A Thousand Days in Venice

by Marlena de Blasi

  Another day we buy a wonderful ivory lace coverlet in a bottega near Campo San Barnaba. Our treasure in hand, we walk a few yards round the corner to a sailing barge, a floating vegetable market, which, in one reincarnation or another, has rocked up along the Fondamenta Gherardini every day for seven or eight hundred years. We buy a kilo of peaches. Lace and peaches, the stranger’s hand to hold. This is good. And it’s this scene I think of as I crumple and fasten the lace to the overhead light fixture in the bedroom, stretching its edges taught and tying them to the posts of the headboard.Now we have a baldacchino, a canopied bed. Now we have a boudoir.

  A vase of cobalt blue glass I find under the kitchen sink is gorgeous with branches of forsythia from the flower lady on the imbarcadero, boat landing. Once an extravagant ashtray, a large square dish of the same blue now holds artichokes nodding on thick long stems and lemons still attached to their leaves and twigs. Reine Claude plums, the color of new grass, are heaped in a basket carried from Madeira to New York to California to Missouri and, most recently, home here to Italy. Books line squeaky-clean glass shelves where once lived wounded model airplanes and tons of old pink newspapers, the Gazzetta dello Sport. I stand twenty or so photos in silver frames on the freshly beeswaxed and chammied lid of what seems to be a wonderful pine chest, a cassapanca he calls it. He says his father carted it down from Merano, the city that lies on the border with Austria, where the family once lived, where Fernando was born.

  I will die with an unreformed and carnal love for fabric. Fabric matters more to me than furniture. Heirlooms and antiques aside, I’d rather drape and festoon some sorry, wounded relic than open the door to the Ethan Allen man. Shamelessly I head for the Lido market, which sets up on Wednesdays down by the canals. I buy a bolt of beige damask, lengths of which, unhemmed, warm up a black leather sofa. With a bolt of raw creamy silk I sort of gift-package the mismatched chairs, fashioning pouches for each one, tying them at their bases with silk cording. The glass and metal dining-room table is draped in a white linen bedspread, the ends of which are twisted into fat knots around its legs. A collection of Georgian candlesticks, rubbed, gleaming, I set like jewels in a row down its middle.

  I find perfect poses for nearly every one of those old pillows I wouldn’t leave behind in Saint Louis. All the surgery-efficient light-bulbs are replaced with bugie—literally, “lies”—low-wattage night lights and vanilla- and cinnamon-scented candles. Sunlight by day, candlelight in the evening: electricity can seem redundant. I am blithe while the stranger pouts.

  Fernando is, in fact, livid when I show him the just-washed walls in the bedroom. He says walls in Venice can only be washed in autumn, when the air is relatively dry, or the dreaded black muffa, mold, will creep and crawl. Lord, as if it would matter, I think. We take turns on the ladder with my hair dryer.

  He mourns the dead plants I set out on the terrace with the paint cans. “Non sono morte, sono solo un po’ addormentate. They are not dead; they’re just sleeping.”

  “You should know what that’s like,” I mutter sotto voce, carrying the plants back into the bedroom, trimming their crunchy leaves down to their sapless stalks. I begin finding how convenient it is to speak a language not understood by one’s beloved. I stamp my feet hard through the apartment, flinging a wake of crushed leaves behind me and wondering why there always hovers, just an inch or two above love, some small itch for revenge.

  A white rool rug from Sardinia conceals the ruins in the bathroom, and the red plastic-edged mirror over the sink is displaced by a smoked, beveled one fitted inside a baroque cornice from Gianni Cavalier in Campo Santo Stefano. He convinces us to buy two gold-leafed lily sconces to hang on either side of the mirror, even though there are no outlets for them. “Attach them to the wall and put candles in them,” he tells us, and that’s what we do. Relieved of its melancholy, the space is soft, inviting. We tell each other it feels more like a country house or a cottage than an apartment. I begin calling it “the dacha,” and Fernando loves this. Now it seems a good place to be, to eat and drink and talk, to think, to rest, to make love. Fernando walks the space three, four times every day, surveying, touching, half-smiling in a still-tentative approval.

  Tingling with curiosity, the troll presses the buzzer one evening, waving a piece of withheld mail to secure her entry. “Posso dare un occhiata? May I take a quick look?”

