by Polly Coles
Holidays are delightful things, but they are only ever brief exeats from the real business of living. Relationships, creative endeavour, community enterprises do not happen on daytrips. And if Venice becomes nothing more than one giant daytrip destination it will perish – will, well and truly, have become that exquisite, empty backdrop over which we coo and gush, on to which we project our fantasies and desires. People walk the streets, marvel at the buildings and go. The only thing they leave behind is their cash. Even the most lavishly appreciative, the most sensitively self-effacing tourist can give only money back to Venice.
Quick fixes do not bear lasting fruit in any area of human activity. The indiscriminate handing out of resources is only ever of dubious benefit in the long run. A food parcel does not put down roots and bear next year’s harvest. Where there is no possibility of a relationship between giver and receiver, the recipient fast becomes dependent on a one-way flow of gifts. The complex internal structures of a community soon atrophy, because all its attention is directed outwards, to the external sources upon which it has become dependent. In a community where all that counts is personal gain from a single source of income, individuals stop investing in a multifaceted and complex society; they stop diversifying into relationships or activities and become single-mindedly focused on just one aspect of life: the getting and using of a sole commodity.
Human society is characterized by culture. Culture is the product of multiple endeavours and enterprises. Dependence removes the possibility of genuine dialogue and mutual benefit, and you are left with a group of people, heads upturned, beaks agape, gasping for the next worm, like a row of squawking fledglings in a nest.
In Venice, the wealthy hoteliers, the purveyors of knick-knacks, the dodgy politicians, the restaurateurs, the taxi boat drivers who winter in the Caribbean on the takings of the summer season, might be surprised at being compared with the starving masses or a nestful of clamouring hatchlings, but there is a parallel to be drawn here and it is my friend Pisana, a secondary school teacher, who first brings it to my attention.
We are talking about the sad straits in which much of Venice finds itself, about the death of its communities, the paucity of municipal support for enterprises other than tourism, the overwhelming influence of money-grabbing business interests and individuals who know that pimping the Whore Venice to the ever greater and grosser incursions of tourists is their quickest way to a fortune.
‘But surely,’ I say, ‘there’s another scenario: a future in which the city can become a place of artistic and artisanal excellence again and a cultural centre where people are able to live on a small, environmentally sustainable and creative scale?’
She shrugs. ‘You know,’ she says sadly, ‘when I ask the kids in my class what they want to do when they leave school, they all say the same thing: we want to own a hotel or run a restaurant.’
Could it be that just as the son of the drought-stricken African farmer no longer needs to remember the lore of the land – the rhythms of preparation and planting and harvesting – because a sack of grain will always – probably – arrive from somewhere else, these well-heeled Venetian children, growing up in a mono-economy, have lost sight of what is most valuable and ultimately productive? Belonging to a community that is rich and yielding, that takes them forward into new adventures, rather than round and round on the merry-go-round of acquisition and consumption? If children have no imagination, how can they imagine the future or the past? And why should they give a damn about it? That is when Venice – not the stones, but the community – is no longer merely in peril, but extinct.
Meanwhile, like parents looking abstractedly on as the children devour the party tea and lay waste to the house, the Venetians sometimes seem to me perversely uninterested in the delights that surround them. In those early months after my arrival, I at first think that what most distinguishes me from the natives is not my dress or my body language, but the fact that I cannot resist, as I step over a bridge, the impulse to glance sideways and drink in a shaft of creamy sunlight across dull-green water, the quirky angle of a corner, a slash of crumbling red stone seen through pink stucco.
But I am wrong. Over time, I am touched to see, as the vaporetto Number Three floats by, that there are often people sitting in the outside seats at the back of the boat. On the Numbers One and Two, no resident of the city would bother to do anything other than head straight into the cabin, find a place and get to their destination, leaving the outside seats and the view for the eager, greedy, jostling visitors. But on the Number Three, where layers upon layers of tourists have been miraculously peeled away, you can see Venetians themselves leaning on the bar, staring dreamily, curiously, appreciatively, at the wonders of their city; or sunning themselves at the back, reading a book and quietly relishing their home, as they float along the Grand Canal to work.
RIP: Less than one year after the triumphant inauguration of the Number Three (all aboard the press! The flashing cameras! The politicians!), I return to Venice after a holiday and find that the line is no longer for the exclusive use of residents; it is, indeed, soon to be cut altogether. It is not economically viable. Perhaps the authorities knew this would happen, but thought they could curry a few more votes by throwing a temporary sop to the exhausted Venetians.
Baba Yaga
‘O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous’
(King Lear, 2.4. 291–305)
‘Bury me standing, I’ve spent all my life on my knees’
(Gypsy saying)
ON ONE OF the bridges that I cross several times a day as I walk to school and back with my children, an old gypsy woman begs for money. I say ‘old’, though I struggle to pinpoint her actual age. Nothing about her appearance or her behaviour gives me a clue as to who or what she really is.
