We have stayed a long time in Paris, a month of days and nights inside the rapture. Because it’s nearly time to return to Venice, I begin to wonder how that will feel. “Fernando, what do you think will happen when we return home?”
“Nothing so different,” he tells me. “We’re our own happiness. We’re the festival, and wherever we go our life won’t change much. Different backdrops, different people, always us,” he says, with eyes that look straight ahead but sneak back to check my response to his broad brush. Is he trying to tell me something without telling me again? What’s he saving up for me, behind that jauntiness? We decide to fly back to Venice rather than ride the train, and in the airport we see that same French woman in line for a flight to London. With my eyes I say thank you for her gentle chaperoning through these first days of marriage and she, with hers, says it’s been a pleasure. I can’t help but wonder about her next assignment, about the lucky couple to whom she’ll flash the silky comfort of that goddess smile. And, I wonder, too, about her finding real picholine in London.
It is November 21, and we are just awakening to our first morning back from Paris. I remember this is the Festa di Santa Maria della Salute, the feast recording the day when Doge Nicolò Contarini declared to the Venetians that, after twelve years of ravaging, the black death had been extinquished by a miracle of the Madonna. I want to attend services, to offer a new Venetian’s thanks to the Madonna and others, not only for past miracles but also for their unwitting role in convincing Don Silvano to marry us last month. I ask Fernando if he’d like to go, too, but he says the bank reentry promises enough ritual observance. I tell him I’ll go alone, that I’ll meet him at home for dinner.
On this day each year, six or eight gondolas perform as traghetti, transfer vessels, to ferry the celebrants back and forth across the canal from Santa Maria del Giglio to the Salute. I arrive at four and queue for the traghetto among quiet, almost orderly crushes of people who overload the landing stage. Almost all of them are women, and they stand up in the traghetto, twelve, fifteen of them at a time, tottering, leaning against one another and, without apology, casually linking arms to steady themselves. When it’s my turn I see that the gondolier who is hoisting people down onto the floor of the boat turns out to be my very own, my wedding-day gondelier and he lifts me in a wide arc from the dock down into the boat, saying “Auguri e bentornata. Greetings and a good homecoming to you.” Venice is a small town, after all. And now it’s my small town. The older ladies in the traghetto beam at this expression of allegria and, once I’m settled into the boat, I link arms, too, as though I link arms always. There is a sympathy out here on the wavy black water, in the rocking black boat.
We debark in front of the basilica, and I stand a while looking at her, lit as she is by the wake of powdered yellow light the sun just left behind. Raised up at the apex of the half-circle formed between San Marco and the Redentore on the Giudecca, Longhena’s great church rests upon a million wooden pilings sunk into the mud bottom of the lagoon. Round and immense and sullen, too big for her throne, she seems a grand robust queen sitting in a dainty garden. What conceit had a man to dream this temple, to suppose he could build it and then do it? I walk over to the narrow pontoon bridge that is flung out across the canal only on this one day each year. Venetians negotiate its swinging, shifting platforms, carrying gifts in thanks to this Madonna, who delivered their ancestral families from the plague nearly five hundred years ago. Once the offerings were loaves of bread or cakes stuffed with fruits, jam or salted fish, maybe a sack of fat, red beans. Now the pilgrims bring candles, each holding one like a prayer, the flames of the faithful lighting up the cold stones of the Virgin’s old house. Near the steps of the basilica, I buy a candle, a thick white one whose breadth is nearly too big for my hand to grasp. Without my asking, a woman lights my candle with the flame of hers. She smiles and melts into the crowds.
Generations of women walk together, sometimes three or four sets of linked lives, their connections chiseled into their flesh by the same artist. An old woman walks with her daughter, her granddaughter, her great-granddaughter, and I see the baby girl’s face in the great-grandmother’s face. The old woman’s legs, sticks in white stockings, are brittle, tentative under a pretty red wool coat. What’s her story? She wears a beret pulled low over straight silver hair. The woman who is her daughter has hair straight and silver, too, and the one who is her daughter has hair straight and blond. One of them has pulled the baby girl’s beret low over her blond head, and the four of them are beautiful. This is what I’ve always wanted, I think as I watch them. I’ve wanted to belong, to matter, to cherish and be cherished. I wanted life to be that romantic, that simple and safe. Is it ever that way? Is anyone ever sure? I wish my daughter was walking over this bridge now. I wish I was waiting for her. I would like to hear her voice, to hear our voices together in the dusky blue of this twilight, on our way to visit the Madonna. I would like to tell my daughter that she can be sure.
