by Polly Coles
‘They put us in coaches and took us to the Austrian border. Then we had to walk through Austria. Mostly, we went through the forests, to avoid being seen. We would walk all day, and at night we would stop and the guide would dig up food and bedding that had been left buried in the earth or in piles of leaves by the last group to pass through. I was so tired, I would not lie down to sleep because I was afraid that I would never get up again.
‘Sometimes, the border guards shot at us, or pretended to, trying to scare us. We would panic and run. I hurt my foot running.
‘I can never look at sweetcorn now. I can’t bear it. For three days, we walked through the maize fields and those plants cut our faces to pieces.
‘When I got to Venice, I was lucky because my sister was already here. She was looking after an old lady who was senile, so she could smuggle me into the house at night, to sleep. In the days, I would walk around the city looking for work. Or I would sit in the parks.
‘Then, someone – I don’t know – a neighbour or another Moldavian maybe – told the old woman’s daughter, about me, so I had to leave that house. Other Moldavian women took me in. I stayed in many different places. There is a whole network of Moldavians working in this city. Some are good people; some are not. Like everywhere. I have known some very good people and some very bad people in my life.’
The Eastern European housekeepers and carers gather in the park near to our house every Sunday afternoon. They sit on the benches under the tall lime trees. At first I do not distinguish these respectable-looking middle-aged women, gossiping on the benches, from any other Italian matrons of the same age. Then, as I am walking with the children to the playground one day, I see two women, one of whom is brushing the other’s hair, and I looked closer.
Italians only do what they consider to be outside things in public. They do not eat on the street, except for ice creams; they do not do their hair, except perhaps to flick it back glamorously or pat it into place. They emerge from their houses turned out for public, not private, life. They are made up, buttoned up, ready to face the day-lit world. There is, therefore, something disconcertingly intimate – almost, you might say, naked – about these ageing women hairdressing on the park bench.
That is when I realize that they are not Italian at all; that they do not have comfortably besuited husbands in tow, or grandchildren in buggies; they only have each other. And of course, this is when I notice that they are physically different too: heavier, more solid, with square faces and fairer complexions and staider, cheaper clothes. They are from Romania, Moldavia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and other ex-Soviet countries, and they are in Venice to work.
On another Sunday afternoon, I watch a small group of these women standing in a circle near the stone fountain and singing. As they sing, they bow rhythmically to each other and clap their hands in time to the melody. I feel sure that this is the ghost of a dance they would, under other, more relaxed circumstances, marry to their rousing, repetitive, defiant and melancholy anthem.
The same women appear on warm evenings near our local vaporetto stop. They sit their ample behinds on the stone ledge of the raised campo that looks out across the Grand Canal. Placed at intervals between them are wheelchairs, in which droop the ancient wisps of human beings for whom they care. The women chatter and laugh over the heads of their fragile charges and I detect shreds of cruelty – relief at being able to disregard their duty and talk in their own language; at being, for now, in the majority, free to gossip about home and their resentments.
The Life of Fish
The mansions arranged along either bank of the canal made one think of objects of nature, but of a nature which seemed to have created its works with a human imagination.
(Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue)
CITIES BANK UP buildings and bodies as insurance against decay. When one individual falls by the wayside, ten more step forward to fill the gap. Cities make us feel good because the city that never sleeps is, by a kind of illogical extension, the place where you never die; the lights are always on, the conversation and the wine flow for ever.
But when you dig – down, down, down – what do you find? Under the patterned labyrinths of medieval ghettos and the Roman pavements; below the woven huts and the undulating palisades are the marshlands, the scrublands and the unconstructed world.
In most cities, this is what we can only imagine, seeing in the glimpsed face of an urban fox an ancient order stealthily recolonizing. But in Venice you need make no such effort of the imagination. When the acqua alta is seriously high, what strikes me is not the rainbow lake, a city afloat on reflections, but the mudwash, the drain-disgorgement: the rise and rise of filth.
For centuries before any thought of global warming, these periodic inundations would have come as a portent of apocalypse. What had already happened long ago, in the biblical past, would, with terrifying inevitability, happen again one day in the future. Then, the city that had come out of the primordial slime would disappear, submerged forever by the waters. But for now, every time the tides skulk away, the clouds clear and Venice, this most perfect of human ornaments, glistens again – ancient and reborn – in the sunlight. And it is partly because of this rising and falling of waters, this prominence of natural processes, that you never lose sight of the artistry of the place, of the fact that it is a constructed thing.
What one can forget, though, is that this beautiful artefact is set against other lives: the life of fish, the arrivals and departures of birds and of itinerant human beings; the sudden impasse of the mudflat. Waiting for a vaporetto on the Grand Canal, I remember that I am in the middle of a salt water lagoon when a silver fish flops out of the water, or a quick little shoal flickers by below my feet.
The lone fisherman, standing over there, in the shadow of a tremendous palace, casting his rod on a summer’s evening, is a part of that other world too. If you take care to look closely, this parallel life is revealed more than you might expect.
My friend Jenny is walking among the stone pines at the easternmost tip of the city. A little way off she sees a group of unassuming elderly men and women in tracksuits, training binoculars on the tree canopy above their heads.