For a start, the woman is dressed in the costume of fairy tale. She wears a dark headscarf knotted under her chin and a shapeless dress in some equally drab material. An apron is tied around her waist, and draped over her shoulders is a triangular fringed shawl. None of her clothing seems to have been touched by industrial dye: the rough cloth might have been dipped in berry juice, or boiled nettles or onion skins or mud. Her brown skin is profoundly creased, but somehow smooth at the same time, and she has few teeth.
She kneels, bent forward in supplication over an empty sardine can. Propped against her knees there is a small card with a highly tinted image of the Madonna. The cerulean blue of the Virgin’s shawl, her pious upward look, her hands, palm to palm in ecstatic supplication, make the old beggar woman who, from time to time, also gazes skywards, in wrinkled parody of the picture, to my eyes, both a fraud and an alien.
For hours on end, she rocks back and forth and intones in a harsh monotone ‘Buono … Buono … Buono …’ And although her pose is one of dereliction and dependency, she commands attention. Her grating incantation is compelling, sinister even, and I half wonder if she has left her broomstick around the corner; if, at the end of the day, she will pull her shawl tight about her shoulders, retrieve her besom, and soar into the gathering darkness, the wind carrying her back to some forest faraway to the east, where her chicken-legged hut whirls and scampers randomly among the trees like that of the legendary Russian witch, Baba Yaga.
The reality is, of course, quite different. In the early morning, as the commuters flood into the city from Mestre, many of them to service the tourist industry, so too do the beggars, that same industry’s underbelly and underclass. Little huddles of women arrive, some carrying babies, all bundled in the same shapeless peasants’ garb. They talk among themselves as they walk briskly up the Strada Nuova. They are smaller than everyone else, tougher, uglier, harder and utterly separate.
Throughout the day, these same women are to be found stationed around the city, solitary now, and on their knees; prone, bent double and begging. Sometimes they moan or groan in pain and supplication. Once positioned on their pitch, they each assum
e a particular expression – either of grief or suffering or resignation or despair – which stays fixed on their faces like a mask for all the long hours of their begging day.
Although they rarely look directly at the passers-by, they can be seen appraising with perfect acuity whoever is approaching, a discrete glance telling them whether it is worth rocking harder for the next punter.
Sometimes, a policeman will walk past and move them on, joking: ‘Come on, it’s no good for your knees to stay on that cold stone all day,’ and the gypsy women with their angry eyes do not answer, as they heave themselves up, shoulder their rucksacks and move around the corner, to wait until the policeman has gone, so that they can go back and resume their extraordinary show of imploring desolation.
One aged crone shuffles, shoeless, around Campo Santa Margherita, right angled over her stick, her begging tin extended in one crabbed hand, her gaze, always, downwards. It is her saggy-stockinged feet that most strike me; I try to imagine how it feels to shuffle like that, on those unforgiving paving stones, all day long. I notice that she sifts through the lively, pacy crowds in small, apparently random circling movements. When I look harder, I see that there is a logic to her progress, as though she were moving across the campo, very slowly, with a metal detector.
I can only imagine that these women are getting at least some reward for their efforts, though I very rarely see anybody stop to drop coins in their tins. Up until now, I have never given the woman on the bridge money either. But why should I, a person of liberal beliefs, who considers herself compassionate towards those less fortunate, react so uncharitably to this particular beggar?
Perhaps the answer lies in that very liberalness. Could it be precisely because the gypsy beggar has no place in the model of a liberal, secularized modern world that she does not touch a modern ‘liberal’ conscience? The image she presents of highly formalized, destitute supplication does not move me because, like the schmaltzy image of the Virgin in whose name she is begging, the old woman belongs to a culture to which I cannot connect. Despite her passive pose, there is about her a kind of fierceness. Nothing in my culture has prepared me to understand this combination of strength and weakness in the context of begging, and because I cannot reconcile the two elements, I feel her, viscerally, to be dishonest. I may be completely wrong in this, but in my culture pride and submission are not compatible: where I come from, only the utterly destitute – which is to say those destitute in mind as well as circumstance – resort to begging.
In Britain, we do not admit to a model of begging because we refuse to accept the idea of a class of institutionalized destitutes. Destitution can only be a terrible accident, or a sign of social breakdown. For obvious reasons, we refuse to accept either of these as anything other than exceptions to the rule: a blip in the pursuit of a greater good.
The grim-faced, talkative little bands of beggar women who stride into Venice every morning belong to another world altogether. The gypsy woman on the bridge has none of my pseudo-liberal hypocrisy: she is under no illusions about wealth and poverty and knows that she is a beggar and that she must therefore enact the part of beggar, just as any of us enact certain roles in our work. In doing this she is consciously placing herself within a social structure, slotting into the predesignated role of beggar.
This does not make of her anything less (or more) than a beggar, so why is it that I am able to give money to the red-eyed addict in a London underpass and not to this tiny, gnarled, knowing grandmother, on her knees in the street?
