A Thousand Days in Venice

by Marlena de Blasi

  One day I ride out to Torcello to walk in the long meadow grasses and rest in the seventh-century dimness of Santa Maria dell’Assunta. I sit under the pergola at Osteria al Ponte del Diavolo to eat risotto with hop shoots, served by a waiter with pomaded hair parted in the middle and a salmon-colored silk cravat.

  “Where we ate on your first weekend here,” says Fernando.

  I see dozens of churches and the sublime paintings that hide in some of them, never setting foot inside the Accademia or the Correr during that first visit. My research of the bacari, wine bars, is rather intermittent and spontaneous. As I come across one, I stop in and sip Incrocio Manzoni or a tumbler of Malbec or of Recioto, always with some sort of wonderful cicheti, appetizers. I like the barely hard-boiled halves of eggs, their yolks orange and soft and ornamented with a sliver of fresh sardine and the tiny fried octopus dressed in oil, thumbnail-sized artichokes in a garlicky bath. I find it easy, really, to avoid the Venice of which I had been so long diffident. She presents a clear choice between stepping into or away from cliché. Her heart’s blood rushes just beneath her artifice. Just like mine, I think. Venice wants only a little pluck as the price of entry onto her sentimental routes.

  I don’t know how long he’d been sleeping, why I never noticed the quiet clicking of his snore. Anyway, I was happy for the chance to have heard my story. Carefully I walk him to bed, thinking he is gone for the night, but, once there, he props himself up on his elbows, “Will you tell me everything tomorrow night?”

  The stranger has less trouble staying awake for our baths. And early on we find our best talking takes place in the tub. For two people so full of mysteries as we are, there is a spiritual intimacy between us that needs no coaxing. As it was from that first evening in Saint Louis, I’m the bath maker. I pour in handfuls of green tea salts and sandalwood oil, too much foaming pine, and a drop or two of musk. I always make the water too hot, and I’m always submerged among the bubbles and steam when Fernando enters the bathroom. He lights the candles. It takes him a full four minutes to adjust to the water as his pale skin blooms crimson. “Perché mi fai bollire ogni volta? Why do you wish to boil me each time?” During one bath time the subject is cruelty. I want to tell him more about my first marriage.

  I open with, “I betrayed my first husband. He was a patient man who waited for me to provide a clear-cut reason so he could leave me. He couldn’t just say, I don’t love you, I don’t want this marriage, or you, or these children. He told me these things only many years later. At the time, what he did was to reinforce my clearly pathological insecurities about being a lovable person.

  “He’s a psychologist. He’s also cunning. And what he did was stop talking to me. He withdrew, leaving me to stumble and tremble, to wonder what was happening. And when he did talk, mostly it was to ridicule and threaten. He seemed to enjoy his immense capacity to frighten me.” Fernando’s face is no longer red but very white. Each phrase seems to need five minutes of translation, then another eternity for him to take it in. At least the water is cooling. But I’m crying.

  I continue, “I didn’t even understand what depression was, but depressed I must have been. I was pregnant with Erich during the worst of it. Perhaps I knew then that his father was already gone from us. It was my little girl, Lisa, who got excited by the baby’s first kick. It was she, her head in my lap, who rejoiced at his rumblings, translated them for me. She and I sang to the baby, told him how we already loved him, that we couldn’t wait to hold him. Still, somehow, Erich was born knowing about sadness.”

  Now Fernando is crying too, and he says he needs me to be in his arms, and so we slosh out to the bedroom and lie down.

  “Soon after Erich’s birth, there were moments when I confronted my husband, telling him I was lonely and frightened. ‘Why are you so cruel,’ I’d ask him. ‘Why don’t you hold your daughter? Why don’t you hold the baby? Why don’t you love us?’

  “But he was just biding his time waiting for that exit cue. So I provided it, Fernando, I provided just the perfect reason to make him go away. I met a man and fell madly for him. I thought him kind and sensitive. I saw him infrequently, but I was certain his passion was an expression of love. ‘Ah, so this is what it’s like,’ I’d think. When my husband followed my well-laid tracks, I still believed he’d fight for me. But he was gone in three days. Still it would be okay because the other man really loved me. He really loved me, I was sure.

