The Politics of Washing

by Polly Coles

  Although there is never an excuse for rudeness, here, in this beleaguered little community, there are numerous reasons for it. So I have to admit that if these people continue to look at me with disdain, they are, from a certain point of view, justified in doing so. After all, what am I in this city other than an undercover tourist? A parasitic sucker of the Venetian blood; playing, in their home, at belonging?

  But you could, of course, turn all of that around. Venice, though now a village, was, and should be again, a city. Cities are ample places – where change is the continuum; where new blood breeds new life. And all sorts of different foreigners come to cities: the welcome and unwelcome, the temporary, the permanent. The trouble is that when, as here, a siege is on, nothing really comes in or goes out.

  I never wanted to be an undercover tourist. Quite the opposite, but I cannot fully belong here because Venice does not allow it. The city closes itself up, turns its back on the world which, with careless sentimentality, ruthlessly exploits its charms. Like the victim of violence, Venice can no longer distinguish between those who will cherish and commit to it, and those who want only to exploit.

  ‘Do you know?’ I hear an American guide drawl at an incredulous tourist group, waving her hand magisterially along the length of the Giudecca. ‘Those aren’t hotels over there. They are real houses where real people live! And they have shops which only six people can get into at a time!’

  It’s time for the cut-price airlines, the cruise ships, the hotel chains, the tour operators to lay off the relentless onslaught. To leave this damaged city in peace for a while so that it can rebuild confidence, relearn to appreciate diversity and change, safe from the brutal monoflux of tourism. Where is the political vision that will encourage small businesses and artisans to return to the ancient workshops? That will provide affordable housing in Venice, for the people who are born, live and die here? Where are the politicians who see that the human race cannot go on in this way – consuming everything in sight – and that this unique city offers a visionary blueprint for small-scale living, close community, sustainability?

  ‘No, Venice is finished,’ says Gianfranco. He is the committed director of a municipal project of rare imagination and creativity – a rush of optimistic fresh air into the community. ‘Ten years ago, my building was full of residents. Now, my family is the only one living here and all the other apartments are holiday flats. When we come out on to the landing, there are different people there every day. Usually, they don’t even say good morning.’

  ‘I lived in San Stae until six years ago,’ Monica tells me. ‘My family had been there for generations, but then the landlord realized that the short-term tourist lets were going to make him much, much more money, so he chucked us out.’

  ‘No,’ says the friendly woman I am chatting to on the vaporetto, as we head out for the beach at the Lido, on a Saturday morning, with our children. “We don’t live here any more. Since we had our children, we can’t afford to stay. We’ve got a house in Mestre now. But you know, I never stop wanting to come home.’

  We can all imagine a Venice submerged by the waters of the Lagoon. This may yet happen, but what about fostering in the meantime a shorter-term vision of the city’s future, which, linked as it is to the sustainable and the local, might offer a model of change, not apocalypse.

  In this picture of the future, the houses that have been packed with short-let holiday flats fill up again with families and people who live their real, daily lives here. The shiny, skin-deep tourist outlets flogging masks and scarves are reclaimed by butchers and bakers and grocers who sell the stuff of life – meat, bread and milk. In this Venice of the future, the deserted streets and courtyards come alive again, bubbling with a new generation of kids who, on hot days, dive-bomb from bridges into the water.

  Growing Up in History

  AT A PARTY, I meet a Venetian woman who is about to leave the city and go with her young children to live on terraferma. She is rather elegant, with melancholy eyes.

  ‘What makes me sad,’ she tells me, ‘is that they will not grow up in all this beauty.’

  I have often noticed how much Venetians speak of the loveliness of their city. I suppose that the changing dimensions of the place – always charming, sometimes just plain wondrous – never stop being surprising, even after a lifetime.

  So much of Venice is on a small scale: the narrow byways and cramped apartments giving a feeling of containment, of the local and familiar. Then, every so often, as one moves around the city, this intimacy undergoes a dramatic transformation. It is as though you are paddling happily in a shallow stream, take one step more, and find yourself on the brink of a vast and vertiginously plunging waterfall: all spume and glitter and cascading, silken perspective. The fishing village turned Shangri-La.