Inside, the basilica is a great ice cave draped in red velvet. The air is blue from the perishing cold, cold like the oldest cold, five centuries of cold trapped in white marble. No room to move, all of us touch, our breath blowing out in smoky clouds. Bishops and priests stand at every altar blessing the faithful, aspergillums of holy water lifted high above their heads. I try to move closer to a small side altar where a very young priest exuberantly sprinkles the congregation. Perhaps it is his first festival of the Salute, as it is mine, and I think his benediction would be particularly fitting. Feet swaddled in woolen socks, legs in thick suede boots to the knee, long shawl over long coat over long dress, Fernando’s World War II cossack hat with the earflaps down, I am Mother Russia, and still I am cold. I wonder how it must feel to be Venetian, to be part of this rite, to know that one’s blood and bones are descended from the blood and bones of those who have lived and died here for so long. How little I know about myself, I think, as I walk back down the steps and over to the traghetto.
I see him then, beaver hat, long green Loden cape slung over his shoulders, looking like Caesar on the Rubicon. Quickly, I remember something I do know about myself. I know that I love this man with my whole heart. My husband steps up from the boat. “There you are,” he says. “I wanted to surprise you.” As if the idea of surprising me was just revealed to him.
Fernando is right in that nothing is so different in our post-marriage-posthoneymoon-in-Paris-settled-back-in-Venice life, nothing much, except he is hardly ready to live quietly ever after. He says it’s time we began the real work on the apartment. I’m feeling a Paris sheen and noticing a slowly growing comfort in the rhythms of my Venetian life. I have even grown affectionate toward the draped ruins and, at least for now, I am not convinced we must begin tearing apart the walls. He says winter is the right time to do it, that waiting at all means waiting another year, and that’s too long. I prefer to wait. I want to think about Christmas and then about spring. I tell him that I just want to live in peace and without a major project.
He says that’s just fine as long as I understand that the restructuring is inevitable. “We can’t pretend that just because it looks so beautiful in here right now all the structural work doesn’t matter anymore.” He’s right. And I know that somehow he feels a connection between the work on the apartment and his own personal weeding and scrubbing and that’s why he doesn’t want to wait. Exhilarated by the momentum of these past months, Fernando wants more of it. “It’s your project, though,” he tells me one evening, as though he is conceding Austria. “So you’ll have to decide when to begin.”
“At the least, let’s get the plan on paper,” I say, and so we write a list, room by room, meter by meter, of each phase of the work to be done. I see the extent of the whole tantalizing plot in black and white, and not even a minute passes before I feel the primal whip of the fire keepers. Since the beginning of forever, I have always seen to it that the larder was fat and the table serene. But fire keepers are also in charge of fixing
up the house. Or, in my case, in charge of watching over those who fix up the house. And the next house, and the one after that. Without even applying, I’ve got my old job back, and I tell Fernando I’m ready.
I spend my afternoons looking at fixtures and appliances and tile and such, getting estimates for various parts of the work. In the evening Fernando and I go together to these suppliers, make final selections and contract the work. I try not to replay the laments and desperate tales of every foreigner who ever negotiated more than the dry cleaning of a raincoat in Italy. Those overblown stories about the everyday machinations of the Italian worker are the stuff of slapstick. Haven’t I just passed through the wickets all the way to my wedding? Still there is some uneasiness about this journey into the jackhammering of what’s left of the bathroom floor. I must remember that not only am I in Italy, I am in Venice, and surely the Princess will present a piquancy all her own.
