A Thousand Days in Venice

by Marlena de Blasi

  I just sit there looking at her, thinking I am beginning to understand her, a fact that both terrifies and gladdens me. We settle on a piece of cashmere that feels like heavy silk. It is beautiful and just large enough. Bombastes asks the price and, of course, offends Rapunzel. She tells me to return in a week to discuss the preventivo, estimate, with her twelve-year-old assistant. Could I just telephone next week? “Signora, it’s nicer if you can come here. The telephone is a little cold, no?” she corrects me again.

  On my return, I climb up to the atelier, I sit and look at the embossed envelope with my name on it that sits in a tiny dish on the table before me. Do I pick it up and open it? Will the assistant read it to me? Do I take it home and read it and climb back up to the tower to say, okay? La sarta hands me the envelope and I feel free to look at the one line written on the paper inside. Un abito di sposa—seven million lire—about thirty-five hundred dollars at the current exchange rate. I could have two Romeo Gigli dresses plus Gucci boots plus lunch at Harry’s once a week for a year for seven million lire. She sees my distress. I tell her the price is much more than I can pay, thank her for her time, and begin to back out the door. Even if the estimate was inflated just to see how much I would bear—a demonstration of furbizia innocente—I am appalled. I can only think that I have lost a precious week. Walking down and out into the piazza, I am sorry for the fifteen year old and the twelve year old that they must find someone else to pay their rent for the next three months.

  I decide to forget the Mongolian flounce and just find a dress, readymade. I try Versace and Armani and Thierry Mugler. I try Biagiotti and Krizia. Nothing. One day I go to Kenzo in the Frez-zeria, and as I leave the shop I pass by another called Olga Asta. Here the sign promises readymade as well as custom-made clothing. I tell the lady I am looking for a dress to wear to a wedding. Whose wedding I do not say. She shows me a string of tailleurs—nice little suits—one navy blue with a smart white shantung trim and a dark brown one with a matching silk blouse. All wrong and I am loath to even try them. I am already halfway through my exit song when she tells me she can make something for me, she can design and sew anything. Through a wince I ask, “What do you think about a simple white wool dress with a Mongolian flounce?”

  “Sarebbe molto bello, molto elegante, signora. It would be very beautiful, very elegant,” she says quietly. “We might even add a peplum to accentuate your waist.” She shows me lengths of stuff actually sufficient to make a dress. We choose one, and then she asks me to wait while she climbs up to her atelier. It seems Olga Asta is also a furrier, and back down she comes with a hank of long white Mongolian lamb in a ruff round her neck. Motioning me to follow her out into the daylight, she shows me how the fur and the white wool are of the same creamy tint. “Destino, signora, è proprio destino. It is destiny, signora, absolute destiny.” I want to know the price of destiny. Fearing inflation, I’m still mum about the fact that I’m to be the bride. She sits at her desk and writes and looks up prices and telephones upstairs to the atelier. Following decorum she does not announce the price aloud but writes two million lire on the back of her business card and hands it to me.

  I say, “Benone,” just like Don Silvano and set up a series of appointments for fittings. I tell her the date on which I’ll need the dress, and she flinches not at all.

  I shake her hand and tell her how happy I am to have found her, and she says, “Ma figurati. Don’t be silly, a bride-to-be must have exactly what she desires.” I never asked how she knew I was the bride, but I was glad she did. After the third or fourth fitting, I ask her to just finish the dress. I am sure it will be perfect and will come to fetch it on the afternoon before the wedding. She agrees, and I wonder why everything can’t be so clean and straight, and then I remember what Rapunzel told me and I am happy for the suffering that sweetens things.

  Fernando decides the Hotel Bauer Grunewald will be the scene of our wedding lunch. His longtime friend and client Giovanni Gorgoni is the concierge there, and, early on, he told Fernando, “Ci penso io. I’ll think of everything.” So, according to the stranger, our reception is planned, a fait accompli.

