A Thousand Days in Venice

by Marlena de Blasi

  He was five, I think, or perhaps younger, and each morning she would awaken him before the rest of the family, sending him to race across the narrow street in front of the house to the railroad tracks to gather coal for the old iron stove. Together, then, they would make a fire, set the coffee brewing and the bread toasting, before they tugged everyone else awake. One morning, as she stood at the kitchen window, watching him as she always did, a short line of B&O freight wagons came careening around the curve, way off schedule. Out of nowhere. Her screaming choked by hurtling steel, she watched the train crush her baby. Walking alone to where he lay, wrapping him in her skirts, she carried him home.

  When my babies were born and, maybe even before that, I began to understand why she’d freely told me the story that she’d never been able to recount to anyone in the then half century since its happening. Of course, people knew the story, but no one had ever heard it from her. She’d lived through the most horrific of human injuries, and her telling of it was a legacy: it gave me a perspective that would serve me always, a prism through which I would examine my own injuries, to give their weight and their solution a just energy.

  I had far too few days to spend with my grandmother. I used to wish I was older than all her children, older than she was, so I could take care of her. But she died alone in the early twilight of a December afternoon. Snow fell. And the rags of my illusion about family died with her. The pain of childhood loneliness still haunts me. But life was round, sweet during those flitting moments when my grandmother was holding my hand, whenever she was close enough for me to catch the scent of her. It is still.

  In those solitary evenings by my fire I found finely spun threads, a pattern, my own story. I opened up the kind of memory that feels like a wistful hankering for something lost or something that never was. I think most of us have it, this potentially destructive habit of mental record-keeping that builds, distorts, then breaks up and spreads into even the farthest flung territories of reason and consciousness. What we do is accumulate the pain, collect it like cranberry glass. We display it, stack it up into a pile. Then we stack it up into a mountain so we can climb up onto it, waiting for, demanding sympathy, salvation. “Hey, do you see this? Do you see how big my pain is?” We look across at other people’s piles and measure them, shouting, “My pain is bigger than your pain.” It’s all somehow like the medieval penchant for tower building. Each family demonstrated its power with the height of its own personal tower. One more layer of stone, one more layer of pain, each one a measure of power.

  I’d always fought to keep dismantling my pile, to sort and reject as much of the clutter as I could. Now, even more, I made myself look back straight into that which was over and done with, and that which would never be. I was determined to go to Fernando, and if there was to be some chance for us to take our story beyond this beginning, I knew I would have to go lightly. I was fairly certain the stranger’s piles would provide enough work for both of us.

  Except with my children, I had little conversation with anyone during those last months in Saint Louis. It was my own counsel I wanted to keep. There were two exceptions. Misha, my friend from Los Angeles, came to visit, condemning my intentions to marry Fernando, placing them neatly into the ranks of midlife crisis. Milena saw things differently. My best friend, a Florentine who had been living in California for more than thirty of her then fifty-six years, Milena was characterisically severe and talked mostly with her eyes. Trying to read her by telephone was maddening. I would have to face her if I wanted to know what she was thinking about my news. I went to Sacramento to visit, and only then, sitting in front of those sharp, dark eyes, could I feel her acceptance. “Take it in both your hands and hold tight to this love. If it comes, it comes only once.”

  When I told her about Misha’s cynical predictions, Milena called him a two-penny prophet whose oracles might even be true. And, with eyes looking far away, chin tilted up, mouth pursed, she banished Misha’s gloom with a wave of her beautiful brown hand. “If this is love, if there is even the possibility that this is real love, what do you care? What will it cost you to live it out? Too much? Everything? Now that it has presented itself to you, could you dare to imagine turning away from it for anything or anyone?” She lit a cigarette and pulled at it fiercely. She had already finished talking.

  “Did it ever happen to you?” I asked. Her cigarette was nearly a stub by the time she answered.

  “Yes, I think it did happen once to me. But I was afraid the sentiments would change. I was afraid of some form of betrayal and so I walked away. I betrayed it before it could betray me. And maybe I thought life inside that intensity would suffocate me. So I chose a sort of pleasant, safe compromise, an emotion less than passion and more than tolerance. Isn’t that what most of us choose?” she asked.