The first thing to learn is that the whole Venetian enterprise is water-dependent. Venice was raised up a refuge, her inaccessability is her very reason to be. Not so much has changed over fifteen centuries, in that nothing can take the old girl by surprise. Everything and everyone travels her shimmery domain by boat. Even those persons and goods that would come upon her by air must then be plied over the water. Hence there is a surcharge on every potato, every nail and sack of flour, every lightbulb and flat of petunias for passage across the lagoon and canals. For travelers as well as citizens, Venice is the most expensive city in Italy, a fact justified by her watery situation, the same position that grants immunity to all lateness. Who is fool enough to argue with “La barca è in ritardo. The boat is late,” or “C’era nebbia. There was fog”? Even homegrown goods must traverse a canal or two, a rio, a riello. Water is the conduit, water is the barrier, and Venetians use both to their advantage. The woodworker who comes to replace a floorboard or the cement-dusted squad that comes to resurface your walls—all chant the water theme, and this affects how things get done.
We lose the first two weeks in January to “fog,” the third to “high water,” the fourth to “humidity.” On the last day of the month, work begins. That is, the tools of the preliminary destruction are delivered and the workers tramp from room to room, knocking on the walls, measuring, shaking heads, rolling eyes. It’s not as though they haven’t seen the job, studied the situation, approved the plans, but still they pace about like commanders in a war room. Their preferred way to smoke is to wedge a lit stick in the corner of the mouth and let it be. They talk, sneer, get on with things while the cigarette burns down to a long snake of undisturbed ash. Then they remove the butt of it and crush it under their heel. After all, isn’t the floor going to be replaced?
And yet despite such a stammering start, work proceeds nicely, even steps up toward briskness, with the men singing and whistling, their smoldering cigarettes all the while secure between their lips. When these men work, they work hard and well, but they are sprinters with no predisposition for long distance. After three hours each day, they’re at the finish line. Somehow the destruction phase eases into the reconstruction phase, and I’m thinking it’s going fairly well until I notice Fernando shuffling through the rubble on his way to the bedroom one evening. I already understand that the process terrifies him. He won’t be happy until the work is finished and at least twelve people have told him it’s magnificent. But there he is, lying crosswise on the bed, dead-bird eyes cast up, saying he just doesn’t like the damn apartment and nothing we do to improve it is going to make much difference to him.
“It’s small and cramped and there’s no light and we’re spending all this money for nothing,” he tells me.
“It’s small and cramped and there’s no light and we’re spending all this money, but it’s not for nothing. You’re the one who insisted we take the place down to its ribs. I don’t understand you,” I tell him, wishing I could be alone in a room with no sledgehammer, no buckets. Not a single bag of cement. No stranger. “Why don’t we just sell the place?” I take him by surprise. “Is there a sestiere in Venice where you’d like to live? Surely, if we tried, we could find an apartment, with a mansarda, a roof-top space, that we could fix up and both grow to love,” says the gypsy in me. My proposal disturbs him.
“Do you know the cost of real estate in Venice?” he asks.
“About the same as the cost of real estate on the Lido, most likely. Why don’t we go to see an agent and just get a reading on the market?” I ask.
He repeats “real estate agent” in the same tone he might say “Antichrist.” Why are Italians so afraid of asking questions? “If we sell this apartment I wouldn’t want to buy something else in Venice,” he says. “I’d want to really move, to move someplace totally different, away from here. Moving into Venice is not the solution,” he tells me.
Since I’m not sure what the problem is, I am also unsure that Venice is the solution. He doesn’t want to talk about it anymore because he knows if I understand what he really wants to do, I might just agree and then where would he be?
One thing seems clear. We can no longer live in the work site, and in late February we move to the hotel next door. The hotel closes officially from Christmas through Easter, but since two staff persons stay to keep an eye on things, the owners agree to rent us a bedroom and bath. We’ll have access to a pretty country-French-furnished sitting room with an old ceramic woodstove and a small dining room with a black marble fireplace. Our room will be heated, but the corridors and sitting and dining rooms will not. Because of insurance stipulations, we will not have kitchen privileges, as the two caretakers do. A hotel kitchen, equipped, spacious, sparkling, down the hall, and I’m not allowed to use it! Or is it that they are perfectly agreeable to my using it, but are obliged to tell me not to use it?
