At first I can’t see a thing except the outlines of cartons and cardboard boxes, which seem to be stacked everywhere. Universal Flood aromas lie thick in the air. With the flicking on of an overhead bulb Fernando illuminates the space, and then I know it’s a gag. I hope it’s a gag. He has taken me to an abandoned space, some third-floor storage room just for laughs, and so that’s what I begin to do. I just laugh and giggle, “Che bellezza. How lovely,” cupping my face in my hands and shaking my head. Perhaps this is where the black-stockinged old lady comes forth to press me to her bosom and lead me to my real house. I recognize my handwriting on one of the boxes, and it becomes clear that this is my real house. Scoured of all vanities, it is the lair of an ascetic, the mean hut of an acolyte. Savonarola could have lived here, all of it bespeaking reverence for a medieval patina, undisturbed by the passing of time or someone’s rifling about with a dust cloth. I have come to live in the shuttered-up gloom of Bleak House. I begin to understand the real meaning of Venetian blinds.
The space is astonishingly small, and I think immediately that this is good, that a tiny bleak house will be easier to reform than a large one. Fernando hugs me from behind. I go about lifting the wretched persiane, letting in air and sunlight. The kitchen is a cell with a Playskool stove. In the bedroom there is a bizzare oriental carpet covering one wall, a collection of very old ski medals hang from rusty claw-shaped hooks and, like ashen specters, tatters of curtains float over a windowed door that opens to a cramped terrace piled in paint cans. The bed is a double mattress on the floor, a massive and ornate burled-wood headboard leans against the wall behind it. There is perilous walking in the bathroom, what with missing and broken tiles and the great girth of an ancient washing machine dead center between the sink and the bidet. I notice the washer’s hose empties out into the bathtub. There are three other tiny rooms whose stories are too terrible to tell. There is no evidence of preparation for his bride’s arrival, and he is neither fey nor apologetic when he tells me, “A little at a time, we will make things suit us.”
Over and over again he had talked with candor about where and how he lived, that the where and how were passive symptoms of his life, that the apartment was the space in which he slept, watched television, took a shower. If I am reeling from first-sight shock, it’s the fault of my own glossing over. This is neither more nor less than an honest homecoming. It’s good that Fernando knows it is for him I have come to Italy, not for his house. Houses are easier to find than are sweet strangers, I think. I think again, this time to a man I knew in California. Jeffrey was an obstetrician, successful, madly in love with Sarah, an artist, starving, who was madly in love with him. After years of fencing, he set Sarah aside for an ophthalmologist, extremely successful, whom he married almost immediately. His rationale was unembarrassed by sentiment. With the doctor, he said, he would have a better house. That is, Jeffrey married a house. This thought soothes me. All this aside, I miss my French canopied bed. I want to drink a good wine out of a beautiful glass. I want a candle and a bath. I want to sleep. As we set about clearing a space on the bed, he says once again what he’d said way back in Saint Louis. “You see, there are un pò di cosette da fare qui, a few little things to do here.”
A sickle moon shows in through the tiny, high-set window in the bedroom. I focus on it, trying to quiet myself for sleep. I’m still on the airplane or maybe in the car, on the ferryboat. I have moved through each leg of the day’s odyssey at descending speeds. It’s as though, at some point during the journey from there to here, a lapse of sorts has occurred, a short death, during which one era passed the keys onto the next. Rather than being delivered to the edges of a new life, I am already inside it, through the looking glass and center stage. Sensations are untethered. I can’t sleep. How could I sleep? Now it’s me lying here in the Venetian’s bed. Fernando sleeps. His breath is warm, constant on my face. Searching for rhythms? Here is a rhythm I think. Very softly I begin to sing. “I can’t stop loving you.” A lullabye. If it’s so that dreams dreamed just before waking are true, what are dreams dreamed just before sleeping? I fall into half-dreams. Half-true?
6
If I Could Give Venice to You for a Single Hour, It Would Be This Hour
The scents of coffee and a newly shaven stranger awaken me. He is standing over the bed with a tray on which sit a tiny battered coffeepot, steaming, and cups, spoons, and sugar in a sack. The house terrifies me in the morning light, but he is luminous. We decide to work for two hours, that whatever order we can wrest from the rubble by then will be enough for the first day. By eleven we are racing down the stairs. He wants to ride out to Torcello, where we can talk and rest and be alone, he says. “Why Torcello?” I ask.
