A Thousand Days in Venice

by Marlena de Blasi

  He comes to the café with me each morning, helps with the second bake, chopping rosemary and dumping flour into the Hobart. He loves pulling the focaccia out of the oven on the wooden peel, learning to shake the hot, flat bread deftly onto the cooling racks. We always pat out a small one just for us, set it to bake in the place where the oven’s hottest so it comes out brown as hazelnuts. We tear at it impatiently, eating it still steaming, burning our fingers. He says he loves my skin when it smells of rosemary and new bread.

  Afternoons we stop in at the newspaper office if I have a column to drop off or something to work out with my editor. We walk in Forest Park. We have supper at the café or go to Balaban’s or Café Zoe and then downtown to the jazz clubs. He doesn’t understand much about geography, and it’s three days before he can be convinced that Saint Louis is in Missouri. He says now he understands why the travel agent in Venice was exasperated when he tried to book a ticket for Saint Louis, Montana. Still, he suggests we go to the Grand Canyon for a day, to New Orleans for lunch.

  One evening we return late from dinner at Zoe. We had talked for a long time about life when my children were little. I take a small green faille box of photos from my desk, looking for one to show him of the Lane Gate Road house in Cold Spring, New York, that we all loved so much. Sitting by the fire, the stranger sifts through old vignettes. I join him, and I see he keeps turning back to one of the just-born Lisa, who is cradled in my arms. He says her face is so sweet and so like the face in her grown-up photos, so like her woman’s face. He tells me that my face is sweet, too, that Lisa and I look very much alike. He tells me he wishes he’d known me then, wishes he could touch the face that was mine in that old photo.

  Now the stranger begins unfastening my bustier, and his hands are beautiful, big, and warm, fumbling as they graze my skin through the soft lace. He begins brushing away crumbs from my décolleté, from between my breasts. “Cos’è questo? What is this? Your whole day is recorded here. We have evidence of burnt rye toast; two, perhaps three, kinds of cookies; focaccia; a mocha brownie—it’s all here archived inside your lingerie,” he says tasting the few telltale bits. I laugh until I cry, and he says, “And about those tears. How many times a day do you cry? Will you always be full of lacrime e bricole, full of tears and crumbs?” He presses me down into the cool plush of my bed and, when he kisses me, I taste my own tears mixed with the barest traces of ginger.

  “Will you always be full of tears and crumbs?” He’s a wise old man, I think, remembering his question while I watch him sleep. Yes, crumbs are the eternal symbol of my intemperate nibbling, my chest forming a good shelf to collect them. And, too, there’s some constancy about the tears. Quick to cry as I am to smile, who can tell me why? A long-ago something that still rasps inside me. Something in the pith of me. These are not the stinging, weeping, nighttime tears I can still cry from old wounds. “Stand up you who have nothing left of your wounds,” said my friend Misha one evening after a double vodka. After one of his patients shot himself dead with a pearl-handled pistol.

  Much of my crying is for joy and wonder rather than for pain. A trumpet’s wailing, a wind’s warm breath, the chink of a bell on an errant lamb, the smoke from a candle just spent, first light, twilight, firelight. Everyday beauty. I cry for how life intoxicates. And maybe just a little for how swiftly it runs.

  Less than a week passes before I awake one morning with a raging flu. I never get flu. It’s been years since I’ve had even a cold, and so now, exactly now, with this Venetian lying in my rosy silk bed, I am burning with fever, my throat is on fire, and I can’t breathe for the hundred-pound stone on my chest. I’m beginning to cough. I try to remember what I have in the medicine cabinet for comfort, but I know there is only vitamin C and a ten-year-old, oily, unlabeled bottle of Save-the-Baby that I’ve carried about since New York.

  “Fernando, Fernando,” I croak out from the blistery narrows in my throat. “I think I have a fever.” At this point I do not yet understand that the word, the concept of “fever,” conjures plague in the soul of every Italian. I think this phenomenon is a manifestation of medieval memory. Where there is fever, there is sure to be a slow and festering death. He leaps from the bed, repeating “febbre, febbre” and then leaps back into the bed, placing his hands on my forehead and face. He says the word “febbre” at three-second intervals like a mantra. He places his still-hot-from-sleep cheek on my chest and speeds up the mantra. He says my heart is beating very fast and that this is a grave sign. He wants to know the whereabouts of the thermometer, and when I tell him I don’t have one I see, for the first time, Fernando’s face in torment. I ask him if this thermometer-lessness is a deal breaker.

