My Venice and Other Essays (9780802194039)

by Leon, Donna

  “We don’t drop ’em, ma’am. We just defuse them,” one of them insisted, and my heart expanded at the slight tone of defensiveness in his voice.

  “I understand that, but doesn’t it ever seem strange to you that something like this can exist?”

  “That’s war, ma’am.”

  I tried again, suggesting that those old Greeks, the guys in the history books, when they fought, did so with a sword, had to stick it into the body of their enemy, saw his eyes while he died, got blood on their hands. They did not kill from ten thousand meters.

  “Agh,” one of them exclaimed with horror.

  “That’s barbaric.”

  “It’s what?”

  “All that blood. It’s barbaric.” The others nodded in agreement. Barbaric.

  I thought about it, poised there in that half second when we decide things: whether to swing the car left or right; whether to put up with it or quit; whether to say yes or no.

  I ran through our predictable conversation, realized that my ideas of war and their ideas of war were never going to be the same and that our ideas of courage were never going to be the same. Nor of what was barbaric.

  “I see,” I said with a smile and got to my feet. I thanked them and we shook hands all around. The mascot dog came over for a final pat, and it was then I noticed he had a pair of air force insignia on his collar. He wagged his tail and ran to the door with me, helping them to escort me safely on my way back to the civilian world.

  On Sprüngli

  and CNN

  You know that feeling you get when you stop in Sprüngli on Saturday afternoon, look at the pastries, order one to go with your coffee, then, after you’ve eaten it and the waitress has removed the evidence, you sneak back to the counter and get a second one? Usually, you do it only when you’re alone; after all, would you want your friends, your spouse, to know what sort of person you really are, what piggy appetites lurk behind that calm exterior?

  My behavior is similar whenever I watch CNN. I do it only when I am alone; because I’ve never had a television, I have to do it outside of my own home; and the aftermath is always a cloying sense that I’ve eaten so many empty calories that in a short time, I am going to feel faintly sick.

  Over the years I’ve become accustomed to the banal excesses of CNN, the grim solemnity with which the newscasters greet every event, no matter how trivial. In the past they have irritated me, the way a whining child in the next train carriage will, but a week ago they went too far and pushed me over the edge with choking disgust.

  I speak of the Egypt Air disaster and of those poor devils who fell, rocklike, to their instant deaths in the Atlantic. I first heard of it on CNN, only a few hours after the first news reports had come in. It was quickly told: originating airport, time, location, probable number of people on board. Left unclear was the cause of the crash or the nationalities of the dead. Because the flight had originated in LA and New York, it was probable that many of them were American, and the final destination, Cairo, was enough to allow an inference that many others would be Egyptian.

  In the various CNN centers, the various talking heads, faces tight in that standard-issue look of grief and high importance that television news presenters, I am sure, are trained to adopt, repeated this paltry information, then turned things over to colleagues in different places, who proceeded to repeat the same few facts. Interspersed with this were film clips of a New England harbor, navy ships, and large swathes of empty sea. We also saw the facades of various airports, the unmanned check-in desks of Egypt Air.

  Suddenly we were alerted that CNN, less than half an hour from now, was going to provide us with a ninety-minute “special” about the disaster. As news of this was given, we saw shots of dark-skinned people wearing funny clothing (you know, women in abayas, men in dresses) arriving at the Cairo airport. Many of them were tight-faced with the sort of solemn grief that the television presenters had been simulating for the past fifteen minutes. Some of the women, faces torn apart with agony, collapsed into the arms of the people around them. And, at this, I realized what we were probably going to get ninety minutes of: grief. Hey, look, real tears, real grief, people who will show us real pain. Let’s sit right here, sipping our beers, finishing off the second sandwich, and right in our own living rooms we can see real people suffer pain.

  Even a week later those pornographers of pain were still banging away at it: Coptic mourning in exotic Cairo, even a Muslim ceremony right there on Nantucket Island. And because these were the relatives and friends of people who died, by gosh, those have got to be real tears. This is not journalism and it is not news. It is ghoulish voyeurism, an insult to those asked to watch it as well as to those shown. I’ll never stop going to Sprüngli but I have stopped watching CNN.

  The United States

  of Paranoia

  It took a Rubens nude to convince me that, regardless of the current belligerence of American foreign policy, the emotion that fuels America is, and has been for my lifetime, fear, not courage. Behind the trillion-dollar panoply of weapons, it’s a nation of scaredy-cats, a population continually manipulated into, and kept in, a state of red alert against dangers that are grave, horrible, and overwhelming and against which resistance is all but futile.

  In justification of my view I offer this peek at some of the trends that have convulsed the country during my lifetime. When I was a kid, our elementary school conducted civil defense alerts, during which we hid under our desks in the belief that its two-centimeter wooden top would suffice to protect us from nuclear fallout, to make no mention of the blast that would flatten New York, sitting there just across the river from us.

