A Thousand Days in Venice

by Marlena de Blasi

  The hours I spent in the custody of this society linger, crystalline, as they will for all my days. They taught me about food and cooking and patience. I learned about the moon and the sea, about war and hunger and feasting. They sang me their songs and told me their stories and, over time, they became my chosen family and I their chosen child. I feel the rough touches of their gnarly hands and their wet, sour-breathed kisses; I see the rheumy color of their old eyes that changed as the sea changed. They are Venice’s downstairs maids and butlers, the ones content with their portion in this life, descendants of Venetian women who never wove pearls in their hair, descendants of Venetian men who never wore satin breeches or sipped China tea at Florian. These are the other Venetians, the ones who rode the lagoons from their island farms to market, day after day, stopping only to fish for supper or to say prayers in some country church, never even once having walked in Piazza San Marco.

  As I passed by Michele’s table one day, his head was bent into the work of weaving the dried stems of small silver onions into braids. Without looking up at me he freed his hands to hold out a branch of tomatoes, each one so small it looked like a tight rosebud. I pulled at one and rolled it around in my mouth, chewed it slowly. Its savor and perfume were that of a two-pound sun-warmed tomato distilled, suspended inside the tiny ruby fruit. Still with his head bent, Michele asked, “Hai capito? Have you understood?” Short for “Have you understood that these are the earth’s most beautiful tomatoes?” He knew very well I’d understood.

  And as if the market were not gift enough, Cantina do Mori was tucked nearby in a quiet ruga just off the market’s center. I loved to stay inside the narrow lantern-lit room to watch the droll march that began much earlier in the morning than I would ever see. The reprises were endless, though: Plastic-aproned fishmongers, butchers in bloodied smocks, lettuce farmers and orchard workers, almost every man in the market pageant would, at approximate half-hour intervals, step through the door and sidle up to its fifteenth-century bar as merchants and gentlemen and brigands had been doing for more than half a thousand years before them. Then, with certain subtle movements of head, eyes, fingers, each calls for his cup. They gulp the Prosecco, the Refosco, the Incrocio Manzoni in a single swallow, two perhaps if they are speaking at the same time, slam down the emptied glass and the proper coinage, and walk out the backdoor to work. Often I was the only woman there besides the tourists or a rare visit from a female shopkeeper, but all of us were tended to by a gentle moon raker called Roberto Biscotin. He has been cooking and pouring and smiling his Jimmy Stewart smile there for forty years. And there are always very separate acts being played on his stage.

  Japanese tourists call for Sassacaia at thirty thousand lire a glass, Germans drink beer, Americans read aloud from their guidebooks, the English are distressed there are no chairs or tables, the French never like the wine, and the Australians always seem tipsy. And all of them are wallpaper to the locals.

  At noon or so the market quiets, shoppers start for home, and workers pay attention to their appetites. Roberto is ready with truffled panini, tramezzini of roasted ham or smoked trout, chunks of whiffy cheese, great platters of artichokes, tiny pickled onions wrapped in anchovy, and barrels and bottles of local and not-so-local wines.

  During my first winter, after my loyalty had been noted for a few months running, Roberto would offer to take my coat, my string bag full of market stuffs and put everything back in the kitchen so I could be freer. I would eat and drink according to the weather and the state of my hungers, and I remember my stand-up meals there as among the most satisfying of my life. Slowly I began to know the other faithfuls, to engage in the badinage that stitched one day to the next—who’d had a fever, who had gallstones, the state of repairs on Roberto’s Harley, the way to stew fresh fava beans in the fireplace, where to find a secret porcini cache in the Treviso forests, why I’d come to live in Italy, why it is an Italian man’s destiny to be unfaithful. The sheepishness they first felt because of me eases, but slowly. When they begin to surrender formal addresses for winey three-kiss hugs and “Ci vediamo domani. We’ll see you tomorrow,” I know I have yet another room in my house.

