And then there’s the whole idea of service, which, in Italy, has never quite caught on. Here a customer base is often generations old, and, for better or worse, its numbers will rise and fall only with the birth and death rates. In Italy “cutting edge” refers to one’s knives, good and sharp enough to carve up a salame thin as paper. There was enough innovation during the Renaissance to last another thousand years or so. Ancestral inventiveness suffices here, and few feel the need to improve on it. Who could even think to improve the wheel or a straw broom or the lead plumb that tests the straightness of a wall? Besides, if something goes amiss, the Italian can look to heaven and curse his entire lineage for thwarting him. There is always destiny to blame for any red marks that an evil accountant might enter on one’s annual report. Anyway nonna, grandmother, and everyone else has more sympathy for a whiff of failure than for the smell of new money. Except in sports, the greater sympathy in Italy is reserved for the vanquished. The celebrity Fantozzi has long been the essential, irresistible, benign bungler in Italian film. His is the preferred identity of the working-class Italian male, including even some bankers.
Ambition is an illness in Italy, and no one wants to catch it. At least, no one wants you to know that he has caught it. If the saints and angels had desired him to be rich, rich he would be by now, he tells you. Hence workers in Italy are not less reliable, less efficient, or more cunning than workers are anywhere else. They are, instead, Italian workers, functioning according to a perfectly acceptable Italian rhythm and attitude. It is we outsiders who refuse to accept this. When an Italian rolls his eyes in mock horror at another Italian’s casual approach to a day’s work, there is also a sort of pride in his look that says, “Some things, thank God, will never change.”
Fernando is delighted with the nightly recountings of my newly burnished takes on his countrymen, and he tells his own set of stories about the inner workings of the Italian banking system and its splendidly played farces. He laughs, yet a wisp of rancor lingers when he’s quiet. I don’t ask him about it, since he seems only tentatively at peace with his work-in-progress crises.
We have chosen large black and white marble tiles to cover the walls and the floor. Fernando wants them laid straight, while I think it might be interesting to place some of them on the diagonal. I sketch, and he crumples my paper and says the effect will be too contemporary. I drag him to the Accademia and Correr to illustrate how time-worn and classic black and white on the diagonal is, and he says okay. But he won’t give in on the new washing machine, which he desires to be positioned exactly where the old one sat, thus carrying on the tradition of colliding with it each time we open the door. I want one of those wonders of Milanese design, a washer slim as a suitcase that lives inside a handsome cabinet. He says these machines only wash two pairs of socks at a time, that their cycles last three hours, that they are wholly impractical. I want to talk about form over function, but he says I can just drape the big machine the way I drape everything else, and so it’s the big machine that we order.
I am reading a biography of Aldo Moro, the Italian prime minister who, in the sixties and into the seventies, preached, among other things, a “historic compromise” between the church and the communists. He called for a coincidenza of the virtues of authority and reform, what he termed “converging parallels.” How sublimely Italian, at once civilized and yet socially and mathematically impossible. Each faction rolls straight ahead, alongside the other faction, and both talk across the void between them about their impending coexistence, all the while knowing it will never be. Just as in a marriage.
I ogle and fondle bolts of fabric all over Venice, but, like all the good Lidensi, I must content myself with choices from the goods stacked up in the garage next to the laboratory of Tappezzeria Giuseppe Mattesco in Via Dandolo. The entire inventory seems to be white, off-white, creamy white, pale yellow, or mint green sheer cottons and polished cottons, though there are a few flowered chintzes in shades of lilac and red and pink and an occasional maverick bolt of tapestry. Since we have only a few windows with which to work and three pieces of furniture that need slipcovering, I want some opulent satin and velvet stripe, cinnamon, bronze. I want to know why I can’t buy fabric elsewhere from which Signor Mattesco can make our drapes and slipcovers, and Fernando tells me it’s because, years ago, Mattesco bought out an overstocked mill up in the Treviso, hundreds and hundreds of bolts of the same fabrics, and ever since, he has been measuring and cutting and stitching up the same bargain-priced drapes and slipcovers for everyone on the island. He says working with Mattesco on Mattesco’s terms is a sort of local ordinance.
