A Thousand Days in Venice

by Marlena de Blasi

  We walk right past the bank as though he forgot it was there, and when we meet one of the tellers outside he throws him the keys to the safe and says, “Arrivo subito. I’m coming right away.”

  We walk out of San Bartolomeo, past the post office and over the Ponte dell’Olio, and he’s not saying a word. The Princess is beautiful this morning, peeking from behind her March veils. When I ask him if he doesn’t think so, too, he doesn’t hear me. We stop in at Zanon for an espresso and then rush over the Ponte San Giovanni Crisostomo, as though this was the way to the bank rather than away from it. We’re almost running now, along the Calle Dolfin and over another bridge into Campo Santi Apostoli, full of children screaming their way to school, and then into Campo Santa Sofia and onto Strada Nuova. He says nothing until we come up to the vicolo that leads out to the Ca’ d’Oro landing stage. And then all he says is, “Let’s go back.” We ride but we don’t debark at the next stop, which is the bank, so I think we’re going home. Instead we get off at Santa Maria del Giglio, and he says, “Let’s go into the Gritti for coffee,” as though it’s our habit to take a ten-thousand-lira espresso in Venice’s most plush hotel.

  He doesn’t sit with me at the little table in the bar but plunks down a fresh package of cigarettes and his lighter and asks the waiter to bring a cognac. “Only one, sir?” asks the barman.

  “Yes. Only one,” he says, still standing. To me he says softly, “Smoke these, drink this, and wait for me right here.” He has perhaps forgotten I don’t smoke and that I like my cognac after dinner rather than at nine-thirty in the morning! He’s gone in a flash. But where? Has he gone to call Gambara and kill off the sale? Could he even do that if he’d wanted to?

  Half an hour, perhaps thirty-five minutes pass, and he reappears. He is dazed and looks as though he’s been crying. “Ho fatto. I did it. I walked over to Via XXII Marzo to the main office and climbed the stairs up to the director’s office, and I walked in and I sat down and I told him I was leaving,” he says, tracing his every move to assure himself he’d really made each one of them. Always in control of his bella figura, now he is unselfconscious in this Lilliputian space among the barmen and the concierge, three men drinking beer and a woman puffing on a very large cigar. He proceeds with his story. “And do you know what Signor d’Angelantonio said to me? He said, ‘Do you want to write your letter here, now, or bring it to me tomorrow? As you wish.’ ‘As you wish,’ was all he had to say to me after twenty-six years. Well, I did as I wished,” he says. He tells me he sat down in front of a manual Olivetti and pecked out his salvo, that he tore it from the rollers and folded it in three and asked for an envelope, which he addressed to d’Angelantonio, who still stood a yard away behind a desk.

  I have learned these tempests of his are not tempests at all but only the last quick darts of lightning that come after long, seething reflection. Fernando’s passages are nearly always silent and nearly always private. I understand this, and still he staggers me. I reach for the untouched cognac and try to begin lining things up in my mind. I think the story goes something like this. I come to Venice and meet a stranger who works in a bank and lives on the beach. The stranger falls in love with me and comes to Saint Louis to ask me to marry him, to ask me to leave my house and my work and come to live happily ever after with him on the fringes of a little island in the Adriatic Sea. I, too, fall in love and I say I will, and so I do. The stranger who is now my husband decides he no longer wishes to live on the fringes of a little island in the Adriatic Sea nor work in a bank, and so now neither he nor I have a house or work and we are beginning at the beginning. Incredibly, I am at ease with all of this. It’s only the whiplash way in which he moves that stings. What happened to patience? Then again there has been not one prudent act in this story.

  I drink a ten o’clock cognac, and I cry and laugh. It’s the old terror-and-joy two-punch, once again. Anyway, what does it matter that we are doing everything backward and sideways? In ten minutes I’ll have found my wind. Still I ask him, “Why today and why without our having talked about it?”

  “Sono fatto cosi. This is the way I am,” he says. A clean self-acquittal, unambiguous, selfish I think. Fernando is Venetian, a son of the Princess. And on both their faces folly and courage look the same, bleeding into this morning’s muslin light.

