The Best American Travel Writing 2014

by Paul Theroux

  First, I called the gondoliers’ union and asked for an apprenticeship. Someone there told me to learn the mechanics of rowing—no gondolier had the time to teach me—and put me in touch with a rowing club (a collection of dues-paying Venetians who convene to row traditional wooden boats). I was instructed to get off the vaporetto on the island of Giudecca, find the second-longest bridge, walk away from it to the south, and knock on the last door before the water. The sidewalk turned into a wooden gangway covered in guano and shellfish fragments. Behind the door, a heavyset man in his 50s invited me into an office where the red-and-gold banner of the Venetian Republic was displayed like a rebel flag. He took $24 off me, and held up a white V-neck T-shirt with burgundy trim, emblazoned front and back:

  ASS. CANOTTIERI GIUDECCA

  Gliding around with the word ass on your chest was very skaterly. I took it.

  “But who will teach me to row?”

  “Other members will help you. Just ask for lessons.”

  In the club’s yard was a barn full of sandoli, s’cioponi, mascarete, pupparini, sanpierote, and vipere, flat-bottomed, slant-sided vessels—low, maneuverable, brightly painted, faster than a gondola, which presents too much freeboard to the wind. There were also a few gondola variants: a gondola traghetto, for carrying commuters (old, leaky, pink); a couple of narrow, fast, and impossible-to-control gondolini; and a caorlina, rowed by up to six men, and so big it was effectively a barge.

  A sullen pensioner called Luciano sat next to a crane on the seawall, reading a communist newspaper. His job was to put craft in the water. But Venice was in a rowing recession. Oars were the province of the old. Hours passed without anyone coming to the club. I finally found a fat, shirtless man in mirrored sunglasses and asked him, “Signore, could I go out rowing with you?”

  Not just silence but a complete refusal to acknowledge my presence. In the caste system of Venice, I was unnoticeable.

  This went on for days. I came to the Ass., greeted Luciano—“Ciao!”; “Oh, ciao . . .”—and was ignored, until one afternoon, unexpectedly, he put down his newspaper, fetched a red-and-white mascareta, craned it into the water, and told me to climb down an iron ladder and get in. I rowed for 15 elated minutes, incompetently. Then a wiry and very tan old man showed up and agreed to take me out. He hollered, “Shonee! Your leg—you’ve got it completely wrong! You are not capable!” The next day. “Worse dun yesterday! You row from the stomach not the balls.” Soon I was being berated several hours a day.

  Gino Macropodio, my father’s gondolier, 60 years old, wore his shirts unbuttoned to the navel and a solid-gold Lion of St. Mark on a chain around his neck. Most days, he could be found at the gondoliers’ station immediately in front of the Doge’s Palace, or at the bar around the corner, which he called “my office.” Twice a week, he partnered with a pair of young gondoliers, Roberto and Romano, to work shifts from a small wharf behind St. Mark’s Basilica.

  Gino possessed Mann’s “roguish solicitude,” but in combination with knowledge, effusiveness, and style. In conversation, he could veer from Venetian history to classical music to the wonders of combining alcohol with athleticism. (He’d once rowed three miles across the lagoon with six friends to drink 40 bottles of wine—“and then we rowed back.”) He made statements like “I have a terrible defect—I like to see beauty.” In response to my credulous admiration for Giacomo Casanova’s escape, in 1756, from a cell beneath the lead roof of the Doge’s Palace, an action so bold that the memoirist found himself “alone, and at open war with all the forces of the Republic,” Gino was doubtful: “They let him go. Nobody escaped from there. It’s fiction. He worked for the state. Really, Sean, reading is good. But you must try to look between words and see the point of view.” I have never heard it put forward by any historian that Casanova went from Venice to Paris not as a fugitive but as a spy.

  Gino’s favorite composer was Wagner, “an immortal artist,” who “died February 13, 1883, if I recall correctly. Maybe ’82. But of the day I am certain. February thirteenth. And he was an autodidact.”

  “Like you.”

  “No. I’m nothing.”

  Silence.

  “I’m a scoundrel of the canals of Venice.”

