The Politics of Washing

by Polly Coles

  ‘To tell you the truth: it’s no good.’

  And so it unfolds: our children, Gasparini regrets to have to inform us, are a bunch of bright, badly behaved ne’er-do-wells. They fail to do their homework and are simply not sufficiently respectful of their teachers.

  ‘Yes,’ chips in the maths teacher, Professoressa Zapputti, ‘and do you know what they’ve started doing in my lessons?’ She pauses theatrically; she scans her audience. ‘They imitate me! They repeat everything I say! It’s just no good.’

  She frowns and everybody – parents and teachers – nod gravely.

  It strikes me that in Britain, the day a teacher speaks publicly in this way, is Judgement Day: that terrible moment when she has finally given up. The failed pedagogue who, after years of struggle, can take no more, has cracked under the pressure and will now, wiping the tears from her eye, slink from the room and into early retirement, a broken woman.

  Is this Professoressa Zapputti? Oh no. Zapputti is a short, square, ageing and glamorous blonde, with a flirtatious smile and robust upper arms. Michael quakes at the mere mention of her. Zapputti by name, I obscurely, onomatopoeically think, is ZAPPUTTI! by nature: a kind of mathematical Superwoman to Gasparini’s Literary Superman. The cultural assumptions behind her words are, once again, the complete opposite of those one would find in Britain. It is a logic untarnished by guilt or by any undue sense of personal responsibility; it is utterly unclouded by the possibility that she herself might be at fault. To Zapputti and, it seems, to all the other people assembled here, the situation is clear: the children of 3E are not behaving acceptably and that is their fault. The mood is one of solidarity: nobody is blaming anybody else. These kids are forces of nature and we, their civilized elders and betters, must work together to tame them.

  Now, one of the fathers speaks up.

  ‘Professore Gasparini,’ he begins pleasantly, ‘I am a little confused. Clearly the children have made a mistake, but when you say that only two out of eighteen did their geography homework last week, I wonder if, perhaps, there was some kind of misunderstanding – a problem of communication. On the part of the kids, obviously.’

  Yes, yes, Gasparini nods sagely, they must have failed to understand. The father sits back in his chair, apparently satisfied. The matter does not appear to me to have advanced at all. I must have missed something.

  So far, so united. Then, a mother raises her hand to speak; she is small, plump and has a lot of bouncy brown hair.

  ‘And French?’ she asks emphatically.

  There is a palpable change in the atmosphere: a drawing in of breath, a collective pursing of the lips. The French teacher, Professoressa Maestri, is not present, but far from this restraining anyone from discussing her, it seems to give them licence. The Professoressa has been absent so much, the plump mother goes on, that the children are learning no French at all. What is to be done about this?

  While she delivers this indignant speech, the teachers nod and smile sympathetically. Then Gasparini speaks:

  ‘Well, Signora, obviously as her colleagues, we are not in a position to discuss the situation. You would need to speak with the headmaster.’

  He smiles benignly and is clearly in agreement with everything the woman has been saying. This is no closing of ranks, no serious refusal to comment on the matter. Quite the reverse. I think of poor Maestri – a pretty, hectically over-made-up woman who, it is said, is struggling with a long journey to work from the mainland, a young child and her obvious inability to teach high-spirited thirteen-year-olds. But the plump mother has not finished yet.

  ‘And you, Signora,’ she continues, turning now to a teaching assistant sitting on the outer flank of the High Table. ‘From your more detached position – would you say the children are under control in the French lessons?’

  The elderly, impeccably coiffed assistant smirks in this unexpected limelight.

  ‘Quite honestly, no,’ she says happily and, judging by the general nodding and smiling, it seems that everyone is satisfied with this reply.

  The absent Maestri, with her wide, nervous blue eyes, her harum scarum mascara and too-red lipstick, is unaware, for now, of the knife twisting in her back, and I see that respect and professional solidarity go only so far here. The weak are shown no mercy.

  Now, the meeting is ending. People are standing up and beginning to leave and one of the mothers approaches Zapputti.

