The Politics of Washing

by Polly Coles

  Next, they drag the old machine into the narrow hall and leave it blocking the front door, in a growing pool of water that is dripping from the disconnected tube.

  ‘All right,’ they say. ‘Goodbye, Signora,’ and start off down the stairs.

  ‘But,’ I call at their disappearing backs, ‘what about this?’ – waving hopelessly at the abandoned machine – ‘you’re going to take it away, aren’t you?’

  The fat man turns around again and grins up at me from the landing below.

  ‘Oh no, Signora. It only says: “consignment” on our instructions. That’s your problem.’

  And he turns his great, drenched back on me and stumps heavily away, his miniature side-kick skittering close behind.

  I stand at the door for a second then sprint back into the flat to check the paperwork. There it is: ‘previous appliance to be removed’. I leap into action, squeeze past the jettisoned washing machine in the hall, and race, three steps at a time, down the stairs and out into the street. I fly along the calle, dodging tottery old ladies and buggies and dogs, breathless, desperate, until I have almost reached the quay on the Grand Canal and see – thank God – the massive hulk of the delivery man and his scampering partner about to get back on their boat.

  ‘Hey, hey!’ I gasp, waving the form wildly at them, ‘it says you have to take the old one away, too.’

  The fat man registers neither surprise, nor irritation.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he says, glancing at the paper. ‘All right then,’ and turns back towards my house. It was, it seems, at least worth a try.

  At the Friday market there is a stall run by farmers who bring their produce by boat from one of the market garden islands of the Venetian Lagoon. A heavily built man in his forties with a wide, mild, ingenuous face and a surprisingly high voice serves the customers and a smiling woman, perhaps his wife, works alongside him.

  Sitting a metre or so behind the stall is another man, in his sixties, and strikingly like the younger man at front of house. He straddles a small, three-legged stool and has, next to him, a stack of crates filled with artichokes and a plastic washing-up bowl of water. He takes an artichoke from a crate and, with his sharp knife, quickly and efficiently pares the dark, stringy leaves from the tender lower part of the flower. Then he drops the cream disc of flesh into the clean water and throws the leaves into a bin.

  Having spent years dutifully gnawing minuscule bits of artichoke flesh off woody leaves, in the French way, I relish this peremptory Italian rejection of all that nonsense, cutting to the quick and the best part of the plant.

  The farmers from the island sell a limited number of vegetables – only those, in fact, that grow in their proper season, a few kilometres away from the city. Occasionally, they have something extra: heaps of sour, walnut-sized fruit that are, the younger man explains, a sort of plum. These clearly do not come from any kind of cultivated stock; they look like little, wild crab apples, and must have been gleaned from trees around the fields.

  In the spring, they sell ungainly bunches of mimosa: masses of lovely, lollopy yellow heads, the stalks bound together with twigs. They will not sit up in any kind of container and shed their fluffy blooms within hours, but I buy them all the same.

  There are often several people waiting to buy from the farmers, whose produce has been harvested that morning and carried the shortest of distances to market. But even if there is a long queue, the procedure remains the same: the fluty-voiced son and his smiling wife serve, while the father sits, legs planted wide apart, peacefully paring artichokes.

  Once, soon after my arrival, I say to the son: ‘So, you have a farm on the island?’

  He looks at me, visibly surprised, and says: ‘We are the island.’

  Although we are standing and talking together in the market square, I see in that moment that this island farmer and I come from separate universes.

  One day, when I am teaching English to a class of thirteen-year-olds at a local school, I ask them what their ambitions are. One boy, with a cocky smile, a slick of black hair and a satiny bomber jacket says:

  ‘I want to be a taxi driver.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I like the water.’

  It takes me, bred in London as I was, some moments to understand what on earth he could mean.

  Thursday 15 December

  IN THE MORNING, I need to do some shopping. It is cold outside and I rug up well in coat, hat, gloves and wellies and set off along the calle, pulling my pink flowery shopping trolley behind me.

