spend her life understanding how everything works together, the near and the far, the terrestrial and the marine, the animal, the vegetable and the human, the sun and the snow, and the wind.”
Claudie Gallay, born in 1961 in Isère, once again follows in the footsteps of Jess, whom readers met, with her group of childhood friends, in Before summer (Actes Sud, 2021). With her fine, intimate and slightly poetic pen, the author of Breaking waves (2008) also reconnects with Venice, which she had explored in Only Venice (2004), a stroll through an out-of-season, depopulated and melancholic museum-city.
Crossed by multiple and permanent tensions while remaining contemplative, driven by the idea of transmission and heritage — children, gardens —, The Gardens of Torcello passes a bit like a dream: Venice bending under the hordes of tourists, the gardens threatened by the rising waters, the immediate future of Jess and the uncertain couple formed by Maxence and Colin. A deep breath filled with sea spray and silence.