  ‘Professoressa,’ I hear her say deferentially. ‘I know my Giovanni was one of those behaving rudely and I would like to apologize for his behaviour.’

  Zapputti accepts the apology graciously, regally even. A particular vision of the world remains intact: children are to be duly respectful to adults. We, their parents and teachers, must ensure that they conform to our rules and expectations and that they grow up acknowledging the authority of their elders and betters.

  Here, in this dreary Venetian school room, with nothing on the yellowing walls except one large, lopsided map of the world; where the work is often difficult and dry and unimaginative, there is still this consensus between parents, teachers and children. The kids muck around; the teachers complain; the parents rant and apologize. It is a ramshackle business, as human relations and human solutions generally are, but everyone is playing the same game by the same rules. In that sense, at least, it works.

  Salute!

  THE PEOPLE THRONGING good-naturedly through the streets are almost all locals. Any tourists are incidental to this most Venetian of holidays and, just for a change, barely intrude. A pontoon bridge has been set up across the Grand Canal and thousands of people are moving slowly over it, all day long, passing from San Marco to Dorsoduro in the annual pilgrimage to the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute, where they will give thanks to God for the end of the plague that devastated the city in 1630.

  In good Venetian style, the shocked gratitude of the survivors was expressed architecturally, in the construction of Longhena’s church with its great snail coils of masonry and ballooning domes. This is our destination on a chill, grey November afternoon nearly 400 years later.

  As I shuffle forward with the crowd, I look over the edge of the bridge and see below a slight, white egret, with brilliant green feet, standing on one of the bridge’s supports. The bird is utterly still; the crowd clatters overhead. We come off the votive bridge and pack into a narrow calle. Moving on, under an archway, there is a dense press of bodies and the air is cold, damp and steaming. Even in this dark tunnel between buildings, the tall man next to me goes on smoking. We emerge into the paved space in front of the church that widens out before us like a river delta into which the streams of people are pouring. This area gives on to the Grand Canal and is lined with stalls selling candles to the pilgrims. The candles are heaped up extravagantly – some are a metre high and two handspans round. I buy four of a more modest size with patchy little transfers of the Madonna stuck on the wax, one for each of my children. Against the odds and a certain amount of vociferous public opinion, Freddie and Roland try to fence with their candles as we carry on, at the crowd’s shuffling pace, up the broad steps of the church.

  Inside, the Basilica is like a vast, fat bud opening from its circular centre into the petals of chapels. To the right as we enter, the crowd is gathered ten deep around an iron grid on legs. It is the size and shape of a large table and dozens of candles have been wedged into the many holes; they make gross stalagmites of dripping wax and spindly, dwindling outcrops. The whole glowing white mass veers to one side and seems to be on the brink of collapse. Two girls in efficient brown overalls and heavy duty gloves are quickly removing half-burnt candles, snuffing them out and piling them on one side. Then, they take the fresh candles held out to them by the people pressing up to the barrier, light them, and stick them into whatever space they can find in the crude candelabra.

  The Festival of the Salute is part of real life in this city, an integral element in the cycle of every year. Unlike the hollow and showy Carnival – reinvent
ed for the tourists and universally detested by Venetians – this is not an exotic spectacle. Well-polished and pragmatic locals in their uniformly dull-coloured padded jackets, sensible shoes, hats, gloves and scarves have a plain, provincial look which is almost comically counter-balanced by their lavish Basilica with its stone angels and saints, its extravagant spirals and domes. There is a dogged normality in the way these people gossip in clusters, while the great space of the church around them fills with perfumed drifts of incense, and at the High Altar the priestly celebrants follow their ritual course, beneath the gaze of the Black Madonna, the gold-encrusted, twelfth-century Byzantine icon turned, somehow, wallpaper.

