The Politics of Washing

by Polly Coles

  Windows are bringing out the worst in me. In Venice, it is clear, you could become obsessively conscious of the scrutiny of your neighbours. Either that, or develop a brazen insouciance to the gaze of other people.

  The most uncomfortable overlooking of all is that of the blank window. A permanently shuttered window presents no problems: a blind, honorary wall. Windows that revealed brief moments of other people’s lives are also acceptable. But there is one particular window that I can see from my sitting room that I do not like at all. It is enshrouded in a net curtain and never lit from within. This unnerves me. If anyone should happen to be looking out from behind that curtain they would see me clearly; I, on the other hand, would see nothing of them.

  Glimpsed fragments of other people’s lives can, though, be as comforting as a sentimental film. When I see the elegant lady across the rio opening the windows of her airy flat, or the family who live below her busily compressed into their few rooms – making a bed, playing the guitar, sitting in front of the computer – all seems right with the world. Surely, with so much visible, bustling, prosperous normality all around, there can be no real suffering, no tangible pain? Even the old woman I see from my dining room, who, every morning, draws her dingy net curtains and shakes out her bedding, a single light bulb suspended from the ceiling behind her, has her daily rituals and her place in my imaginative comfort zone.

  But, after all, no amount of flinging open of windows or shaking out of dust is a guarantee of anything. The mystery of an apartment at the level below us is solved after months. The window is hung with a rickety Venetian blind like a lopsided mouth packed with collapsing teeth; the place appears deserted. Then, one day, as I am, yet again, hanging out the washing, I see a sick and aged man emerging on to the minute terrace like an ancient tortoise coming out from long hibernation; each step is impossibly slow so that he seems on the point of fossilizing into immobility. With one slippered foot, inch by inch, he nudges forward a plastic laundry basket. Once he and his washing have reached the outside, he begins the slow unfolding of his spine as he bends, then reaches, then takes hold of a single sock. Now, vertebra by vertebra he straightens up and moves his trembling hand towards the line upon which he intends to peg the sock. That sock could be travelling light years across the distance from basket to washing line.

  I stand a pace back from the window, into the shadow. The man could not possibly see me; I am looking down on the bald crown of his head. Though I hide myself partly out of respect, and feel sorry for the extreme effort cost him by his minuscule task, I am, none the less, spying on him with unrestrained curiosity, gawping at this other life.

  Meanwhile, no one else escapes scrutiny or comment. Antonio, who lives on our landing and is a big, ebullient lion of a man and a fertile source of gossip, tells me that the saturnine Signora Zambon is ragingly jealous of her equally brooding spouse.

  ‘She’s always at him,’ Antonio tells me. ‘She’s convinced he’s got hundreds of lovers. You should hear her when she gets going.’

  I’m not convinced: it seems improbable to me that her husband, who has a misanthropic reluctance even to greet a neighbour on the stairs, should be engaged in extra-marital gallivanting, but Antonio is adamant. Their teenage children, he tells me, have perfectly gauged their mother’s Achilles heel and can often be heard taunting the green-eyed signora for her fits of violent jealousy.

  How much can one hope to conceal here, where we all live piled up, hugger-mugger? When my friend Filippo plans an illicit triste, he arranges to meet his beloved in a bar in a distant and isolated part of the city. As they walk into the anonymous place on an anonymous street, Filippo hears a voice from behind the bar:

  ‘Ciao! Filippo!’ It is the girl who works in the bar next door to his bookshop, where he goes for coffee and brioche every morning.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he says.

  ‘Oh, this is my sister’s brother-in-law’s wife’s place and I fill in for her on a Thursday afternoon sometimes.’

  The fact is they could pin anything on you in Venice and, certainly, one ends up seeing the ancient Venetian predilection for masks as neither quaint nor sinister but merely desperate, and about as ineffectual as the act of a small child who covers both eyes with her hands and is convinced that no one can see her.

