by Donna Leon
Like many people to whom disasters happen, I was a willing accomplice in my own destruction. I went, walked through the weed-filled garden, up the faintly cat-smelling staircase, past the tiny cracks in the wall, and into the apartment. I wasn’t much impressed with anything, not until the owner went to the front windows and casually threw open the shutters, and all of Venice seemed to bow low before me.
A bit to the right was the upper part of the facade of SS Giovanni e Paolo, straight off in the distance the bell tower of San Francesco della Vigna, a sort of miniature San Marco, and to the left rooftops and more rooftops, all glistening brown and rich in the afternoon sunlight. From other windows I saw the bell tower of San Marco itself, a canal lying smooth and green below me, a garden, more rooftops. Because I looked at the view, I did not look at the walls, and so I saw only what I wanted to see. And so, in May of 1996, I bought it. Think of having an engineer come in and check the place out? Think of having an architect examine it? Are you mad? Two friends came and looked the place over, said the view was beautiful, and so I went ahead with the deal, and it was mine.
Two weeks later, I asked my architect to come in and have a look so that we could discuss the restorations I wanted to make: two bathrooms to be refitted, a kitchen to be installed, perhaps a bit of sanding for the parquet. He studied the view, much pleased, but, being an architect, he also studied the walls, not much pleased. Turning from having leaned out the window to look at the wall below, he said, using of course a metaphor that could only be Italian, “Non mi piace quello spanciamento di muro.” “I don’t like that paunch in the wall.”
Innocent, then, I asked, “What paunch?”
And he told me, then showed me.
It was born there, my ruination, though I didn’t know it at the time. He assured me that it would be an easy thing to get the other people in the building to agree to make structural improvements, so why not continue with my own restorations while waiting for that? I thus had the workers come in and rip down the plaster ceilings in seven rooms to expose the original seventeenth-century beams, thirteen meters long and all of them not only beautiful but also intact. Then came the painter, who sanded them all, as well as the still intact wooden boards between them, a job that took three men a full month.
The other owners did not fall into line as my architect had assumed and refused to listen to his insistence that the building had structural problems. They wanted proof, and this required that I call an engineer to determine the exact nature and extent of the structural weakness of the building, and his study revealed that a restoration that had been done two owners ago had added so much weight to the building (who had given the permits and who had inspected the work?) it was tilting on its axis, weakening the walls to such a degree that his report declared the building to be “in pericolo.”
Simple, I thought. All I needed to do was explain to the five other owners that the building was in danger, and they would, driven by the dictates of common sense, hasten to join together to get the building fixed as quickly as possible. How could I, after more than twenty years in Venice, have trusted in the good sense of Venetians?
To tell it quickly (for to tell it slowly is to open painful wounds for too long a time), we proceeded to spend a year and a half arguing about whether the building was in peril or not, which required the hiring of another engineer, who finally confirmed the diagnosis of the first. One might suspect that this would lead to universal acceptance of their conclusions; instead, it led only to the demand that a third engineer be called.
During this time, the painters finished sanding the beams, and three days after their work was completed the two architectural students who had rented the mansard apartment (invisible from the street, empty when I bought my apartment, and thus quite ignored by me) moved in, and the sound of their every step, every techno disco compact disc, every remark, reverberated into my apartment. Then it rained and water flooded down from the same apartment, this from the illegal terrace that had been put in during the restoration. Then it rained again, this time causing water to flood in from a blocked drainpipe on the roof. Then the shower in the students’ mansard burst a pipe and again the flood. It was rather like having acqua alta on the third floor.
Am I forgetting anything? The Dalmatian of the owner of the first-floor apartment who covered my garden with a moquette of excrement? The cat of the person on the second floor who used the stairway for much the same purpose? The garden wall that had begun to collapse into the street in front of the building? The water heater for the heating system that refused to turn itself off at night, thus creating a heating bill in one year of more than 8,000 euros, 28 percent of which was mine, though I was not living in the house?
For twenty-one months I suffered from this house, running from city office to engineer, from meeting to architect, all in the attempt to get the other people in the building to accept the declared and self-evident fact that it was in danger. I thought and talked of nothing else; my vacations and trips away from Venice all began to be planned in function to the house. And then one morning I woke up at four and heard the sound of a heavy motor, as though someone had parked a truck in my living room and left the motor idling. I went into the living room. There was no truck but there was still the sound, pounding inside my ear. Stress.
The next morning, I called a real estate agent and asked her to sell the apartment. No, I didn’t have a price in mind, anything she could get. I’d paid for it more than a year before and now refused to continue to pay. A week later she called to say she’d found a victim, er, buyer. We met and I explained, in chronological order and without once bursting into tears, all the problems with the apartment. No, not because I am a particularly honest person but because I didn’t want to leave him a loophole out of which he could squirm in the future. And still he agreed to buy it.
We sign the final papers next month. I’m living in a rental apartment now, and I no longer read the real estate ads in the papers. I sleep well. The noise is gone. Soon the apartment will be too.