  16

  Ten Red Tickets

  Back at the apartment, which in eighty-one days will belong to this man called Maietto, we take our portfolio and a pot of tea to the bed that will probably always be ours. We tally up our resources for the hundredth time, but nothing changes. The severance payment from the bank, the proceeds from the house, what’s left of our savings, a few other assets, and, before the tea is cold, our financial meeting is finished and we lie there feeling, in a way, excited but more than anything else, little. Not “little” as in “diminished” or “fragile” but as in “new.” We begin sifting through possibilities that might permit our economic independence. We have illusions of neither ease nor grandeur ahead. We are, indeed, going off to launch a lemonade stand, but we both know I’ll drape it in old damask and pour the lemonade into thin, crystal goblets.

  We’re running out of time. Ruthlesslessly, we narrow our geography to a patch of southern Tuscany. Sunday morning rain falls in leaden sheets, the windshield wipers beat a dirge. We head toward Chianciano, Sarteano, Cetona, then up a mountain road where we’ve never been. We wind up and up to the crest full of pine and oak woods. It’s beautiful. “Where are we going?” Fernando asks and I tell him the map promises the tiny village of San Casciano dei Bagni.

  “Roman baths. Thermal waters to cure problems of the eye. Medieval towers. Population, 200.” I read the facts in a fake, cheery voice. The descent is less sinuous until it becomes more so, until the last, brusque veer to the left and then—just as it’s been for one or the other or both of us at other moments in this life of ours together—nothing is the same. The road ends and we stop the car.

  Straight ahead, up a hill, we see the village towers, looming out of the mist. It seems a place conjured. Miniature, heaped-up stone houses, red Tuscan roofs polished by the rain, clouds wrapping it, concealing it, before the wind blows it clean and we see it’s real. Leaving the car below, we walk up the slope to the village. A man with a single wide, sharp tooth and a navy beret sits in the hush of the piazza’s only bar, still as furniture. We tiptoe up to him and begin a gentle interrogation.

  He tells us two families own most everything in and around the town. These are the ancestors of warring factions, medieval enemies of the blood, and we can be certain neither one of them will sell even an olive tree. He says they survive by minimally remodeling one property at a time and then renting it long-term to artists, writers, actors, and anyone else prepared to pay a high price for Tuscan solitude.

  He seems to know everything. He is the sacristan of San Leonardo, on his way, now, to lead a funeral march from the church down to the cemetary. “Infarto. Heart attack,” he tell us. “Valerio was standing right where you’re standing only yesterday, and after we took our morning grappina together he went home and he died, poveraccio, poor man. Only eighty-six he was.” He says we can walk along with the mourners if we’d like, that it might be a good way to get to know people, but we decline.

  In parting, he urges us to chat with the matriarch of one of the dominant families. There’s work being done on one of her properties, un podere, a farmhouse, on the road to Celle sul Rigo, a few yards outside the village. “She’s eighty-nine and ferocious,” he warns. When we knock on her door, she shrieks down from the third floor that she wants nothing to do with any witnesses of Jehovah. We tell her we’re only Venetians looking for a house. All blue hair and cheekbones, she is hesitant, but we lure her into parting with the truth that there is reconstruction in progress on one of her farmhouses. Yes, we can see it, but not today. No, it is not for sale. She has yet to decide on the rent, and do we know how many people from Rome have been waiting for how many years to rent a
house in this area? We say that all we know is that this a beautiful village, that we’d like to live here. Come back next week, she says. We hike up the road to the house, circling it again and again, searching for reasons not to fight for it. We can’t find one.

  Made of crudely cut stone, taller than it is wide, it’s a sober place whose spare garden spills out and down to a meadow and a sheep-fold and then down further onto the lane that twists back up to the village. We stand at the edge of the garden under a vault of still-weeping Tuscan sky. There is no epiphany, no great jubilation. We do not see stars at noon in the rain. But softly entranced we are, as if kissed by a witch with half her powers. We look to the village and the chain of yellow and green valleys pleated and tucked around and beyond it, to the Cassia, the ancient road to Rome. It is a humble estate, and, perhaps, a good place for us to be.