  “What is the menu?” seems a reasonable question from a bride who is a chef about her wedding lunch.

  “It’s a fabulous menu with hors d’oeuvres and Champagne on the terrace and five or six courses at table,” he tells me, as though it was really information.

  “What five or six courses?” I beg.

  “It doesn’t matter, it’s the Bauer Grunewald, and everything will be wonderful,” he says. I can’t decide whether this is bella figura or furbizia innocente at work, but I would really like to meet with these folks who are to feed us on our wedding day. He says I worry too much, but if I’d like to see a copy of the menu, he’ll ask Gorgoni for it. I want to tell him I’ve planned parties for Ted Kennedy and Tina Turner, but I don’t. He’d tell me this is different. I know it’s different, but I’d just like to be part of things.

  One morning we meet by chance in Calle Larga XXII Marzo. He’s just picked up the menu from the Bauer, and he hands it to me with great brio. It’s an undusted fin de siècle beauty, full of odes to Rossini and Brillat-Savarin, and I see he has said yes to a fish course that raises the price of lunch by fifty percent, to three baked pasta dishes with the same sauce, to “house wines” without knowing from whose house they will come, and a wedding cake sullied with a plastic gondola. I feel my sabre rattling. I look a little off to the left as I tell him I want to cater our wedding. Does he want to see my menu? He rolls his eyes until I think he’s going to have a fit, and I crumple the menu and stuff it in my purse. I have one more bullet.

  “Wouldn’t it be lovely to have something a little less formal? We could all go out to Torcello and sit under the trees at Diavolo.” I’m thinking of my sweet waiter with the salmon-colored cravat and the pomaded hair parted in the middle, the same waiter who brought us cherries in iced water at the end of our first lunch together on Torcello. The stranger kisses me hard and long on the lips, leaves me standing in the middle of the calle, and heads back toward the bank’s main office for a meeting. I know the kiss says I love you with my whole heart, and I know too that it says we will not traipse out to Torcello with the priest and the pageboys and Armenian monks and a delegation from the British Women’s Club to sit under the trees and be served by the waiter with the salmon-colored cravat. Most clearly of all it says you will not cook for your own wedding.

  Why do I let him dismiss me like this? Without deciding to, I step inside Venezia Studium and buy a small, pleated white silk pouch finished with a tassle and suspended from a long satin cord. At least I can decide what purse I’ll carry to my wedding lunch. I feel better, my perspective back in focus. The marriage is more important than the event to me, and I know that’s why I just let the stranger fly. And besides, he’s having so much fun. Anyway, if the Bauer’s propaganda is at all true, even the Aga Khan and Hemingway suffered through the same bloody meal.

  Fernando asks me to meet him one morning at a travel agency where he has already booked us on the night train to Paris. “Why do we have to go to Paris on a honeymoon when we live in Venice?” I ask him.

  “It is precisely because we live in Venice that we are going to Paris,” he says.

  My big job is to choose the hotel. When he tells me we’re going to the printer’s to look at paper and typeface for our invitations, I can’t believe it. We’re inviting nineteen people!

  “I’ll get some wonderful paper and envelopes and use my calligraphy pens. We can use wax and a seal, if you’d like. They’ll be personal and beautiful,” I tell him.

  “Troppo artigianale. Too homemade,” he says.

  The printer’s workshop is an ink-smudged dream scented with hot metal and new paper, and I could stay there forever. The printer sets stacks of albums before us and says, “Andate tranquilli. Take your time.” We look through all the books, and then we look through all the books again and the stranger places his finger on
a page full of engravings of Venetian barques. He likes one with a couple being rowed down the Grand Canal. I like it too, and so we order it in a dark Venetian red on woven silky paper of the palest green. We go to take an espresso at Olandese Volante while the printer prepares the estimate. When we return, the printer is off working and a little folded-up piece of paper addressed to us waits on his desk. The cost will be six hundred thousand lire. That’s three hundred dollars for nineteen invitations. When the printer comes back to us he is apologetic for the cost and explains that the lowest amount of paper he can order is for 150 invitations. Even though we need only nineteen, we must pay for 150.