I think this is a fantastic story but it turns out to be almost true, and so I feel less terrible about never having been invited into any of my neighbor’s houses. Now I know in all of them flutter the same white batiste curtains bordered in little wine-colored balls. At least that’s what Mattesco tries to push off on me. I dig about in his garage for days until I find a cache of ivory brocade. It is heavy and lush and smells profoundly of mold. He is so happy to get rid of the forgotten stuff he says two days in the sun will cure it, and it does, nearly, or enough so that we can use it.
Signora Mattesco is the seamstress. She has white skin and white hair and wears a pristine white smock as she sits at her machine in a sea of white cloth. She looks like an angel and seems confused, sad even, about my not wanting the border of little wine-colored balls.
There is a bottega in San Lio where a father and son pound and carve, twisting thin sheets of metal into chandeliers, lamps, and candlesticks, rubbing the beauties with woolen cloth dipped in gold paint. We’ve been watching them at work in their window, stopping in to visit and chat once or twice each week for months before we even begin to explore what we might like to have them make for us. They and we are happy for one another’s company, and all of us know there is no hurry about deciding anything. Venetians like to stretch certain encounters out as thin as a wasp’s wing, to unroll them pian, piano, ever so slowly. Why scurry, why settle something before it needs to be settled? If enough time passes between the settling and the finishing, one might find one’s self not needing what it was one settled on and someone else finally finished. And anyway, where is the joy in endings? I swear I am beginning to understand Venetians. I continue to think about Rapunzel and the Italian truth that without suffering and drama nothing is worth having or doing. Without the rubble and the screaming and Fernando’s dead-bird eyes, I would have only a bathroom rather than a black-and-white marble-walled and -floored room, where I will take candlelit baths with a stranger.
The Biblioteca Marciana, the Venetian National Library, is another room in my house. A room that is, gratefully, not under construction. The library is located inside a sixteenth-century palazzo designed by Jacopo Sansovino and was constructed to house the Greek and Latin collections bequeathed to Venice by Cardinal Bessariono of Trebisond. Sitting square on the edges of the stone-flagged Molo and the Piazzetta, it looks toward the Doge’s Palace and Basilica San Marco. The library’s spare, severe Ionic and Doric columns are neighbors across the Piazzetta with pink and white Gothic arcades and the smoky glitter of Byzantium, all of them behaving nicely together in a sort of architectural cordiality at the entrance to the earth’s most beautiful piazza.
I have spent more hours inside the dank solemn space of the library than anywhere else in Venice besides my own bed in our apartment or my rented one at the hotel next door. I’m determined to learn to read better and better in Italian. I’ve come to know the stacks and files, where certain manuscripts and collections are shelved, and even what’s behind some of the funny little doors. Free to wander about its three-quarters of a million volumes, I have come to know the particular and merciless cold that saturates its spaces in autumn and winter and to love its smells of damp paper, dust, and old stories. I know which sofa sags less than the others, which lamps actually have bulbs, which writing table gets the warmth of a space heater, and who among my companions
reads aloud, who sleeps, who snores. I read-stumble-read history and apocrypha, chronicles and biographies and memoirs in my new language, often in an archaic form of my new language. Librarians, Fernando, dictionaries, my own curiosity, the will to imagine I could understand something of the ancient consciousness of Venice and the Venetians are my spurs.
On Fridays I don’t go to the Marciana at all. I don’t write or read a word. I don’t even go to market or to Do Mori. I simply walk. More peaceful now, I revel in the gifts of whole, golden mornings with no one else’s claim scrawled across them. I remember the days when, if an hour stretched out all mine, I would grab it and run, gorging on its moments as I would an apronful of warm figs. Now I have the feast of hour after hour, and so I choose a neighborhood and explore it as carefully as if I’d just acquired it in a game of blackjack. I walk in the Ghetto and in Cannaregio, or I stay on the water and debark in some unusual post.