  The city is grey and tired. It registers nothing of the impending festivities: Christmas is always surprisingly absent from the streets of Venice. Walking along the fondamenta towards the boat stop, I slush through several inches of water and more is slopping up from the canal and running across the paving stones, like waves fanning out over the sand at the beach. Everyone in the calle is wading along very slowly, taking care not to splash water over the top of their boots. The acqua alta is high but not excessive and there is a strangely peaceful, slow motion feeling to it all; people are friendly and talkative, advising one another on the best routes to take from one place to another. It reminds me of those rare days in England when, after a heavy snowfall, there is the same good-humoured complicity of people united in the face of extreme weather. I stand and hesitate at a certain point, wondering which tack to take.

  ‘If you come this way, Signora,’ a young man says courteously, pointing diagonally across the flooding fondamenta, ‘you’ll keep on the high section of the pavement.’

  I thank him and wade cautiously across.

  In this lull before Christmas the city is as empty as it can be of tourists. The few remaining visitors are bundled up in warm clothes like everybody else and no more disposed to linger in the cold than the locals. The relief of these emptier streets is surprisingly intense. It feels good that we are all here for daily life and spared the elaborate weavings in and out between meandering holidaymakers. I need to go to the bookshop, but have not taken into account that it is at a very low point in the city which is always quick to flood. A steel barrier has been slotted into place on the lower part of the shop’s doorway. These are used all over the city on ground floor premises, but it is clear that the proprietor was not sufficiently ahead of the game today because his shop is already full of water. I gather up my coat, shoulder my trolley, and high step over the barrier.

  The scene I find inside reminds me of a famous photograph of Holland Park Library in London, taken immediately after the Blitz. In the ruined, rubbly shell of the bombed-out building, there are respectably homburg-ed and over-coated gentlemen browsing among the miraculously still-standing bookshelves. Here, in this Venetian shop, there is a gentler echo of that scene of devastation: in an atmosphere of quiet concentration, customers stand reading books or scanning the spines, in a good 30 centimetres of water. The bookshop has turned paddling pool, but business, surreally, serenely, carries on.

  Back on the fondamenta, I wait for a boat to take me to the Co op. The cold is vicious in the sheltering imbarcadero. I am only going one stop, so once on the vaporetto, I stand outside on the open deck, my scarf wrapped around half of my face, against the biting cross-wind. The boat tips and roils as counter-currents buffet her bows. She grinds to a standstill on the other side of the canal and I pull my trolley off and wade along to the shops.

  Inside the Co op it feels beautifully warm and bright. It is full of people, as if they can’t quite bear to leave and brave the elements again and are lingering extra long among the fruit and veg. There is a holiday atmosphere in the queue to the checkout. A fat, elderly woman chats to me in dialect as we stand there. The low season and my full-to-bursting trolley make me a local. I smile and nod, as I always do when people talk to me in dialect. Since I usually manage to understand about half of what they’re saying it feels like the safest course. It surprises me how much human interaction requires no more reply than a nod and a smile of agreement.

&nbs
p; Back outside again, the waters have receded. On the stone paving of the fondamenta, there are streaks of seaweed jettisoned by the tide. Because, as usual, I have bought a lot, I drag my purchases home, with considerable effort, against the icy wind, along mud-slimed pavements. That is my morning in Venice, in December.

  After lunch, I have business in Padua. A mere twenty minutes away in the car, Padua represents an hour and a half’s travel for me today. First, there is the thirty-minute walk to the station through heavily gusting wind and pelting rain. For as long as I am in the narrow, high-walled calles I am reasonably protected from the elements, but as I come out into a wider wind-tunnelling campo my umbrella flips dramatically inside out and I am soaked by squalls of wind and rain.