  They speak nearly exclusively in dialect, and I nearly exclusively in Italian during those first months—that is, when I wasn’t falling back into English or that Esperanto thing. Inside Do Mori, my social circle is composed of a butcher and a fishmonger, a cheeseman, an artichoke farmer, a local landscape artist, a portrait photographer, a few retired railway workers, two shoemakers, and a couple of dozen others to whom I am connected, for an hour or so each day, by sympathy. We gather there because it is a place where others would notice, regret even, should one of us not be there. The market and its little cantina are my refuge from that still-hovering malaise, a balm against the quiet grief that comes, once in a while, with big doles of unmarked time in a city that’s not yet home.

  Do Mori closes for a few hours at one-thirty in the afternoon and, mostly, I am the last to leave. I don’t like pushing through the swinging doors, stepping out into the soundlessness of the ruga. Tables stripped, pavements swept of carrot tops, fishmarket floor washed clean, glistening, the hush is checked only by a few snarls from resident cats in battle over a butcher’s gift and the click, clicking of my heels as I walk away. Now begins of the second part of my day.

  Only the trattorias and restaurants are open, and everyone not lunching out is at home, at table or in bed until at least four. Often my appetite is satisfied by Roberto’s antipasti, and I don’t stop in somewhere else to sit for a proper lunch. What I desire is to drift in some far-flung quarter.

  Perhaps no one ever gets to know Venice as much as they remember her, recall her from an episode in some other dream. Venice is all our fantasies. Water, light, color, perfume, escape, disguise, license are gold spun and stitched into the skirts she trails across her stones by day and spreads out over her lagoon in the never-quite-blackness of her nights. I followed where Venice led me. I learn which benches stay shady, where waits the most potent espresso ice, when the afternoon bake is ready at which panificio, which churches are always open, and which bells can be pulled to summon a shuffling sacristan from his pisolino, nap. One, his great iron keys threaded on a length of green ribbon, leads me with a candle to see a Jacopo Bellini that floats from frayed amber cords in the chiaroscuro of a tiny back room in his church. The old man’s eyes are unpolished sapphires, and, in the haze of a thousand years of incense burned, he tells me tales of Canaletto, of Guardi and Titian and Tiepolo. He speaks of them as though they are his confidants, the fellows with whom he sups on Thursday nights. He says life is a search for beauty and that art dissolves loneliness. His and mine, I think. I am not alone. I am a wanderer in a blue felt cloche, come to Venice to stitch together her fantasies.

  But I know myself, and stitching fantasies just won’t be enough to keep me upright. I need to cook my heart out. And if I can’t cook for our own table, I’ll cook for someone else’s table. But whose? I think of the troll and her posse. No. I decide on the inmates at the bank. A white chocolate and raspberry tart one day; on another day, one made with tiny yellow plums called susine. I risk bread, still warm and fat with whole hazelnuts, its own pot of brandied mascarpone as accessory. These I tuck in a basket and leave at the front desk like foundlings. There are eleven who work there with Fernando, one or other of whom is forever ordering up trays of pastries and cups of gelato and bottles of Prosecco to be carted over from Pasticceria Rosasalva, so I think the dainties will please. Rather they confound, impose upon them, and before Fernando has to ask, I discontinue the Red Riding Hood visits and go back to my stitching.

  One evening Fernando and I have supper at a place in the Ruga Rialto, a bawdy workingmen’s osteria, just taken over by a man called Ruggero. A rambling type, a newcomer to Venice, he thought to dazzle the simple folk by bringing them back a piece of their own gastronomic history. Ruggero is a showman who works his house like a stage. He pounds a ship’s gong when
ever the cook brings forth some great bowl of watery risotto or pasta washed in squid ink and plunks it down on the bar. Ruggero then portions it out to his customers for a modest four thousand lire a head. There are whole wheels of creamy mountain cheeses and rounds of crusty bread from the baker round the corner, a white fluff of pounded salt cod and a tub of boiled beans dressed with olive oil and sweet onions. These, with the essential sardines lolling in puckery sauce, are his menu. Cold, white wine flows fast from the spigot into one’s tumbler and, midst the noises of a hundred hungry, thirsty Venetians, one stands or sits at rough, acid-green paper-covered tables and sups in the way of the once-upon-a-time bacari, the wine bars. Fernando and I love the spectacle.