  Not bothering with underwear, he slides on his jeans and pulls a sweater over his head, dressing for a mercy mission. He asks me how to say termometro in English, and because its pronounciation is close to the Italian, he can’t differentiate the two. I write it on a Post-it along with “Tylenol and something for flu.” It hurts desperately to laugh, but I laugh anyway. Fernando says hysteria is common in cases like this. He checks his money.

  He has lire and two gold Krugerrands. I tell him the pharmacy takes only dollars, and he throws up his hands, saying how little time there is to waste. He bundles into his jacket, wraps around his muffler, tugs his furry hat into place, and stretches a glove over his left hand, the right-hand one having disappeared into the ether over the Atlantic. Girded for the wars he might face in the forty-degree sunshine during the three-block journey west into Clayton, the Venetian departs. This is to be his very first solo socioeconomic encounter in America. He comes back into the house to fetch his dictionary, kissing me twice again, shaking his head in disbelief that I could have invited such tragedy.

  Full of warm tea and all the little pills and potions with which the Venetian has plied me, I sleep most of the day and into the night. Once, when I awaken, I find him sitting on the edge of the bed facing me, his eyes pools of sweetness. “The fever has passed, you’re lovely and cool now. Dormi, amore mio, dormi. Sleep, my love, sleep.” I look at him, at his narrow hunched shoulders, his face still a picture of worry. He gets up to adjust the blanket, and I look at him bending over me in his sensible knee-length woolen underwear. I think he looks like the skinny man on the beach before he wrote away for his copy of “Muscle Culture.” I think he is the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen.

  I ask him, “Did you think I was going to die?”

  He says, “No. But I was frightened. You were very sick. You still are, and now you must sleep again. But you know, just in case you do die before I die, I have a plan, a way to find you. I don’t desire to wait another fifty years, and so I’ll go to Saint Peter and I’ll ask directly for the kitchen, for the wood-burning oven, to be exact. Do you think there’s a bread oven in Paradise? If there is, there you’ll be, all full of flour and smelling like rosemary.” He tells me all this while he pulls at the sheets, attempting knife-edge military corners. Finally content with his adjustments, he sits near to me again and, in a whispery baritone, the Venetian stranger who looks very much like Peter Sellers and a little like Rudolf Valentino sings a lullabye. He caresses my forehead and says, “You know I’ve always wanted someone to sing to me, but now I know that what I want more is to sing to you.”

  Next morning, tracking the scent of his burning cigarette, I run out toward the living room. “You should not be get upping,” he tells me in English, chasing me back into bed. He climbs in next to me and we sleep. We sleep the sleep of children.

  On the morning of the day he is to depart for Venice we forgo our fireside chat, we leave coffee in our cups. We don’t stop by the café. We don’t even talk very much. We walk a long time through the park and then find a bench on which to rest for a while. A flock of geese are honking and flapping their way exuberantly through cold crystal air. “Aren’t they a little late getting south?” I ask him.

  “A little,” he says. “Perhaps they were waiting for one of them to catch u
p or, perhaps, they were lost. It’s only important that now they are on their way. Like us,” he says.

  “How poetic you are,” I tell him.

  “A few weeks ago I would have never even looked up at those birds, I would have never even heard them. Now I feel part of things. Yes, I feel connected. I think that’s the word. I feel already married to you, as if I’ve always been married to you but I just couldn’t find you. It even seems unnecessary to ask you to marry me. It seems better to say, please don’t get lost again. Stay close. Stay very close to me.” His is the shadowy voice of a boy saying secrets.

