The warm sun encourages him to dream and drift. Morning turns into afternoon, and afternoon into evening, as he walks across piazzas, over bridges, onto piers and vaporetti, crisscrossing the Canal Grande, finally shedding all sight of tourists and their trappings. So intense is his curious state of euphoria that every sight, sound, and smell dissolves into a ghostly sensual pentimento. He even forgets that behind the city’s Renaissance veneer, the splendor of its façades, there lies a layer of squalor. Slums sit like diseased pockmarks across the city, and it’s in one such place that Gauke’s dreaming and drifting comes to an end. Born in a slum, like a homing pigeon, he’s back in one.
For some reason he had assumed they would shoot him. Only when two tattooed muscular arms loop over his head does he realize he was wrong. He was to be garroted. A wire glints in the sunlight as it closes on his throat, cuts into the flesh, severs his esophagus, then the carotid arteries. Blood spurts against the decaying wall of the alley he’s being dragged into. As he loses consciousness his admiration for the Mafia soars. Efficient, effective, and economic. Why waste a bullet? The assassin backs away, letting him fall to the muddy cobblestones. Bulging from their sockets, his eyes are wide open as he hits the ground. Lenny Gauke’s world, as he finally sees it, is the way he always knew it was: upside down.
The next morning urchins find his corpse among a mangle of rusty cans, broken bottles, bent bicycle wheels, plastic bags, and used condoms. The canal, gently lapping at the end of the alley, is washing over his fancy handmade shoes. Perversely, the boys are not so shocked by the gaping wound in his neck as by the black bloated misshapen object sticking obscenely through the blood caked about his mouth. Only later does the pathologist confirm that the obscene object was, in fact, Signor Gauke’s tongue.
PART IV
AN IMPERFECT PRESENT
TOURISTS FOR SUPPER
BY MARIA TRONCA
Santa Maria Formosa
Translated from Italian by Judith Forshaw
The tide was rising quickly. In less than half an hour three-quarters of the city would be flooded and the water would flow over and submerge everything below sixty inches. The acqua alta was bad; it had been going on for three days and gave no sign of wanting to end its siege of La Serenissima and its tired, infuriated residents. And the tourists, who were charmed and excited to start with, were just as frustrated and irritated after the second day.
The female, on the other hand, was happy. By now she was finding it hard to run with her pregnant bump—it weighed her down and made her slow—and it was more comfortable and she could move more easily if she swam. Another couple of days and she would give birth. On her own. She stuck her head through the wide crack in the wall and quickly looked to the left and right. No one, just water, silence, and beauty. She loved this city, still and eternal, tasting of salt and mold, with its foundations covered in algae and the great marble palazzi built on millions of upside-down tree trunks. They said that the city was dying, suffocated by the tourists and the greed of shopkeepers and restaurateurs, gondoliers and taxi pilots. They said it was sinking, that its population was decreasing, and soon it would become a ghost town, a huge open-air museum, a theme park for grown-ups, the Disneyland of art. But she would not have chosen any other city in the world, and she was happy that her babies would be born here. She sighed as she thought about her husband; he had been gone for three days and she did not want to believe that he had abandoned her. Something must have happened, but she didn’t have the faintest idea what that something could be. She sighed again, and with that small amount of agility she had left, she plunged into the water. The tide now covered the entire foundation of San Giovanni in Laterano and was creating a single, very broad canal, making the black iron railing that stood there, in the middle of the water, look surreal, pointless, and isolated. The female with her blue-black fur swam underwater until she reached the wall of the palazzo opposite the one where she had stayed all day, safe. She was hungry but the acqua alta, helped by the current, would deliver supper to her door—she just had to wait for the first bag of trash to be swept past by the tide and she would be okay for the following day as well. She resurfaced and checked the wall of red bricks for a wide enough crack; it was hard to breathe and she could feel her babies moving incessantly inside her. A tear merged with the beads of water on her water-repellent coat, but she held back the rest and made herself think only about supper and about her little ones and all the things she would teach them. She calculated the route she needed to follow and plunged under the water again, swimming toward the palazzo’s canal-side entrance. She reached the bottom steps, which were completely submerged, and headed for the lower cornice running along the wall; it supported one end of the drainpipe, a staircase that would lead her to the crack where she could rest. A sudden and excruciating spasm in her abdomen took her breath away and immobilized her under the water; she was just a few yards from her destination but it seemed an infinite uphill distance to cover with that pain. She looked in front of her; the steps seemed to be the only solution—they would take her to the courtyard inside the palazzo and she was bound to find some hidden corner where she could give birth. She moved slowly; the pain had faded and she began to breathe again, but she was scared she might have a second spasm, stronger than the first. The large rectangular courtyard was flooded and at first glance it didn’t seem to provide any cover; she felt trapped and her fear made her nauseous. A distant squeak made her prick up her ears; perhaps there was someone who could help her. She floated motionless in the water, straining to catch even the smallest change in the still silence; the merest vibration would have been enough, but she could hear only the sound of the small waves that lapped against the brick and cement walls and the simmering of the rising water.