One day in the Campo Santa Maria Formosa, I stop to buy a sack of cherries and sit on the steps of the church. Legend says a bishop from Oderzo founded this church after a majestic woman with majestic breasts, una formosa, appeared to him and said he should build a church there and wherever else he saw a white cloud brush the earth. The good bishop built eight churches in Venice, but only this one is called after the formidable lady. I like this story. At the base of Santa Maria’s baroque bell tower there is a grotesque—a medieval scacciadiavoli, devil chaser. The old bell and the even older grotesque are at ease together, the sacred and the profane taking the sun.
When it’s too cold to stay outdoors all day, I ride out to the islands, to Mazzorbo and Burano, or to San Lazzaro to sit in the Armenian library—but I don’t read. I sit there happily among old Mechitar’s manuscripts and the soft padding about of the monks and I think. Sometimes I feel as though I’ve lived here forever. I think about what I’ve read, tried to read, understood, not quite understood. I think about the sadness Venice wears, that faint half-mourning that becomes her. And sometimes I see her naked, her sad mask loosed a moment and look straight into a face that’s not sad at all. And I begin to understand she’s done the same for me, loosed my sad mask, so old I wore it like skin.
In my readings I often come upon some ripple of lust, some small scrap of it, lust being a historic Venetian impulse. Sexual, sensual, and economic hungers drove la Serenissima. A place of arrivals, brief soujourns, debarkings was Venice when she was new as much as she is still. A stopping-off place like no other, the insubstantialness of Venice bewitched. A sanctuary for indulgence. In the fifteenth century more than fourteen thousand women were registered with the city governors as licensed and tax-paying courtesans. A volume was published each year, serving as a guide to the hospitality of these women. It presented short biographies, the family and social alliances, education, and training in arts and letters of each courtesan. The book assigned each one a number, so that when the king of France or an English noble, a soldier waiting his billet on the next Crusade, a mirror-maker in from Murano, a Carthaginian trafficking in pepper and nutmeg came to town and sought some feminine succor, he could send a porter round to the lady’s often sumptuous address, requesting an audience with number 203, or 11,884, or 574.
Should a courtesan’s business lull, she would go for an afternoon to stroll. In wide, fluttering crinolines, red-blond hair woven with gems, white unsunned skin safe under a parasol, she would troll the piazza and the campi, beckoning this one with a deep curtsy, another one with the quick fluttering of her fan or a half-moment’s baring of her breast. A Venetian courtesan wore zoccoli, sandals built up on twenty-inch pedestals—stilts, really—which served to keep her frock from wet and soil while raising her up from the crowds, identifying her.
The Venetian aristocracy and the merchant class, along with the clergy, partook of the sophisticated social ministrations of these goddess spies who kept state secrets, if only for a while, and told truths, if not all of them. These women were as often the wives and daughters of the nobility as they were those of a policeman or a stone-mason. Sometimes they were young women who’d been parceled off to convents by their middle-class, dowry-fearing fathers. These unwilling postulants often violated their vows by secret and not-so-secret forays into this other, this less chaste sisterhood. The convent of San Zaccaria became celebrated for its libertine nuns, for the conspirings and plots they birthed along with a bevy of illegitimate children. Under the inquisition of a bishop’s council, one of these nuns is said to have offered up the defense that her service to the church was greater than her sin upon it, she, after all, having kept as many priests as she could from a slip into homosexuality.
