The Gondola Maker

by Morelli, Laura

  Only as a young child, after I noticed the tiny grave in our family plot, did I raise the question with my mother, possessing then the courage that innocence brings. His name was Primo, she told me, the first-born. My father had taken him into the boatyard within days of his birth, and my mother had had to pry the child away to feed him or put him in the cradle my father had made. She smiled, then, seeming to read my mind, and she gathered my bony shoulders and squeezed me tightly.

  “What happened to him?” I asked wide-eyed.

  “It was the day before his third birthday,” my mother said, her voice quavering as I have never heard it before or since. “Your uncle Tino found him floating in the shallow water at the bottom of the boatyard ramp.” My mother left the room then and I was left to imagine the rest.

  I was not supposed to be the eldest son. Yet, here I am, the accidental heir to my father’s boatyard. I suppose I consider it nothing short of a miracle that I am here at all.

  On the opposite side of our bedchamber stands a wooden bed fashioned from our father’s own tools, where my younger brother and I sleep. Our sister occupies a narrow cot next to our parents. Their bed now stands at an angle so that my mother can get into it without climbing over my father. This bedroom, along with the kitchen and a small gathering room, constitutes the only home I’ve ever known. Occasionally, when our father has taken on a new apprentice, we’ve set up a temporary cot in the kitchen, but it is only the five of us now, soon to be six, God willing.

  Sensing my presence, Mamma turns her head toward the door, opens her eyes halfway, and gestures for me to come. I approach carefully and perch on the edge of the bed. Immediately, she presses against my back and brings her small left hand to my face. I cover it with my larger, calloused one. I favor my left hand, just like my mother. She smiles.

  “I brought the fish from the market, Mamma.”

  “Good,” she replies. She looks into my eyes, and her body softens. We are like mirror images, my mother and I, our eyes the color of the amber stones that come off the ships from the East, trapping small black insects inside their glowing orange orbs. People tell my mother and me that our eyes seem to burn with flames or shine like the sun. My mother’s eyes sparkle, defying the sadness that must lie beneath. A fortuneteller in the Rialto once told my mother that she and her eldest son had descended from gypsies and were destined to wander. It made my mother laugh, and her eyes glowed even more. Today my mother’s eyes are uncharacteristically dull, ringed by dark circles. I feel the weight of her unease for the new soul that grows inside her womb.

  “Signora Galli sends her regards to you and the baby,” I tell her, acknowledging with a glance the taut abdomen that touches my hip. “And she also scolded me for doing the shopping.”

  Mamma laughs, but it ends in a weak cough. “Did you see Annalisa at the market?”

  “No,” I say, and turn my gaze to the window to watch a gull wheeling in the sky.

  Annalisa Bonfante is the girl who will be my wife. Since I was old enough to toddle around the boatyard, my parents have worked to arrange a union between their eldest son and the ferro maker’s daughter. My father’s sole concern is the future of our trade; he has insisted on ensuring this alliance to bridge our two related crafts. It took Father nearly a year to convince Bonfante that I was worthy of his daughter’s hand, though, as the gruff blacksmith already had in mind the son of a master goldsmith in Rialto. My father is both skilled and persistent in his arguments. Once his mind is set, there is no changing it. My own thoughts about the engagement have never been asked.

  It is not that Annalisa Bonfante is an unreasonable choice for a wife; she is a fine girl. Her skin and teeth look healthy, my mother has pointed out more than once, and my aunts take note of her broad hips. Annalisa’s mother and grandmother have taught her to cook, raise hens, and embroider linens. She is nearly sixteen, ripe for marriage. She will be a good mother and bring me sons to build gondolas in our family boatyard for years to come.

  I am already well aware of Annalisa’s skin and teeth. Her hips, too, for that matter. Once Annalisa’s father had finally agreed to his daughter’s betrothal, she found a way to steal away from her market-going long enough to track me and push me behind the wall of a vegetable warehouse in Castello. For a girl, she surprised me with her nerve. In the mere moments we had together before being interrupted by a cabbage seller pulling a laden cart, she had managed to grab the ties of my shirt, press me against a stone wall, and let me taste the salt in her mouth.