“Non lo so esattamente. I don’t know exactly. Perhaps because that crumble of earth is even older than Venice.” He wants us to begin at the beginning. “Today’s my birthday, our birthday, isn’t it?” he wants to know.
We settle ourselves on the prow of the vaporetto facing into the wind. It’s neither possible nor necessary to speak out there; we squeeze hands. He kisses my eyelids, and, with flapping seagulls for escort, we glide under a Tiepolo sky through abiding lagoons, past abandoned thimblesful of sand, islets that once were market gardens and sheepfolds. We lurch up against the dock at Canale Borgognoni. Torcello is the ancient mother of Venice, in her lonely yellow leaf. Primitive echoes drift. Here there is a whispering up of secrets: Take my hand and grow young with me; don’t rush, don’t sleep; be a beginner; light the candles; keep the fire; dare to love someone; tell yourself the truth; stay inside the rapture.
It is past two and, with roaring appetite, we take a table under the trees at Ponte del Diavolo, the Devil’s Bridge, to eat wood-roasted lamb, arugula dressed with the lamb’s own charry juices, and heft after heft of good bread. We eat soft mountain cheeses scribbled with chestnut honey. We sit for a long time until only we are there to keep company with the old waiter—the same one who I remember had served me risotto coi bruscandoli, risotto with hop shoots, when I first came to Torcello years before. He still wears a salmon-colored silk cravat and a middle part in his pomaded hair. I like this. Amid so many changes, I feel sympathy in these unbroken facts. Beatifically, the waiter folds napkins as we, also beatifically, dawdle over black cherries, plucked one by one, from a bowl of icy water.
Raised up upon direct order from God to the bishop of Altinum Torcello’s Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta is a bedizened shrine to a Byzantine king. Inside its great cavern, the air feels charged, haunted, holy. A great elongated and shadowy Virgin of Byzantium holding Christ looks out, pitiless, from the conch of the apse. A country church with no parish. I ask a monk in brown robes about the hours when mass is said. He brushes past me and floats beyond a tapestry-draped door, my Italian too rustic to earn his response, perhaps. Outside, I run my hand across the marble throne smoothed by a million hands before mine, since the time when Attila sat there, orchestrating doom among the wind-whipped weeds. I want to sleep out there in that meadow, to rest in its prickly grasses and memories. I want to sleep where the first Venetians slept, sixth-century fugitive fishermen and shepherds in search of peace and freedom. From here, the apartment and its medieval patina seem a small business.
To return to the Lido to rest and change seems a waste of time, we say, and so we debark from the boat at San Marco. Since I have packed my purse like an overnight bag, the ladies’ room at the Monaco will be my dressing room. More than once have its aqua and peachy chintz comforts provided me succor. As I sit before the mirror, I somehow think of New York, of 488 Madison Avenue and Herman Associates, how I trundled into the city from upstate four days each week to write ad copy and “learn the business.” The Hermans would love that I’ve come across the sea to marry the stranger. They would take credit for having long ago stirred my sense of adventure. After all, it was they who sent me off to present an ad campaign to the government of Haiti just weeks after Baby Doc fled.
I remember the two men we
aring greasy jeans and wide smiles who accompanied me across an airstrip to a graffitied van and drove, wordless and pell-mell, through what were the most sorrowful scenes of human desperation and the most heart-stopping vistas of natural beauty I have ever seen. Later that first evening, I lay in my hotel bed under a canopy of patched mosquito netting, breathing in the thick, sweet air, listening to the drums. Just as in the movies. Except where is that man from Interpol, the one with the silver hair and a white dinner jacket, who should be slipping into my room just about now, enlisting me as accomplice in a night’s treachery?
I saw no other American or European woman the week I was in Haiti, the other New York agencies having dispatched fresh-faced boys upholstered in dark blue. An officer of the police force was also a member of the tourism committee. Kind enough to rest his automatic weapon on the table, he sat next to me. My hand brushed the leather strap of it each time I picked up a piece of paper. I began my pitch nervously but gained strength, momentum even, and returned to New York with the account.
