A Thousand Days in Venice

by Marlena de Blasi

  She closes the portfolio and says, “These papers are old and without value. The laws have changed.” The Little Flower gives forth a short shriek.

  “Old? These were prepared in March, and it is August,” I tell her.

  “Ah, cara mia, in six months everything can change in Italy. We are a country in movement. The government changes, the soccer coaches change, everything changes as much as nothing changes, and you must learn this, cara mia. You must return to America, establish residency, wait one year and refile your documents,” she says without condolence. The Little Flower wilts, fights a faint.

  From beyond my swoonings I hear Fernando saying “Ma è un vero peccato perchè lei è giornalista. It’s really a shame because she is a journalist.” He tells her I write for a group of very important newspapers in America, that they have assigned me to chronicle my new life here in Italy and to write a series of articles about my experiences, about the personalities who help me to find my way. Especially, he tells her, the editors are interested in the story of her marriage. She has deadlines, signora, deadlines. These articles will be read by millions of Americans and those personalities about whom she writes are bound for celebrity in the States. La direttrice removes Fernando’s glasses and puts back her own. She does this exchange several times while I look at Fernando with a mixture of awe and disgust. He has lied through his long white teeth.

  “You know I would like nothing better than to help you,” she says really looking at us for the first time. I do not know that, I think. Now, pressing hands to temples she says. “I must go to the mayor, to the regional administrators. Could you write here the names of these very important newspapers?”

  “I will write everything for you, signora, and deliver it on Monday morning,” he promises. She tells us to return next Saturday, then we shall see. I begin to understand that it is not so much that the Italian bureauacracy is, itself, twisted, as it is twisted by those who administer it, who inlay and torture it, with their own set of corruptions, personal as thumbprints. There is fundamentally no Italian bureaucracy, only Italian bureaucrats. Fernando decides to tell la direttrice the Associated Press itself has assigned me this series of articles, and hence it is possible that hundreds, thousands of newspapers across America will pick up the stories. He writes all this in a telegram. I think it is diabolical. I pray it works. La direttrice telegrams in response. The troll delivers it, the easy-to-open, resealable envelope still warm from her manipulations.

  “Tutto fattible entro tre settimane. Venite sabato mattina. All is possible within three weeks. Come on Saturday morning.”

  “What do we do when she asks to see the articles?” I want to know.

  “We’ll tell her that America is a country in movement, that assignments change, that everything changes as much as nothing changes, and that she must understand this, cara mia.”

  The state feels good in our pockets, but the indulgence of Mother Church remains suspended. We had learned from a single terse audience at the Curia in Venice that the sanction of the church can only be gained—if it is to be gained at all—through a mysterious investigation “that satisfies the bishop of the couple’s avowed intentions to live within the church’s laws.” The searching of Fernando’s spiritual past would be easy, but why did they need to minister the Inquisition on my behalf? Did they want the names and addresses of my churches and priests in New York and Sacramento and Saint Louis? Did they have some great papal Internet where all they had to do was punch up my name and check on my every spiritual peccadillo? And I hope these “avowed intentions to live within the church’s laws” did not include birth control directives. Even if I had only hours of fertility left, I wanted no one to tell me what to do with them. I am broken by too many laws, old laws, new laws.

  “We have permission from the state, the city hall is beautiful, let’s just get married there,” I say.

  The stranger says no. Though he has tiptoed about behind the last pew of the church all his adult life, now he wants ritual, incense, candlelight, benedictions, altar boys, white carpets, and orange blossoms. He wants high mass in the red stone church that looks to the lagoon.

  On a suffocating July evening we sit in the sacristy waiting for Don Silvano, the curate of Santa Maria Elisabetta. Once we get through the social groundings and chatter, the priest says something about how nice it will be to have us “young people” as communicants. I can only wonder at the average age of his congregation. We must attend classes every Tuesday evening, along with other prospective couples, to be instructed in the “moral imperatives inherent in a Roman Church—sanctioned marriage.” Lord! What about our own moral imperatives? Why does he make it sound as though we would have none without his telling us we must? He has the sweet round face of a country preacher and punctuates each phrase with benone, great good, but still he speaks in sermons.

