He asks, “Do you have a normal sex life?” I am perplexed. Is he suggesting I have an allergy to sex?
“I think it’s normal. For me, that is,” I tell him.
After a pause to converse with his housekeeper over the composition of his lunch, he stands nearby, fingers pressed to my pulse, and says, “E-e-et is only that you are scarry, cara mia.” I hope he means, “It is only that you are scared, my dear.” I ask his fee, and he looks shocked that I would sully this tête-à-tête by speaking of money. Months later, there arrives his bill for 350,000 lire, about 175 dollars, a very special fee reserved for rich American ladies.
As I walk through the city, I begin to notice American travelers. They seem better looking than all the others, the nasaly timbre of their voices almost Pavlovian for me. As though all of them are dear friends, none of whom quite recognize me there in my Venetian surroundings, I am eager to speak to them. I sit in a café or stand on line at a gallery entrance, sleuthing for some way to engage them. Some one of them almost always gets around to asking how long I’ve been in Venice, or where I am going next, naturally thinking I am a traveler, too. When I tell them that I live here, that I will soon be married to an Italian, the swapping of compatriotic sympathies shifts. A wealthy friend once told me that as soon as a person discovers how much she’s worth, that person’s attitude toward her changes, categorizing her first as “portfolio” and second as “woman.” When I tell my story, I am shuffled from the category of an American into that of an exotic and certainly I am no longer one of them. I’ve gone to the other side. I am good for supper recommendations, the name of a farmacista who’ll hand out antibiotics without a prescription, or maybe an extra room for a guest in my house.
I consider joining the ranks of the British Women’s Club of Venice. Perhaps they could soothe the malaise. I learn they are eighty sisters bound by a collective disenchantment with life in Italy, life with their Italian husbands. Most live on terraferma, the mainland, as far away as Udine and Pordenone and, hence, must trek in over the waters for this monthly commingling of Englishness. Many of them came to Italy as girls, sojourning for a summer among the dark-eyed boys, perhaps spending a year at university in Rome or Florence or Bologna, each having been a huntress on the scent of her own quarry. On the Lido I find only three.
Always wearing a turban and ropes of fake pearls, an eighty-two year old named Emma had married a Venetian city guide twelve years her junior, who soon forsook her to run off with a former paramour. Though her story is half a century old, she speaks of it like a fresh wound. Caroline, a fiftyish blond with a wonderful half-inch gap between her front teeth, rushed about her corner of the island, from baker to butcher as though bandits waited beyond the milk shop. A victim of the torpors, I think she was. I can’t remember the name of the tall, sallow woman, hair shorn rather than cut, who lived near the church in San Nicolò. I was in the entryway of her home once and saw her wedding photo, the strange sweet pose of a gangly, freckled girl and a round-faced boy whose wavy pompadour barely brushed up to his bride’s chin. Each time I would meet them walking about the Lido I would recall the photo and smile. I think they were still in love.
The group’s president is also the wife of the British consul. She is a siciliana who croaks out her English in a hoarse Transylvanian accent. By the time I arrive, her husband, a small dull chap, has already been advised that the funding needed to keep the consulate plushly housed on the piano nobile, first floor, of a sixteenth-century palazzo across the calle from the Accademia is soon to end. For now though, up its grand marble staircase, inside its mahoganied seclusion, the sisterhood still gathers to tipple and munch and stir up tribal rancors. Though I find some of them charming, their familiarity with one another will be hard to penetrate. Besides, I am not so certain that twenty years from now I would like to be among them, fretting over Italy’s capricious supply of gingerstem biscuits.
Each afternoon at five-thirty, I meet Fernando at the bank. I like having this rendezvous, even though his humor is almost always cranky at this hour. One evening, he tells me he needs five minutes to arrange some papers and asks me to wait in his office. He closes the door after him, and so I sit there in the big, fancy room he dislikes so because of its isolation from all the action. Its walls frescoed with coquettish nymphs, its green marble fireplace, a photo of us in Saint Louis, the scents of old leather and cigarettes and my husband’s cologne, I like it here. Riffling through a financial journal, I think how very much I like it here, and I step out of my brown tulle collottes. Using a chair to boost me, I drape the pretty things over the telecamera. I sit there, then, on his desk, legs swinging out from my thin silk dress, and I wait, the marble of his desktop cold under my thighs.