  The first time we met, I showed up unannounced, covered in sweat, hair matted in multiple directions, wearing the Ass. shirt. Gino shook my hand. He couldn’t close his fingers completely—the result of 40-plus years of holding an oar—but looked at me hard with pinpoint pupils in eyes so shockingly blue that they seemed recently dredged. He bought me a coffee, and explained that the hunk of cast metal on the gondola’s prow was the ferro, meaning “iron.” It supposedly represents the elfin cap worn by doges in lieu of a crown, each of the six jutting teeth beneath it standing unromantically for one of the six administrative zones (sestieri) of the city. (I, romantically, considered getting it tattooed on the back of my neck.) The ferri on other Venetian boats look like ax heads, spears, shells.

  Gino took me out rowing. All boats rowed with a single oar require a forward and a reverse stroke to execute a straight line. This is complicated by the fact that a Venetian oar is 14 feet long, and is held in place by a piece of carved walnut called a forcola (a bastardization of the word fork) that rises up from the right side of the aft gunwale. A little C-shaped incursion, called a bite (morso), is cut into the forcola and acts as a cradle for the oar. At the entrance to the bite, a nib, known as the little nose (nasèlo), takes the full power of the straight-course-keeping reverse stroke and, if you have no skill, fails to keep the oar from popping out. My oar popped out all the time. This was called “losing the forcola.” When I lost the forcola, 14 feet of hardwood crashed onto the starboard freeboard, knocked me off balance, and needed to be lifted back into place as the vessel bobbed and pitched. It was weightlifting while surfing. When he saw how terrible I was, Gino said I should keep practicing and invited me to dinner. His policy: feed me, teach me about Venice, and see if I became a rower.

  Gino loaned me a copy of Life on the Lagoons, by the Scottish historian Horatio Brown. Published in 1894, and dedicated to “my gondolier,” the book stated that the “traditions and instincts of republican Venice endure with greatest tenacity among the gondoliers . . . They, more than any other institution of Venice, have successfully withstood the changes and chances of progress.” As I got to know Gino, I realized that custodian of the past was a role he inhabited with seriousness. I once heard him express his esteem for a friend by saying, “He has never owned a motor.”

  Gino was only ever called Gino, making him an exception to the rule that all gondoliers have nicknames—when he was young, he was known as the Rooster, but nobody called him that anymore. His shift partners, Roberto (nickname: Nanoci—Little Giovanni) and Romano (nickname: Pullman—Bus), called me Che Qua e Che Eà. This was pronounced as a single (Hawaiian-sounding) word, “Kekquakeà,” and meant “He Who Is Here and There.” It seemed to encapsulate my efforts at self-reconciliation.

  Most of the talented amateur rowers in Venice were training for regattas. My breakthrough came at the instigation of a female racer named Claudia Forcolin, who taught me the most important thing about rowing: not to think. She had blond hair (like most Venetian women), and when she took me out, she wore a bikini. This was overwhelming to Kekquakeà. I forgot how bad I was and started to get better. Then she said, “I think you’re good enough to row in the back.”

  This allowed her to lounge in the prow. She seemed to love this. I definitely loved this. Claudia occupied some of the more spectacularly clueless passages of my journal: “She is quite attractive. She took off her clothes and rowed in her bathing suit which was distracting. Bikini. Madonna! We are friends, though, and I am in no way interested in her. She is really sweet and I made her smile parecchio”—a lot. I went on: “She said yes. I CAN ROW DA SOLO! I then went to San Marco to tell my Gondolier friends the good news. They bought me drinks like usual and I asked Gino if he would adopt me.”

  Claudia wa
s the object of gondolier admiration. Perhaps there was more to Kekquakeà than at first there seemed? Or perhaps not. The nickname was uttered with a knowing smile and a slight handsome shake of the head. Not contempt. There was fondness in it. It was understood that there was something charming about me. But I was dimly aware that the phrase alluded to other, less flattering qualities. Roberto told me, “It doesn’t really have a meaning.” So I decided it just meant me. In the evening, I’d find myself crossing a bridge and hear it shouted by somebody rowing in the canal below: “Oi! Kekquakeà!” and then the person would drift around a corner and be gone. It was like a surfer’s name. Like the big kahuna. Only 20 years later, at the start of my trip through the lagoon, did I learn that it was a phrase applied to misfits, and, among gondoliers, it was double-edged in its affections. An Italian friend alerted me to yet another connotation: “It’s sort of a way of saying you’re kind of a fag.”