  Because it is a quarter of the price of the express train, I get a ticket for the more down-at-heel and graffitied regionale that stops at every single station. The train is full but warm, and I am settling down comfortably with my book for the forty-minute journey when I hear a suddenly raised voice at the other end of the carriage. A man is speaking; he has a strong Neapolitan accent and the Neapolitans’ eloquent courtesy:

  ‘Ladies and gentleman! Forgive this shameful request! I am on the train, but I have no ticket. I must get back to Naples, but they will throw me off at Padua. Please! A euro from fifteen of you and I will have enough to get home! Forgive me, I am ashamed to ask this! Please help, I beg you!’

  Several people begin to rummage in their purses and the man steams up and down the carriage, garnering the money, thanking them in his booming, urgent voice. He has a battered, smudged face; a white bandage over one eye, jeans, dirty trainers.

  ‘Thank you, Signora, you’re very kind! Thank you, Signore! I thank you!’

  The carriage is full of neatly dressed, subdued northerners. I am struck by how much mute generosity is shown to this needy and disturbed man. Then I hear another voice, further along the carriage:

  ‘Ha, yes. Go on. You go back to Naples! The better for us. Then stay down there. We don’t want you southerners here, understand?’

  The speaker is a bullish-looking man in his sixties. He has on a smooth fedora and a dark-green jacket. The Neapolitan curses him harshly and thrusts past and out of the carriage.

  An hour and a further bus ride later I arrive at my destination, a school in Padua, where I am going to do some English support teaching. I am early and sit down on the chair outside the secretary’s office to wait for the head teacher. I am cold, wet and rather weary. The secretary comes out:

  ‘Oh no, Signora. You must wait in the hall. You can’t sit here.’

  In the hall, there are no seats, so I stand, with my dripping umbrella at my feet. I can only assume that the apparently meaningless rules and regulations that criss-cross Italian public life give some meaning, some structure to someone, a sort of bureaucratic weft and warp. But I only wanted to sit down on that unoccupied chair.

  After the midwinter darkness has fallen, I leave the school and head for the bus stop. There is already someone standing there, huddled under the bus shelter, the rain driving through the beam of the streetlight above her head. She is a young English woman who teaches at the school. When the bus arrives, we get in together and sit talking. She is from Hull, a tall, stout girl with a kindly, round face, long bleached hair and thick black-framed spectacles. She is wearing a fluffy white coat and over-sized Peruvian gloves, and she keeps pushing her spectacles back up her nose. She could not look less Italian and, to me, there is something comforting about her broad Yorkshire accent, her lack of vanity. In the warm, almost empty bus with its steamed-up windows we talk about England.

  ‘I am the first person in my family to go to university. When I go home, people can get a bit sniffy. You know, I didn’t have a baby by the time I was eighteen, like the other girls in my class. They say: “You’re a bit posh, aren’t you? Think you’re better than us?”’

  I don’t know this girl from Adam; we come from very different parts of England and of English society, but she is none the less familiar to me and somehow, strangely, more real – though more real than what, I cannot say.

  It is a relief to be talking in English in a public place, but outside Venice; to be foreign, but not one of the invading army. The few other people sitting nearby look up and register that we are not speaking their language, but without judgement. Only at moments like this, when I am away from Venice, do I realize how insidiously unhealthy it can be, living as an unwanted foreigner in a community that is under siege from the rest of the world.

  Wind-battered, I get home after eight to find Lily in a state of hysteria, because she has just eaten some pasta made by Michael which contained a large chip of china. Freddie, oblivious to this drama, is busy emptying the cupboards optimistically in search of a top hat.

  I soothe Lily, fob Freddie off with a rogue tweed cap, and have a man-to-man chat with Roland about making more of an effort at school. I then spend twenty minutes trying to explain to Michael, who is desperately studying for a history test, why knowing the difference between the fine details of romanesque and gothic architecture should even remotely matter to a thirteen-year-old boy.