  Her twitterings please Fernando. “Ma qui siamo a Hollywood. Brava, signora, bravissima. Auguri, tanti auguri. Here we are in Hollywood. Good, signora, very good. Good wishes, many good wishes,” she says, scuttling back down the stairs. The bunker will be informed by midnight. Thanks to the troll I begin to understand that Fernando needs endorsement, confirmation, before he can embrace what I do. If I can please the crowd, he is pleased. Seven years later, three houses later, as I am telling you this now, still he waits for a testimonial, maybe two, before relaxing into approval.

  Rallied then, Fernando begins to summon neighbors and colleagues to stop by for a peek at the place. No one is asked to sit, to drink a glass of wine. Each one knows his office is to reconnoiter and report to the rest of the island. I am part of the furniture, a parlor chair upholstered in vintage Norma Kamali, and no one speaks directly to me. Addressing the air eight inches above my head, one of them might come forth with some flummery like, “Signora, Le piace Venezia? Does the lady like Venice?” Then, in a sort of mechanized minuet, he turns smartly around and out the door. I will learn that this is a form of Venetian social life, that some of these “visitors” will wax affectionately for years about what a lovely time they passed in our home. Nothing feels real yet, and I begin wondering if it ever will. More, I begin wondering if I will remember what real is, should it resurface. I play house. It’s a little like when the children were babies and I could play dolls. But no, this is different. Then I was much older.

  Though he’s on his own turf, doing the things he has done always, Fernando, too, has slid through the looking glass. He walks up and down the same avenues, says buona sera to the same people, buys his cigarettes from the same tobacconist, gulps the same aperitivo in the same bar where he’s gulped it for thirty years, yet now, nothing is the same. Fernando has his own stranger. “You, too, are inside another life,” I say to him.

  He says no. He says this is not another life but a first life. “At least the first life where I’ve been anything more than an observer,” he says. There is a bittersweetness in my stranger. And a long-repressed hot tremor of anger. I think how lonely it would be to just bump along, to hang on, while life drives one about. I believe in the fates, in a kind of fundamental predestination, but fused with home-cured strategy. I remember, when I was still very young, feeling relieved, reading Tolstoy. “Life will shape itself,” he promised. Though I didn’t buy it completely, I was so happy to think life might do even a part of its own work, that I could rest once in a while. But to sleep as Fernando had slept was sad.

  It’s a Saturday evening and, with no aim, we float. Out on the deck of a vaporetto I pull Prosecco from my purse; the wine, having rested an hour or so in the freezer, is achingly cold, its tight sharp bubbles an anesthetic on the tongue. He is timid, hoping no one will mistake him for a tourist, but he takes long hard pulls of the wine. “Hai sempre avuto una borsa così ben fornita? Have you always had such a well-stocked purse?” he asks. My purse is an evolved diaper bag, I explain. I try to explain. We have already taken to speaking a hybrid of our languages, a sort of homemade Esperanto. Or sometimes he will ask a question in English and I will answer in Italian. Each wants the other’s comfort. The boat plunges through black water, through wet, silky air shot with a pink light that becomes amber before it becomes gold.

  On the Zattere we debark, change boats, and ride back to San Zaccaria. It’s nearly nine. Curiously few strangers are about and, in the sultry air, the piazza drowses. Our steps sound hollow as violins send Vivaldi and Frescobaldi back and forth from the cafés across the unpeopled space. There is no one to dance, and
so we dance. We dance even when there is no music, until some boisterous Germans on their way to supper begin to dance along with us. “Sei radiosa,” Fernando says. “You are radiant. You wear Venice very well. It’s rarely so, even among Venetians and, as for foreigners, they are most often ignored, obscured by her. Foreigners are mostly invisible in Venice. You are not invisible,” he says softly and almost as though it would be easier for him if I were.

  We decide to have supper at Il Mascaron in Santa Maria Formosa, a place that had always been my favorite during earlier Venice trips. I love angling up to the slab of old wood that is its bar, demijohns of Refosco and Prosecco and Torbolino crowding the space. Gigi heaves down tumblersful of Tokay, fizzy and white-capped from its fast tense journey through the spigot. We tell him what we’d like for antipasti from white oval dishes of baccalà mantecato, castraure, sarde in saor, fagioli bianchi con cipolle, codfish mousse, thumbnail-sized artichokes, sardines in sour sauce, white beans with onions. Ancient, sharp, sensual. Canonical Venice from the tines of a fork.