  After returning home from the airport that evening, I light a fire in the hearth in my bedroom and throw cushions down in front of it as he had done each evening. I sit there where he had sat, pull his woolen undershirt over my nightgown and feel as small and fragile as I can remember. It has all been settled. He is to begin moving papers about in Venice in preparation for our marriage. I am to close up my life in America and get to Italy as quickly as I can, looking to June as the absolute latest date. I decide to sleep by the fire, and I pull a blanket off the bed and lie down under it. I inhale the scent of the stranger, which rises from his shirt. I love this smell. “I love Fernando,” I tell myself and the fire. I am bewildered by this fresh new fact of my life, more from the swiftness of its coming than by its truth. I search for some sense of folie à deux. I find none. Rather than being love-blinded, it is in love that I can see, really see.

  Never was there even a flickering sense of my having been beckoned up onto a white horse by a curly-haired swain, by the man-who-would-be-king, my one-and-only-meant-to-be-mine. I never felt the earth crack open. Never. What I felt, what I feel, is quiet. Except for those first hours together in Venice, there has been no confusion, no confounding, none of the measuring and considering one might think to be natural for a woman up to her knees in middle age who thinks to jump the moat. Now all the doors are open, and there is warm yellow light behind them. This does not feel like a new perspective but like the first and only perspective that has ever belonged only to me, the first perspective that has been neither compromised nor redrawn. Fernando is a first choice. I never had to talk myself into loving him, to balance out his merits and defects on a yellow pad. Nor did I have to, once again, remind myself that I wasn’t getting any younger, that I should be grateful for the attentions of yet another “very nice man.”

  Too often it is we who won’t let life be simple. Why must we squeeze it and bite it and slam it against what we’ve convinced ourselves are our great powers of reason? We violate the innocence of things in the name of rationality so we can wander about, uninterrupted, in our search for passion and sentiment. Let the inexplicable sit sacred. I love him. Skinny legs, narrow shoulders, sadness, tenderness, beautiful hands, beautiful voice, wrinkled knees. No saxophone. No airplanes. Jesuit ghosts.

  I wait for sleep that doesn’t come. It’s nearly three in the morning, and I remember that in five and a half hours the real estate broker and her agents will be arriving, en masse, for a look at the house. I wonder about my audience with the Italian consulate in Saint Louis, whom I’ve heard is a witchy Sicilian. I understand how much I have taken on with the stranger but, more, I know that whatever else might happen, I am in love for the first time in my life.

  3

  Why Shouldn’t I Go to Live on the Fringes of an Adriatic Lagoon with a Blueberry-Eyed Stranger?

  A stunning cold wakens me. Dull thin snowlight shows itself from behind the window’s white lace. White on white, and Fernando is gone. I run to raise the thermostat, then back to the window to watch the spectacle. A foot or so of icy snow has already fallen on the terrace. Would the real estate agents still come? Should I wait to begin polishing up things? I wander through the rooms, which seem bigger or smaller now, empty without his open suitcases and shoes and all his highly colored cargo festooning them. I miss the disorder that went away with him. How unlike me. I remember back to the June morning when I closed on this house. I had played the unflinching martinet, running my hands over surfaces, tsk-tsking over paint splatters on the mahogany satin floors, threatening to halt the proceedings because of a quirky garage door opener. The restructuring of the house had been a yearlong saga, ten months of which were conducted long-distance from Sacramento. “A fireplace in the kitchen, the bedroom, and the living room?” sneered the contractor during our initial meeting. During the final two months of work I had stayed at Sophie’s—she being a new friend, a woman in a transition of her own, who sought company at least as much as the income she earned from renting rooms in her musty old house. I would spend hours each day on-site, deep in some little project of my own or sometimes running and fetching for the workers. I thought back to the great painters’ rebellion on the morning I began with, “You see, I’d like each room to be painted in an almost imperceptibly descending tint of terracotta.” I’d spilled a sackful of color chips onto the floor. “And the dining room, I would like it to be in this clear, bright sort of primary red,” I continued, brandishing a swatch of damask.

  “Red, really red, like your lipstick?” asked one of them incredulously.

  “Ah, that’s exactly it. Lipstick red,” I smiled in perfect satisfaction at his quick comprehension. Besides, what’s so odd about red? Red is earth and stone and sunset and barns and schoolhouses, and certainly red can be the walls of a little candlelit room where people sit down together to supper.

  “It will take six, maybe eight coats to get an even coverage with a color that dark, ma’am,” warned another. “It’s gonna make the space feel smaller, closed-in,” he said.