  Once they are all in bed, I leave the house for the last appointment of the day. The dark calle is still bitterly cold, but at least the rain has stopped and the high water has sunk back down. As I walk along the water front of the Zattere, a full moon brilliantly illuminates the white face of the church of the Redentore, across on the Giudecca. The wide Canal is like a dark glass filled to the brim. As I stroll through the empty streets I feel, for the first time today, calm. It is after ten and I am exhausted, but it is good to be out in the silent, bewintered city.

  I arrive at my destination – the usual, anonymous door in a high wall. I ring the bell and the door snaps open. I pass through and find (Alice again) that I am in a garden. I follow a brick path through bare winter bushes and come to an open door spilling light. I climb the flight of shallow marble steps.

  The meeting of the reading group is taking place in a big room where two curving sofas make an oval under an extravagantly sculpted gilt chandelier. Books are artfully heaped on tables and alongside the sofas. On one wall, there hangs an antique tapestry depicting a strangely unpopulated Arcadian landscape: there are trees and rivers and hills and fountains, but not a single living creature in sight. My friends, the members of the group, are sitting around, drinking wine in the candlelight. They are listening to a young woman who is reading aloud.

  A little creakily, after so much trudging and huddling and battling against the elements, I sit down cross-legged on the floor, at the edge of the circle. I do not listen to a word the reader is saying, but the warm, subtle, open spaces around me, the intimacy of the group and its quiet unhurriedness, feel like heaven and it occurs to me that, at the end of it all, we might climb into the tapestry, like the children of Hamelin following the Pied Piper back into the hillside, and never come out again.

  Iconic

  IT IS NINE o’clock at night, the bells are tolling and we are wading to church. Piazza San Marco is a shallow, luminescent lake across which we must walk in order to reach the Basilica. Around all four sides of the great rectangular space lights shine and are reflected in the rising water. It is Christmas Eve and we are going to Midnight Mass which has, this year, been brought forward two hours because by midnight the waters will be impassable.

  So far, so good: we are well within the territory of Venetian cliché: bells, lights, water and architectural wonders.

  Inside the Basilica, the key notes are more prosaic: packed along pews, in the side aisles and leaning around the walls are hundreds of people wearing wellington boots. Rigged up to the marble pillars that line the nave are large flat screens relaying a close-up view of the priest and prelates conducting the Mass. Whether it’s the boots or the screens, the atmosphere is neither hushed nor holy. A light steam rises from the hundreds of damp bodies.

  The service is being delivered in a strange mishmash o
f languages – Italian, Latin, French, German and English – and as it winds its way along, between chanting and intoning and song, much of the congregation is busy taking clandestine or not so clandestine photographs of the glorious mosaic ceilings. Different sensibilities are revealed here, but they are united in their need to immortalize the Immortal.

  A little way into the Mass, a cameraman appears and walks up the central aisle. He is a strange, amphibious creature who seems just to have emerged from some post-apocalyptic swamp. He is wearing brown thigh-high waders, a dark woolly hat and a damp, sludge-green rain-jacket. He balances his bulky television camera on one shoulder and on his back he carries a rucksack, out of which protrudes a black umbrella. He wanders up and down the church, filming the people watching the film of the priests who are droning on, joylessly, up at the front.

  The whole occasion has an entirely random feeling to it; there is a general air of distraction, what with the weather and the cameras and the fidgeting, shuffling congregation. What is most alive here, it strikes me, is the building itself: a dim, breathing presence that surrounds us like a sleeping beast, into whose leviathan belly we have entered and found caverns encrusted with blood and minerals.

  The mosaics are all lit up tonight and the millions of gold tessellations glitter and merge, like the constellations of the Milky Way, so heaving with stars that no single point is visible any more, except in the brief glint of an individual star. Vaulted ceilings link one to the other and recede into shadowy distances of chapel and aisle. Ancient saints raise their flat hands in benediction. At the high altar the Pala d’Oro, the bejewelled treasure of San Marco, has been turned to face the body of the church. From where I sit at the back, it looks like a vast piece of gold bullion and is brutishly dazzling.