Whatever lust now titillates the Byzantine core of a Venetian he will often reserve for travelers rather than his neighbors. There is a locandiere, owner-manager, of a simple pensione and a four-table osteria who hasn’t tuned up his menu for thirty years. Each morning he cooks the same five or six genuine, typical Venetian dishes. The food he doesn’t sell on a given day he nicely sets apart and conserves. Next day he cooks again, presenting the just-made dishes to his daily customers and the more mature rice and peas or pasta and beans or fish stew to passersby. Hence, the couple from New Zealand is eating the same type of food as are the two Venetian matrons who sit next to them. It’s just that the New Zealanders’ food is seasoned with two or three days’ worth of patina for which the locandiere is wont to charge them thirty percent more than he does the ladies from Sant’Angelo whom he will see again the next day. He knows he’ll never see those New Zealanders again and isn’t Venice, herself, enough to content them? What do they know from pasta and beans, anyway? A merchant of Venice often sees himself separate from his product, be it fish or glass or hotel rooms. He is neither diminished nor enhanced by his own slipperiness, by his asking vulgar fistfuls of lire for yesterday’s fish, slipperiness being another form of masquerade and masquerade being his birthright. The prostitute nun, the ermine-cloaked beggar, the doge who signed a pact on the day of his coronation that left him virtually powerless, these particularly Venetian forms of minor key harmony have given way to less reckless expressions of “coexistence,” sometimes in the form of “pot A and pot B” of pasta and beans.
15
The Return of Mr. Quicksilver
We are trying to find the right place to breakfast on the rocks along the dam in Alberoni early one Saturday in July. Stepping over and around poles and buckets and lanterns and armies of stray cats that besiege the fishermen, Fernando opens quietly, “You know that idea about selling the apartment? I think we should do it. It’s going to be beautiful when it’s finished, and Gambara says our investment in the renovation will permit an interesting gain for us.” Gambara is the real estate agent in the Rialto whom we finally went to see and who has come several times to look at the work-in-progress. Our consulting with Gambara was an exercise in collecting intelligence, we’d agreed, impressions and numbers to stash away for someday. Is it someday already? Fernando thinks me a revolutionary, but it’s he who is the anarchist.
“When do you decide these things? Am I always across the water when these holy flashes strike you?” I ask. All I wanted was to drink this cup of cappuccino and eat this apricot pastry while sitting on a rock in the sunshine. “How sure are you about wanting this?” I ask him.
“Sicurissimo. Absolutely sure,” he says, as though it’s steel.
“Have you thought about where you’d like to look for another house?” I try.
“Not exactly,” he says.
“I guess we’ll have to look in the quarters we can afford and hope we can find something we like. Probably Cannaregio or Castello, don’t you think?” I ask him as though it’s already steel with me, too.
“Remember when I told you if we sell our place I’d want to move somewhere totally different?”
“Sure I remember. Venice is totally different from the Lido, and we’ll find a house with a little garden so you can have roses, and we’ll have big windows with lots of light and some wond
erful view, rather than having to look out at Albani’s satellite dish and the troll’s decrepit Fiat, and we can walk everywhere without having to be on the water half our lives. Believe me, Venice will be totally different.” I say all this very quickly, as though my speaking will prevent him from speaking, because I don’t want to hear what I think he is going to say next.
“I’m leaving the bank.”
It’s worse than what I thought he was going to say. Or is it better? No, it’s worse.
“I don’t know how much time we have before one of us dies or gets terribly sick or something, but I want to spend all of it together. I want to be where you are. I just don’t have another ten or twelve or fifteen years in me to give to this job.” He’s very still now.
“What would you like to do?” I ask.
“Something together. So far, that’s all I know,” he says.
“You don’t want to transfer to another bank, then?” I ask.
“Another bank? Why? I’m not looking for another version of this life. What would be the point of changing banks? One bank is just like another bank. I want to be with you. It’s not as though I’ll leave tomorrow. I’ll wait until we arrange things so that we won’t be hurt by my leaving. But please understand me when I tell you I am going to leave,” he says.
“But isn’t selling the house the last thing we do rather than the first? I mean, if we sell the house, where do we go?” I want to know.
“It will take years to sell the apartment. Gambara says the market is very slow. You know everything moves pian, piano here,” he says like balm. Everything except you, I think. My vision is fading and my heart is thrashing, climbing up into my throat. I flash back to the apartment and back to Saint Louis. I even think back to California. Didn’t I just arrive here? Isn’t Venice my home?
A Thousand Days in Venice Page 16