  “I find the intensity beautiful. I’ve never felt more serene than since I met Fernando,” I told her. She laughed.

  “You would be serene in hell. You’d start cooking and baking and redecorating. You are your own serenity. It didn’t come from nor can it go away because of Fernando,” she said. Milena’s cancer was diagnosed that next fall. She died on the night of Christmas, 1998.

  Too quickly, too slowly, June arrives, and on the night before departure, Erich comes to stay with me. The house is as empty as a barn. On my bedroom floor we make two pallets of the packing quilts left behind by the movers, cover them with fresh sheets borrowed from Sophie, finish the last of the Grand Marnier, and talk away the night, liking the echoes that our voices make in the empty house. Next morning we say good-bye easily enough, having settled that he will come to Venice for the month of August. The shuttle driver, Erich, and two neighbors heave my baggage into the van. My new minimalism seems to have gained weight.

  It takes half an hour to wheel and drag everything into the terminal and over to Alitalia. The overweight fees are too terrible to pay, and I wish I had heeded Fernando’s good advice about bringing only what is indispensabile. There is nothing to do but unpack and stage an auction right here in front of check-in.

  The ticket agents unzip and unbuckle while I pull out treasures. I inaugurate the event. “Would anyone like this Limoges chocolate set?” Then, “Here’s a suitcaseful of hats, winter hats, straw hats, veils, feathers, flowers. Anyone for hats?” Soon there is a gathering of travelers and passersby, some just gaping, some happily, incredulously taking things off my hands. I am offering up a case of ’85 Chateau Montelena cabernet and a trunkful of shoes when the captain of my flight saunters by with his equipage. We recognize each other from different lives: his as an occasional guest at the café, mine as “that lady chef.” He stops. I offer an abridged recitation of my story and, after a short conference with an agent, he motions me to follow him, bending down to whisper, “Everything will be taken care of.”

  A steward ushers me into the first-class waiting room, another sets down a tray with a bottle of Schramsberg Blanc de Noir and a flute. One pops the cork, pours, hands me the glass by its stem. I’m impressed. At twenty-second intervals I sip, fiddle with my shiny new Casedei sandals, take my hair down, and tie it back up again. I keep trying to remember to breathe. A woman of, perhaps, fifty, wearing a Stetson, alligator boots, and capri pants sits down next to me, avoiding the other six tenantless leather couches.

  “Are you a woman in transformation?” she begins. I’m not sure I’ve heard her correctly and so I just continue to spit-polish my shoes while flashing her a smile of welcome.

  She asks me again, and this time I have no choice but to believe my ears and so I answer her, “Well, I think we all are. I hope we all are. I mean, isn’t life, itself, transformation?” She looks at me with craven pity, tilting her head, preparing to illuminate my innocence, when I am rescued by an attendant and escorted up into the penthouse of the 747, far away from my original coach position.

  I am fed and coddled by the staff and given much attention from the four Milanese businessmen who are my cabin companions. After every
one is settled down, chocolates and cognac duly consumed, the captain opens his microphone with wishes for all our sweet dreams. He adds that, in honor of the American woman who is going to Venice to be married, he will take the liberty of singing an old Roberto Carlos song. At thirty thousand feet, all husky and sensual, he croons. “Veloce come il vento voglio correre da te, per venire da te, per vivere con te. Fast as the wind I want to run to you, to come to you, to live with you.”

  At sunrise I am still awake. The little cabin is washed in new June light, and I pretend to breakfast as though it is any normal morning. The balladeer masquerading as our captain announces our descent over Milan. I sit there in tremors, emotions tumbling, colliding, an icy free fall from one life into the next. I clutch the seat arms as though they and the quick hard beating of my heart could force the great hulking machine down faster or make it stay still. A last attempt at control, perhaps. I’d descended upon Italy so many times before, a traveler, a visitor with a return ticket. I have time only to wipe my face dry, to take my hair down and put it up one more time. We touch ground with the gentlest thump.