  A further variation on the theme of the privacy problem is the vexed question of what you do or do not hang out to dry. I, personally, draw the line at underwear and find myself prudishly protective of my own and my daughter’s nightwear – this, while carelessly pegging out rows of boys’ pyjamas. It occurs to me that the far from cronish, but undeniably beady-eyed, psychoanalyst who nearly scared me to death with her smoking and watching was, in fact, professionally intrigued by the psychodynamics of my laundry.

  Anyway, there is no doubt that when I first arrived in September, tens of pairs of neighbourly eyes lifted washing-line-wards to clock the arrival of a large family in the long-empty Borolini apartment. And who can help but be sneakingly admiring of whoever it is who hangs out absolutely every last scrap of bra or stringy knicker on the washing line that stretches clean across the calle leading to the much used swimming pool and sports centre?

  Now, I am putting out the washing on a soft, sunny autumn day. The unoiled pulley squeaks peevishly as I yank it along between each pegging. Our first-floor neighbour Francesco is down below in his corner of the Zambon garden (it is, it turns out, not exclusively the signora’s property). He is a big, good-natured man in a washed-out blue fisherman’s smock. This morning, he caught some small silver fish in the Lagoon and now, meticulously, he is cleaning his catch. I wish that my washing line wouldn’t shriek so much; I want to go quietly about my business as Francesco is going about his and with at least the illusion of solitude. But, of course, at the third or fourth screech of wire rope on metal pulley, he looks up and waves, and I – pleased after all to have a genial neighbour – smile back.

  The matter of washing line rights is a mystery to me. How far along one’s line is it acceptable to peg the clothes? The logical answer is that since the line is mine, I should be able to peg my underwear right across to the wall of the opposite palazzo. But there are other factors to take into consideration. By doing this, I rig my laundry out over the terrace of the signora opposite. Am I therefore breaking an unwritten rule of limits, of borders, of air space Venetian style?

  I decide to play safe; to heave up the flag to a horizontal half mast and, while not able to spare the signora the sight of my washing, I am at least not subjecting her to the greater indignity of taking her morning coffee, in the sunshine, with someone else’s boxer shorts flapping directly overhead.

  The business of space and of separation has grim shades in the Ghetto of Venice. Until the end of the Venetian Republic in 1797, it was forbidden for Jews to live outside the Ghetto, so they were forced to build not outwards but upwards, to accommodate their growing families. As a consequence, running along the side of this island within an island there is a canal where washing lines are extended palazzo to palazzo, far higher over the water than in the rest of the city.

  On these distant, high-strung wires, lanky trousers and diaphanous shirts swell and flap in the wind with a particular, far-away beauty, like balloons escaping into the blue. In the sometimes comically public world of this city, it seems that the public washing of one’s linen can achieve a kind of poetry if only because a section of the population, with ample reason to reach, metaphorically speaking, for masks or to acknowledge paranoia with pragmatism, were forced to go skywards and had to hang out their washing accordingly.

  Authentic

  WITHIN WEEKS of my arrival in the Calle del Vin, the landscape of the street has changed. First, the kindly, harassed, grey-haired woman who runs the stationery shop at the end of the street announces that she is closing down her business in order to move closer to her grandchildren, on the mainland.

  A month later, the crowded little shop, which is always cheerfully pack
ed with schoolchildren stocking up on the inordinate quantities of stationery devoured by the Italian school system, is empty.

  It is not long before a young Chinese man is to be seen at a lone desk, in the otherwise bare premises. A few Perspex photo frames have been placed in the window along with a sign explaining that he will frame photographs on order. His wife, with a baby on her hip, appears occasionally.

  Soon after that, an antiquated haberdasher’s shop halfway up the calle announces its intention to close with a small, handwritten card in the window. The place smells of old fabric and old cardboard and behind the counter there sits a quiet, smiling, plainly dressed girl whom I imagine to be the proprietor’s granddaughter. The dozens of little wooden drawers full of buttons and pins and threads must have been stocked years before her birth.