  I began to venture out on my own. From the journal of Kekquakeà: “The wind was pretty difficult . . . I couldn’t even get going and went backwards . . . Then I got pushed into a boat with two guys fishing. I said Ciao, how are you, I came to visit, and believe it or not they knew me. One of the guys was a gondolier.”

  “Kekquakeà,” he said, and gave me a shove. “And from there on I handled it. I went out and circled a pole that I had chosen. I then drank my milk and came back.”

  I rowed the canals of Giudecca. I rowed a mile south to St. Clement’s Island, known to locals as the Island of the Insane, for its female psychiatric ward. Gino described the inmates as “dangerously crazy women, not just moody ones.” He added, “There’s another one for those.” I tried to cross the Canal of Giudecca to Venice but couldn’t handle the waves kicked up by motorboat traffic. After a handful of solo outings, I came alongside the seawall and Luciano refused to lower the Ass.’s crane. The man who denied my existence (Gigi, I’d learned from the other rowers) appeared, accompanied by Claudia. He took off his shirt and handed it to her—I wanted to do that.

  She smiled and said, “Good luck.”

  He climbed down into my boat, installed a second forcola, in the front, and put an oar in the bite, and we rowed into the lagoon. A few hundred feet out, he spoke to me for the first time.

  “Turn the boat around.”

  Pulling a 180 is a simple maneuver if the vessel has any forward momentum: you slip your oar under the water, feather it, and press down. As I did so, I noticed that people had gathered on top of the wall to watch us. Gigi shouted, “Via!”—“Away!”

  The mascareta lurched, and he’d already completed two strokes by the time I regained my balance. Then two more. I suddenly understood that I was supposed to do what any Venetian could do: use the leverage of my position in the back to overpower him and turn us away from the wall. It was a battle—a tug of war—in which I had the advantages of youth and physics.

  My oar popped out of the forcola. I slammed it back in and rowed a stroke. He completed two more in the time it took me to get back in position for another. We were going straight for the wall. I put in one more hard stroke, applying so much force to the forcola that it threatened to shatter. I heard cheers from the wall. Then I lost the forcola again, said “Fuck!” in English, felt the boat turn his way, slammed the oar back in, threw my whole body into the next stroke, hit the water with the wrong part of the blade, and sent a curtain of spray over us both.

  Someone shouted, “Go, go, Sean!”

  I fell to a knee. We began to turn in his direction. I got up, socketed the oar, and put in two decent strokes, and we were straight again.

  I matched him stroke for stroke for the next 10 strokes. Everyone on the wall was screaming now. We headed straight for the bricks and the noise, fast, neither of us stopping, 50, 30, 10 feet, and I was still giving it everything, no longer flailing, the spear tip of the boat’s ferro shaking back and forth: his way, my way. Just before we crashed, he snapped his oar out of the forcola and stabbed it into the lagoon. The boat turned and slapped the wall sideways.

  Everybody whistled and shouted: “Gigiiiii! Shoneeee!”

  He pointed to himself, and said, “Sessantaquattro”—sixty-four.

  Youth is full of prohibitions. Stealing that Yamaha in San Francisco was a gesture of autonomy. Once I was cleansed of my criminality, naiveté became my way forward. Kekquakeà’s way—to deny even the existence of prohibitions. And returning at the age of 40 to row the parts of the lagoon that I’d never been able to reach was an attempt to reclaim my independence and my naiveté (both long gone). When I left Venice, the old man who’d told me to row from the stomach had said, “You can’t go; you’re a Venetian now.” But I’d known just enough to be certain of how little I knew. Now I thought I was ready. It was a midlife-crisis kind of readiness—I figured that I wasn’t going to do it when I was 64. But I also sensed a possibility of balancing between two places and getting to some long-desired third. And what better place to balance than in a rowboat on the waves?