Shit
Picture, if you will, the Carpaccio painting of Saint Augustine in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni: to the right, the saint sits at his desk, gazing off in the general direction of heaven, while in the bottom left corner sits his tiny white dog, perhaps a Maltese, his small size more than compensated for by the adoration with which he regards his master. You just want to bend down and pat his dear little head, don’t you? The dog’s, not the saint’s, please understand.
Yet pause a moment and consider. Who took that dog for a walk? Who put him on a lead and led him out into the streets of Venice? And, more important, who tied the brown plastic bag to the lead before they left the monastery?
Leapfrogging over the centuries, you would I fear come up with the same answer as you would in 1500s: no one. It’s not that people don’t walk their dogs in Venice; they do. During the years I’ve lived here, I’ve seen the fashion-statement dogs being walked by their owners: the Dalmatian, the husky, and now the golden retriever. The lag time between the appearance of the new fashion-statement dog and its first appearance in the shelters, either given over or simply abandoned on the street, is eighteen months. The first Labradors began to make their appearance last summer.
But I digress, for my topic is shit, not style. Decades ago, the streets were quite impassable for the moquette of dog shit. Then, for reasons I do not understand—certainly not for any vigilance on the part of city authorities—things improved, and one would often see dog owners cleaning up after their animals.
I once observed a well-dressed woman stoop and pick up her dog’s leavings with a paper handkerchief, after which she walked to the top of a bridge and tossed it into the canal. “Bene,” I dared observe, “città pattumiera.”
The woman turned on me and said, in a voice so savage I was forced to wonder if she often had comments passed on her behavior, “Where do you thi
nk yours ends up?” Well, she had a point, didn’t she, but I don’t want to digress into that.
Some years ago, for a period of time so brief as to leave no sign—save perhaps in the accounts of the company that sold the machines—special garbagemen appeared with giant mechanically powered vacuum cleaners, with which they cleaned the streets. But then they disappeared.
For a while things improved, and it was rare that one encountered dog droppings, at least in the city center. But with the advent of the new year, there seems to be a recrudescence of negligence on the part of dog owners in the city, and the streets again present the obstacle course common some years ago.
This, however, does not go unprotested. A week ago, walking down Calle del Cristo in Cannaregio, I noticed something on the ground that appeared to be moving back and forth. Approaching, I saw a pile of dog shit waving at me. Closer examination revealed that the waving was being done by a small paper flag glued to a toothpick stuck into the top of the pile. On it someone had written, “Il mio padrone.” Well, yes, he is a shit.
I continued down the calle and found more evidence of the diligence of the protester: on each piece of civic negligence there appeared a flag, each with its friendly and appreciative greeting.
Last evening, at dinner with five Venetian friends, I mentioned the flags, which two of them had seen, whereupon followed the predictable grumbling about the disgusting state of the streets.
One of the guests, however, sought to lighten our mood by telling us of something that had happened to him a month ago, when he went out early to get Il Gazzettino. As he turned away from the newsstand, a woman in a fur coat came down the bridge into his campo and bent to unleash her tiny white Maltese, no doubt a descendant of Saint Augustine’s faithful friend.
The dog, freed of restraint, sniffed its way about the campo until it found the right place, just in front of the door to a house. In the first-floor window of the house a man stood, drinking his coffee.
As my friend watched, the dog attended to his doggy business, the woman walked to the other side of the campo to distance herself from the act, and the man at the window finished his coffee.
Allow thirty seconds to pass. The woman walked in the direction of the dog, the door to the building opened, and the man from the window emerged.
He looked down, saw what was directly in front of his door, looked at the dog, looked at the woman, and asked, “Excuse me, Signora, is this your dog?”
She threw up her hands in offended innocence and said, “No, of course not.”
The man smiled, called to the dog in a gentle voice, and, when it came, he picked it up and delicately turned it upside down, then used the fur of its back to brush up the shit. Just as carefully, he set the dog back on its feet, said a polite “Buon giorno” to the woman, and walked away.
We five erupted in joy, as though Venice had just won the World Cup. Two pounded the table in their happiness, one cried out, “Vittoria,” and then we lifted our glasses in a toast to the genius of our Venetian Terminator.
Neighbor
People occasionally ask if the experiences of daily life drift into the books. Until a year ago, the answer to this was that they did so occasionally and in only the most trivial way: the mother of a friend walked in and out of a scene, someone’s dog made a cameo appearance, Brunetti bought parmigiano from La Baita or flowers at Biancat. But every major attempt to cannibalize my life failed, and all I could do was nibble at the smallest pieces of personal experience.
Until. Until about four years ago, at three thirty in the morning, when I was catapulted from my bed in a newly rented apartment by the sounds of a violent automobile chase, complete with the rat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire and the squeal of tires on pavement. In Venice. At three thirty in the morning.