  Next spring I will marry Annalisa in our parish church. Every member of the boatbuilding guild will be there. We will move to a small but solid house provided by Annalisa’s father. I will continue to work in my father’s boatyard, and at the moment of his death, it will become my own. I will teach our sons how to season walnut and oak, fashion the keels to be virtually indestructible, and stain ten different woods with our family’s own formula of lacquer that will make the craft watertight. On my own deathbed, I will pass the business on to my eldest son. It is preordained.

  My mother’s breathing draws me back to the present. Her eyes are closed again, and I watch her swollen girth rise and fall gently under the blanket. Her face is lined, but her hair spreads in waves across the pillow, and I remark that she is lovely. My father parades his beautiful wife at meetings of the Scuola Grande, but that is the only time I have ever seen Domenico Vianello treat her in this manner. I believe that my mamma loves Father, but at times I fail to understand why. I learned at a young age that my father’s way of showing affection is through discipline. With his wife, he is particularly harsh. I have never seen Father raise a hand against her, but I read the pain of his abrasive manner in her eyes. She swallows the sting of his words and never utters anything unkind to him or about him. I have never told anyone, but I hope that at the least, Father will match my sister Mariangela, soon to be of marriageable age at fourteen, with a husband who will treat her with greater regard.

  My mamma’s breathing is labored, and her temple throbs. I rise and slip out of the room. I take my hat from the table, salute my sister, and step out the house. If I can reach the boatyard before the bell clangs in the tower of Santa Maria Assunta, I may avoid my father’s wrath. I quicken my pace. The day is young, and there is work to be done.

  Chapter 3

  “Where have you been?” my father growls as he looks up from sanding a long oak plank to see me tiptoeing down the stone stairs into the boatyard, trying to avoid notice. “I promised Signor Pesaro a new gondola by December! The ribs are not even in place yet. Most of them are still stacked in the storehouse,” he grumbles.

  I say nothing, for the best way to respond to my father is through action, not words. I have already resolved not to mention the boat burning, and certainly not my attendance at the event, which could only serve to make my father more ill-tempered. Still, the image of the burning boat haunts me as I carry out my tasks. I head across the boatyard toward the storehouse.

  In spite of its renown, the Squero Vianello, our family boatyard, is little more than a haphazard conglomeration of buildings surrounding a boat ramp. Its three structures—the workshop, the storehouse, and our home—have been standing longer than anyone remembers. The boatyard has an entrance on the landward side as well as a mooring on the canal, so we can access it from the water or from the alley. The buildings in our little compound have been restored, altered, and enlarged so many times that they resemble a jumbled assemblage of stone, metal, and wood, the work of many generations of Vianello men, each of whom has left his mark.

  I lean my weight against the door of the storehouse, and it heaves open reluctantly, scraping along its metal track as it rolls to one side. I stand still for a moment while my eyes adjust to the darkness. I inhale the familiar aroma, a mixture of damp earth, seasoned wood, rusting metal, and lacquer, then I step carefully into the dust-flecked gloom. There is hardly space to walk among the piles of
wood, paintbrushes, varnish, hammers, adzes, planes, axes, nails, and buckets, not to mention splintered pieces of ancient gondolas waiting for my father to breathe new life into them. The storehouse contains all the gondola-building supplies we will ever need in my lifetime. I seem to be the only one of us who perceives the disorder. If I could ever find relief from my work, I would have time to devote to reordering the varnishes, stacking the scrap wood neatly by type, or arranging the tools so that we don’t spend so much time hunting for things as I am now.