Sitting here now, in front of this mirror, I remember racing from the Madison Avenue office most evenings after work to sit for a few moments in front of another mirror, one in the ladies’ room at Bendel’s. A dose of civility before boarding the five-fifty-seven up-line to Poughkeepsie, collecting the children, cooking, supping, homework, baths, the extended tucking-in ceremonies. “Mom, I know exactly who I want to be for Halloween,” Erich would say every night, beginning in July.
“Good night, old man. Good night, little girl.” So long ago. Not so long ago. What am I doing here without them? Why didn’t all this happen fifteen or twenty years ago? Now I wash my face, change my shoes, trade my black linen shirt for a billowy white voile one. I put pearls in my ears. It is eventide in Venice and the sweet stranger loves pearls, so I add a necklace of them. Opium.
The forever barman at the Monaco is Paolo, dear Paolo, who had stuffed newspaper into my wet boots eight months before, when I’d missed my first rendezvous with Fernando. He herds us out onto the terrace into the luster of a slow-ripening evening. He brings us cold wine and says, “Guardate. Look,” pointing with his chin at the mezzotint, the Canaletto, live before us in the rosy leavings of the sun. His everyday tableau delights him, surprises him. Paolo can never be old in my eyes.
Across the canal sits a low-slung building, the maritime customs house of the republic’s later days. The promontory is raised up above the lagoon on a million wooden pilings, and at the summit of the building’s stone tower twin Atlases bear up a great golden sphere, a perch for Fortuna, goddess of all fates. She is beautiful. A timid wind tries to dance with her now. And slim shards of light become her. “L’ultima luce. Last light,” we say to each other like a prayer. “Promise me we’ll always be together at last light,” Fernando says, needing no promise at all.
If I could give Venice to you for a single hour, it would be this hour, and it would be in this chair that I would sit you, knowing Paolo would be close by, clucking about over your comfort, knowing that the night that comes to thieve that lush last light would also make off with your heartaches. That’s how it would be.
“Let’s walk as far as Sant’Elena,” he says. We cut through the piazza and head toward the Ponte della Paglia, past the Ponte dei Sospiri, onto the Riva degli Schiavoni, past the Danieli and another bridge, past a bronzed Vittorio Emmanuele on horseback, and another bridge in front of the Arsenale.
“How many more bridges?” I want to know.
“Only three. Then a boat from Sant’Elena to the Lido, a kilometer on foot to the apartment and we’re there,” he says. Nothing about this life is for the fainthearted.
After two days, Fernando goes off to the bank. I am kithless, my language is sparse and often contorted, and my groundings are only two: a kind of philosophic composure, that sense of “portable sanctuary,” and my sweet stranger. I am free to begin coloring in that crisp, new, just unrolled space that appears to be my life.
Our joint plan is to confront a fundamental restoration of the apartment after the wedding. We will resurface walls and ceilings, hang new windows, completely reconstruct the bathroom and the kitchen, find furniture we love. For now, a swift ambient transformation with hard scrubbing and lots of fabric. Fernando tells me to rely on Dorina, his donna delle pulizie, cleaning woman. Cleaning woman? What did she clean?
Dorina arrives at eight-thirty on my first morning alone. Large, and long unbathed, she is a sixty-something woman who changes from her striped pinafore into another striped pinafore, which she carries in a wrinkled red shopping bag along with a pair of stacked-heel shoes, whose backs have been carved away. She moves about with a bucket of murky water, room to room with the same bucket of murky water and the same vile sponge. I ask Fernando if we might be able to find someone with more energy, but he refuses, saying Dorina has been with him for too many years. I like this loyalty to Dorina. The trick is only to keep her away from her bucket, to find something else for her to do, shopping, mending, ironing, dusting. I can finish the baptismal cleaning before she is due to return. I have thirteen days, and it’s not exactly the earth I’m going to scrub. I can finish it in four, perhaps five. I think back to my evening chant in Saint Louis, Weed, scrub, and dig clear down to China.