We bring only two suitcases of clothes, some books, and the Georgian candlestick that has gone where I’ve gone since I was fifteen. When we need anything else, we just go next door. Our bedroom is small and square with a very high ceiling. Flemish tapestries cover two walls, pink Murano sconces flank a large mirror, and pink moiré covers the bed and drapes the long window. There are good rugs, a heavy, dark wood armoire, a sleigh bed, pretty side tables. A burgundy velvet sofa faces the garden.
The solution to the kitchen problem is through the caretakers. They can use it, and so, if I use it with them, I will be only smudging the rules. I am beginning to think like an Italian. The first night I bring back things to cook from the Rialto and ask Marco, one of the caretakers, if he and his colleague would like to join us round our little black fireplace about nine. I tell him I’m braising porcini in sage cream and Moscato, that I’ll grill chestnut polenta with Fontina, that there are pears and walnuts and more Moscato for afterward. Smiling, he asks how I’m going to braise the porcini over the wood fire, knowing already I’m headed straight for the kitchen. I invite him to prep with me and Fernando joins us and then Gilberto comes in, finished with his painting session in the reception rooms, and soon we are all mincing and whisking and drinking Prosecco. That evening, and several evenings each week thereafter, until the proprietors come home, Marco, Gilberto, Fernando, and I keep good company round the little black fireplace in the small hotel.
Gilberto is an extrordinary cook, and when he takes a turn at the burners, he roasts ducks and pheasant and guinea hens, stirs up thick wintry concoctions of lentils and potatoes and cabbages. One evening he announces we will have only dessert. He makes kaiserschmarren, delicate crèpe-like confections cut into ribbons and swathed in wild blueberry jam. He passes a bowl of thick cream and a bottle of iced plum eau-de-vie purloined from the hotel’s private larder, and when we finish every jot, I am grateful I don’t have to climb over thirteen bridges and ride over the waters to get to our bed. When no one cooks, we roast whole heads of garlic and small purple onions over the fire, charring them until they collapse, sprutzing them with good balsamic vinegar, feasting on them with fresh white cheese, trenchers of crusty bread, and good red wine.
We live for nearly nine months in the hotel, at first like voluptuous stowaways, then as proper guests, sitting at table with the others, and, once in a while, exchanging mysterious smiles with Gilberto and Marco.
I walk over to our apartment each day, but the workers are almost never there. I’m learning another fact that affects the Italian work ethic. The working-class Italian, the average small businessman, wants less from his life—from his earning life—than do many other Europeans in similar situations. What a working-class Italian can’t do without he usually already has. He wants a comfortable place to live—whether rented or owned makes little difference to him. He wants an automobile or a truck or both, but they will be modest. He wants to take his family to Sunday lunch, up to the mountains for a week in February, and down to the sea for two weeks in August. He wants to offer a good grappina from the Friuli to his colleagues when it’s his turn on Friday afternoon. He’d rather have money in the bank than in his wallet because he’d never spend it anyway. What he needs costs relatively little, so why should he work longer or harder to get more when he thinks himself already well-off enough?
The Italian knows that speed—say, the fitting in of another appointment or hurrying to finish something he can finish tomorrow—will give him not more satisfaction but less, if such preposterous acts interfere with his rituals. An espresso and a chat with friends will always come before the installation of your baseboard. And he knows that because you are such a lovely person, you would applaud his sense of values. When he watches a soccer match rather than work on your estimate, he knows you’ll have expected him to do just that. If he uses your down payment to clear a debt rather than buy materials for your project, he is only practicing a sort of triage, the addressing of the severest need first. In the end this will serve you, as it has his customers before you and will serve those after you. Italians have learned about patience more than almost anyone else. They know that, in the end, a few months, a few years, one way or the other, will not cast long shadows over your well-being nor enlarge it. The Italian understands wrinkles in time.
A Thousand Days in Venice Page 15