  As we edge forward to hand over our candles, I see how this ritual has, in certain ways, barely changed over centuries. Here are the same keen-faced, beady-eyed, wiry-framed Venetians; the handsomely cassocked priests and their antique chants; the whine and thud of dialect. But then, of course, it is also dramatically different: no more rankly stinking bodies or breath; strong white teeth, smooth hands and bright blond hair are everywhere. The vigorous and smart fifty-and sixty-year-olds milling around here would once have been the aged, the toothless and the bent. Now, nobody is hump-backed, no one limps or lisps as a result of polio, bad hips or cleft lips. And the dialect spoken is mostly diluted by the pretty melodies of modern Italian to mere accent, proverb and fragments of the original Venetian.

  But despite these obvious differences, this short, local pilgrimage of thanks is not an empty re-enactment of a long dead history, wiped in all but name from the communal memory. Nearly four hundred years ago, in these Venetian streets, these houses, these squares, every second person you knew was dead or horribly dying. The person next to you. Your intimate, busy, handsome, prosperous city had been transformed, overnight, into a hell hole, a charnel house, a place where malign and unstoppable forces were battling for the souls of your children, your friends – for your very own soul.

  On the elegant marble benches in the hall of our building, where we rest our shopping bags or stop to pick up a parcel left there by the postman, the pall bearer of 1630 had slumped for a few minutes’ rest before grunting to his companions that they must once again shoulder up the sorry corpse they had somehow managed to manouevre down the stairs and take it on its way to disposal. Stinking, buboed bodies had piled up in the calle where I now drop a carrier bag of rubbish in the mornings, in time for the arrival of the 8.30 a.m. refuse boat.

  In those terrible days of 1630, the skin of your warm child suppurated in front of your eyes, rotting before she was even dead. Pain and disfigurement, decay and loss were smeared on the walls of these narrow streets, as though some monstrous and vengeful hand had dropped a titan’s boulder in the stillness of the Lagoon and a tidal wave of devastation had ringed out from it.

  And, of course, over years, over generations, the circles widened and thinned until the memory of all that horror was no longer concrete, but became the echo of memories. What was, in 1630, an unbearable grief had transformed, by 1655, to buried sadness; by 1700 it had worn down to bitterness, which modified, slowly, across the ensuing decades, into a certain grumpiness of character. This in turn transmuted over subsequent generations into a marked stubbornness which was the merest shadow of the resignation arising from past grief. This, in a great, great, great grandson of a plague survivor, had become a certain dourness of look or abruptness of manner. All of these might be qualities, reactions, behaviours that had their roots in that original, terrible cataclysm.

  How much of what any of us are has drifted down in this way from the past, like sticks caught up in black-matted flotsam, then dislodged again, back into the current? Running down the stairs from their apartments, to get to school or work, the inhabitants of Venice do not think of the stumbling, sweating seventeenth-century pall bearers, hulking a sad cargo down these same steps, between these same walls. But the city is still their place, as it was their ancestors’, and in celebration of that, as much as anything else, they continue to file up the steps of the Salute, with candles in their hands.

  Here on this dank November afternoon I am witness to a crumpling up of time. By walking in the footsteps of their forebears, by joining the flow with them and continuing to give thanks for delivery from something that terribly mattered, the Venetians are keeping in their lives ampler realities than that of the lone individual wading through the short, muddied span of one life.

  Virginia Woolf describes how, when reading Chaucer, ‘we are floated up to him insensibly on the current of our ancestors’ lives’. Moving through the ancient streets of Venice, adapting their contemporary life to the spaces and rituals of past generations, modern Venetians are floated up to their ancestors on the currents of art, habit and endeavour.

  In the Salute, named for health and ill health, the lottery of mortality and the hope of eternal redemption are enshrined in a divinely inspiring space. Standing among ordinary Venetians, in an extraordinary building, on an ordinary winter’s day, giving ritual thanks for a temporary deliverance from sickness and death is, perhaps, as close to stepping out of linear time as I will ever get.