  We had begun our instruction classes late in July. One Tuesday when we arrive, the priest takes us aside, tells us our papers are not sufficient, that the Curia has denied us permission to be married in the church. What is lacking, we want to know. “Well, for one thing,” he says to me, “your certificate of confirmation is still missing.”

  “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen my certificate of confirmation. I don’t even know if I was ever confirmed a soldier of Christ,” I tell the priest. We go to walk along the sea, and Fernando says it was a grave mistake to admit I was unsure of having been confirmed. I should only offer information necessary for their search and simply let them keep working at it. “But it’s probably a wild-goose chase. Isn’t it better to just receive the sacrament of confirmation now?” We go back to Don Silvano with the idea, and after he says benone two or three times, he tells us that I’ll have to join the next confirmation class, which will begin its studies at the end of September, and, if all goes well, I can walk down the aisle with a group of ten year olds to receive the sacrament in April. April? On the way home I ask again why we can’t be happy with a civil marriage. Fernando just smiles.

  So on this morning in September, when the stranger announces we’ll be married in October, I am wordless as stone. Is he forgetting it took six weeks just to get through the state’s papers. The church could take months. Years.

  When I find my voice I want to know, “Are you going to use the Associated Press story on Don Silvano?

  “Not at all. I have an idea much better suited to him,” he says.

  Fernando tells Don Silvano he wants to be married on October 22 because that was the day in 1630 when la Serenissima sent out the decree that a great basilica would be built along the Grand Canal, dedicated to the Virgin Mother in thanks for her deliverence of Venice from the plague. Santa Maria della Salute, it was to be named. Saint Mary of Health. He has pulled at the old priest’s heartstrings. “Che bell’idea,” he says. “Such sympathy is rare. That a man desires to combine his sacred marriage with the sacred history of Venice is something the Curia must consider. And besides, the certificate of confirmation is bound to appear sooner or later. I will offer my personal testimony to the bishop. Are you certain you don’t want the ceremony to be on November 21, on the festival of la Salute?” he asks.

  “No. I want October 22 because it was when the whole idea was initiated. It was the beginning. This is about beginnings, Father,” says the stranger.

  “October 22 it will be,” says the priest.

  “You just lied to a priest,” I tell him, as he pulls me across the avenue and onto the vaporetto. He lets out a long loud whoop, and I realize, this is the first time I’ve ever heard the stranger scream.

  “I did not lie! I do want us to be married on that day, which is indeed the day when the government gave Longhena the go-ahead to begin construction on la Salute. It’s all true, and I’ll show it to you later in black and white in Lorenzetti. And besides, Don Silvano was waiting for me to insist, he was waiting for me to give him something with which he could battle the bishop on our behalf. I had to choose a day and be aggressive about it or
else nothing would happen for ages. I understand how things work and don’t work here. Furbizia innocente, innocent cunning, is all it takes to live in Italy,” he tells me. “The church, the state, and everyone in between can be compelled by the smallest stab at ego or sentiment. In the end we Italians are Candide more than we are Machiavelli. For all our historical reputation as fabulists and libertines, we are more often soft-touch emotional bunglers always looking about to be admired. We hope to keep duping the world and even each other, but we know who we are. And now let’s just be quiet and revel in the fact that we have a wedding date,” says the stranger.

  He takes me to La Vedova behind Cà d’Oro for supper and Ada, whom I’ve known since my first trip to Venice, makes hand-rolled whole-wheat pasta in duck sauce and liver with onions. We drink an Amarone from Le Ragosa, and we never stop smiling. When Ada sends round the word that we’re getting married in October, every shopkeeper and local who comes through the door insists on another brindisi, a toast. No one understands when we drink to the health of la grigia and il prete, the gray one and the priest.