  In the depths of our first winter, I take Freddie to see a doctor near Campo Santa Maria Formosa. We are unfamiliar with this part of the city and are trying to find our way through a maze of anonymous, dank-smelling calli with dark, water-streaked walls. The sky overhead is a flat, black strip.

  As with all routes navigated for the first time and at night, it feels long and tortuous. I hesitate at every junction or bridge, not sure whether I have completely lost my way. Freddie trots along beside me, holding my hand. Then, with no warning at all, instead of leaving one tight little calle and entering another, we find ourselves on the edge of space. A trick of the darkness, of street lights or perspective, shows a wide expanse of pale stone pavement sloping upwards to touch the walls of the Church of Santa Maria Formosa. No water, no grass, nobody: a stone edifice rising from a sea of stone, looming white, arctic, against the night sky. The small boy at my side lets out a sharp breath: ‘Ah!’ No words for this mysterious, sudden vision that has, in that instant, so radically altered his six-year-old’s perceptions, turning the physical world into something grand and ghostly.

  What does it feel like to live in this place if you are a child and still adrift in those years when what is inside your head and what is outside are often indistinguishable? My children hang from the back of the boat as it scuds through the choppy waters of the north Lagoon to the Lido. They lay their cheeks on the cold metal bar and shout into the eruptions of froth and the wind. They watch the Christmas decorations going up along the rio and see the strings of white lights reflected in the still, chill, black water. They hopscotch down the dirty calle when there has been no rain for days and then, all of a sudden, there is acqua alta and they are knee deep in salt water. When school is cut off by this high water, they make Lego boats and play with them in the street turned river. Their world has dissolved in the space of an hour, into something unimaginably different – a waterborne playground.

  When my eldest son Michael moves to the senior school in Venice, he enters the hushed halls of a seventeenth-century palace. The atmosphere is monastic: grey, calm, unadorned. It is a strangely empty place. Despite the size of the building, one teacher explains to me, the numbers of pupils are strictly limited by health and safety regulations. This, it occurs to me, is the unlikely spectacle of twenty-first-century bureaucracy coming to the rescue of the monkish, the collegiate and the classical.

  Michael’s lessons take place in high-ceilinged rooms that would once have been the richly furnished and decorated apartments of an aristocratic Venetian household. Over the door frame in his classroom there is a stucco oval relief. It is held up, like a large egg, by two crumple-bottomed cherubim; at its centre a Grecian hero, in his pony-tail helmet, sits ruminatively – more, it must be said, of a foppish eighteenth-century youth than a hellenic superman.

  The rooms are bare except for some plastic-topped tables and metal-legged, stackable chairs, circa 1972, which are lined up in front of a blackboard scrawled all over with columns of Latin verbs. The only other contemporary addition, besides the single electric light bulb hanging down on a very long cord from the very high ceiling, is a map of Greece. Whether the cultural reference points implicit in this map,
or these teetering piles of verbs or indeed the blackboard upon which they are written can actually be described as contemporary is debatable; let’s just say that they arrived in the room more recently.

  In this environment, adolescent Italians are swallowing industrial quantities of Latin and Greek every day. This is the Liceo Classico – the most academic of the state-financed senior schools – in which the curriculum is still strikingly similar to that of the ancient Greeks from whom it takes its name: philosophy, literature, languages, mathematics. The only subject that has all but lapsed since classical times is athletics, which may explain the dejected and slightly flabby appearance of the Grecian youth over the door and also the trapped and dazed look one often sees on the faces of the latter-day students.

  Here at the Classico the approach to learning is dry and mercilessly rigorous. Within months of his arrival, my son is tackling serious bits of Homer. Because he is struggling with his Greek I go to talk with his teacher. I mention, in the course of our discussion, how much he loves reading the Greek myths.