  There’s a second-story window that has been left open just a crack, so I step from the little porch up onto some crude scaffolding, raise the window higher and catapult myself into a bathroom, onto a floor of brutally ugly, just-laid, puce-colored tile. The stranger follows me inside and, wandering through it, we tell each other it feels like home.

  All the floating pieces drop into place. The apartment is really sold. Fernando has really retired from the bank. The blue-haired matriarch agreed to a two-year lease, and we really are going to live in a tiny Tuscan village. Though we are free to move in during the first days of May, we decide to pack leisurely and depart Venice on June 15. With our long dramas quieted, we want simply to be in Venice and then to part with her peacefully.

  We perform a ceremony of the dead for the alarm clock, but still Fernando wakes each morning precisely half an hour before sunrise. His groans of disbelief wake me, and soon we’re both on our feet. I pull an Aereonautica Militare sweatshirt over one of Victoria’s oldest Secrets, slip into Wellies. Fernando wears Ray-Bans even in the dark, and we stumble across the road to watch the sea and the sky light up. In our folkloric costumes we are Maggion’s first customers, and we take our paper tray of warm apricot cornetti and the old Bialetti coffee maker, steaming and sputtering, back to bed. Sometimes we doze a bit, but usually we dress and head down to the boats.

  Fernando carries a small yellow portfolio everywhere, filled with articles on olive farming and his designs for the bread oven that he’ll build from the ruins of an outdoor fireplace in the garden in Tuscany. He has planted in little plastic pots twelve eight-inch-high olive trees that he plans to transplant down the western slope of the garden. He’s calculating that his first harvest will happen, if all goes reasonably well, in twenty-five years and will yield a cup and a third of oil. He packs one box or carton or suitcase each day with the hand-wringing glee of a boy off to summer camp.

  “I’m so exciting,” he says fifty times a day in his weird English. I look at him sometimes and wonder how he’ll fare out there on dry land behind the lemonade stand rather than in a palazzo sitting above the lagoon, behind a marble-topped desk.

  “You know, we’re likely going to be poor, at least for a while,” I tell him.

  “We’re already poor,” he reminds me. “Like any under-capitalized business, like any under-capitalized life, we’ll have to be patient. Big way. Small way. Hard. Not so hard. If we can’t make one thing work, we’ll make another thing work.”

  On our last Saturday morning he says, “Show me a part of Venice you think I’ve never seen.” So we ride the vaporetto to the Zattere. Even though we’ve already had two breakfasts, I pull him into Nico and order three hazelnut gelatos drowned in espresso. “Three, why three?” he wants to know. I just take the extra cup and the extra little wooden spoon and tell him to follow me. We walk the few yards to the Squero San Trovaso, the oldest workshop in all the city, where gondolas are still built and repaired. I introduce my husband to Federico Tramontin, a third-generation gondola builder, who is sanding the prow of a new boat with two hands, his arms stretched out taut. He tells Fernando he’s using jeweler’s sandpaper, fine enough to smooth gold. He knows I already know this. I hand him his gelato and Fernando and I sit on a plank off to the side, each one of us stirring and sipping at the luscious potion. We say a word or two about the weather and then another word or two about what a pleasure it’s been to have spent this time together. I’m still in the lead as I draw Fernando up to a tiny storefront travel agency, in whose grimy window there is posted a hand-wrought sign, an old invitation from Yeats.

  Come away, O human child!

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

  I translate the words for Fernando and tell him that when I came upon this sign during my first few weeks in Venice, I had thought the poem was for him, that he was the lost child; now, though, I sometimes think it’s me who is a bit lost. But which one of us is not? Which one of us does not long to be hand in hand with a faery who knows more than we do about this sad world? That’s marriage, taking turns being the lost child, being the faery.

  The shops are just opening when we come, on another morning, to walk in the Strada Nuova. Everything echoes here. A man whistles while he sweeps outside his shop, where he sells rubber boots and fishing gear, and a man across the way is polishing smooth-skinned violet eggplants and laying them in a wooden box and he whistles the same song. They are a coincidental duet. Water purling up against the fondamenta, the embankment; bells, foghorns, feet shuffling up a bridge, down a bridge. Everything resonates. Sometimes I think Venice has no present, that she is made all of memories, the old ones and those aldilà, beyond. New memories, old memories are the same in Venice. Here there are only encores of a diaphanous pas de deux. Veni etiam, come back again. A Latin invitation from which, some say, Venice was named. Even the name is a reflection. Which image is the real image? The one reflected? The one reflecting? I touch Fernando’s face as I look at it, mirrored, shimmering in the canal.