  “Let’s choose another paper,” I say.

  “But the lowest lot is always 150,” says the printer.

  “I understand. But surely another paper might be less costly,” I try. The stranger is not budging. He wants the dark red boat on the pale green sea for six hundred thousand.

  “Okay, then let’s take all 150,” I suggest.

  “And what will we do with 150 invitations?” Fernando counters.

  I look to the printer for solution, but he is shaking his head in despair.

  “Can’t you just print nineteen or twenty-five or something like that and leave the rest blank so we can use them as notecards?” I ask gingerly. He doesn’t understand my question. I revert to charades. Fernando lights a cigarette under the No Smoking sign.

  Finally the printer says, “Certo, certo, signora, possiamo fare così.” I am amazed he has said yes. Fernando is close to angry that I asked for something so extrordinary. He says I am incorreggibile. He says I am like Garibaldi in eternal revolt.

  All we have left to think about are rings and flowers and music.

  One night we ride across the water to meet with an organist who lives near the Sottoportego de le Acque, a whisper away from Il Gazzettino. I like the circle I’m making. Il Gazzettino was my first Venetian hotel, and now I’m about to climb the stairs next door to see the man who will play Bach at my wedding. When I mention this to the stranger, all he says is “Bach?” We ring the bell and meet Giovanni Ferrari’s father, who thrusts his head out the second-floor window and tells us to come up, that his son is still with a student. Papà Ferrari looks like an old doge, locks of wild white hair escaping from his tight wool cap, his neck and shoulders muffled in a big paisley shawl. It is the end of September and nearly balmy outdoors.

  Two candles burn on the mantle of a fireplace. I love that these are the only light in the great salon. As my eyes adjust, I see that sheet music is helter-skelter, everywhere. It sits in precarious piles on chairs and sofas; boxes of it line the walls and block pathways. The old doge floats off into some other room without saying anything more, and so we just stand there in the candlelight among Frescobaldi and Froberger, being careful not to trip over Bach. I gasp when Giovanni comes out from his studio.

  He is the old doge in youth. Or is it the same man in a slightly changed costume? The same long thin face, with the same high-arched nose, wool cap, scarf, he says how pleased he will be to play for us, that we must only select the pieces. By now I know better than to think he really means there is some choice in the matter. The stranger is getting ready to dance with him, and I just watch and listen. Giovanni asks what we would like, and the stranger says we have complete faith in his taste; he says it is traditional to play such and such, and the stranger ends with, “Of course, those are exactly what we’d hoped for all along.” Quick, smooth, conventional. Each one has saved the other’s face as well as his own. No one talked about money. This is a world away from any other world, I think as we walk back in the silence of the Sottoportego.

  I remember this silence and the horrid hotel and Fiorella’s smile and running up and down over a hundred bridges in my thin snake-skin sandals. During that time in Venice, it was as though Fiorella was trying to mother me. “Sei sposata? Are you married?” she wanted to know.

  I told her I was divorced, and she clicked her tongue. “You shouldn’t be alone,” she said.

  “I’m not alone, just not married, that’s all,” I told her.

  “But you shouldn’t be traveling alone,” she pressed.

  “I’ve been traveling alone since I was fifteen.”

  She clicked her tongue again and as I turn to leave she said, “In fondo, sei triste. Deep down, you’re sad.”

  I didn’t have the language to tell her it wasn’t sadness she sensed in me. Only my separateness. Even in English it’s difficult to translate “separateness.” I broadened my grin, but she was still looking beyond it. I raced off, and she yelled at my shoulders, “Allora, sei almeno misteriosa. Well then, at the least, you’re mysterious.”

  I look up to the window on whose sill I sat on that long ago and first afternoon. I ask the stranger to stand there under the window with me, to hold me.