  “I couldn’t tell my lover by telephone, though, so I got on the train and we met for lunch and I said, ‘He knows. He knows everything, and now he’s gone and we’re free.’

  “‘Free to do what?’ he asked me, without taking the cigarette from his mouth.

  “‘Free to be together. I mean, that’s what you want, isn’t it?’ I asked him. He was a master at hesitation. Through a fresh puff of smoke, I heard him say, ‘Fool.’ He must have said other things, but that’s all I can remember. I got up from my chair and careened to the ladies’ room. I stayed there, being sick, for a very long time. The woman who tended the rest room was waiting for me when I finally came out of the toilet, a wet cloth in her hand. She told me to lean on her, to sit. I tried to laugh, saying that perhaps I was pregnant. ‘No. This is a broken heart,’ she told me. The French say that women die only from the first man. For me, death came twice in the same week.”

  We lay there quietly until Fernando got up on his knees and, looking down at me, his hands on my shoulders, he said, “There isn’t an agony in this world more powerful than tenderness.”

  8

  Everyone Cares How They Are Judged

  As often as I give the stranger reasons to cry, I seem to give him even more reasons to laugh. I tell his colleague at the bank, a man from Pisa, that I find i piselli among the kindest folks in Italy. Unfortunately what I really say is that I find peas to be among the kindest folks in Italy. Piselli, peas. The citizens of Pisa are called pisani. Signor Muzzi is clever enough to not react to my gaffe and loquacious enough to recount and embroider the story so that l’americana causes tittering among staff and clients.

  Unembarrassed, I am happy to have caused this burlesque. Concentrating so much on day-by-day rejoicing, I hardly notice the malaise that is settling on me: a suggestion of sadness, a bruise that comes and goes and returns, nostalgia. This feeling is not tragic, nor does it contradict the fullness of this new life. It is mainly that I miss my own language. I miss the sounds of English. I want to understand and be understood. Of course, I know the salves. Apart from time itself, there is the English-speaking community, members of which are dispersed all over Venice. I need a chum. And perhaps there is something else: I miss my own ebullience.

  I feel squeezed by this northern stance of bella figura, the keeping of the façade, the quick strangling of spontaneity for the sake of a necessary deception that Italians call “elegance.” It prescribes a short list of approved questions and answers. Fernando is my scudiero, my shield bearer, protecting himself and me from “foul whisperings.” Whenever we are in public he moves about mincingly, trying to distract me from cultural mortification. It’s no use. Too often I feel like a middle-aged Bombastes with very red lips. Unimpressed by, insensitive to my own blunderings, I talk to everyone. I am curious, I smile too much, touch and peer and inspect. It seems the stranger and I are comfortable only when we’re alone together.

  “Calma, tranquilla,” he says to me, the generic warning against every behavior that is not short-listed. Archaic posturing among people who seem to care less than a fig about each other—this nonverbal patois is their real language, and I cannot speak it. It was just as Misha had said it would be.

  Born and bred in Russia, Misha had emigrated to Italy as a newly graduated medical doctor and worked in Rome and Milan for nearly ten years before settling in America. He and I first met when we both lived in New York. We became closer friends after he transferred to Los Angeles and I was up in Sacramento. Misha always had lots to say. He came to visit me in Saint Louis j
ust after I’d met Fernando and our first lunch together was long and angry.

  “Why are you doing this? What is it you want from this man? He has none of the obvious merits women are likely to race across the earth to cling to,” he said in his Rasputin voice. He went on about the perils of exchanging cultures, about how I would be surrendering even the simple joy of discourse. “Even when you learn to truly think and speak in another language, it is not the same as engaging in native fluency. You will neither understand nor be understood. That’s always been so fundamental to you. You who love words, who say wonderful things in that small, soft voice. There will be no one to hear you,” he said. Though it was clear this was a soliloquy, I tried to jump in.