Fernando helps by demonstrating the floor-polishing machine. More a prototype for an upright motor scooter, it seems to me. Though its weight is light, I can’t control its speed, and it has its way with me, jolting me about until I ask if a helmet is required to operate it. He doesn’t think I’m funny. That neither he nor Dorina has ever had occasion to use it does not diminish the machine’s status for him. “This represents the ultimate in Italian technology,” says the churlish stranger. After it bucks him across the living room, we silently tuck the thing away, and I have never seen it since. Surely he sent Dorina home with it one day.
Next morning I splash vinegar-water everywhere and swab the floors with a new, green, string-headed mop. A splattering of pungent brown liquid from a tin labeled Marmi Splendenti, Resplendent Marbles, and I polish the floors by skating over them, my feet ensconced in the soft, felt envelopes Fernando wears as slippers. Under long, smooth glissades, the marbles give up a sheen. My thigh muscles burn. Though they are not truly resplendent, the floors’ rusty-veined anthracite is beautiful to me, and I am eager to proceed. For Fernando it’s not quite so. Each phase of the work causes him to grieve, before he shrugs into a temperate enthusiasm. We excavate the site, sifting things with anthropological sympathy, kneeling over moldering lockers and reproduction sea chests. In one I find a fifty-four piece audiocassette kit, its plastic coverings intact and labeled Memoria e Metodo, Memory and Method. It promises to “order one’s mind.”
“Accidenti,” he says. “Damn, I’ve searched everywhere for these.” Each evening we relieve the apartment of another layer of its past, and Fernando’s eyes are like those of a dying bird; his journeys to the trash dump are funereal. He is the one spurring on this interim cleanup, yet he is anguished by it. He desires progress without change.
I begin to establish survival rituals. As soon as Fernando leaves in the morning, I bathe and dress and, avoiding the elevator, run down the stairs, past the troll, out the gate, and to the left—fourteen yards to the yeast-perfumed, sugar-dusted threshold of Maggion. A tiny and glorious pasticceria whose resident pastry cook looks as a gingerbread man would look if he were a cherub. Inside it, I am near to a fever of joy. This pastry shop is next door to my house, I think. I take two apricot cornetti, crisp, burnished croissant-like beauties, and eat one on the way to the bar to drink cappuccino (fifty yards), the second on the way to investigate the panificio, the bakery (perhaps seventy yards, perhaps less), where I buy two hundred grams, not quite half a pound, of biscotti al vino, crisp cookies made with white wine and olive oil, fennel seeds, and orange peel. I tell myself these will be my lunch. In fact, they are to eat while I walk by the water, along a strip of sea-beaten sand that is the private beach of the Excelsior
Hotel. Though Fernando assures me I can walk through its lobby, out its grand glass backdoors, and down to the sea without intervention, I prefer to swing my legs over the low stone wall of a terrace that looks to the water, edge my way down the embankment and onto the wet brown fringes of the Adriatic Sea. I am nearer yet to the fever. The sea is across the street from my house, I think. In summer and winter, in the rain, wrapped in furs, in a towel, once in a while in despair, I will walk this stretch of the Adriatic each day for three years of my life.
Back up the stairs to work, then back down the stairs two or three times more during the morning for espresso, for deep drafts of unmusty air, for one, maybe two, tiny strawberry tarts from the gingerbread cherub. Exits and reentries are recorded by the troll and her posse, each of whom is uniformed in a flower-printed smock. Buon giorno is all we say. I have lost hope for the welcoming black-stockinged lady, and I am less certain about the potency of tenderness and bitter chocolate. There is a stereo in the apartment but the only cassettes, besides Memoria e Metodo, are, of course, Elvis and Roy, and so I sing. I sing for the sheer joy of another beginning. How many houses have I made? I wonder. How many more will I make? Some people say that when your house is finished, it’s time to die. My house is not finished.
By the third day, the scrubbing is nearly complete, and I’m ready to begin shopping. Fernando wants us to choose everything together, and so, when his workday ends, I’m there at the bank, and we go off to Jesurum for heavy ocher-colored sheets, a bedspread, a duvet, all dripping with eight inches of embroidered borders. We take masses of thick white towels and bath sheets adorned with milk chocolate-colored lace, a more intense ocher for an embossed damask tablecloth and napkins big as dish towels. These things are more expensive than a baby grand but, at last, there will be vanities in the stranger’s lair.
A Thousand Days in Venice Page 6