  5

  Savonarola Could Have Lived Here

  Thump. The first carriageful of suitcases is thrust through the swinging doors from the baggage claim out into the horrid yellow and black of Malpensa airport. The good captain had seen to it that all my things, except those already given away, arrived with me. Thump. A frontier guard, shepherding things, leaves his automatic weapon dangling from his belt as he forces one cart after another out into the arrival area while I look on. “Buona permanenza, signora,” says the guard sotto voce and barely moving his mouth. “A happy stay for you, my lady. I hope he is a true gentleman.”

  “How do you know that a man is waiting for me?” I ask him.

  “C’ è sempre un uomo,” he answers with a salute. “There’s always a man.” I sling two carry-ons over squared shoulders and follow my bags out into the crowd of those waiting. I hear him before I see him.

  “Ma, tu sei tutta nuda,” he is saying from behind a sheaf of yellow daisies, yellow, like the Izod shirt he wears loose over green plaid slacks. He looks like a technicolor anchovy, so thin—small almost—standing among the others behind the cordons. Blueberry eyes set in sun-bronzed skin, so different from his winter face. I am going to marry that stranger there in the yellow Izod shirt, I say to myself. I am going to marry a man whom I’ve never known in summer. This is the first time I’ve walked toward him while he stood still. Everything around him in sepia, only Fernando is in color. Even now whenever I come upon him, meet him in a restaurant, under the clock tower at noon, at the potato lady’s table in the market, in our own dining room when it’s full of friends, I flash back to that scene and, for half a moment, once again only he is in color.

  “But you’re all naked,” he is saying again, crushing me into the daisies he still holds tight to his chest with one hand. My legs are bare, stretching up from my new sandals to a short navy skirt and a white T-shirt. He’s never seen me in summer either. We stay fixed, quiet for a long time in that first embrace. We are shy. We are comfortably shy.

  Most of the bags and cases we fit into the the car’s trunk and backseat, neat as fish in a tin. What’s left he secures to the roof with a length of plastic rope. “Pronta?” he asks. “Ready?” A blithe transfiguration of Bonnie and Clyde off to burgle the romance of our lives, we race northwest at eighty miles per hour. The air conditioner is blasting out great puffs of icy air, the windows are rolled down, inviting in the already hot, wet air outside. He must have both.

  Elvis purls out his heart. Fernando knows all the words but only phonetically. “What does it mean?” he wants to know. “I can’t stop loving you. It’s useless to try.” I translate lyrics that I’d never before paid attention to, words he’d been listening to forever. “I’ve missed you since I was fourteen,” he says. “At least that’s when I began to notice that I missed you. Maybe it was even earlier. Why did you wait so long to come to me?” There is about all this a sensation of mise-en-scène. I wonder if he feels it. Could anything really be this good? I, who think Shostakovich a modernist, belt out “I can’t stop loving you” into the great plain of the Padana stretched out flat and treeless over Italy’s unlovely industrial belly. Perhaps this is the date I was always expecting to have.

  Two and a half hours later, we take the exit for Mestre, the belching, black-breathed port that warehouses petroleum for all of north Italy. Can it be true that Venice lives cheek to cheek with this horror? Almost immediately there is the bridge, the Ponte della Libertà, the Bridge of Liberty, five miles of it, raised up a scant fifteen feet and hurled out over the waters, riveting Venice to terra firma, dry land. We’re nearly home. It’s high noon under a straight-up sun, and the lagoon is a great smashed mirror that glints and blinds. We eat thick trenchers of crusty bread laid with ruffles of mortadella, lunch from the little bar in the car park while we wait for the ferry that will carry us to the Lido.

  It is a forty-minute cruise on the Marco Polo, traversing the lagoon and slicing down the Guidecca Canal to the island that is called Lido di Venezia, the beach of Venice. Thirteen hundred years ago fishermen and farmers lived here. I know that now it is a faded fin de siècle watering hole where, during its heyday, European and American literati came to rest and play. I know that its village of Malamocco, once the Roman settlement of Metamaucus, was the eighth-century seat of the Venetian republic, that the Lido is the stage for the Venice Film Festival, and that there is a casino. And Fernando has told me about it so often, I can imagine the tiny church there, and, in my mind, I can see its plain red stone face looking out to the lagoon. I know that Fernando has lived on the Lido for nearly his whole life. More than this, I have yet to learn.