Leaving the bank, we walk to the boat station. Now that we are dining more at home, Fernando begs off our after-work strolls, wanting the apartment’s comfort. His feet hurt, his eyes burn, he hates the heat or the cold or the wind or whatever else the skies might be offering, he rips open his third package of cigarettes, and I fall in love again, happy that another day’s wars are ended for him. He has begun to resent the bank or, more, his own noble sort of devotion to it. Safe in its communist embrace, its dependents can work or not work and still pocket the same spoils at month’s end. He wishes to sit all day among his Aperol-breathed cohorts but his conscience rubs. Apart from a threadbare contessa or two whose accounts he has tended for quarter of a century, his clients are mostly hand-to-mouth merchants in the neighborhood. He frets over them, pushes back due dates, and adjusts regulations to keep wolves in fedoras and cashmere coats from their doors. He cares deeply about these people, but not much about the institution of the bank itself. He says that since our life began, his work leaves him bloodless. He says he wants to restore furniture and learn to play the piano, to live in the countryside somewhere, to have a garden. He says he’s beginning to remember his dreams. Lord. Like a blueberry-eyed bear feeling new muscles and rubbing his eyes at the spring light, Fernando is plotting his own risorgimento.
On the motonave back across the water, we sit always on the top deck, never minding the weather nor how empty or how peopled it might be in any other part of the boat. Wearing a vacant Chauncey Gardner smile, he looks mostly out to the water, turning to me once or twice as though to make certain I am still present. He may recount some buffoonery enacted by a colleague or, more often, his directors. In a poignant gesture, he lifts up of a hank of my hair and kisses it.
This evening on the boat he greets an old man, introduces him to me as Signore Massimiliano. The man has laughing silvery eyes, and he holds my hand in his two hands and looks at me for a long time before he walks slowly to the exit. Fernando tells me the man was a friend of his father’s and that, when he was a boy, Massimiliano used to take him fishing along the Riva Sette Martiri for passarini, tiny fish Venetians like to fry and eat, bones and all. He says that when he was about ten or eleven and spending a lot of time playing billiards in the Castello rather than going to school, Massimiliano sat with him one day and asked him if he’d prefer to marry a girl who liked boys who shoot pool or boys who read Dante. Fernando says he asked him why he couldn’t marry a girl who liked boys who shoot pool and who also read Dante and the man told him it wasn’t possible, so he said he’d prefer the girl who liked boys who read Dante, of course. Massimiliano looked at him and asked, “Don’t you think you’d better be getting ready for her?” Fernando says the man’s words hit him like rocks, that he read Dante day in and day out, waiting for this girl to come along. He says how strange it is, sometimes, which conversation or event stays with us while so much else melts fast as April snow. Yes, I tell him.
I say I knew a woman who went to see Man of la Mancha on Broadway and then walked from the theater down to Chelsea, back uptown to her apartment, and packed everything she wanted from her life there while her husband slept. “She told me she climbed into bed and she slept, too, for a few hours and later, from the airport, she called her boss to say good-
bye. She went to Paris that morning to think, and she’s still in Paris, thinking. But she’s fine, she’s better,” I tell him.
He says, “I knew a man who told me he’d betrayed his wife throughout their long marriage because the Madonna appeared to him on the night before his wedding and absolved him of all future guilt. For forty years he went peacefully into the night to prowl. He said the same dispensation was valid for his sons.” It is my turn.
I tell him, “I knew a woman who was being crushed by her husband’s philandering, and when her doctor told her if she didn’t leave him she would die, she asked him, ‘But what about all that history? We’ve been together for almost thirty years.’ The doctor asked her, ‘And so you’re aiming at thirty-one? You will sustain your rage, using time as a defense against fear and indolence. In the great stash of defenses, time is the one least imaginative,’ he told her.” His turn.
“I knew a man who said, ‘Some people ripen, some rot. We grow, sometimes, but we never change. Can’t do it. No one can. Who we are is fixed. There isn’t a soul who can unfix another soul, not even his own,’ he said.”
I tell him, “I knew a man who sat with his freshly estranged wife outdoors at the Saloon near Lincoln Center and, over fried zucchini, he asked her if she’d loved him, and she said, ‘I can’t remember. Perhaps I did, but I just can’t remember.’” He looks at me hard and shoots my own words back at me.