  One evening we pack our supper basket and drive down to the murazzi, the great wall of rocks planted by the Lidensi in the sixteenth century to shield the little island from the tempests of the sea. I tie up the wide skirt of my old ballerina dress, and we hike across the stones high above the water, looking for one smooth and flat enough to be our table. We set things up, and by the light of a candle burning in a pierced tin lantern, the Adriatic crashing and booming all around us, we eat quail stuffed with figs and girdled in pancetta and roasted on branches of sage, holding the birds in our hands, devouring the scant, sweet flesh down to the bone. We have a salad of fresh peas and butter lettuces and leaves of mint, all dressed in the quail-roasting juices, some good bread, and a cool Sauvignon from the Friuli. Is it really Prufrock sitting next to me, gently licking quail juices from his fingertips?

  He sings “Nessuno al Mondo,” and two fishermen who sit roasting clams and smoking pipes way below on the beach yell bravo up to the rocks. We talk about the wedding, and then Fernando tells me the story of the Festa della Sensa, the marriage of Venice to the sea. On the Feast of the Ascension, the anniversary of the day when the Virgin Mary was to have ascended into heaven, the doge, dressed as a bridegroom, would board the great gilt royal galley rowed by two hundred sailors and embark from the port on the Lido. A procession of flower-wreathed galleys and skiffs and gondolas rowed behind him until they reached San Nicolò, the point where the lagoon flows into the Adriatic. Then the patriarch stood on the prow and blessed the sea with holy water, while the doge cast his ring into the waves saying, “In sign of eternal dominion, I, who am Venice, marry you, o sea.”

  I like the symbolism, even if it is a bit of hauteur, that the doge “who is Venice” thinks he can tame the sea by marrying her, I tell Fernando. And did someone dive in to retrieve his ring, or did the pope give him a new one every year? I ask.

  “I don’t know about the ring, but I do know I’m wiser than the doges,” he says, fiddling with the lantern, “and I would never think to tame you.” Hmm, I wonder. I pull on my sweater and sip at my wine. I am happy to be marrying the stranger at this time in my life.

  12

  A White Wool Dress Flounced in Twelve Inches of Mongolian Lamb

  Whether we call it controlling or enabling or the more poetic “taming,” power issues don’t rear up as frenzied in a marriage between older people, the riper souls understanding these maneuvers to be ruinous. Older people get married for different reasons than young people do. Perhaps it’s that in a younger partnership, the man lives on his side of the marriage and the woman on hers. Gracious opponents in competitions over career, social and economic status, frequency and intensity of applause, they meet at table or in bed, each exhausted from the solitary race. In a later marriage, even if they work on different things, they’re still working as a team, remembering that being together was why they got married in the first place. I look at Fernando, and I can’t imagine not remembering that.

  And I can’t imagine not remembering how Italians adore complication. A small farrago, some short agony, this they need every day. Less often, but often enough, it’s a real chest-beating for which they yearn. A thing innocent of complication is not worth doing. Posting a letter and choosing a tomato are dramatic opportunities. Imagine then what stuff is a wedding. And not just any wedding, but a wedding to be designed and executed in six weeks, the wedding of an Italian man “of a certain age” to a foreign woman, also “of a certain age” who thinks of wearing a white wool dress flounced in twelve inches of Mongolian lamb at high mass. Ours is a wedding lavish with opportunity for complication. Opportunity number one: I wish to find a seamstress and get this mythical dress in the works.

  The history of Venice has always been reflected in fabric. Look at the work of the Venetian Renaissance portrait painters. Light and fabric commandeer the eye; the subjects take second place. Look at Veronese and Longhi and Tintoretto and all three artists from the family Bellini. Look at Titian. One hears the rustle of a gown in yellow watered silk, one feels the deep cuts in the velvet of a sable-ruffled cape the color of pomegranates. Venetians told their story in brocade and lace and satin, in the length of a cuff woven from spun gold. A merchant’s emporium, warehouse, and living quarters were all part of the same gilded palazzo, permitting him to move through each act of his day and night drenched in spectacle. Nobles, impoverished nobles, and often beggars dressed themselves in silk. “Why should one dress for misery?” is a query an old woman wrapped in ermine is said to have asked, as she sat each day begging in the Piazzetta. The Venetian twist on “Let them eat cake” was “Let us, at the very least, dress in silk.”