‘I knew they were British,’ she tells me afterwards, ‘and I went up to ask them what they were doing.’
They are, it turns out, a party of Lancashire twitchers who have just left the Po Delta where they have been watching the arrival of the migrating birds. On their way home, they decide to stop off in Venice where, because they are twitchers before anything, they quickly leave behind the splendours of Piazza San Marco and the Rialto bridge and come to this out-of-the-way nineteenth-century quarter, devoid of medieval palazzi, but with a significant arboreal canopy in which a rare, red tree creeper has recently been spotted. They are not, as they wander through the park with their binoculars, really tourists at all, but something practically unheard of in Venice these days: they are travellers, passing through on their way to somewhere else.
My friend, pleased by this, thinks of something that might interest them.
‘There’s another unusual bird around here,’ she says, ‘I’ve never heard of one of these before. It’s an albino blackbird!’
The twitchers lower their binoculars; they smile at her politely; they are unmoved.
‘Yes,’ they say, ‘we know.’
And they are so very separate from the world of mass tourism or luxury tourism and all the other tourisms, that they seem, miraculously somehow, to have drifted in on another current. Like the fish, like the birds and the tide.
In the spring, the swallows arrive in the city. In rural Britain there has been such a rush to restore old barns in the last few years that these small birds have often been fatally deprived of the elevated nesting places they need. When a tumbledown garage outside my house was demolished, the practically legless creatures swooped low through the new windows and became frantically shipwrecked on the furniture, in the folds of curtains. Loss of habitat can
hardly be a problem in Venice with its acres of ramshackle belfries and crumbling ledges, and when they arrive they flood in, shrill, like little roaring boys – skirmishing, wheeling, minuscule flying aces. The space between the buildings outside my kitchen window is their diving pool. They swoop, circle and call, slicing back and forth in their lovely element, up and down, turning, gliding across the sky prairie. They occupy it, cross-hatch and navigate and possess the area with their small, fleet selves.
When the window is open, I can hear their wings cut through the hot air. There is a twittering, cheaping, chirping cacophony. The gulls – off stage – squabble like gangs of jungle monkeys. Sometimes, a big pigeon flaps comfortably by, dense wings beating heavily through the stillness.
And then, the bronze bells begin to clang and Venice’s concert of the air comes crowding in, a world of space and dissonant music.
*
There are other migrants who arrive and briefly stay. Coming home from the market, I pass over a bridge and see a group of African street vendors. Tall, elegant men leaning loosely against the wall, their wares – fake designer bags and sunglasses – bundled up in white sheets, at their feet. They are talking and laughing in a language I do not recognize. Then, suddenly, without a word passing between them – but as if an electric current has, in that moment, been switched on – they grab up their bundles and leg it: bounding away, skimming off at angles down different alleys, fleeing the still invisible police, and as they scatter, they break into exuberant laughter and disappear, instantly.
This sudden flight is no game, but these men live it like one and it is impossible not to smile.
In the winter, there is another, small and quiet human migration – men from, I guess, Indonesia. They squat in the streets and construct models of grasshoppers and frogs out of reeds. As they finish each small, ephemeral masterpiece, they hang it on a branch propped beside them in a bottle.
The grasshopper men sit on their haunches in an easy squat that is as alien to a European physicality, a Western sensibility, as the gypsy women’s prostration on cold stone.
Their deft-fingered craft, the simplicity of the material, the absolute pre-industrial quality of what they are doing, makes of them, to my eyes and in my world, something fragile and rare.
Like the Africans, like the gypsies, they are economic migrants, at the bottom of the great pile of European riches, but they have none of the others’ apparent strengths of speed or wily, dogged determination. They just squat and twist and make their little spidery marvels for a few euros apiece.
When I see a policeman moving one of these grasshopper men along from his corner pitch by the bridge of the Guglie, I cannot imagine why this absurd dislodging should need to happen. Venice, the city, is only real and only has value for as long as there are many lives being lived in it: the lives of fishes, the lives of children, the lives of wheedling gypsies and quarrelsome gulls, the twitchers and fishermen, the swallows and the Africans – primed for instant flight and laughter.
It’s only a matter of luck where you wash up in history. What was once Babylon is now Baghdad.
For the whole morning, a drunk has been sitting slumped on the bridge below my window. He sits down there still, calling out, almost cheerfully, to no one in particular or perhaps to all of Venice:
‘Coraggio … coraggio … coraggio …’
Sunday 25 May
IT IS A hot and cloudless morning and we are heading out of the city in Giampaolo’s boat, chopping across the glittering water, towards the open Lagoon.
Our small craft is stuffed with children, picnic baskets, wine, swimming costumes, hats, sun cream, water bottles, towels and fishing nets and buckets – all the accoutrements of beach life that make us into travellers for a day, our camp on our backs. We are not alone; all around us there are dozens of small boats also setting off. The Lagoon is Venice’s countryside; this is the Venetian equivalent of a Sunday walk in the country.