  Both of these events inspire in me a feeling of anxiety – panic even – a sense that no sooner have I arrived in Venice than the last, precious scraps of real Venetian-ness are disappearing before my very eyes. Thank God, I think, that the second haberdasher’s shop, at the other end of the calle, is still there. But even this cannot last and before another month has passed, brown paper has been taped all over the insides of those windows too, and one more fragile, indigenous light has been snuffed out.

  Filled with the gloomy conviction that I have, as it were, arrived a day late for the party, I begin to notice just how many shut-up premises there are in the city. And how many of those that are still open sell one of four commodities: pizza, ice cream, glass or masks. This is when I begin to ask myself what it is, precisely, that I want of this place?

  The fact is that I want – crave even – an ‘authentic’ Venice, where ‘real’ Venetians live ‘real’ lives. And what, after all, is that?

  In Venice, you often hear a statement prefaced with the words ‘… as a Venetian …’ or ‘… we Venetians …’ Monica wants to move house and tells me about an apartment she has been to see.

  ‘But you know,’ she shrugs, ‘It was no good. As a Venetian, when I went in, I didn’t feel as though I was in Venice.’

  What could this mean? Certainly something very different from what an American, for example, might have in mind when he says: ‘as an American …’

  The catch-all prefix connects the individual American to an abstract national ideal, but this is not what my Venetian friend is expressing. She is using her group identity to express a condition of belonging physically, even aesthetically, to her city. While an American might bear his American-ness before him wherever he goes in the world, like a passport, or a sheriff’s badge, a Venetian’s sense of shared identity is so much linked to the actual place that it evaporates the minute he or she leaves the collection of tiny islands that is home, and sets foot on terraferma.

  Announcing yourself as American could be seen as an act of assertion; it may even be felt as imperialism. But Venice’s imperial days are long gone, and to appeal to Venetian-ness is now the diametric opposite of imperialism: it is a proud and desperate attempt at survival by a people, whose island home is constantly, daily, invaded by millions of strangers with no real investment in the place.

  One evening, we join a group of parents and children from the elementary school for a start-of-year pizza in Campo Santa Margherita. The September night is balmy and we parents sit out at tables while our children swarm over the well at its centre, or play football. As we chat, Flavia, one of the mothers, suddenly breaks off in mid-sentence, stands up abruptly and strides across the campo. A young tourist is photographing some of our children as they clamber over the antique well and Flavia collars him furiously, telling him that he has no right to take pictures of children without their parents’ permission. He retreats, visibly confused.

  ‘We’ve become part of the sideshow,’ Flavia storms, as she sits back down at the table.

  Venetians are not going down without a fight. This small community is full of groups and committees promoting local events and activities. There are youth groups, community groups, dance companies, theatre companies, choirs, rowing clubs. There are associations working for residents to change policy on housing, transport, the environment.

  Events that come from outside are also, of course, part of the real life of the city. The rich influx of the arts is enthusiastically embraced by many of the people who live here; the Biennale exhibitions, visiting speakers, concerts, opera and theatre are all part of the lives of Venetians. But the difference between Venice and any other city, the reason why there is so much sensitivity and debate about what is and is not Venetian, lies in the uniquely critical problem of numbers. The citizens of Venice are so vastly outnumbered by the visitors to Venice that there is no balanced relationship between the city and the world at large. There is no equal exchange in which the city offers up her history and her beauty in return for the cultural riches brought in from the outside world. Not surprisingly, this leads to a deeply ambivalent, not to say confused, reaction to outsiders.

  As a foreign resident, I encounter this ambivalence daily. I am neither one thing nor the other in the eyes of many ‘true’ Venetians and I am as likely to find myself disgracefully overcharged in a bar and treated with casual disdain by the waiter as I am to be treated with charm and courtesy.