  As we head back to the boat, the air now is drenched in darkening blue. I feel a shivery reckoning. This is my neighborhood. I am giddy, weepy, and yet—as though it has always been mine, as though all of this has always been mine—I am easy inside this happiness. I trust this happiness. But Mr. Quicksilver, whose moods are always changing, breaks through the peace.

  When I ask about one palazzo or another, about an artist, an era, he answers indifferently or not at all, a reluctant guide. “Venice is not exotic to Venetians,” he says. “And besides, I don’t know all the answers. There are parts of the city where I have never been. I want you to know me first, to be at home with me, and then we’ll worry about helping you to feel at home with her,” he says like a jealous lover. “You’re not here on vacation, you know,” he continues.

  Vacation, I want to scream. Do you have any recollection how I’ve spent these past weeks? I want to scream louder, looking down at my two-hundred-year-old hands. I would be able to scream these words only in English, and I already know he would dart behind incomprehension even if he understood every bloody syllable.

  “I can’t find anything in my own house. I reach for a pair of scissors and there are no scissors,” he says with the now familiar dead-bird eyes.

  “I don’t even have a house,” I remind him, saying the words as diabolically as I dare. I’m on a roll now, and I don’t care if he understands. I’m going to say how I feel, and I’m going to say it in my own language. “I have no equilibrium, no job. And what about a friend? How about someone, anyone, looking me in the eye and saying welcome. What about a clean glass?” I seethe out.

  We walk a little more before he stops again and, wearing the moon and the beginnings of a smile, as though we’d just taken turns reading to each other from Bread and Jam for Frances, he says, “Tell me what I can do to make you feel at home.” It’s my turn not to answer. Revenge flutters nearby.

  7

  That Lush Moment Just Before Ripeness

  Slowly, very slowly, I begin to feel I am at home. Sometimes I step out-of-scene for a moment, checking to see if I find some shabby sense of farce about us. Are we used people pretending to be new? No. The most stringent pulse-taking always reads negative. We are not old. We are at that lush moment just before ripeness, the moment that love suspends in a soft, sustained note of rhapsody. In the cinnamon candlelight and a lengthening tenderness, we strangers live well together in the little dacha. As a couple there is some sense about us that feels like risk, like adventure, like the tight, sharp bubbles of a good Prosecco. Even when we bewilder each other, make each other screaming crazy, there’s a bright metal ring to us like the resonance of something gold and something silver tumbling fast across wet stones. It feels as if we’re living on the eve of a rapture.

  The stranger likes me to tell him stories. One evening, stretched out on the sofa, his head in my lap, he says, “Tell me about the very first time you saw Venice.”

  “You know that story,” I groan.

  “I don’t know all of the story. Tell me everything. You were with a man, right?” he sits up and looks at me.

  “I was not with a man, and what if I was?” I half taunt.

  But he’s serious, gentle. “Please just tell me the story.”

  “Okay. But close your eyes and really listen, because it’s a beautiful story. Try not to fall asleep,” I say.

  “You know the part about my being in Rome, about my not wanting to leave Rome to go to Venice. But I had an assignment to write about Venice and so I had to go. Do you remember all of that?” I ask placing the event like a good raconteuse.

  “Yes. I remember you arrived by train and that you debarked at San Zaccaria so you could listen for la Marangona,”

  “Which never rang,” I interrupt.

  “Which never rang. But why didn’t you walk in the piazza then? How could you be right there at the entrance and then turn away?” he asks sitting up again so he can read my face. He lights a cigarette in the candle flame, walks across the living room and opens the doors to the little terrace. Stepping outside, he leans against the railing, facing me, waiting.

  “I don’t know, Fernando. I just wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready for how Venice made me feel, from that first moment when I walked out through the doors of the train station. It was as though Venice was more than a place. It was as though Venice was a person, someone familiar but not familiar at all, someone who caught me off guard. I was pretty jaded back then. I’d already been many places, seen so much, I just wasn’t prepared for the frenzy of emotions in that moment,” I tell him.

  “Just as you were unprepared when you first met me?” he asks.

  “Yes. Very much as I was when I first met you,” I say. “Now come back and lie down and close your eyes so I can tell you the story.”

  Fernando takes his position.