The Venetian archipelago is made up of over fifty islands. Some, like San Secondo melting pathetically away by the Ponte della Libertà, barely exist any more; others have disappeared entirely, leaving only a name and, perhaps, an occasionally emerging sandbank. Almost all are in a state of radical decay, their shorelines nibbled away, year in year out, by the tides; their buildings – convents, monasteries, churches, hospitals, villas, boatyards – either gone or ruined.
The long, slow death of the islands of the Lagoon began 200 years ago with the occupation of the city by Napoleon in 1797 and the death of the Republic. For a thousand years, each island, many of them very small indeed, had played its part in the ecosystem of the Lagoon and the infrastructure of the Venetian Republic. Many of them housed a monastic community, each one of which was obliged by law to include in its complex of buildings a gunpowder tower. By keeping these potentially incendiary stores in isolation, the Republic could be sure of having adequate reserves of gunpowder while, at the same time, remaining safe from the potentially devastating effect of an explosion in the densely populated city itself.
Then there were the fishing islands and farming islands and, crucially, as trade grew and the flow of people entering the city from all over the world increased in the age of plagues, the hospital and quarantine islands. Venice has the oldest public health system in the Western world and it is no accident that the word ‘quarantine’ was coined here. In the glory days of the Republic, with ships arriving from almost every part of the known world, it was imperative for the Venetians to devise a way of limiting the spread of disease, most particularly the Black Death. It was, therefore, made mandatory for incoming ships to stop at quarantine islands and for the crew and passengers to sit out forty (quaranta) days, until it was clear they were not carrying the plague. I wonder about those unfortunate sailors and merchants who arrived perfectly healthy and were then forced to stay forty days cheek by jowl with those already infected.
Then Napoleon came and, in a dual drive to castrate the dying Republic and impose the French system of secular governance, instigated a mass closure of the monasteries. Treasures were removed, glorious buildings emptied and either demolished or left to fall into disrepair; military installations were constructed in their place. Nowadays, on the island of Certosa, for example, there is no visible trace of the Carthusian order and the magnificent church they finished building there in 1492. But the French military lookout posts remain: a series of dour, geometrical little sentinel boxes dotted along the shoreline.
Napoleon’s systematic ruination of these jewels of architecture and art in the Lagoon is surely one of the greatest acts of cultural destruction in history. The thought of it, 200 years later, makes my blood boil.
On this summer Sunday, our little boat goes deeper into this world of ghostly islands as Giampaolo steers us away from the crowds and we enter the canal that bisects the island of Poveglia. Once in the narrow thoroughfare, the sense of movement and wind and light instantly disappears and we are passing through sultry, enclosed waters. On either side of us, the banks are overgrown with brambles and the air is full of raucous insects.
It is time for lunch, so we tie the boat to a large, rusting iron ring set into the marble blocks that shore up the sides of the canal and recall another, grander and worldly past for this small, deserted island. The white stone, the silence, the riot of brambles: we might be deep in the jungle, could have stumbled across the remains of an ancient civilization.
We eat our picnic in the baking stillness, our rug spread out on the landing stage, in the shade of tired acacia trees. We talk about the future of the city. It is the same familiar conversation that Venice has over and over again with itself. It goes like this: here we are, living in the most wonderful place imaginable – not merely for its evident beauty, but for the inestimable privilege of a daily life without cars. And yet, we desperately need more people to live here, really live here, so that it can come fully alive again. The foreigners who buy apartments and come for a week every so often add nothing to th
e place. This disaster that is uncontrolled tourism is destroying daily life in the city, and this quality of life is quite as precious, quite as much a treasure of the human race, as the palaces and bell towers and canals taken hostage by the tour guides. Perhaps more so. What can we do? What can we do?
When we have finished eating, feeling hot and full and dispirited, I get up and wander off on my own, following a dirt track into the mess of undergrowth behind us. I step over fallen tree trunks, squeeze between saplings, and duck under brambles until I come to a clearing and the buildings and church tower I glimpsed earlier from the boat. This is the remains of the quarantine hospital which, though now a virtual ruin, is an early twentieth-century addition to the island whose history stretches back more than 1,200 years.
I make my way gingerly over the heaps of white rubble towards a gaping doorway. I look through into what must once have been the hospital kitchen. There is an industrial-sized, stainless steel cooker lying upended with its four feet in the air and several enormous aluminium pans are scattered around the floor. It’s the giant’s palace again.
The terracotta floor is intact but the plaster ceiling hangs in a dry swag, like a crumbling stage curtain, and I can see straight up to the floor above. A soft drizzle of plaster powders my hair as I walk, as though I have set off an imperceptible tremor just by being there. I wonder how safe this place is, but I am too curious to go back.
The hospital is built around a central courtyard. Most of the wooden doors have been barricaded shut, but when I peer through cracks, I see that the rooms are ruined shells. There is a wide flight of splintered wooden stairs leading up to the first floor. This, I do not risk. The sawing of crickets intensifies the silence. The air is alive with mosquitoes and I am constantly brushing them away from my face and arms. Now, I feel like the prince who has cut his way through the enchanted forest to Sleeping Beauty’s castle. But this time it is deserted; I have come too late.