  Only by participating in the past – its griefs and rhythms – by looking death and suffering in the face and every so often acknowledging it as ours, do we have a hope in hell of survival. Do we have a hope of remembering that, in other parts of our planet, now, in this minute, whole cities are in the stranglehold of illness, of hunger; are being besieged by crazed armies; are living a present that is, thank God, for now, our past and holiday memory.

  PART 5: December

  Undercover Tourist

  SNOW AND HIGH water come together on the same Saturday in December – one dropping silently from the sky, the other gurgling up from the drains. I have a parcel to fetch from the post office at the Rialto, and at 9 o’clock I set off. The Accademia bridge is deserted as I drag my trolley behind me, up the snow-muffled steps. A bitter wind blows along the Grand Canal from the Adriatic.

  Once on the other side of the bridge, I meet an American friend, steadfastly crunching across Campo Santo Stefano in wellies and a sheepskin hat with ear flaps, determined to open her gallery on time. A little further on, I come to one of the lowest points of the city and find the calle flooded with rank-smelling, icy water surging around my ankles. I gather the skirts of my overcoat in both hands and wade, very gingerly, on.

  After the bitter, monochrome of the streets, the sorting office spills yellow light and warmth out of the door. It is full of postmen in sweaters and a holiday mood, who have been reprieved from their long morning trudge from door to door by the extreme weather conditions. These are just about the only Venetians I encounter during the whole morning. Who, after all, in their right mind, would set foot outside the house in such weather? The entire round trip (an easy forty-minute walk, under normal conditions) takes me two hours of wading, half slipping and half freezing.

  At the vaporetto stop, temporary walkways have been laid out for the high water. Some Japanese tourists are edging along them, looking for the right boat stop, and for all the world as if they might be blown away at any moment by the vicious north wind. They are giggling nervously and, being seriously under-dressed, are blue in the face. I can only think that they are utterly perplexed: what kind of a way is this to conduct one’s life, in a wealthy country, in the twenty-first century?

  At the boat stop, I hear someone calling my name. It is Katerina and her niece, two stalwart Moldavian cleaners for whom I suppose this is a picnic in comparison with their own eastern winter. They are pink-cheeked and good-humoured; their black hair is obscured by brightly printed shawls, and each looks as though she might have stepped out of another, larger version of herself, in a stack of Russian dolls.

  Almost everyone I meet on the street today is a foreigner. Whether visitor or immigrant, we would reveal our true alien colours to any Venetian through the mere fact of being out at all. It is at times like this that I know with conviction that my fragile sense of belong
ing here is an illusion to which I cling, but which cannot outlast my time in the city. Despite not having lived in London for sixteen years, I can still be a Londoner. When I step out of Paddington Station, I am part of the real life in those streets and even if I don’t know exactly how to buy a ticket for the bus any more, I am still at home, albeit a dithery old-timer. In Venice – a village under siege from foreigners – you can win temporary acceptance by living daily life here, but when you leave, you are, once again, forever a tourist.

  Which is why, even as a resident, I face the reality and the risk of being an alien every single time I leave my house. On a good day, I do not have to think about it. On a good day, I scuttle along my little rat run of friendly faces: the parents at the school gate and the teachers; the sweet-faced woman from Sant’Erasmo on the market stall; the loquacious cake shop owner with her wonderful pastries; the helpful man in the health store; the kindly, melancholy ice cream lady; the laddishly jolly tennis coach, the music teachers, the neighbours and friends – and I feel happy, welcomed and accepted. But on other days, if I should happen to diverge from this circuit of known faces who, far more importantly, know me, I might well be stung – both financially and socially – by any number of hostile locals.

  If I go into the wrong bar and ask, in my foreign accent, for a coffee, I may automatically pay twice what the man next to me is paying with his singsong of a Venetian accent. Not only do I pay twice the money, but I pay also for being a stranger, with the off-hand, unsmiling manner of the waitress, the palpable contempt of the shopkeeper. I find myself, pathetically, wanting to plead with them, waving my credentials in their faces:

  ‘But my kids are at school here, you know! I live just down the street, all year round! Treat me kindly – please … Allow me to belong …’