A Thousand Days in Venice

by Marlena de Blasi

  At first, I talked more often than usual to Lisa and Erich, my children. I would call, and they would ask a million questions I wasn’t certain how to answer, or they would call just to hear if I was okay, if I was having doubts or that sort of thing. After a few weeks we spoke less frequently and with strain. They needed to talk more to each other than to me during this time, having to sort out shock and joy and fear, perhaps. Lisa would call and I would cry and she would just say, “Mom, I love you.”

  Erich came to visit. He took me to dinner at Balaban’s and sat across the table searching my face hard. Satisfied, then, that at least I looked the same, he sat a long time sipping quietly at his wine. At last he opened with, “I hope you’re not frightened about all this. It will be good for you.” It was a vintage tactic of his to reassure me when it was he who was drop-dead scared of something.

  “No, I’m not frightened,” I said, “and I hope you’re not either.”

  “Frightened? No. I just need to readjust my compass. You and home have always been in the same place,” he said.

  “And they still are. It’s just that now home and I will be in Venice,” I told him.

  I knew the difference between going off to university, knowing that home is a few hundred miles away, and having one’s mother dissolve that home to go and live in Europe. Now home would be six thousand miles away, not accessible on long weekends. And there was also this person called Fernando. It was altogether a less dramatic event for my daughter, she having lived in Boston for several years already, deep in romance, her studies, her work. I wished my children could feel part of this future of mine, but all this wasn’t happening to the three of us together, as most events that had happened before in our lives. This time something was happening only to me. A part of me knew we were an old team, inseparable by a sea. Another part knew that their childhood was ending and that, in a strange way, my childhood was beginning.

  The really precious parts of my life are transportable, not conditions of geography. Why shouldn’t I go to live on the fringes of an Adriatic lagoon with a blueberry-eyed stranger and leave no trail of biscotti crumbs to find my way back? My house, my fancy car, even my native country were not, by definition, me. My sanctuary, my sentimental self were veteran travelers. And they would go where I would.

  I shake off the reverie and put on the kettle, start my bath, call the café to see if the baker has arrived on time and sober and set Paganini at a gentle volume. The real estate agents will soon be here.

  Rather than racing about to clean the whole house, I opt for the more elemental seduction of crackling fires and the scent of some cinnamon-dusted thing wafting from the oven. Once I have flames leaping in all three hearths, I cut up some three-day-old scone dough left from one of Fernando’s breakfasts, top the little pillows with spice and sugar and great dollops of butter and close the oven door as the bell rings. I greet the throng, which arrives together, despite the storm, as though on divine command. The brigade files past me, tossing coats and scarves onto a divan, revealing their smart mustardy blazers, and, without ceremony, commences inspection. There are eleven agents in all. The restrained murmurs of approval soon give way to delighted screams as one opens the door into the pewter-papered guest bath, another looks up at the nineteenth-century Austrian crystal dripping from the living-room ceiling and yet another eases herself down into the coppery velvet plumpness of the wingback chair in front of the kitchen fire.

  “Who was your architect?”

  “Who did the work on this place?”

  “Your decorator must be from Chicago.”

  “My God, this is fabulous,” says the only gentleman among the women. “Why on earth do you want to sell this?”

  “I know,” stage-whispers someone else. “It’s so romantic it makes me feel frumpy.”

  “You are frumpy,” the gentleman assures her.

  “How can you bear to part with it?” asks another.

  It was clearly my turn to speak. “Well, I’m leaving it because I’m going to marry a Venetian.” Big breath. “I’m going to live in Venice,” I say gently, deliciously, trying out the words. Was that me, was that my voice? The brigade responds with a long silence. When one begins to speak, all of them do.

  “How old are you?”

  “How did you meet this man?”

  “Is he a count or something?” asks one, eager to embroider the text.

  Mostly, I think, they want to know if he is rich. To say outright that he is relatively poor would perplex them, nick away at their fantasy, so I opt for a part of the truth. “No, he’s not a count. He’s a banker who looks just like Peter Sellers,” I say.

  “Oh, honey. Be careful.” It’s the frumpy one speaking. “Have him checked out, I mean, really checked out. Four years ago my friend Isabelle met up with a Neapolitan on Capri, and he almost bamboozled her into a quick marriage until one night she woke up and heard him mooning, whispering into his cell phone from the terrace outside their hotel room. He’d had the nerve to tell her he’d only been saying good-night to his mother.”

  Her story seems some inappropriate cocktail of low-level envy and a genuine desire to protect me. She doesn’t know Fernando, I think. That I don’t know him either seems irrelevant.

  One of them, trying to rescue the more symphonic motif of the tale comes in with, “I’ll bet he has a gorgeous house. What’s it like?”

  “Oh, I don’t think there’s much that’s gorgeous about it. He lives in a 1950s condominium on the beach. Actually, I haven’t seen it yet,” I say.

  “You mean you’re selling your home and cashing in your whole life without. . . .” Her query is overruled by the gentleman who aims to comfort the crowd.

  “Maybe it’s Venice you’re in love with. If I had a chance to move to Venice, I wouldn’t give two hoots for what the house was like.” They sally and banter without me.