When I see a homeless drunk on the streets of London, I recoil from his visible degradation, but I am also compelled to empathize with him. My sense of social responsibility is not fuelled by religious belief, but by a conviction that here is another being with whom I share my humanity. I think that I have a notion of how he has arrived at this tragic point and I pity him accordingly, from the bottom of my selective heart. He and I belong to the same social structure; I am safe in it, he has drifted to its hopeless nether regions; there, but for the grace of God, go I. Bad luck, bad genes or bad governance have forced him into this place and I recognize these forces and believe that there is a way out for him … possibly … maybe …
Unlike the drunk, the gypsy beggar does not consider herself as having drifted off the social map; on the contrary, she has a distinct place in it. Her job is begging and she commutes into Venice to beg. This does not make her a fake or a thief. She is part of a social structure in which begging for alms has its place; it is an ancient culture in which the moral appeal of beggars to the wealthy is based on religious obligation and the hope of buying a place in heaven:
‘For alms are but the vehicles of prayer’
(John Dryden)
In begging for ‘good, good, good’, the picture-postcard image of the Virgin propped against her knees, the old woman on the bridge is telling us that the support of the poor is both a religious imperative and a social duty. What I must face up to is this: the fact that she is begging within a social structure does not make her situation any less desperate, nor does it mean that I should care for her any less.
And so, confused and uneasy, I resort to the child’s eye imagery of the gypsy beggar as a witch. I do this because I can place her nowhere except in storyland – a generic, mythical figure. People like her don’t have a place in my conscious, practical life, because I come from a society which is overwhelmed by the cult of the individual.
What motivates me to give away my money is the recognition of another individual and our common humanity. I am not moved by religious duty or belief, or by any kind of investment in a social hierarchy that makes some people into beggars for alms. I am motivated by guilt, by pity, by fear, by cod psychology. The waters are muddy. But when it comes to this muttering medieval mendicant on the bridge, a refugee from unknown lands to the east, I have no such difficulty and I sail past her daily, as though she were, indeed, a ghost in a parallel universe.
If the fishermen on the Giudecca, or that aged farmer on the lagoon island, provide me with a comforting cliché of the old ways, a pleasant nostalgia for the ‘authentic’, the gypsy beggar does not. One morning, as we hurry over the bridge to school, always late, always bounding two steps at a time, she is there as usual: Virgin at her knee, babushka headscarf, sardine can.
‘Look at her!’ Freddie shouts indignantly. ‘I won’t give money to her!’
And what can I say to him? ‘Oh reason not the need! Would you, my boy, choose to spend your whole life on your knees?’
Because all that this secular, materialistic six-year-old sees is a beggar talking loudly on her mobile phone.
Giardino di Merda
THERE ARE HIDDEN gardens all over Venice. In January, when the city is at its stoniest, I might be walking down a narrow, grey calle and find myself suddenly engulfed in a cloud of rich perfume. Behind high walls, a gaunt witch hazel is in bloom – the little white flowers seeming to have been stuck along the naked branches and fiercely exuding summer into the cold, dead air.
In April, wisteria plays a similar trick, clambering over the walls and pouring down the other side to brush the heads of passers-by with purple blooms and thick, sweet scent.
The land birds of Venice nest in these gardens too. Sometimes I hear the trill of a blackbird and look up to see the little yellow-eyed creature perched on the top of a wall. And there are the plaguing mosquitoes too, lurking among the trees. Out at the back of the island of the Giudecca, on the edge of the South Lagoon, there are a number of grand, private gardens. Trees and climbing plants loll over brick and drift the tips of their leaves in the still water. You can see this only from a boat and, even then, you can only guess at the luxuriance of fig trees and roses, jasmine and willow tangling in there.
Of course, having a garden in Venice is a privilege. Often enough, people have bits of outside space attached to their houses – backyards, strips along the side of a building – but whether you can persuade any plant life to take root in these sha
dy pockets is another matter. One afternoon, while we are waiting for our children to come out of school, Federico tells me about his ‘garden’, a small dank yard that never sees the sun.
‘I was woken up at dawn last week. I heard this loud shouting coming from the back of my house. I was half asleep, but I went out on to the terrace to see what was happening and I found this drunken tramp lunging around down there. So I said, “Hey! What are you doing?” Well, he climbed back over the wall, cursing and swearing, and disappeared.
‘Then, this morning, I heard the noise again and I found the same man crashing around out there and he looked up at me and yelled:
‘“Oy! You! Signore with the shit courtyard!”’
Federico looks at me, laughing.
‘You see what I mean? It really is a dump, even he knew that. Even in that state!’
I dream of having a garden in Venice, but only under certain circumstances. Maria Grazia has a large garden – full of mature trees and with a big, undulating lawn where generations of her children, grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren, play. It seems like an unimaginable luxury in this city of narrow streets and stone public spaces, but when I tell her how jealous I am, she smiles wryly.
‘I call it the amphitheatre,’ she says and gestures at the surrounding buildings. That’s when I notice the tens of windows overlooking the garden from every side. Nothing that you do or say here could possibly go unobserved.
The courtyard garden of my neighbour Signora Zambon has distinct shades of the prison yard: the walls are so high and the surrounding buildings so beetling that for most of the day three-quarters of this brick cube is cast in shadow. There is a meagre patch of grass in the middle, which struggles to survive against all the odds. Grass can usually be counted on to tell you what a place is really like, underneath it all: the grass of Venice is rough and dry; it is, of course, dune grass, sea grass.