  Years passed and the population began to suspect that the bombs weren’t going to fall this week, but other fears were always splattered onto the covers of what pass for news magazines in America, Time and Newsweek, and like Goya io yo vide. There was the cover warning of the risk of herpes, a plague not seen since the days of the Black Death. Then there was the Lyme tick, a minuscule insect whose mug shot, blown up to the size of a grapefruit, appeared in eight-legged glory on the cover of at least one of those magazines. There was also the pit bull, a menace that can still—when nothing particularly horrible is happening in the world—be dragged out of the journalistic cupboard to menace Western civilization. There are also those old standbys AIDS and illegal immigration, to which have now been added international terrorism and militant Islam. One blushes at adding WMD to this list but there they are. Or weren’t.

  This is the habit of paranoia that has been drilled into the civilian population. Imagine my surprise to discover, when I began to teach for an American university that offered classes on a U.S. military installation in Italy, that our boys and girls in blue are also kept continually alert to the many dangers presented to them by—well—by life.

  All foreign U.S. bases have radio and television stations that provide both news and entertainment. They also present “public service announcements,” and it is here that the national paranoia has found full voice. There are warnings about the danger of leaving a rake lying in the yard (you’ll step on it and it will come up and hit you in the head), foreign drivers, household accidents (the kitchen is a deathtrap, it seems). As the years passed, I adjusted myself to these new terrors; I could, after all, when class finished, step off the base and back into Italy, where—though there were rakes and drivers and kitchens—life was considerably less dangerous.

  As time passed, I began to savor these announcements and the sheer inventiveness of the forms in which danger was seen to lurk. There was the family drama of the squeaky-voiced little girl telling her father, “Daddy, Daddy, there was a strange man down at the road, looking at our mailbox,” to which the eternally vigilant father responded, in a suitably deep voice, “It’s a good thing that you noticed him, Emmy Lou. We can never be too careful.”

  Or the delicious count
ry-and-western song (preceded by a ­sober-voiced warning, “What you’ll hear next is very sad”) about the man who drove down to the corner to get a quart of milk. (Imagine the guitars.) Little Billy Bob wanted to come along for the ride, and the foolish father, little thinking of the menace that surrounds us in life, failed to fasten little Billy Bob’s seat belt. So now Billy Bob is an angel up in heaven—“And I’m goin’ down to the other place.” In American mythology, however inefficient God might be at protecting us, He’s always ready to mete out punishment.

  Or consider the deliriously wonderful warning, at the height of the avian flu panic, against “suspicious poultry.” Osama disguised as a turkey? A goose with a Kalashnikov?

  But the Rubens nude: where’d she go? Recently a former colleague of mine, who remained at the university, teaching art history, was forwarded a copy of an e-mail sent to one of her students. While researching his thesis for the class in Western art, the young man, using his military e-mail address, contacted the Prado, asking to be sent an image of Rubens’s The Three Graces, the painting he had chosen as the subject of his art historical analysis. He wanted to attach a copy of the painting to his paper.

  The U.S. military, no doubt at breathtaking cost to the taxpayer, has installed a powerful filter that reads through all e-mail traffic, ever on the alert to danger, menace, peril, to make no mention of God-offending obscenity. One of the categories routinely searched by this filter is “art/culture” (think about this), one subsection of which is “nudity” (keep thinking).

  Alarm bells sounded, at least inside the computer, either at the title or at the sight of these buxom nudes disporting themselves, and access to such corruption was blocked. One has no choice but to infer the existence of a list, even if only inside this computer program, of paintings judged to endanger the nation by presenting the human nude; beyond that, one must also consider the mind of the person capable of preparing that list, the mind capable of believing that the sight of the nude human form imperils the survival of democracy.

  So those of you who think that America is a bold colossus that has taken on the task of keeping the world safe from this and that, you might want to begin to think about a colossus that thinks it’s necessary to protect its defenders from “art/culture” and from “nudity.”

  ON BOOKS

  E-mail Monsters

  The problem arises from the fact that I’ve known my computer technician since he was a kid. Roberto’s family lived in the apartment below mine when I first settled in Venice, twenty-five years ago. He was a gawky, tall boy, well mannered and polite, but a kid, you see, a boy. Now, a quarter century gone, he is Dottor Pezzuti, with a degree in computer engineering from the University of Padova and a job with ACTV, the public transport system, which allows him to create programs that will regulate all public boat and bus traffic in and around Venice. But to me he’s still a gawky kid, and that probably accounts for my difficulty in giving sufficient credence to his patient and, I’m sure at least for him, long-suffering explanations of the basic principles governing my computer and the programs he installs in it. After all, how can a kid you once saw kick a soccer ball into the canal in front of SS Giovanni e Paolo know what he’s talking about?