  When the brigade exits, one agent stays behind to write an offer to buy my house herself. The offer is serious, reasonable, not so many thousands of dollars less than the price Fernando and I had talked about with my attorney. She tells me she has long been planning to end her marriage, leave her job, and start an agency of her own. She says that finding this house with the lipstick-red dining room is the last button necessary to activate her renaissance program.

  “I won’t be leaving behind any magic dust here,” I warn. “If you buy this house it doesn’t mean you’ll fall in love with a charming Spaniard or something like that. It’s just a pretty little, regular house,” I say inanely, wanting to protect her from her impulse and, perhaps, me from mine. “Why don’t you think about it and we can talk later,” I continue without looking at her and as though I was big and she was little.

  “How long did you think about it before you said yes to your Venetian? This is all happening just as it should,” she says with a voice that came from a misty place inside her. “I’d like you to tell me what furniture you are willing to sell,” she continues. I learned much later that, with some deft caressing of the zoning laws, my red dining room became the office from which she operates her independent agency.

  I call my children. I call my attorney. Fernando calls me. I call Fernando. Was it all going to be this simple? I pull off my good black dress and pull on jeans and boots, remembering I had to place an order with the meat purveyor before ten. I ring up Mr. Wasserman without thinking first what I’d cook for that evening’s menu. I hear myself telling him I’ll need baby lamb shanks, fifty of them. I’d never yet cooked baby lamb shanks at the café. Used to my orders for game and veal, Mr. Wasserman misses half a beat, then assures me they”ll be delivered before three. “How will you cook them?” he wants to know.

  “I’ll braise them in a saffron tomato broth, lay them over French lentils and add a stripe of black olive paste,” my chef’s voice announces without consulting me.

  “Write me in for two at seven-thirty, will you?” he says. After a look at the ice-encrusted car, I walk the mile or so to the café, t
hough I’d never once walked to work before. Of course I’d never been romantic about old smoke from an Italian cigarette left behind in my bedroom, either. And those baby lamb shanks. Tramping through high snow that is falling still in earnest, my old white Mother Russia coat trailing, making a soft, scraping noise behind me. I wonder when I will begin, if I will begin at all, to feel sad about all these endings I was sealing. Would there be some late lapse of courage? Is it, indeed, courage that was shaping my way? Is it bravado? Did I fancy myself some aging armchair swashbuckler setting off, at last, to adventure? No. My friend Misha says I am la grande cocotte with flour on my hands. Or ink stains. No, I’d never been an “armchair” anything. And let’s go back to why I must anticipate anguish or muddy what was feeling immensely clear. There is nothing I want more than to be with Fernando. Anyway, June seems far off, safely, sadly far away.

  As I near the corner of Pershing and DeBalivier I remember there is to be a meeting with my partners before lunch. A father and son, the elder is a rancorous old magistrate, the younger, a gentle-hearted philosopher who is restaurateuring to please his magisterial old papa. That it is papa’s choice to never be pleased has yet to impress the son. It’s a brief, cool discourse between us, an almost luscious divorce, and we agree that June 15, the day after our last programmed event and one year, to the day, from when I’d moved into my house, would be my last. I call Fernando. He says to book my ticket even though it is only December 19. It is not yet noon, and I’ve sold my house and drawn up a graceful exit from a piece of my business. All that’s left to do now is the slow braising of fifty baby lamb shanks.

  4

  Did It Ever Happen to You?

  Before Fernando returned to Venice, we had scribbled a time line of sorts, establishing priorities and settling on definitive dates by which everything would be accomplished. It was he who thought it best to sell the house immediately rather than rent it for a while, to wait and see. Sell the car, too, he had said. And the few pieces of good artwork, the furnishings. I should come to Italy with only those things that were absolutely indispensabili. I balked until I remembered the talk I’d already had with myself about “house, fancy car, etc.” Still, I thought him callous, talking as he did about the house as though it were only a pretty container in which I would wait until it was time to go, a nicely decorated launchpad. But, also, I remembered another talk I’d had with myself after knowing Fernando only a few days. He needed to lead.

  I already knew how to lead. For better and for worse, I had always been more than ready to carve away at life whenever the fates left me a little room. But he had been a sleepy observer of his life, watching its events and embracing them in a kind of passive obedience. He said that telephoning me that afternoon when we first saw each other in Venice and, more, chasing me back to America were among the first acts of sheer will he’d ever dared to undertake. Fragile, I think. There is a new gossamer-thin self-awareness about him, and Fernando needs desperately to be in charge. So be it. As much as I know how to lead I know how to follow, when I trust someone. But I know, too, that the following sometimes chafes.

  “Let’s just begin at the beginning,” said he who’d lived his most of his life in two apartments on an island less than a mile wide and seven miles long, said he who’d gone to work in a bank at age twenty-three when what he really wanted was to fly airplanes and play the saxophone. Yet, unsolicited, his father had secured a post for him and then laid out a new suit and shirt and tie on his bed, new shoes on the floor below it, and told Fernando they’d be waiting for him at the bank at eight the next morning. He went. And he goes there still. It was curious, his telling me to be a beginner when so many things in his life would remain exactly as they were. Or would they?