  ‘Ah, but you see,’ she explains gently and a little patronizingly, ‘the Classico isn’t about enjoying the myths. Michael’s work here is to learn the grammar of ancient languages.’

  So, in these still, elegant and understated spaces 300 teenagers sit for hours on end, tackling big concepts and boring, repetitive tasks. There must be days when they are overwhelmed with inertia in this environment which could not be more different from the small-scale, two-dimensional, constantly moving virtual world of the internet in which they are also growing up – both imaginatively and conceptually. The speed and colour and noise of the modern media must seem to them so terribly absent in these echoing, monochrome halls. When Michael gets home from school and flops down in front of the computer, his relief is practically audible. School can be horribly tedious at times and also very, very difficult. Little account is taken of individual expression or spontaneous creativity in the study programmes; you either like it, lump it, or get out.

  At the same time, I can see that the young people who survive these places (and many don’t last the course, peeling off to other, less heroic but more forgiving institutions) are astonishingly knowledgeable: they have great swathes of The Odyssey by heart, they can quote you Dante and translate Ovid without batting an eyelid. They are the last remaining standard bearers of a 2,500-year-old culture and there is, for me, both value and a kind of crazy nobility in that.

  And then there’s the question of boredom. I hang on to the conviction that we need the grey spaces in our days; that without the pauses, the daydreaming, the absences, the silence, there is nowhere for imagination and meditative thought to take root. If life is constantly played out on the same sensory plane, centimetres from a screen, if there are no changes of perspective, no refiguring of dimensions outside of a virtual arena, how can we ever be surprised into new or different ways of perceiving?

  But how can I communicate to my son, who was born in 1998, that this extraordinary, archaic system, still and only just lumbering on like a dinosaur across Italy, might be of interest or in any way valuable to him? Of course, when parents say just about anything to their adolescent children, it is, by definition, like word coming through from the Jurassic. This has always been the case, but it is clear to me, all the same, that at this particular point in history the gap between the generations is especially yawning.

  When I first went to university in 1981, I stood, like a medieval clerk, at high wooden desks in the library and thumbed through dogeared cards in a long wooden drawer, with copper half-moon handles, that were marked Ab – Acc, in order to track down the book I needed.

  In 1985, when I returned to postgraduate studies, the system had changed and I learned how to slide brittle squares of plastic into a mini projector in order to access the same information.

  By the time I came to spend a year in a third university, in 1989, I sat down in front of a computer screen. My early adult years were set against the backdrop of a revolution I didn’t know was happening. Now, I am, in the lingo, an ‘immigrant’; without going anywhere, I have become a foreigner in the country of the computer. Dorothy has not gone to Oz: Oz has come to Dorothy. And, by an accident of history, I will never entirely be part of the future.

  Poor Michael. Poor me. Surely this can only be a terrible handicap to a mother, when it comes to communicating with her fully naturalized-computerized children? Or perhaps not. Might it be both Michael’s and my good fortune that I have found myself free-falling down the rabbit hole of history, one minute straining to get through the wrong-sized door, the next reaching as high as I can, but not high enough, for the antidote on the glass table? I am in the privileged if uncomfortable position of being on the cusp of something. This means that I can look both backwards and forwards in time. Can I start by pointing out to Michael the sort of books he most enjoys reading, the computer games he loves to play? Age of Empire, Age of Mythology, the Roman Mysteries, cartoon versions of the Greek myths, of the Odyssey, the Iliad and the Percy Jackson series in which the son of Poseidon is to be found combating evil in present day North America.

  The popular culture my son is lapping up has, as its direct lineage, the civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean. Both the languages he speaks (English and Italian) are intricately laced through with the meanings, metaphors and rhythms of thought of those ‘dead’ cultures. The counterpoint of these and all the other many cultures that make Michael what he is, and who he will become, create a rich music.