  “Yes, the space will be warm, inviting,” I said as though we were in agreement.

  I remembered going to visit the painters during their work, bringing them cold tea and the first fat ripe cherries still warm from Sophie’s tree. And when the opus was finished and nearly every one of the workers, all of them spiffed and scented, came to the house-warming, it was the painting squad who photographed the rooms from a hundred angles, two of them coming back again and again to shoot the spaces in changing light. The sweet little house, made with so much love, had, after all, been an obsession, short-lived. All I wished for now was to be free of it, to leave it fast behind me, to go and live in a house I’d never seen, a place Fernando wincingly described as “a very small apartment in a postwar condominium that needs a lot of work.”

  “What sort of work?” I’d asked brightly. “Paint and furniture? New drapes?”

  “More precisely, there are many things to put in order.” I waited. He proceeded, “Nothing much has been done since its construction in the early fifties. My father owned it as a rental property. I inherited it from him.”

  I skewed my imaginings toward the grotesque, hoping to avoid later delusion. I pictured small-windowed square rooms, lots of Milanese plastic, mint green and flamingo pink paint peeling everywhere. Weren’t those the colors of postwar Italy? It would have been nice if he’d told me he lived in a third-floor, frescoed flat in a Gothic palazzo that looked over the Grand Canal or, perhaps, in the former atelier of Tintoretto, where the light would be splendid. But he didn’t. It wasn’t for Fernando’s house that I was going to Venice.

  I missed him desperately, even sniffed about for some remnant of his cigarette smoke. As I walked through the living room I could see him there, his Peter Sellers grin, arms folded at the elbows inward toward his chest, fingers beckoning me. “Come here to dance with me,” he’d say, as his newly acquired, enormously esteemed Roy Orbison disk sobbed through the stereo. I would always lay down my book or my pen, and we would dance. I want to dance now, barefoot, shaking in the cold. How I want to dance with him. I remember the people waltzing in Piazza San Marco. Was I really going to live there? Was I really going to marry Fernando?

  Terror, illness, deceit, delusion, marriage, divorce, loneliness had all come to visit early enough in my life, interfering with the peace. Some of the demons just passed through, while others of
them pitched tents outside my back door. And they stayed. One by one they went away, each leaving some impression of the visit that made me stronger, better. I’m thankful the gods were impatient with me, that they never waited until I was thirty or fifty or seventy-seven, that they’d had the grace to throw down the gauntlets when I was so young. Gauntlets are the stuff of every life, but when you learn, young, how to pick them up, how to work them against the demons, and, finally, how to outlast if not escape those same demons, life can seem more merciful. It’s that long, smooth, false swanning through the course of a life that seems to drive a person, sooner or later, into the wall. I never swanned through anything, but I was always grateful for the chance to keep trying to shine up things. Anyway, by this time, there wasn’t much left to fear. A grim childhood, scattered here and there with the hideous, provided early grief and shame. I kept thinking it must be me who was all wrong, me that was so dreadful, me the cause of the epic agony in my family. No one worked very hard to dissuade me from my thinking. Why couldn’t I live in a house with golden windows where people were happy, where no one had bad dreams or white-hot fear? I wanted to be anywhere where someone wasn’t lashing old pain across my new life, flailing it smart as a leather strap.

  When I understood it was me, myself, who’d have to build the house with the golden windows, I got to work. I salved heartaches, learned to bake bread, raised children, invented a life that felt good. And now I’m choosing to leave that life. I let myself remember my quaking fears when the children were small, the lean periods, my playing for time with the gods, asking to stay strong and well enough to take care of them, to grow them up a while longer. Isn’t that what single moms do? We fear someone stronger than us will take away our babies. We fear someone will find grievious fault with the job we’re doing, with the choices we’re making. We’re already hard enough on ourselves. And even in our strengths, we’re judged broken. At best, we’re half-good. We fear poverty and solitude. Lady Madonna, children at her feet. We fear breast cancer. We fear our children’s fear. We fear the speed at which their childhood passes. Wait. Wait, please, I think I understand it now. I think I can do it better. Can we just repeat last month? How did you get to be thirteen? How did you get to be twenty? Yes. Yes, of course, you must leave. Yes, I understand. I love you, baby. I love you, Mommy.