She thought she must have imagined it.
She shook herself out of her immobility and moved toward the center of the courtyard. On the right, beyond a marble wall, a staircase opened up; just looking at it made her feel short of breath and exhausted. And it was dangerous to venture so close to humans; they were savage, dangerous animals. But deep down she liked them, especially when they laughed and sang. It was a pity they were so scared of her kind, especially as their fear was totally unjustified.
The female shuddered and peered again at the stairs that rose up into the dark. Yes it was dangerous, but there was no other option. She started to quickly climb the wide steps, but the overpowering smell of food and the warmth that radiated from an apartment on the first landing made her stop. She was tired and hungry; she was frightened and could burst into tears at any moment. A blade of light shone through the crack under the door; the female drew nearer and nestled her damp nose between the wooden door and the floor, sniffing at the heat and the scent of home and food. An imperceptible noise chased her away to the next flight of stairs. She hoped at last to find a place to rest and some peace at the end of her climb, but her path came to an abrupt end on the seventh step, which opened under her paws and swallowed her up.
Signora Adele cleared the table, washed the plate and glass and the small pan in which she had fried an egg, cleaned the stove top where some oil had splashed, and swept up the few crumbs on the tablecloth. She went and sat down on the sofa in the living room and switched on the television hoping to catch a nice romantic film, possibly something from her youth. But she knew it was virtually impossible that her sort of film would be on, at least at that time of day. They broadcast them toward the end of the evening and sometimes late at night, hours after she usually went to sleep, and she never managed to stay awake for them. And anyway, sometimes it turned out not to be a love story at all. She didn’t like detective films or gialli, let alone horror or war films. They upset her and she found them too frightening. Signora Adele needed things that were romantic and nice; pleasant, pretty images; gentle and harmonious sounds. She was a simple and sensitive soul; she loved poetry and the theater, two things that hardly anyone was interested in anymore. Once upon a time th
ey used to have plays on television, often even Goldoni’s, in Venetian, and she used to watch them all. When she was younger she went to the theater every week—she had season tickets—but then her husband died and she had started to suffer from osteoarthritis in her knees.
Little by little she had stopped going out: she found it difficult to move up and down the stairs, and there was no elevator in her building. But even if there had been one the situation would have been the same: with all the bridges in Venice there was no avoiding steps. They delivered her groceries from the nearby delicatessen, a lonely survivor—along with the wine merchant and the butcher—of the string of small shops that until five years before had lined the entire length of the street. The bakery had gone, and the dairy, the fishmonger, and the grocer. And also the cobbler, the haberdasher, the health center, and the ironmonger. Now there were just glass and mask shops, second-rate garbage that was made on the other side of the world and was all identical. And bars, restaurants, hotels, and B&Bs. Prices had rocketed and houses had been deserted; families had moved away to the mainland, replaced by the tourists who swarmed into the city. Their numbers had grown every year and they brought with them a huge amount of money and filth. And vulgarity. All they wanted to do was eat, drink, sleep, and buy souvenirs, and to keep them happy the shopkeepers had been driven out, families evicted, and the city condemned to death. And not just any city—La Serenissima: the most beautiful city in the world. Unique, one of a kind.
When Signora Adele stopped to think about it for more than a few minutes she felt ill; it made her anxious, she had difficulty breathing, and she got the unpleasant sensation that her living space was shrinking. Her own home! Too many people, too many heads, legs, arms moving along like a single entity, too many mouths talking, singing, shouting, making an unbearable din. Too much litter, ice cream dropped on the ground and melting on the street, bits of discarded pizza along with bottles and cans in every corner. She saw it all from her window: she didn’t have to go outside, all she needed to do was look out and watch the flood of people that flowed every day through the alley where her building stood. Thank goodness some of her windows looked out onto the canal, where there was simply peace and quiet and the smell of the ocean and seaweed. The gondoliers didn’t pass under her windows: she heard their voices from far away and the songs with which they entertained the tourists—it was almost pleasant. It took her back to when courting couples, people on their honeymoon, and even Venetians used to ride on the gondolas. There were none of those horrible water taxis then, speeding along the canals and across the lagoon, shaking the foundations of the palazzi with their noise and the waves they left in their wake. Signora Adele was extremely upset by the barbarian invasion and was unable to accept the fact that her city was now being held hostage by people she thought were vulgar and greedy, who were destroying its beauty and had delivered it into the hands of the tourists.
There was nothing she wanted to watch on television so she switched it off and went to the window that looked out onto the street, pulling her checked flannel dressing gown around her and straightening the woolen shawl on her shoulders since it was especially cold that evening. Signora Adele was a large woman—tall and plump—she was seventy, and apart from the osteoarthritis in her knees, she felt quite well. The hairdresser used to come to her home twice a week, and once a month she would touch up the color, a dusty pale blue verging on silver that brought out the blue of her eyes, by now rather watery but still pretty.