  So what is this furious, dogged resistance of Michael’s to learning Latin and Greek? A lot of it is about growing up: viscerally resisting an education system that bulldozes across the landscapes of childhood, formalizing myth into history, play into drudgery. He is right to be suspicious: the juggernauts of outmoded traditions and institutions flatten many children. Five years at the Liceo Classico strikes me as a sort of peculiarly protracted initiation rite. If you survive its brutality, then you come out an adult, able to face hard, tedious work and, perhaps, to turn it into something better and bigger. I wonder whether it is preferable to undergo five years of boredom interlaced with panic and despair than to live through a week in the jungle, having your body lacerated by the juice of poisonous plants.

  In the meantime, Michael has his own take on the matter.

  ‘I know what you would say about those dead languages, Mum,’ he tells me some time into his relentless first term at the Liceo Classico. ‘You’d say that if aliens landed on earth, they would communicate with us in ancient Greek. But you’re wrong, because the nearest habitable planet is 500 light years from earth, so they will have been observing us in Tudor times, which means that what they’ll actually say when they arrive is: “Hail, sire!” ’

  But, having accepted the spirit if not the accuracy of Michael’s creative physics, this isn’t right either: travellers in sixteenth-century Europe would, in fact, have used Latin as their lingua franca; a ‘Hail, sire!’ was much less likely to have been understood than the Roman greeting ‘Salve!’

  All of which goes to prove, once again, that history and time have wonderful ways of slipping sideways, backwards and forwards, and that Michael, when he finally comes face to face with his Martian, might have to start thinking it through all over again.

  The historian Theodore Zeldin thinks that boredom has taken over from loneliness in the modern consciousness. I wish neither boredom nor loneliness on anyone, but mental repose and solitude are another matter. Turning back and trying to wade against the tide of history is a hopeless enterprise, just as being seduced by its great forward surge can also bring disaster, but I wonder if we could only harness as a metaphor and manifesto this ancient, improbable Venice, built such a long time ago, out of long dead necessities, to our future good?

  There must be room in our vision of the future for a world of changing perspectives – where an individual can move from the virtual to the actual, from history to the present day; where, emerging from t
he maze-like networks of the internet, a child can come out into the open and see, ahead, across space, that great white church and say – ‘Ah …’

  Technicals

  WHEN MY WASHING machine breaks down, Oscar arrives. He is a small, elderly man, in a perfectly laundered white shirt, trousers and jacket and shining shoes. He moves in a fragrant cloud of aftershave and brings with him his tecnico – the electrician – a young man with a wry smile, whose clothes, though neat, are workers’ clothes and, unlike Oscar’s, show some signs of use.

  The two men edge gingerly into our narrow strip of kitchen. Having examined the machine, the tecnico starts to explain to me why we will need to get a new one. Oscar breaks in.

  ‘Oh no. You need to speak with the landlord. The signora is renting the house. And anyway, she is not Venetian.’

  ‘All the same,’ I smile, ‘I still need a washing machine.’

  Oscar smiles brightly, uncomprehendingly, back.

  The new machine is to be delivered next week. The main landing stage closest to our house is on the Grand Canal, which is a ten-minute walk away. The machine will have to be unloaded from a boat and then trundled to Calle del Vin on a trolley. Once at number 3460 it must be transported up the four flights of stairs to our apartment. It will be a small miracle of muscle power and logistics if this large piece of white goods ever gets to our kitchen.

  When the street door bell rings, I buzz in the delivery men. Then, I open the door of the flat and wait. Many minutes later and still two floors down, I hear the sounds of extreme effort: grunting and hard breathing. Eventually, the gleaming new washing machine appears around the corner, on the landing below, in the arms of the largest human being I have ever seen. Helping him with the fancier footwork is a second man, the size of a leprechaun.

  When at last this unlikely couple manages to manoeuvre the washing machine through our front door and into the kitchen, the big man is a red mountain of fleshy, sweating effort. As they plumb it in, they chat away to me, but in such a dense Venetian dialect that I can only smile and nod and hazard a guess at what they might be saying.