  “Misha, I’m in love for the first time in my life. Is it then improbable that I would want to be with this man whether he lives in El Paso or Venice?” I asked. “I’m not choosing a culture. I’m choosing a lover, a partner, a husband.” He was ruthless.

  “But who will you be there, what will you be able to do? The Mediterranean culture in general and the Italian culture in particular operate on a different standard of impressions and judgments. You’re not nineteen, you know, and the best they’ll think about you is that you ‘must have once been a beauty.’ It will be important if you can make them think you have money, which you don’t. Nothing else much will matter. This is an eccentric sort of move you are making and most will be wary of you and ask, ‘What is it she wants here?’ It is inconceivable for them even to consider purity of motive because they contrive so. Every move is staged to effect a countermove. I don’t suggest this is singularly Italian, but I do suggest that the intensity of this sort of posturing is as rampant there today as it was in the Middle Ages. Clever as you are, you’ll still be too childlike for them. There’s too much of Pollyanna in you for their tastes. That you are an eternal beginner, if that can be contemplated at all, will seem frivolous to them. Better that your Fernando were a rich old arthritic bastard. Then they might understand your attraction to him,” he pounded.

  “Misha, why can’t you simply acknowledge my happiness, even be happy for me?” I asked.

  “Happy—what is ‘happy’? Happiness is for stones, not for people. Every once in a while our lives are illuminated by something or someone. We get a flash and we call it ‘happiness.’ You are behaving spontaneously, and yet you will be judged contrarily because you can only be judged by their standards, which do not embrace spontaneity,” he concluded slowly, deliberately.

  “I don’t care how I’m judged,” I said.

  “Everyone cares how they are judged,” he said.

  I’d tried to listen to him back then, but mostly I’d tucked away his gloom as though looking at it would make me feel foolish and frightened. And bringing his gloom forward now does make me feel foolish and frightened.

  Timidly, Fernando begins to introduce me to one person or another whom we happen upon in the street, on the ferry boat or the vaporetto, at the newsstand on Sunday mornings or when we stop to drink an Aperol at Chizzolin or to sit at Tita over iced metal cups of gelato di gianduia. On the weekends we drive out toward Alberoni, stopping at Santin to take the island’s best coffee, to eat warm pastries stuffed with rum and chocolate, and later in the evening, when the place is even more crowded, we go again for crisp little ricotta tarts and flutefuls of Prosecco. But this is a place where no one really wants to talk with anyone else. Either people are alone and they like it that way or they come to perform, to talk at the crowd. And as the bar goes, so goes the island. I will learn that those Lidensi whom he called his friends were nearly all “five-phrase” companions, their affection demonstrated in chance meetings with discourse that opens on the weather and closes with airy kisses and a promise to call. But no one ever calls anyone on the Lido.

  Usually, the whole stiff ambience makes me smile. It’s a bad Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood episode, and I comfort the little hurts that it sometimes inflicts by remembering it isn’t his island, anymore than it is his house for which I’d come to live with Fernando. I take to composing little songs, teaching them to him in English so that, at the least, we can poke fun at the perfect precision of each encounter. He likes this, wickedly enlarges upon it. But if I dare protest some particularly bewildering response or event, he perceives aggression and changes flags, haughtily defending his island. “But who do you think you are that you can judge or try to change a culture? Quanto pomposa sei. How pompous you are.”

  I try to tell him that I don’t mean to judge. I’m not trying to change anything about these people or their culture. I am only trying not to have to change anything about myself or mine. He can seem some holograph image, a stranger, fading and finding form, fading and finding form. Is Fernando’s journey away from the bella figura, which he will freely tell you he detests, just too new? One step forward, many steps backward. Even now—right now—that the road behind him is long, still he dances the old dances. And I dance mine.