  In Manhattan, where I’d lived for 18 years, I talked to Dean Poll, the holder of the concession to run Central Park’s boathouse, and the custodian of the gondola La Fia di Venezia (subsequently rechristened Dry Martini)—a gift to the Central Park Conservancy from a Venice-loving philanthropist. Poll gave me permission to go out on the lake, after specifying, “Any money you make with that you gotta split with me.” The official gondolier, Andrés García-Peña, an Italian Colombian painter, took me on as his apprentice after I promised I wasn’t out to steal his job.

  The only customers I ever rowed were a pair of 11-year-old Latino kids, Alex and Benny, who shouted from the shore, “How much for a ride?” I quoted the base rate, $30, and they replied, “Can we just sit in it?” I took them out anyway. Afterward, they declared, “You got mad skills!” and insisted on paying me a dollar. Like any good scoundrel of the canals, I kept Dean Poll’s 50 cents.

  I contacted the Venice City Hall, got permission to visit the islands (many of them are barred to visitors), asked Gino Macropodio if he could help me find a boat—and if he would come with me.

  “No,” he said. “I’ve put down the oar. And don’t try and do it in a gondola. Gondolas aren’t made for the wind. You need an outboard motor to be safe.”

  “No way. I’m doing this with my own strength.”

  “But not in a gondola.”

  So he found me a wooden racing sandolo owned by a rowing club on a littoral island between the Adriatic and the lagoon. After I’d passed a rowing exam, I was given the boat—sky-blue and bright yellow, 24 feet long—and warned of numerous dangers. There was a crime wave in the lagoon. Albanians were running guns and stashing them on deserted islands. Mosquitoes carried West Nile virus. Certain gondoliers were fighting certain taxi drivers for the city’s cocaine trade, so taxi drivers were capsizing rowboats.

  Aside from encountering a woman sunbathing nude on the deck of a runabout, and some inquisitive monks on an island that had been given to an Armenian, in 1717, to establish a religious order (one asked if I’d discovered “the nymphs, the sirens, the women who live under the water”), I found that my first two days were uneventful. On the third day, on fire with adrenaline from my close encounter with the police, I rowed two miles, hard, for Bailer Island, where, out of sight, I tied my sandolo up to a navigational piling and fell asleep.

  Nobody came to arrest me. Waking, an hour later, I rowed a couple more miles in the wind (barely easier than swimming), and wound up on St. George in the Seaweed, where, in the 1850s, John Ruskin was captivated by “the kind of scenes which were daily set before the eyes of . . . Titian.” A monastery had been founded there in the 11th century, and in the early 1400s St. Lorenzo Giustiniani, the first patriarch of Venice, after renouncing his wealthy family (“Christ died on a cross and you want me to die on a feather bed?”), lived there in seclusion, as did the young Pope Eugene IV. The monastery contained a library of rare manuscripts and paintings by Bellini, which were destroyed in a fire in 1716. Before
the completion of a railroad bridge from the mainland, in 1846, St. George was the first piece of Venice that travelers encountered when arriving from the west, and it was the site of grand receptions intended to impress them. Eugenio Miozzi, the renowned Venetian bridge engineer, described the treaties hammered out in the seaweed as “anticipating by eight centuries the role of the League of Nations.”

  I rowed for all that, aiming for the western side of the island. But the tide had shifted and was heading out fast. Whitewater broadsided the boat. I lost the forcola. Finally, I gave in and rode the current, like a surfer, to the east side.

  The wind died as I rounded a corner and entered a canal-cum-driveway that led into the island’s walled interior. A boathouse at the end had collapsed—rammed, it looked like, by a huge topo, which was still sitting there. I spied a mooring spot, tied up, jumped ashore, and immediately stumbled upon a matching pair of bronze door handles, scaled in rust, sitting in a pile of bricks, bottles, seaweed. They were heavy, and when I scratched them, dull gold shone beneath the corrosion. I stashed them in my boat. The way onto the island was blocked by the wreck, which had been turned on its side by whatever wind, current, or drunk had brought it here. I pulled myself aboard, balanced along the vessel’s gunwales, and then dropped to the other side. I was in a room at the bottom of a stone staircase that clung to a wall with no visible means of support. Everything was powdered with flaked plaster. Vaulted ceilings were punctured by sunlit holes.