  Along the back wall, I find what father is looking for: corbe, the U-shaped ribs that will give form to the new gondola we are building for Lorenzo Pesaro. Truth be told, the fair-skinned, thin-lipped spice merchant is as pompous as he is prosperous, but that is none of our concern, Father is quick to remind my brother and me. The man has fine taste in boats as well as a large purse, and that is all that matters. Pesaro is one of the few patrons who occasionally appear unannounced to inspect the progress of the gondola they have commissioned us to craft. The ever-present possibility of an unexpected visit from a client puts Father on edge. I feel his nervous energy project itself onto me in the form of tingling bumps creeping across my arms and up the back of my neck.

  “Luca!” My father’s voice booms from the direction of the workshop, and I flinch. “Where are those corbe?”

  I rifle through the stacks of wooden ribs, feeling for the right sizes. During the rare times that orders for new boats slow, my father commands us to craft corbe for future projects. My brother, uncle, and cousins spend countless hours pre-making these gondola ribs. You could never have too many on hand, my father says. My younger cousins cut, sand, and fasten the curved frames of oak and elm together with wooden nails, fashioning increasingly narrower and wider pieces to form, respectively, the skinny fore and aft ribs, and the sturdier members that will support the flat central keel of the boats. We stack the finished ribs in the storehouse, which makes the work in the boatyard more efficient during times when we have many commissions.

  “Arrivo!” I emerge from the storehouse into the sunshine and begin organizing the ribs by size along the exterior wall. From the corner of my eye I catch sight of my cousin, Roberto, standing in a gondola tied to one of the posts that mark the canal-side entrance to the boatyard. A scuttle in one hand and a horsehair brush in the other, Roberto is refreshing the paint on one of the mooring posts. He salutes me with the paintbrush, bracing himself in the rocking boat with his legs spread wide and his hair falling sideways across his brow as he cocks his head to paint.

  This is my favorite place to work in the boatyard. The téza—the hulking, shed-like structure open on its southern side to the boat ramp—is covered with a truss roof of wooden beams supported on massive brick pillars. Here we take each gondola through the final steps of its construction: varnishing, water-testing, and finally launching it in the water before our house. The ramp slopes gradually from the téza into the dark waters of the canal. Made partly of stones, partly of packed earth, the ramp turns to mud during the spring’s rainy season, and everyone must watch his step to avoid slipping on the muck. Beyond, a cluster of mooring posts painted with red and black spirals stands just off the ramp in the water, marking the entrance to the squero. In the summer, we take frequent leave of our work to walk down the ramp and splash our faces with cool canal water. In the winter, we watch our breath vaporize in the damp air as we varnish boats under the shelter of the great roof.

  Along the back wall of the téza, stacks of timber wood stand exposed to the open air, left to season sometimes for years. These raw planks of oak, ash, elm, cherry, fir, larch, and mahogany once grew as trees in the great forests of the Dolomite Mountains to the north. I, never having ventured outside Our Most Serene City, find it impossible to imagine trees so large growing in such vast quantities. The barge captains who traffic the timbers down the rivers to our boatyard describe forests as thick as grass stretching as far as the eye can see, punctuated by the craggy cliffs of the Dolomites, a sight I have tried many times to envision. My father buys timber only from two barges, whose captains he has known for years and whose lumber he has come to trust. Each autumn Father hand-selects our raw planks, avoiding pieces with knots, splintered edges, and other imperfections. Some of the planks in the storage area, I calculate, have lain there for ten years or longer, waiting to be transformed into a boat at the moment when Domenico Vianello deems it right.

  The narrow sliver of water before the téza is not the Grand Canal, but it remains our own piece of this Most Serene City, where we witness an ever-changing pageant of watercraft. Our days are propelled by the rhythm of the boatmen who steer simple cargo rafts, flat-bottomed lagoon craft, small rowboats, dinghies, and infinite numbers of black gondolas through the waterway that borders the squero. A few times, I have feasted my eyes on diplomatic boats, exempt from the decree handed down from the Doge himself that boats must be painted black to avoid the sin of opulence. These ambassadorial craft are the most conspicuous, some decorated with red velvet upholstery, carving along the sides and decks, and even gilded figures and animals on the prows. Other times, private gondolas owned by men rich enough to afford the steep fines imposed for breaking the sumptuary laws pass our squero. These fine boats are usually rowed by two men instead of one and are also elaborately painted and gilded. Today there are the usual comings and goings of the water-seller’s raft, a neighbor’s unadorned gondola, and a boy in a rowboat.