  “Who do you think we’ll be when we’re old?” I ask him.

  “Well, by some standards, we are old so I guess we’ll be as we are right now. But the truth is I’m not sure we’ll have time to really get old, what with one beginning and another,” he says.

  “Do you think you’ll miss Venice very much?” I ask him.

  “I’m not sure, but whenever we miss being here, we’ll just come back to visit,” he says.

  “I want to come back every year for the Festa del Redentore,” I tell him.

  Palladio built the church of the Redeemer, in 1575, on the island of Guidecca, across from San Marco, in thanksgiving for the ending of yet another long siege of the plague. And each year since, the Venetians have rejoiced with their own sacred hallelujah of sails and lights and water. On the prescribed afternoon in July, every Venetian with a boat converges in the Bacino San Marco at the mouth of the Guidecca Canal, and the festival begins. The boats are draped in flowers and flags and are so dense in the water, one can pass a glass of wine to one sitting in the boat next door. One throws a sweater to a friend, a box of matches to another. And if the boats are small enough, boards or an old door can be balanced between them, an impromtu table for aperitivi together.

  The feast of the Redentore is a reunion, when the Venetians celebrate themselves. They are saying, “Siamo Veneziani. We are Venetians. Look at us. See how we’ve survived. Shepherds and farmers, we survived to become fishermen and sailors who built up lives where there was no land. We’ve survived Goths and Longobards, Tartars and Persians and Turks. Pests and emperors and popes, we’ve survived them, too. And, we are still here.”

  Everything is ritual on the night of the Redeemer. As the sun sets, candles are lit on the prows, makeshift tables are set, and supper is served: pots full of pasta and beans tied up in linen towels and braised lagoon duck stuffed with sausages, fried sardines and sole in saor. Demijohns of Incrocio Manzoni and Malbec empty at an alarming pace; watermelon awaits midnight. It is the festival when one sees that figm
ents and chimera are real; when fireworks are as normal as stars, their light another side of the moon. Everyone stays on the water until, at two or so, like a tired, victorious flotilla, the great white sails and the small patched ones inhale the soft wet breeze and move, to the sound of mandolins, slowly, slowly up-lagoon toward the Lido to watch the Redeemer’s sunrise.

  “It’s my festival, too,” I tell Fernando. “I’m Venetian as much as if I were born here. I’m Venetian, Fernando. I’m more Venetian than you,” I say.

  We had agreed that there would be no weeping farewell to Venice, but as I pull the sticky brown tape tight across the flaps of another box, I wonder how Fernando can be leaving so cavalierly. I don’t want to leave her. Usually so good at tucking and rolling the ending of one thing into the beginning of the next, I just can’t seem to do that now. I remember the very first time I left Venice. That was long before my life with the stranger. So many years have passed since then. I had stayed just two weeks that first visit and, already smitten, it was sad leaving her. Of course it was raining.

  The early mist is soft and warm on my face. The gilded putti I’d bought for my children from Gianni Cavalier and wrapped in a dozen folds of La Nuova Venezia are safe in a sack hung from my wrist. I tug the still-damnable black suitcase back over the stones and stairs. My heels, clicking more confidently than when I had first arrived, are the only sounds in the predawn of the Sottoportego de le Acque. Though it is a longer walk than it would have been to the Rialto, I want to take the boat from San Zaccaria, to be in the piazza once more. Marooned it seems, a tenantless village in a pewter sea. It is so beautiful. I walk across the Piazzetta, past the bell tower, out between the columns of San Teodoro and the lion of San Marco. Just as I turn left toward the pontile, la Marangona rings six long woeful bells. I feel the sound in my chest as much as in my ears and I turn to look back a moment, wondering what it might mean when the solemn old thing rings out one’s departure rather than one’s arrival.