“I know a woman who says it’s only at three o’clock in the morning when anyone can measure things. She says if you love yourself at three o’clock in the morning, if there’s someone in your bed that you love at least as much as you love yourself at three o’clock in the morning, if your heart is quiet in your chest and neither muses nor shades crowd the room, it probably means things are well. It’s the hardest moment to lie to yourself, three o’clock in the morning, she told me.”
We play “I knew a woman, I knew a man” most nights coming home on the boat, and the game seems to ease away the banker and bring forth Fernando. Back at home, refreshed by our bath, his martini, his Prufrock supper, he remembers how to laugh.
One autumn Saturday morning Fernando chides my use of the familiar form tu in addressing a gentleman to whom he introduces me as we stand on the deck of a vaporetto. The man is about sixty-five, handsome, suave in his foulard and silk suit. A flicker of strain, something sharp passes between them. Had I blundered so badly? As we walk through Venice Fernando grows silent, surly even. I am perplexed that a tu rather than a Lei could grieve him so. This almighty bella figura thing? Finally we sit inside at Florian, and he begins to speak. He tells me the story of the man on the vaporetto. He is a doctor who has kept offices on the Lido for as long as Fernando can remember. He says his mother had been the doctor’s mistress. It was an alliance that splattered out over and smothered a dozen years of his childhood. He says it was as though someone else—someone more important than his father or his brother Ugo or himself—lived in their house. Never discussed, this unnamed tyranny destroyed them. There was no mercy from the Lidensi. Vicious and tormenting, they proclaimed the scandal the great cuckolding of its time. His father withdrew to one part of the house, entered into a protracted illness, and took years and years to die of heart problems, both organic and sentimental.
“You still grieve for him,” I say.
“Not still,” he says quickly. “I grieve for him because now I can, unfrozen, unlocked by the lady in the long white coat. I’m content we saw Onofrio, and I’m more content you gave him the tu. But I’m sorry for my father. I’m sorry he went into his long, dark night “a man,” a silent, suffering bella figura. He left me with the torch. It was my turn to become quiet and choked and brave and without needs of my own. I was to be the next generation, the next virtuous bearer of old miseries. I won’t do it, I won’t be another man like my father, stepping over the cracks, lurking about the spaces of his own life like a visitor, fearing more to disturb, to offend, to be too present than he feared to die.”
As long as that dying was, he said, his brother’s death in the same year happened in an instant.
Having long ago fled the Lido and his counterfeit family, Ugo had been a diplomat in the service of the European Parliament in Luxembourg. He was forty when he died from a heart attack. “The echoes feel like bricks on my chest,” Fernando says. Ugo and I spoke only once about the affair, one night when he was fifteen and I was twelve. We were alone in our room, lying in our beds in the dark and smoking. I asked him if it was true, and all he said was yes. Until now, I’ve never spoken to anyone else about it.”
“Tell me about Ugo,” I say. “What was he like?”
“He was like you. Irrepressible, enchanted by things, he lived on the edges of his moments. He could fit a whole life inside an hour. Everything that happened to him was an adventure. I would go down to the ferry to meet him whenever he came back for a few days. He drove a two-seater Morgan with the top down even in winter, and he wore a long white scarf. He kept Champagne in the boot and a red felt case with two Baccarat flutes. The day we met and you pulled out that goblet from its little velvet pouch and your silver flask of cognac, my heart turned over.”
We didn’t say anything for a long time until he raised up his head and looked at me hard. There was no stranger in his gaze. There was only Fernando.
11
Ah, Cara Mia, in Six Months Everything Can Change in Italy
Living as a couple never means that each gets half. You must take turns at giving more than getting. It’s not the same as a bow to the other whether to dine out rather than in, or which one gets massaged that evening with oil of calendula; there are seasons in the life of a couple that function, I think, a little like a night watch. One stands guard, often for a long time, providing the serenity in which the other can work at something. Usually that something is sinewy and full of spines. One goes inside the dark place while the other one stays outside, holding up the moon. I know I must not lean on Fernando right now. Reckonings, hungers, irregular verbs, these are mine alone to fathom while he uses his energy to come clean with himself, to do his own weeding and scrubbing and digging clear down to China. He has work to do, so I’ll provide the peace. As much as I want him to love me, I want Fernando to love himself.