  “Luca!” my father’s voice booms again.

  I duck into the dimly lit workshop with a stack of gondola ribs draped over each forearm. Father stands with his hands on his hips, looking over the shoulder of my brother, Daniele, who is tapping a long oak plank gently with a mallet. Father looks up briefly as I enter but immediately turns his attention back to his younger son’s hammering. “No! More force on the underside, like this,” he instructs in his usual abrasive manner. “Give me the mallet.” Domenico Vianello is a perfectionist; everyone knows it. Daniele, an acquiescent boy, watches patiently as our father demonstrates again how to maneuver the tool. Sunlight streaks into the space from the giant doors, and I am struck by the identical profiles of my father and my brother, as if both men were molded from clay by the same master, one a younger version of the other. My brother is content and good-natured, even under my father’s heavy hand. Daniele is responsible for the mallet-work now, our father having long ago grown weary of my left-handed efforts that did not conform to his idea of how it should be done.

  It was not always so. One of my earliest memories was overhearing a neighbor woman whisper that the gondola maker’s eldest son was marked by the devil. My father must have believed it, as he did his best to undo my curse. In the boatyard, I was not allowed to pick up tools with my left hand. I lived for most of a year with my left hand tied behind my back during my hours in the boatyard, untied only at mealtime. Even now, I feel the knuckles of my left hand tingle when my father raises his voice.

  It was my mother who taught me to temper my ever-present compulsion to use my sinister hand, as she herself had had to do. At the table and in our parish church, she squeezed my left hand tightly while teaching me to make the sign of the cross with my right. In public, she instructed me to sit on my left hand or keep it in my pocket; in private, she reminded me that the left hand was the “hand of the heart.” At night she nursed my knuckles, bruised and swollen from where my father had struck them with a rasp each time I had reached for an implement.

  I never mastered the tools with my right hand nearly as well as with my left. Eventually, Father gave up trying to force me to use my “correct” hand in the boatyard and assigned many of the duties that the eldest son might be expected to do to my brother, who is gifted with dexterity and unmarked by Satan. My uncle and cousins mercifully turned a blind eye to my affliction, and my brother loved me anyway. I did what I could to make beautiful and seaworthy boats, just like my father and grandfather. Our work carried on.
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  A crude wooden frame hammered into the earthen floor occupies the bulk of our workshop’s interior space. No one knows how long the frame has been there; Father recalls his own grandfather using it as a basic mold for the workshop’s gondolas. We still use the roughhewn mold, little more than a few pieces of lumber arched to approximate the size and proportion of a standard gondola, to begin each boat. My younger brother is practicing one of the most critical steps in the construction: attaching the long oak planks that run the entire length of the boat on the left and right of the keel and provide the fundamental integrity of the boat. I have practiced it countless times and understand instinctively why my father is so attentive at this stage; it is critical to get this part right. If the longest planks are even slightly malformed, we have to dismantle the boat and start over again. My father will not settle for anything less. Then we curve the oak planks by soaking one side with water and applying fire with a torch to the other, a deceivingly simple and particular warp that, once achieved, forms the distinctive shape of the gondola. Once the two oak planks are in place, we will begin to place the gondola ribs that I have carried from the storehouse. For a while—up to two dozen moons—the craft will resemble the carcass of a gigantic fish. Then, day by day, the gondola begins to take shape.

  We do not do everything ourselves, to be sure. As every boat maker does, we send some parts of the work to specialists who carry out their own trade better than the Vianello family. The oars and oarlocks are crafted by Signor Fumagalli the oarmaker. My uncle handles the decorative carvings that adorn our standard boats, but for more elaborate commissions we hire an elderly carver who worked for my grandfather, one of the only men in Venice who still carves the elaborate swirls and flowers in the manner done in the time of my great-grandfather.