  So when he assured me there is no devil hiding in my e-mail, I pretended to believe him, though well I knew he lied. For I have seen him, have often detected signs of his diabolical presence. You laugh, don’t you? You sit there in the safety of your chair, long distant from the keys of your computer, and you laugh at my primitive superstition, my savage belief in dark forces? Let me warn you that you do so at your own peril, for I have seen him, and I know. It started about four months after I was converted to e-mail. For years, I’d resisted the temptations of friends who encouraged me to join the Web, hack into the universe. I argued that I’d managed to conduct my life to date without either a television or a telefonino and had suffered no adverse consequences, that is, aside from not knowing the difference between Maurizio Costanzo and Pippo Baudo and not being able to call my mamma from the train to tell her I’d be home in ten minutes and to put the pasta in the water, which are the only advantages I’d ever observed to be had from those two conveniences.

  They persisted: correspondence would be speeded up; information could go back and forth between continents (planets, for all I knew) with the speed of something faster than the Italian postal system. Like Adam, I fell.

  Within a short time, this promise had been realized, though the immediate consequences were not those I’d first imagined. Correspondence had indeed speeded up, though grammar, syntax, and content had suffered alarmingly. Then there were the perilous communications from people named Lola and Michaela, all promising me joys unlimited if I would only open the attachment.

  Roberto got me through all of this. He showed me how to delete this and delete that; once he cured me of a virus; he even showed me a way to get rid of something he insisted on calling “cookies.”

  When I first saw the devil, however, I suspected it was nothing Roberto could help me with, his doctorate notwithstanding. It happened one day when I was working on a book review of a particularly undistinguished novel, laboring over the precise phrase that would slip a knife into the author’s throat without seeming to do so. I tried this and I tried that, but the lethal phrase eluded me. That’s when I saw the tail.

  It flicked up, just a wee little bit of it, right there below my eyes, between the b of “boring” and the v of “vulgar.” Undecided about which adjective to hurl at the book under review, I glanced down at the keyboard and saw the little piece of tail, the same shape as the head of a viper, sticking up there, waving in the direction of that icon at the bottom of the screen, suggesting it might be time to check the e-mails. Perhaps they no longer wanted the review; perhaps there’d been some mistake and I was meant to be reviewing some other book: Tristram Shandy, say, or Vanity Fair, something I could have fun with.

  So I allowed my hand, in a studiedly accidental motion, to move the cursor to the icon, that perfidious Outlook Express, and I permitted myself a peek. No, no change in work, but there was an e-mail from someone in Austria asking if I’d be interested in seeing Handel’s Teseo in Klagenfurt and, if so, which date would I like? That set me to checking the calendar, finding a cast list in an old opera magazine, calling a friend to see if the conductor was worth the trip, then accepting the offer. The second e-mail was from a friend in London, filled with vile remarks about people in the publishing business, and so I had, of course, to pour fuel upon the flames of his outrage. The next was from my oldest friend, in New York, telling me she’d just received a photo of the people who had attended our fortieth high school reunion and I wouldn’t believe how enormous Barbara Campo had become.

  By this time, more than an hour had elapsed, and it was time to go to dinner, but I went with a clear conscience, for I had spent the afternoon at the computer, had I not? There was no sign of the devil for another few weeks. I got the review done and sent it off, wrote a short piece about Handel’s Arminio, and then found myself confronted with the inescapable: chapter seventeen.

  Minutes passed, a half hour dragged along, and very little happened. The characters sat around, walked around, took a ride on a boat, shifted nervously in their chairs, went for another walk, went back to their desks, where they sat, as unable to figure out what was going on as I was. And then, as I sat, inert, there it was again.

  This time it wasn’t a tail, it was a bony little hand, the same hand that had offered the pen to Faust. The hand rose up, this time from between the a for “answer” and the s in “solution,” and it waved to me, then raised one thin, dangerous finger and pointed to the bottom of the screen, where lurked the perilous icon. I resisted for half a page, but as I tried to work, more little fingers, and then just the pointy tip of the tail, would repeatedly flip out from between the keys, always, always, always pointing at that icon. It started to throb and pulse, to
glow red, much as had that first apple. I tried to close my eyes and think of England, but I knew it was useless, knew that there is, for us poor weak humans, no resisting the lure of Satan, no hope when the devil of sloth comes to call.

  I won’t try to tell Roberto about it again, of course. I know he won’t believe me, would probably laugh or, worse, give me another long, compassionate look and suggest that perhaps I’d been working too much lately and maybe it was time to leave the computer alone for a while. There’s the danger, too, that he might try to do something to the computer, see if he could get rid of the tail, delete the fingers. And the horror, the horror is that, even if I thought he could do so, I know I don’t want him to.

  With Barbara Vine

  There we sat at one of the closely placed tables in an Italian restaurant just off Covent Garden, two women of a certain age, respectably dressed, waiting for our pasta, talking shop.

  “What are your favorites?” I asked my companion, nodding to the waiter that, yes, I would like some more mineral water.

  “Oh, I love a good push down the steps.” She paused here and gazed off at the photos of Italian actors that covered the walls, thought about this for a while, looked down and moved her knife (I found that significant) an inch to the left, and added, “Or strangling.” Again, a thoughtful pause. “Yes, I have to admit I have a great weakness for strangling. There’s something so tactile and personal about it.”