  “The people from the market tell me you’re a chef,” says Ruggero to me one evening. “Why don’t you cook here one night and we’ll have a party. We’ll invite some people from the neighborhood, merchants and judges and such. You write the menu, I’ll do the shopping, you cook, and I’ll serve,” he says, all in a single breath. Fernando is kicking me hard under the table, clearly wanting nothing to do with this Ruggero fellow or his private parties. But nearly each time I go to the Rialto, I seem to run into Ruggero. Each time he talks about the party. When he involves my market friends Michele and Roberto I say “yes,” not waiting for blessings from the stranger.

  I want to cook regional American food for Venetians. I think it will be great fun for them, thinking as they do that all Americans, poverini, poor little things, subsist, barely, on microwaved, barbecue-flavored popcorn. I plan a six-course dinner for fifty guests. I ask Ruggero to show me the kitchen. Caverns, holes, magnificently appointed, appointed not at all, I’ve worked in all of them, and no behind-the-swinging-doors tableau can frighten me. Ruggero’s kitchen frightens me. The same ancient fat that fouls the kitchen’s air also paves its floors. The gas oven is rusted and its door hangs open from a broken hinge. The few tools and equipment are neolithic. The water runs only on cold. I think back to all the suppers I have eaten that were made in this mire while he is telling me that most of his food is prepared at another restaurant and carted over to him each day, that the only dishes his cook prepares in-house are the primi—risotto, minestrone pasta. I try furiously to remember if I ever ate one such dish but I can’t think for the nausea.

  Have the powers of the Italian state sanctioned this kitchen? I look for his license, and there it is all stamped and sealed and under glass up on the greasy wall. I still haven’t said a word when he begins to tell me that he’ll have the place bello ordinato, in good order, for me next week. He shows me a box of cleaning supplies acquired in my honor. He says a friend is coming to work on the oven, that a plumber is, in fact, due tomorrow morning. He says all we really need are enthusiasm and fresh ideas, a good spirit, and we’ll have a fine party.

  Ruggero’s cook is a woman in her fifties with shoe-black hair and red tights, and now, when Ruggero goes to take a telephone call, she asks if I know Donato, and I say I don’t think so. She says he’s the capitano della guardia di finanza, the captain of the tax-control force, who comes to lunch each day and often to dinner each evening and that it is he who “arranged” for Ruggero’s license. She opens the door and nods toward Donato and his lunch. I really want this experience of cooking American food for Venetians, but I tell Ruggero that until he makes a little progress in the kitchen, I can’t promise. It’s Tuesday, and he tells me to come Thursday evening for supper and to have another look.

  Fernando can’t imagine why I want to eat first at La Vedova even though we are going to Ruggero’s. I tell him to trust me for once and he does. We walk over to Ruggero’s and head straight back into the kitchen. I have said almost nothing to prepare Fernando, and it’s a good thing because he would have told me how I exaggerated. The old place sparkles as much as it could. Pine and ammonia have rescued the air, new rubber mats are laid on the cleaner floors, shiny aluminum pots and other modest batterie hang overhead. The cook is wearing a white apron. Before Ruggero has a chance to join us, she tells us that he offered a group of regular customers a free lunch and all the wine they could drink in exchange for two hours of work cleaning the kitchen. She says half a dozen of them worked, and then another crew replaced them, and another, and that this is the result. She says the oven is hopeless and the plumber never showed, but isn’t the rest just wonderful? Still wary, I nevertheless sit with Ruggero to write the menu.