I think he also wants to love himself. He is not only awakening, he has taken up the cudgels. “In order to breathe, he must break all the windows,” said Virginia Woolf about James Joyce. I try to imagine what she would say of Fernando. I say he’s a Mamluk with reins between his teeth, wielding twin scimitars, robes flying, gold jangling, riding like hell across hot sands into the French phalanx.
“Let’s tear down the walls,” he says figuratively one morning, “all of them, and while we’re at it, let’s smash in the doors.” I think he is saying, I want to breathe. “New bathroom, hah. New furniture, hah. Everything that ever happened before was surreal,” he says. “I’ve had a sort of hand-me-down life that never fit, that was never my own. Now I feel like a Jew ready to walk out of Egypt,” he says quietly.
Lord! Why is he always so heavy?
“Can you keep up with me?” he wants to know, sparklers lighting up his eyes. “For example, did you know that we’re getting married on October 22?” It is now early September.
“Of what year?” I want to know.
We had begun the hesitation waltz with the Ufficio Stato Civile on the Lido six weeks earlier. Loins girded, hearts stout, we would accommodate the state’s gluttony for declarations and submissions and disclosures; we would fill the works with signatures and testimonies and stamps and seals. We would have our license to be married. On the first Saturday morning visit, as we climb the stone stairs up to the tiny city hall next to the carabinieri barracks, I believe I am a pilgrim fit to travel through the prickly wilderness of the Italian bureaucracy. Armed in patience and calm, shielded by my portfolio full of papers stamped by the palermitana in Saint Louis, viciously, repeatedly, with the great inked seal of the Italian state, I am near to the f
inish. Only details remain, it will be a piece of cake, I think, as we stand in line to see the secretary. Fernando tells me to smile rather than try to talk. He says the bureaucracy is always more indulgent to the helpless, and so I am meek as Teresa the Little Flower. The secretary tells us that la direttrice is, of course, occupied and asks why we hadn’t fixed an appointment. Fernando assures her that he has called, left telephone messages and two hand-delivered written messages beseeching la direttrice.
“Ah, certo, siete voi. Lei è l’americana. Ah, yes, it’s you. You’re the American,” says the secretary, looking me up and down. She wears white jeans, a U-2 T-shirt, and forty bangle bracelets and carries a pack of Dunhill’s and matches in case she needs to light up during the twelve-yard voyages she makes from her office to la direttrice’s office. We sit and wait, grinning at each other. “Here we are,” we say, “getting things under way.”
From nine-thirty until nearly noon the Little Flower and the stranger wait, he breaking the vigil at half-hour intervals with an espresso from the bar down on Sandro Gallo. Once he brings back espresso for me, china cup and saucer and spoon, an almond croissant all on a small tray. “Simpatico,” the secretary says of Fernando, before she tells us to come back next Saturday.
The next Saturday and the Saturday after that pass in much the same way, modified only by our taking turns to go to the bar. Four Saturdays pass without our seeing la direttrice. This is an island of seventeen thousand citizens, sixteen thousand of whom are on the beach every Saturday in summer while the rest are at home watching Dallas reruns. Who can be in there with her? On the fifth Saturday, the Little Flower and the stranger are shown directly into her office. La direttrice is gray. She is all gray. Her skin, her lips, her hair, her baggy linen dress are all the color of ashes. She exhales a gray cloud, extinquishes her cigarette, and holds out her large gray hand in welcome, I think, but, in fact, to take my portfolio. She turns each page as though my documents repel her, as though they are blueprints soaked in hell broth. She smokes. Fernando smokes. The secretary comes in to file a sheaf of papers, and she smokes. I sit there trying to distract myself by looking at the print of the sacred heart of Jesus. I say “Jesus,” and wonder how long it will take for me, a pink-lunged woman who has chased and captured free radicals and religiously swallowed antioxidants for ten years, to die of secondhand smoke. The direttrice’s glasses fall repeatedly from the end of her nose, so she picks up Fernando’s, which he has laid casually on her desk, but these do not appear to help.
A Thousand Days in Venice Page 11