  I have been learning how to voga, or row in the traditional Venetian style, which is to say, standing up like a gondolier. One day, for the first time, I row up the Grand Canal with my friend Jane. She is steering at the back and I am at the front of her old lagoon craft, a Coda di Gamba, or prawn tail. It would be impossible to say how many times we are photographed in the twenty minutes it takes us to get from Ca’ d’Oro to the Salute. Those tens of people clamouring to record their Venetian experience can have no idea that their subjects are an English and Australian woman, navigating their boat, much, it must be said, to the general hilarity of the gondolieri, taxi boat drivers, delivery-boat men and other, assorted, ‘real’ Venetians, who call out to us good-humouredly as we make our zig-zaggy path between the palaces.

  So what is it we are after when we hunt for the ‘authentic’? The very notion of the real or genuine – the original – is problematic where Venice is concerned; how could there ever have been a truly aboriginal inhabitant in this particular Garden of Eden – an artificial construction on water, an historic meeting place between east and west, in a millennial flux of trade and war?

  ‘Ha!’ snorts Giovanni, the historian, ‘True Venetians? There are FIVE of them!’

  ‘Ah yes, dialect …’ Donatella thinks carefully for a moment. Then, eyes lighting up, hand poised. ‘Yes, I know! The best speaker of dialect is Alvise’s brother’s wife’s mother-in-law.’

  This is a city where even the locals have to peer hard to find the genuine article and then, the very last of their race, they count them on the fingers of one hand.

  And what, after all, is this authentic Venice?

  Walking along a back canal on a soft, sunny September morning, heading for a market no tourist will ever see unless they have got really, chronically lost, I pass two men sitting on the fondamenta on upturned oil cans.

  One of them is large, black-bearded and piratical; the other is small, with a typically wiry Venetian build. They are talking with animation in the thick, consonantal, sometimes nasal Venetian dialect that is so far from the pretty, lilting melodies of Italian. As they bellow amiably at each other, the pirate is sorting deftly through a stream of hundreds of very small crabs scuttling and slipping down a long, metal tray that he has balanced across his knees. The other man is untangling a matted bunch of fishing nets.

  How delighted I am to have come upon this scene! How sentimentally gratified! Hungry, as I am, for proof that I have not, after all, arrived in Venice too late to witness and perhaps even participate in its Real Life, these two men seem heaven sent: Real Venetians, doing Real Venetian Things.

  Not long after this, I am out with a friend, strolling peaceably among the pines at the outer edge of the city, while her dog pursues inv
isible sniffing trails through the mangy grass and stops intensely at the foot of trees or lamp posts.

  A little way from us, there is a short, fat old woman, with an equally short and fat dog, of uncertain provenance, which proceeds to poo abundantly in the middle of the path. The woman seems not to register the steaming heap her dog has deposited, and waddles on.

  ‘Signora!’ calls out my friend. ‘Your dog –’ she smiles and points. The old woman turns on us with a look of undiluted contempt, her pencilled orange eyebrows riding high into her sparse, candy-floss hairline, her scarlet lips pursed with pantomime dame disdain.

  ‘I,’ she says, ‘live here.’

  ‘So do I,’ replies my Scottish friend, ‘and I think it’s important that we clean up after our dogs – there are lots of children playing in the park.’

  ‘I,’ spits the old woman definitively, ‘have lived here for seventy-four years.’

  When my sons come home from school they take the vaporetto to ferry them across the Grand Canal. One afternoon, they get on a Number Three, the short-lived line introduced for residents only. They show the marinaio their season tickets to prove that they live in the city and then stand by the rail and chat together in English for the few minutes of the crossing. This is when an aged woman approaches the marinaio and hisses loudly:

  ‘Those three – they’re not Venetians!’

  The marinaio shrugs, ‘I’ve seen their passes.’

  But mere residency never satisfied the true racist.

  Everyone in Venice is, it seems, engaged in the debate about what is authentically Venetian and, given the numbers of visitors, it is hardly surprising that certain sections of the population are no longer able to distinguish between the valuable and the destructive when it comes to newcomers. Older Venetians mourn the passing of the Venice of their youth, where children played out in every calle and communities were strong. Yet those three half-Italian boys, rucksacks on their backs, travelling home from school, are not enough for the woman on the vaporetto because they were not born Venetians.