  After the boatman guides the car onto the ferry, Fernando kisses me, looks at me a long time, then says he is going up on deck to smoke. His not inviting me to come along perplexes me, but vaguely. If I really wanted to go upstairs, I would go. I lean back then and close my eyes, trying to remember what I knew I must be forgetting. Was there no work waiting? Nothing left undone? No. Nothing. I have nothing to do, or perhaps is it that I have everything to do? The car leans into the swells of the sea. Maybe it’s only me keen to feel some sort of rhythm. There is nothing else at this moment but a crisp, fresh, just unrolled space to color. I feel a not unpleasant but curious sort of shift in equilibrium. I feel it. One foot is still six thousand miles away. Just as the boat bumps itself into the jetty, Fernando returns to the car, and we drive off the boat.

  In a breezy drive about the island he points out landmarks, personal and cultural. I try to remember how long it’s been since I really slept and I compute fifty-one hours. “Please can we go home now?” I ask from my trance. He turns off the Gran Viale Santa Maria Elisabetta, the broad avenue that follows along the seaside of the island, onto a quiet street behind the Film Festival theaters and the very worn chic of the Casino, and then into a narrow vicolo, alleyway, framed in old plane trees whose leaves reach across to each other in a cooling arcade. A great iron gate opens onto a drab courtyard lined in skinny, one-Italian-car garages. Above them rise three levels of windows, most all of which are sheathed in persiane, corrugated metal privacy curtains. Exactly as he promised it, home is inside a postwar concrete bunker. There is no one there except a very small woman of indeterminate age who darts about the car in a kind of tarantella.

  “Ecco Leda. Here is Leda, our sympathetic gatekeeper,” he says. “Pazza completa. Completely crazy.” She is gazing upward, beseeching. Is she emotional because of our arrival? In fact she offers no greeting, neither uttered, shrugged, nor nodded. “Ciao, Leda,” he says, without looking at her or introducing us. Leda gargles out something about not leaving the car in front of the entryway too long.

  I try, “Buona sera, Leda. Io sono Marlena. Good evening, Leda. I’m Marlena.”

  “Sei americana?” she asks. “Are you American?”

  “Si, sono americana,” I te
ll her.

  “Mi sembra più francese. You seem more French to me,” she says, as if she means Martian. We unload, she continues the tarantella. Much as I try, I can’t resist furtive peeks at her. She is a Faustian troll with black-olive eyes hooded like a hawk’s. Over the next three years I will never once hear her laugh, though I will hear her grizzly shrieks and see her fists extended to the heavens more times than I wish to remember. I will learn too that she wears teeth only to mass. But here, now, I romanticize her. All she needs is some tenderness and a warm bitter-chocolate tart, I think.

  As we shove and pull my bags along the corridor to the elevator, a few people are in arrival or departure. Buon giorno. Buona sera. The dialogue is stingy. We might be hauling cadavers in burlap bags for all they care. On the last trips out to the car, I notice more than one person cantilevered out of as many just-unsheathed windows. L’americana è arrivata. The American has arrived. Holding out for a scene from Cinema Paradiso, I wait for at least one black-stockinged, kerchiefed old woman to come forth and press me to a generous bosom scented in rosewater and sage. But there is no one.

  Elevators are announcements, and, as much as do entry halls, they tell the house’s story. This one, its atmospheric composition oxygen-free after fifty years of carting smoking human cargo, is three feet square, paved in linoleum, and painted a shiny aquamarine. Its cables screech and creek under the weight of more than one of us. I read that it is approved to transport three hundred kilos. We send the bags up alone, a few at a time, while we race up three flights to meet them at the apartment door. We do this six times. Fernando can no longer avoid opening the door. He braves it with, “Ecco la casuccia. Behold the little house.”