  Map in hand, I head for a place called Il Gazzettino, the small hotel chosen for me by my editors. I find Campo San Bartolomeo easily enough and then follow the crush left onto the narrow, dark path of the Merceria, pushing and pulling my suitcase down the alleyways.

  “Campo San Bartolomeo? You walked right past the door of the bank,” he says, as though the motion was deliberate disrespect.

  “Be quiet and keep your eyes closed,” I tell him.

  I open the door to a tiny, empty reception hall and tug at the bell on the wall. Il Gazzettino, whose décor I later came to know as travestied Venetian, is done almost entirely in Murano glass—chandeliers and vases and sculptures of lurid form and color cover every surface of it except those where prints of lascivious, mocking carnevale figures hang. The light is murky. I begin to miss Rome again. Through the door behind me bursts in a small, smiling woman called Fiorella, she tells me, as she tucks the great, wretched bag under her arm and carries it off up the stairs. My room is outfitted in the house theme and, in defense, I drape a lacy shawl over the worst of the grinning harlequins. The grotesqueness of the space dissolves in the light from the single window that opens onto the backstreet Venetian pageant of the Sottoportego de le Acque. I hoist myself up onto the windowsill and lean back against the frame of the thick, black shutters and sit for a while, breathing in the scene. I applaud the old basso serenading from a gondola in the rio below, and he bows deeply from the waist, as though the tipsy little boat was a prop on the stage at la Fenice. The light goes to shadows, and I feel a little cold. Back inside, I dance round the room like a boxer, not knowing how to begin to wrap my arms around Venice. And what about supper? Shall I go now to see the piazza or wait until dark? I decide to wash my hair and change clothes, then wander about the neighborhood in search of my sea legs and a good aperitivo.

  I tie up my hair, slide into a sheath made from a length of saffron-colored silk I’d bought years before in Rome, originally intending it to be a skirt for my dressing table. It’s a pretty dress, I think, as I buckle my gray snake-skin sandals. I am going to walk in Venice.

  “
Do you still have that dress?” he wants to know.

  “No. I gained weight and it didn’t fit anymore, so I made pillow covers out of it. And if you interrupt once more, I’m going to bed,” I promise.

  Fiorella counsels that I should wait for tomorrow to begin searching out the more typical places to eat and drink and that I should stay close by, round the corner at Antico Pignolo. I was to learn that Fiorella prevails. She phones up the Pignolo, books a table, severely recommends their kind treatment of me, and tells me to return immediately upstairs to change my shoes—all before I can begin to protest. I pretend not to understand about the shoes and race out into a sheer watered-silk twilight.

  Once more defying Fiorella, I walk quickly—again, as though to an appointment—up the Merceria to Calle Fiubera, over Calle dei Barcaroli and Calle del Fruttarol and out into Campo San Fantin. Outside the Taverna della Fenice I sit sipping cold Prosecco and feeling a strange sort of consolation. Some balmy caress from the wine, from the sweet, wet air on my skin? The old Princess provokes a shivery farawayness in me. And yet I do not feel out of place; I feel oddly at home. I drift more than I walk on the return, stopping, peering into angles, touching the worn surface of a wall or a great brass lion’s head guarding a small palace and masquerading as a door knocker. I am beginning to understand the rhythmic game of capture and release one can play with Venice. Light into shadow and back into light, amid her musty, pinched alleys I drift. As I have sometimes drifted through life. And so it is sheepish and starving that I arrive an hour and a half late for my table.

  Fernando interrupts, “And after dinner did you go to San Marco?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  I come through the Piazzetta dei Leoncini and look, full-face, into the piazza. A long, broad moonlit ballroom it seems, with the brooding domes of the basilica its portal. The walls are grand arches flounced in white canvas; its floor is stone smoothed by rains and lagoon waters and a thousand years of the strolling, dancing, marching feet of fishermen and courtesans, of white-breasted noblewomen, of old doges and hungry children, of conquerors and of kings. There are a few people walking, a few more sit outside at Quadri. It is from Florian that the music comes. The ensemble plays “Weiner Blut,” and two couples of a certain age dance unselfconsciously. I take a table near them and stay there, sipping American coffee, until there is no one left dancing or sitting or playing a violin. I leave lire on the table so as not to disturb the huddle of waiters taking off their ties and lighting one another’s cigarettes. I am unsure of the way back to the horrid little room over the Sottoportego de le Acque, but it is only a few mistaken turns onto silent calli before I find Fiorella’s hotel.