  And when he is neither defending the Lido nor making a meal of the place, Fernando tells me stories of how it used to be here, how, until the early sixties, the Gran Viale was banked in swanky sidewalk tea rooms with morning-coated waiters and string quartets where Austrian and French soubrettes lingered in hats with veils, their consorts in crumpled white linen suits. I am forty years too late. Now there are only taverns with pizza ovens. The only exotics I see on the avenue are sun-seekers from Düsseldorf in short shorts and plastic sandals. And the only person with a hat is me. Except for the brief postwar civility of the tea rooms, nothing much had happened on the Lido since Byron, in short pants, was wont to charge a chestnut stallion into its waves, dive into the lagoon, and backstroke through the blue-green waters of the Grand Canal.

  Everyone with some place to run escapes the Lido in boats each day, as though it were the tenth circle of hell, while those who remain are condemned to swift survival forays into the shops, then back behind the shutters for daytime sleeps and television vigils. Despite the shortcomings of this island, I keep trying to find the chocolate side of the Lido. In some ways this seems easy to me because it is surrounded by the sea—I am surrounded by the sea; pieces of its beach are like other rooms in my house. It loosens the sun in the morning and lures it back beneath its bosom at night. But even the sea, with its sulks and tempers and complexions, cannot rouse this sandy little fiefdom from its torpor. Although there is the beach ladies’ dance.

  Until now, I’d spent less than a total of forty minutes of my life actually lying still under a hot burning sun. Here, I live in a culture that mandates all females roast their skin. I didn’t even own a bathing suit. Once the dacha, as we continue to call the apartment, is in order, I go off to Milan to exchange some papers with the American consulate and to buy an Alaia, bias-cut, one-piece, beautiful. If I can’t be an Italian, at least I will look like one. Tied up in a white pareo, shaded in Versace, a pearly pink mouth sealing my disguise, I wait until ten (beach ladies don’t rise early), walk across the street, this time sashaying straight through the sanctum of the Excelsior Hotel and out to the sands. There waits hell’s eleventh circle.

  Women lie in the sun and smoke in front of their cabanas for three hours in the morning, sleep for two hours at home after lunch, return to the beach to lie in the sun and smoke for three hours in the afternoon, until their husbands join them at six-thirty for aperitivi at the hotel bar. Still at the beach, they shower, with a cigarette pinched between their lips; they dress with a cigarette pinched between their lips, and, smoking still, they go off to dinner. She, with skin like a crinkled russet leaf and weighted by a kilo of gold and jewels, seems more exhausted than he. The bathing suit goes to live in the bottom drawer of my bureau.

  Beach life archived, I think about cooking. In the few weeks that have passed, we’ve mostly supped early and modestly, in little osterie in Venice after I meet Fernando each evening at the bank. Sometimes we’ve gone home to change clothes before carting a basket of bread and cheese and wine and chocolate
s down to the seaside rocks for a ten o’clock picnic. But tonight, Fernando will sup at home.

  I set off on foot across Ponte delle Quattro Fontane onto Via Sandro Gallo on my way to the quartiere popolare— the working-class neighborhood on the Lido where Fernando says I’ll find better things less expensively than in the shops nearby. This is perhaps true, but it is also true that long lengths of hot, sun-licked avenue lie between each merchant. I make visits to the dairyman, the butcher, the fishmonger, the fruitman (who is different from the vegetable man, who is different from the herb seller). Flour, olive oil, pancetta from the gastronomia. I, the newly arrived Philistine, ask for lievito, yeast, at the bakery. With round eyes the baker’s wife says she does not sell yeast, she sells bread. She says the bread is baked at the forno, oven, which is located at the other end of the island. Her post is only a dispensary. Does she know where I can find yeast, I ask. Yeast for cakes? Baking powder? It is this you desire, no? she tests me. “No, signora, yeast for baking bread,” I say. My intentions cause her chest to heave. I buy bread to diffuse her agony. I forgo the pasticceria, only a few hundred yards further on and recommended by the wine seller, giving thanks for the nearness of Maggion. Half a day later, muscles twitching from the weight of sacks hauled three miles and up three flights of stairs, I am sunburnt, triumphant, and ready to begin.