Dopey with sleep, I got up and looked out the open window and saw the fountain, the Gothic windows on the building to the left, and the first full moon of May, all motionless and still in the penumbra of moonlight. But still those cars swerved around corners, brakes squealed, more gunshots, and then a shattering crash. My offended senses joined together and united light with noise, and I realized that the cars and guns, as well as the flickering light, were coming from the window of the bedroom of my neighbor opposite, a white-haired old woman of enormous proportions whom I’d briefly glimpsed at her window during the two days since I moved into the apartment.
Agonized shouts began to emerge from, presumably, the wreckage of the car, and a man’s voice, speaking in the patently false tones peculiar to films dubbed into Italian, said, “How could anyone survive?”
Indeed. I moved myself across the hall and into the guest room and survived.
The next morning I went across the campo and found her name on the bell next to what had to be the door to those windows, went home, and called her number. The windows were closed now, but through them I watched her heave herself sideways, much in the manner of a walrus shifting around on the beach in pursuit of the moving sun, to answer the phone. A man’s shouting voice answered, puzzling me until I realized that, with the windows closed, I had not heard the television. With excessive courtesy, I tried to explain the reason for my call, but she said she could not hear me because of the noise and hung up.
Rather than upset myself with a chronological account of the escalation that ensued, it might be less painful were I simply to choose at random some of the incidents that remain most clearly in my memory. There was a period when I asked a Venetian friend to call her and ask, in dialect, if she could turn the television down because it kept his baby awake. When that failed, he became a university student who had to study for his exams, and when that failed his wife developed a terminal illness. And still the noise continued.
I tried the doorbell. This entailed putting a raincoat over my pajamas, usually at about four in the morning, walking down sixty-seven steps, walking across to her door, and keeping my finger on the bell until she turned the sound down. Once, in desperation, I remembered a trick from my childhood, jammed a matchstick into the doorbell, and walked away. But all that did was break the doorbell, which made her accessible only by phone.
By the third year, I turned in desperation to the forces of order: the social services, the police, the Carabinieri, and the firemen. Within a short time I learned that she was no longer a patient of the psychiatric center, that her family wanted nothing to do with her, and that the police could do nothing about her. ‘‘She’s old, Signora. Be patient. If you knew how many cases like that we have here in Venice.” If I made an official denuncia, then perhaps the sound technicians would come along during the next year to register the volume of noise. But they didn’t work at night.
After a time, the Carabinieri all knew me, recognized my voice when I called at two or three or four in the morning, and occasionally they would send a squad to ring her doorbell, stand and shout up at her window, and then retreat in defeat. I turned from them to the firemen, but they told me they would come only for emergencies; a television blaring into the night for five hours is not an emergency. “What would be an emergency?” I asked. I was told, “If she fell and hurt herself.”
If she fell and hurt herself. If she fell and hurt herself. If she fell and hurt herself. Three nights later, I stood at the window of my bedroom, looking across to the sight of her, soundly asleep in her bed, both televisions on—for there was one in the living room blaring a different program into the night—and I called the firemen to report that I could not see my neighbor in her bed and I was afraid she had fallen and hurt herself, for the television was still on.
Twenty minutes later six firemen appeared in the campo three floors below. One of them rang her bell. I sipped at a cup of, if memory serves, Sleepy Time Tea and watched them moving around below me, rather in the manner of uniformed ants. When the bell did not ring, they started to shout her name up in the direction of her window. One of them glance
d up toward my darkened window, but I did not move, other than to sip my tea.
The firemen disappeared, only to return some minutes later with three long pieces of ladder. Carefully, with the skill of long experience, they assembled the ladder, then hefted it up, dancing around under its weight, and slammed it against the wall of her building. One of them, wearing his fireman’s suit and heavy boots, started up the ladder. Because he was soon going to enter her bedroom, from which I might be visible, I moved into my living room. He got to the top of the ladder, stepped into her kitchen, then moved toward the door of her room, calling out, “Signora, Signora, are you all right?” He disappeared.
“Aiieeeeee.” Imagine every scream you’ve ever heard in horror movies as the woman is eaten by the dinosaur or crushed by the foot of a giant toad. Double it. That is the sweet sound that filled the stillness of the night. But then the television in the bedroom was turned off, and then the one in the living room, and then I went back to bed, ignoring the scene across the way.
Time passes, nothing changes. Now I spend most of my summer away from Venice, but I have programmed into my phone her number and the number of the firemen, and so I am guaranteed, if not a full night’s sleep, at least part of one.
Ah, but the books, the books. The next book, Doctored Evidence, opens with the arrival of a doctor for his weekly visit to one of his elderly patients. The opening line is, “She was an old cow and he hated her.” The doctor lets himself into the apartment, hears the familiar blaring sound of the television. He goes into the living room, prepared to listen to her complaints and renew her prescription for sleeping pills.
When he gets to the living room he hears, above the voices on the television, the sound of the buzzing flies, which encircle his patient’s head. For there she lies, dead, in a pool of coagulated blood, her head shattered and split open like a melon, flecks of white brain matter upon her face.