  There will be Mississippi caviar—even though I’ll have to substitute borlotti beans for black-eyed peas—and skillet cornbread, oyster stew, soft-shelled crabs in browned butter, pan-roasted pepper-crusted beef in Kentucky bourbon sauce with potato pancakes and batter-fried onions, hot fudge pudding with brown-sugared cream. Ruggero is surprised at the shopping list, which seems shy of exotic “American” components, and I tell him it’s what we’ll do with the oysters and the soft-shelled crabs and the beef and the chocolate that will translate them into American dishes. I ask him to please keep the kitchen clean and to do the shopping, that I’m off to Tuscany for a few days. I don’t mention the oven or the plumber.

  News of the party travels through the Rialto, and when I go to market on the morning before, everyone wants to talk about it. It is a thing sweet to me that these people, who take for granted their gold-lit lives in the water kingdom, can be so curious about deep-fried onion rings and how whisky tastes with beefsteak. Fernando and Ruggero are my sous-chefs, and our only difficulties seem to be keeping would-be helpers out of our way. Neither the oven nor the water gets hot, but we cook and fry and sauté and serve and eat and drink. I take my anadama breads to bake in the panificio down the alley, trading a few loaves for oven rent. Ruggero, the showman, wears a tuxedo. Ruggero, the impresario, has engaged two classical guitar students from the conservatory Benedetto Marcello, and they play Fernando Sor in the candlelight between the two long tables in the strange little room behind the bar on the alleyway near the marketplace across the canal from the Rialto Bridge in Venice. Each of these facts excites me.

  After everything is done, I take a dish of pudding and sit down between my fishmonger and Roberto and I notice Donato, the captain of the tax-control force with the good appetite, conferencing with the guitarists and nodding my way. Ruggero asks for attention and the room quiets. A slow, taunting Gelosia, Jealousy, is throbbing out from the guitars and, without so much as asking, Donato is kissing my hand, leading me, flushed from the burners and with chocolate on my breath, to tango between the tables. Thank goodness for those lessons Misha gave me as a present so many years ago. All those Tuesday nights with Señora Carmela and the clammy-palmed computer prodigies from IBM. The languid glide, the abrupt, explosive half-twist. (“Restraint, restraint my loves,” warned Señora Carmela. “Black arched, neck elongated, chin up, higher, higher, eyes direct, unblinking, smoldering,” she’d say in an almost menacing whisper.) I’ve never tangoed anywhere but in the Poughkeepsie middle school gym. Now I am gliding and half-twisting in the arms of a picaresque official of the state who is moving beautifully in tight, gray uniform pants. I should be dressed in something smooth and red, my hair should smell of roses rather than fried onions, and I don’t think I’m smoldering nearly enough. Donato is smoldering somewhat more than enough though, and Venetians are on their feet, cheering. Fernando senses it’s time to go.

  While the guests slide deeper into their cups, we say a quiet good-night to Ruggero and head for the beach. We go out through the bar and see that a group of old men, their backs to us, are huddled around the huge bowl that held the hot fudge pudding, scraping at what is left with teaspoons, licking their fingers clean just like all-American boys. We hear one of them say, “Ma l’ha fatto l’americana? Davvero? Ma come si chiama questo dolce? Did the American really make this? But what’s the name of this dessert?”

  10

  I Knew a Woman, I Knew a Man

  But there can’t be a party every day. One morning I lay facedown on the fancy ocher-draped bed under the lace baldacchino, weeping. W
hat is the matter with me? Fernando says it’s low blood pressure. He thinks my seeing a doctor is self-indulgent, but I search the directory anyway. I learn that professional listings are not culled under specific headings. One must know the name of the doctor in order to find his or her number. I’m lost. I stop by the tourist office, and the folks there assure me that the only English-speaking doctor in Venice is an allergist. They tell me he’s simpatico. I take their word for it and set off for his office in San Maurizio. Small, weary, chain-smoking, he interviews me from the velvety charcoal depths of a Napoleonic-era chaise longue that is positioned far across the cavernous room from my straight-backed wooden chair.