  Venetian painters dressed saints in satin and rarely let them go shoeless. Their Madonnas wore russet silk, or gold or royal blue; their coifs, jewels, slim waists detracted not at all from their hallowedness. Always nonintellectual, Venetians could not, still cannot be bothered by contradiction or duality. How can the mother of Christ be dressed in taffeta and wear a ruby necklace at the foot of her son’s cross? Venetians see it all as coexistence. In the end all that remains is the pageant, only the pageant, one allusive, artificial episode after another.

  Venetians were, and some still are, astonished by themselves. That a silk-robed, clove-scented princess named Venice could be sprung from a swamp was a mad fancy. That she should flourish put her beyond myths and transfixed in these Venetians a sense that time is short. There is only here and only now, so let it all be picturesque inside the frolic and behind the mask.

  Even if a few years have passed since then I hoped it would not be improbable to come across a nice length of soft, just-off-white wool, neither heavy nor thin, etched in some sort of delicate tracery, from which a silver-headed crone could stitch me a long, slim, white dress. I think it better to find first the crone, then the stuff.

  Though there are dozens of listings in the phone directory under sartoria, tailor’s shop, nearly every call is answered by someone saying, “Oh, that was my grandmother, poveretta, poor little thing, who passed away in eighty-one” or “My aunt, poveretta, who is blind thanks to fifty years of sewing sheets and underwear for the Borghesi.”

  When I find one, a man, still living and not blind, he barks, “I don’t make wedding dresses.”

  “It’s not a wedding dress I want but a dress I will wear at my wedding,” I try to explain. A thought that makes perfect sense in English often travels poorly when translated literally into Italian, and the gruff voice wishes me a definitive good afternoon.

  At last I find my sarta, a tinkling-voiced woman who says she’s been making dresses for all the most beautiful Venetian brides since she was fifteen years old. She says two of hers were televised on Channel 5 and two more were photographed for Japanese magazines. Trying to calm her expectations I once again attempt the “It’s not a wedding dress I want but a dress I will wear at my wedding” idea, but it fizzles as before.
We make an appointment for dialogo.

  Her atelier, a fifth-floor flat in Bacino Orseolo behind San Marco, overlooks the dock where waiting gondeliers gather to smoke and eat bread stuffed with mortadella and hustle up business. After drama with the buzzer and drama with her assistant, who does not want to admit me ten minutes early, I climb up to Rapunzel’s tower. La sarta must not have been making wedding dresses for long, since she doesn’t look much older than fifteen and her assistant looks twelve. They invite me to sit and look through a portfolio of drawings while I try to tell them I want a plain wool dress, good fabric, classic design. When I mention the Mongolian flounce I get their attention. La sarta begins to sketch on a tissue pad with a stub of pencil and in seconds there emerge the dress, a sort of cape, even a hat, a toque-like thing that would have been perfect for Gloria Swanson. “No,” I tell them. “Simpler than that and with no cape, no hat. Just a dress.”

  “Come vuole, signora. As you wish,” she says, edging her chin higher. She takes my measurements, hundreds of measurements. Knee to ankle, straight; knee to ankle, bent. Shoulders, standing; shoulders, sitting. The circumferences of wrist, middle forearm, elbow, upper arm. I feel like I’m being measured for embalming. She shows me bolt after bolt, swatch after swatch of gorgeous fabric, and when I say I like something she tells me she doesn’t have quite enough for the dress or that the house that makes that particular one is still closed for vacation so she can’t yet try to order it and, even if she could contact them, she knows they haven’t made that fabric for years and it’s unlikely they’d have anything left. Why is she showing me things I can’t have? Because what fun would it be if she had fifty yards of the fabric I wanted most in the world? What thrill would there be in that? No chafe, no twinge of anguish. It would end up being only a dress and not a wedding dress. “A little suffering sweetens things,” she tells me.