  And so I had to decide what would go over the sea and what would stay, and the most puzzling things made the short list. A small oval table, black, marble-topped with ornate carved legs; nearly a hundred crystal wineglasses (going to the kingdom of hand-blown glass!); too many books, too few photos, fewer clothes than I thought I would take (the waitresses in the café were presented with a life’s worth of Loehmann’s and Syms’s final markdowns); an old Ralph Lauren quilt; a set of antique sterling flatware (packed and shipped separately for reasons of security and which never arrived in Venice); and pillows, dozens of small, less small, tasseled, corded, ruffled, chintz, silk, tapestry, velvet pillows, like so many pieces of so many places where I’d lived. Small evidences of past lives, I thought. Proof of my well-decorated nests. Were they, perhaps, to cushion my landing?

  Much of the rest, I divvied up into small legacies. Sophie was transforming a spare bedroom into an office; hence, she got the French desk. I knew my friend Luly wanted the baker’s rack, and so we stuffed it into the backseat of her car one evening. There were many such scenes. And rather than being sad at parting with so much, I found my new and relative minimalism exhilarating. I felt as though I’d weeded, scrubbed, dug in the earth clear down to China.

  My waiting days were full. The café in the morning, writing in the afternoon, back to the café for final prep. I fitted in meetings, way out on the godforsaken edges of the city, with the Italian consulate, which comprised a battered old wooden desk, an older Smith Corona portable, and an older yet palermitana—a woman from Palermo—the wife of the insurance agent in whose office the consulate was situated. La signora was aubergine-haired, thick at her middle, and had spindly legs. Her fingernails were painted bright red, and she sucked at cigarettes in a hungry, hollow-cheeked way. She somehow pulled the smoke up into her nose and into her mouth at the same time, then tilted her head back and sent the last wisps of it curling upward, all the while holding the smoldering thing between those red-tipped fingers and up close to her cheek. She whispered a lot. It was as though her husband—two yards away and seated at a huge formica desk—shouldn’t be privy to our discourse. She pecked away on the Smith Corona, preserving my life’s story on sheaves of official paper provided by the Italian government.

  My personal data, my motive for moving to Italy, testimonies of my free and unmarried state and my upright citizenship, the size of the bankroll with which I would enter my new country, premarital documents to satisfy the state, premarital documents to satisfy the church—all were transcribed. It was a work that might have been accomplished in less than forty efficient minutes, but the lady from Palermo saw fit to extend the task over four full-morning congresses. The signora wanted to talk. She wanted to be sure, she whispered through her smoke, I knew what I was doing. “What do you know about Italian men?” she challenged, from under her dark-shadowed, half-closed eyes. I only smiled. Miffed at my silence, she typed faster and stamped the papers viciously, repeatedly, with the great inked seal of the Italian state. She tried again. “They’re all mammoni, mama’s boys. That’s why I married an American. Americans are less furbi, less cunning,” she whispered. “All they want is a big-screen television, to play golf on Saturday, go off to Rotary Club on Wednesday, and to watch, once in a while, when you’re dressing. They never complain about food as long as it’s meat and it’s hot and it’s served before six o’clock. Have you ever cooked for an Italian man?,” she whispered more loudly.

  As her inquiries became more intimate, she typed and stamped more furiously. She told me to leave my money in an American bank, to put my furniture in storage. I’d be back within a year, she said. She saved for last her story of the Illinois blonde who divorced her handsome politician husband to marry a Roman who already had a wife whom he kept in Salerno and, as it turned out, a Dutch boyfriend to whom he made monthly visits in Amsterdam. I paid her arbitrary and exaggerated fees, took my thick, perfectly executed portfolio, accepted her airy Marlboro-scented kisses, and drove away, wondering about this compulsion some women seemed to have about saving me from the stranger.

  The evenings I spent almost always alone, in a soft sort of idleness. Before leaving the café, I’d pack up some small choice thing for my supper and be home by eight. I’d pull Ferna
ndo’s same old woolen undershirt, still unwashed, over my nightgown, light a fire in one room or another, and pour a glass of wine. Looking for that same good sensation of having weeded, scrubbed, and dug clear down to China, which I’d earned from sorting through my material cache, now I wanted to look at things more spiritual than silver teapots and armoires. I wanted to be ready for this marriage.

  I challenged ghosts, looking backward into long-ago shadows lit with old, strangely palpable tableaux. I could see my grandmother’s sweet, teary eyes and the two of us kneeling by her bed to say the rosary. I always finished before she finished because I skipped every third bead. She knew, but she never scolded me. I learned about mystery from her. Or maybe it was that mystery was as natural and easy for both of us as it was to weep or weed the scrawny patch of hollyhocks and zinnias against the shed out back. It was easy to walk down to Rosy’s or to the coffee lady’s, up the three steep steps and into Perreca’s for two loaves of bread—one round crunchy loaf for supper, one round crunchy loaf for the block-and-a-half walk back home. She was contained, closed even, to most others, but together my grandmother and I would tell secrets. When I was still too young to really understand, she told me about her little boy.