  13

  Here Comes the Bride

  We choose very wide wedding bands, brushed gold, heavy, wonderful. And the florist is so excited about us wanting baskets rather than vases of flowers that she takes me to a warehouse down by the train station where we find six white-washed Sicilian beauties, tall, with arched handles. She says she will fill them with whatever is most beautiful in the markets on the morning of the wedding. She says the Madonna will see to it that we have magnificent flowers. I like that she and the Madonna operate on such a familiar basis. I ask if she thinks the Madonna might send a few golden Dutch iris on October 22. She kisses me three times. I begin to wonder if this exchange has been too simple and if I’m having too little suffering. But on the day before the wedding the stranger provides.

  It is nearly time to meet him at the bank, and I have already gone to collect my dress and the lacy stockings I’d ordered at Fogal. I’d also decided to take the white tulle bustier I’d been eyeing at Cima. The tribe at the market and Do Mori staged a sort of bridal shower for me this morning, and so my market sack is full of roses and chocolates and lavender soaps and six newspaper-wrapped eggs from the egg lady, who also offered precise instructions that Fernando and I should each drink three of them, raw and beaten up with a dose of grappa, for strength. I’d gone to sit at Florian for a while, and the bartender there, Francesco, introducing his latest cocktail, passed round a taste to everyone in the little bar. Vodka and cassis and white grape juice. They said auguri so many times I was embarrassed, and when they said, “We’ll see you tomorrow,” I think they meant they would see us here in the piazza when the stranger and I and the wedding party make the traditional promenade through Venice.

  As I walk to meet Fernando, I notice something is missing: I can hardly remember the last time I felt the weight of the pest on my heart. Sometime over the last month or so I’d left it behind, confounded it for good. Or is that I’ve just passed it onto Fernando?

  When we meet, the stranger is pale, his eyes are fixed in his well-practiced dying-bird stare. I must remind myself he is only being Italian. On this day before his wedding, surely he is due his quotient of angst. He doesn’t ask about my dress or my day or my sackful of roses. He doesn’t even look at me. I think it’s just jitters, and so I say, “Would you like to be alone for a while?”

  “Absolutely not,” he answers almost in a whisper, as though I’d suggested he take a walk over glowing coals.

  “Would you like to go home and take a long bath and I’ll fix you a camomilla?” I try again. He just shakes his head. “Are you sad we’re getting married?” I ask him.

  “How can you say such a thing?” he says, eyes flashing back to life. He is quiet on the motonave and doesn’t break his silence even as we walk. When we reach the corner of the Gran Viale and Via Lepanto, he says, “I can’t go home with you right now. There are some things I have left to do. Cesana forgot to write us in and now he can’t make it tomorrow because he has another wedding. I have to talk to someone else.” Cesana was to be our photographer, another old friend and client who had said, “Ci penso io. Leave it to me.”

  “Is that what�
�s making you so desperate?” I ask

  He shrugs but doesn’t answer. I tell him we can always find someone to take a few pictures, but he will not be comforted. “And I haven’t yet gone to confession,” he says. He begins a convulsive defense. “I’ve been meaning to go for weeks but I just never found the right moment. I don’t believe in confession and absolution, anyway,” he says. He is justly uneasy, I think, since thirty years have slipped away since he’s heard the awful sliding of a confessional screen, but it was he who wanted all this, he who reinvented the truth to make it all happen, and now, seventeen hours before the ceremony, it’s dogma he wants to discuss? I say nothing because he is talking enough for both of us. When he’s finally quiet, I say I’ll go on ahead to the dacha and wait for him.

  “I’ll have tea and a bath ready,” I offer once again.

  “I told you, I don’t want tea or a bath,” he says, a little too loudly and leaves me holding tight to the wedding dress and the roses. I change and run down to the beach, trying to understand what it was he couldn’t say. After a while, he comes loping along and we sit on the sand, legs tangled and facing each other.