The street was silent now; the odd person walked past every so often—young people going to and from the Rialto and the area around the Erbaria, which was full of clubs and tourists enjoying a night out. At the end of the street she could see the dome of Santa Maria Formosa, the church she had attended since she was a girl. Nowadays people watched mass on television—it was all the same to them. When she was young, Signora Adele was always out and about: she did ironing and had clients all over the city. She loved walking along the alleys, constantly finding new shortcuts through tiny passageways or hidden canal-side paths. She knew every corner of Venice; she knew about places that perhaps not even the old people who had lived there all their lives were aware of. She used to meet Alvise, her late husband, every evening in Piazza San Marco, between the two columns that watch over the Bacino, and they would stand in silence at the water’s edge, gazing at the lights of the Giudecca glittering on the opposite shore. Signora Adele rested her head against the cold glass of the window and let a single tear run down her lined cheek.
That evening she felt a bit more sad than usual, and the only thing that comforted her was the thought that tomorrow would be the first day of the carnival. The city was already packed with tourists who couldn’t wait to put on their stupid, and stupidly expensive, costumes and strut about, showing off to other idiots dressed up like clowns. They paid a fortune to rent the costumes and she didn’t understand how they could derive any pleasure from it. In her day, everyone made their own masks; they asked their parents, their relatives, and their friends to help. They put some thought into their costumes, which they sewed piece by piece; usually they were simple, patched, a bit amateurish, but how satisfying it was to wear something that you had made yourself! What fun! The delirium of masks that jostled and thronged in the alleys lasted for a week, blocking the streets and making it almost impossible for the poor residents to get around, and every year there would be a few silly people who would find themselves without anywhere to sleep. And they would arrive at her house, drawn to the notice that she had stuck on the wall above her intercom: ROOMS FOR RENT. During the carnival she put up a larger sign that covered all the other doorbells as well; in any case, she was the only person who still lived in the building. All the other tenants had moved out and the owner was just waiting for her to die so that she could turn the building into a hotel, or sell it to some rich Russian or Chinese or Arab who would do the same thing. Damn them!
She was the last port of call for exhausted youngsters with enormous backpacks, for adventurous couples or elderly people who had lost the rest of their group and were too tired to walk another step. All of them naïve, unwary, and stupid. Leeches, parasites.
Signora Adele trembled with excitement every time she heard the doorbell ring; she knew it was one of them and she looked forward to saying yes, there were vacancies, as many as they wanted. And what a thrill she felt when she saw their tired faces break into smiles of relief and gratitude; what a pleasure it was to take them off the streets. Forever.
If it was lunchtime or dinnertime, she cooked for them, insisting that they accept, or else she offered them a coffee, a tea, a tisane. Anything in which she could put her magic white powder, odorless and tasteless, that took them out of action in about five minutes. And when they had finished eating and drinking, and couldn’t nurse their drinks any longer, she brought them to see the room.
“Excuse me, I’ll show the way,” she would say.
She would open a small door, switch on the light, and move aside to let them enter. Usually they were already half asleep, their eyelids drooping. They would take a step through the doorway and then fall, sometimes without even having time to cry out, and her little friends would finally have fresh meat. There was no floor in that room—it had collapsed many years before—there was a void that went right down to a basement, a storeroom that was always partially flooded and that she had transformed into a vast lair.
It was a friend of hers who had given her the idea.
“Why don’t you put people up? You’ve got so many rooms, and it pays well!”
It had been a flash of inspiration, a bulb that had come on in her brain and lit up her life. It was a bad time—the building was emptying and the shops were closing one after another. The alleys were more and more dirty and crowded, the tourists more and more numerous, noisy, and rude. Signora Adele was angry, exasperated. Her hatred for that human scum had become so strong that she hadn’t been able to sleep or eat, and what they were doing to her city
made her feel physically sick. So she had decided to intervene, to do something to clean up Venice. In her own small way and according to her means. She would take in tourists, but in her own way.
Soon, another “sign” suggested to her the idea of getting her little friends to help. She had just been entering the house when she saw one plunge into the void, through the broken step. The squeak she heard from the other side of the door made her realize that it had ended up in the windowless basement. The first ones had arrived like that, by chance. They were hungry and frightened and Signora Adele decided it couldn’t be a coincidence: it was a sign from heaven. So she had begun to attract more of them, putting out bait to make sure they found their way to the right spot and then fell down the hole. She caught them one at a time, and now there were lots and lots. She had no idea how many there were, but from their squeaking she thought there must be hundreds, and so she had stopped putting out bait. And now there was no need for bait; they reproduced quickly on their own. At first she had fed them: not only did she throw her leftovers into the pit, she had also bought food especially for them, then she had stopped. And she started to feed them with the flesh of the invaders.
She would smile with the contentment of a mother feeding her babies when she heard them squeak happily as their food arrived at last.
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