The Politics of Washing

by Polly Coles

  I think of all those unflinching, officious faces I have encountered in Italy – in banks, at post offices, police stations, ticket booths – and I am in no doubt that were it not for the fact that Everett is famous and the deck chair lady was not, Everett would not have had the remotest hope of getting his own way.

  Meanwhile, when it comes to their own lands, the Guarani have much, much less leverage than the deck chair signora and infinitely more at stake. I am not in their heads; I do not know who they are, nor where they come from. I cannot presume to understand how it felt to these people to leave their home, to fly in an aeroplane for the first time, far away from South America, to step down from that plane in Northern Italy, to rattle in a bus across a long, straight causeway, to a stone city lying low in salt water. I can only guess how they saw Calle del Vin, or how Calle del Vin saw them: the tall, wall-eyed greengrocer on the corner, stacking up empty vegetable crates; the dapper Sicilian who sells cheese and expensive wines; the haberdasher’s granddaughter and her cap-sleeved, gold-sloganed tee-shirts, must all have witnessed the arrival of those five small, dark Guarani, shepherded up the calle by the woman from the Milan office. The rustling hectares of sugar cane were real only in the mind’s eye of the Guarani; it was the grey stone canyons of an aged city that rose up around them now.

  I picture them coming to a standstill outside the great wooden door of number 3460. I imagine the woman from Milan jiggling the key in the unfamiliar lock and the scrape of the door as it opens. They enter the dark hall and begin to climb the stairs. When they reach the first landing, they hesitate.

  From this point on, I have some concrete information because my neighbour, the saturnine Signor Zambon, tells me, a while afterwards, what happened next.

  ‘I found this group of – of – Mexicans – ’ he hesitates, puzzled, ‘– and I said: “who are you?” And they said they were staying in your house. Well, I wasn’t sure – but they did seem to know you.’

  Whereas Rupert Everett was at least temporarily blocked by the signora with the deck chair concession, the Guarani and their chaperone did succeed in running the gauntlet of Zambon. I see Zambon, with his narrow frame and hunched shoulders; his white, lined, troubled face and suspicious eyes, emerging from his apartment with its ponderous wooden furniture and acres of small lace and bric-a-brac. Arturo Zambon – Venetian hotelier and misanthrope. And I see the short, muscular Guarani, with their straight black hair and wary eyes, and I wonder how any of these people could begin to recognize the human being in the other.

  But, in one respect, I may be wrong. Perhaps Zambon, whose budget hotel is cleaned by Filipinas, who have not seen their children since the year before last, is someone the Guarani know very well. Perhaps the Guarani – small, dark, useful, cheap, dispensable – are equally familiar to Zambon.

  The world is run by Zambons; the world is fuelled by Guarani. Is there thanks, after all, to be given for the stolid signora, with a deck chair concession, who dared to challenge the Hollywood star and suggest that he, too, should pay for the sea?

  Together

  EVERY TIME I run into another friend in the street and invite them to my party, I put away the nagging thought that this number of people, and growing, cannot possibly fit into our flat. I try to book a venue – but it’s too late – everywhere is taken. So, in the end, there is nothing for it but to borrow a couple of trestle tables from my neighbour, cover them with bright cloths, and have the party in the street.

  People start arriving while it is still light. They approach from two directions, at either end of the long rio terà, calling out greetings as they draw near with ineffable, Venetian theatricality.

  Across the street from our building there is a secondary school housed in an ex-convent. The high, red brick wall is patterned with centuries’ worth of opened and closed windows, now all blind, and the bricked-in half smiles of interrupted arches and truncated doorways. As my friends gather, darkness comes. The rio terà is like an open-ended room; its ceiling is the hot night sky, spun with stars, smeared over with the Milky Way. Eighty or more people have filled this city room and the warm buzz of their voices carries upwards to the canopy sky, across the canals and the fondamentas and the rooftops and out into the black, unlit reaches of the Lagoon, where the grass barene, or mudflats, emerge from the water and then fall back again, under the rising tides.

  Intoxicated with the pleasure of friends and the heat and food and wine, I have forgotten our bilious neighbour, but at eleven o’clock he sticks his head out of the fourth floor window opposite, like a bearded bad fairy who has not been invited to the party, and starts to bellow furiously down at us:

  ‘Go back to your own houses! You’ve been making that racket for hours! I’ll call the carabinieri if you don’t clear off back to where you come from!’

  The zenophobic undertones are unmistakable, but although he knows that we, the annoying neighbours, are not Venetians, he has not bargained for our Venetian guests.

  ‘You grumpy old bastard!’ Federico hurls at him, grinning with pleasure at this unexpected sport, ‘this is our city too!’

  ‘Yes,’ Marco wades in gleefully. ‘Get stuffed, you fool!’

  The black-bearded Fairy Malvolio comes back hard and for several minutes the row ricochets back and forth off the ancient stones. But there is not, after all, that much to say once a certain amount of abuse has been hurled by both sides and it is, in fact, the children who have the last word.

  Nobody knows how it starts – as far as anyone ever understands not a word is exchanged between them – but as Malvolio’s abuse continues to come thick and fast, they begin gathering up the chairs we have brought out into the street. There are about twenty of them, ranging from three-year-old Nicola and Ariele, to Tito who is five, and Costantino and Francesco, to ten-year-old Nico manful on his zimmer frame, and Freddie and Carlo and Gio, Sofia and Esther, Lily and Roland and the big boys, Luca and Michael and Eric.

  Silently, they arrange the chairs in a row in the middle of the rio terà, directly below Malvolio’s window. Then, silently, they all sit down, put their hands on their knees and tip their heads upwards, staring straight at the ranting neighbour. He stops short and returns their stare, astonished.

  ‘And you … and you …’ he attempts to start up again, but that solemn, implacable joint gaze seems to have struck him dumb and he merely looks back at them for some minutes more. In the end, he draws his head inside and our children sit on, silently united in outstaring him and his ridiculous rage.

  This is a small battle won: the living Venice has pitted itself against the dying Venice. The Venice of the future, determinedly outstaring the past.

  If You Care

  ALVISE IS IN his mid-sixties. He has the head of Father Christmas: a round, genial face, pink cheeks, kindly eyes, a bald pate and a bushy white beard. But he has the forearms of a rower – strong, muscular – and a wide-handed grip on the oar.

  One afternoon, we are rowing across the Giudecca Canal in a sandolo, one of the traditional boats of the Lagoon, flat-bottomed and unadorned, a sort of small, frumpy gondola. The oars are balanced in the focole, the elegant, wooden rowlocks that look like highly polished stands of driftwood or pieces of abstract sculpture. I am rowing at the front, prua, and this makes of me mere muscle power; Alvise, on the other hand, is rowing poppa, or steersman, so he stands at the raised back of the boat, expertly twisting the long, heavy oar in the water and keeping us on a straight course.

  This is a challenge: the Giudecca Canal is a notoriously choppy waterway; never still because of the constant traffic of large boats – car ferries to the Lido, vaporetti, delivery boats, tour boats and the gargantuan cruise ships that bulldoze through the city twice a day. Sometimes, at the end of a calle leading to the canal, one of these passing monsters blocks out the sky, like a genetically reconstructed dinosaur that has escaped from Jurassic Park and is wreaking havoc in the world of human beings.

  ‘Ha,’ says Alvise angrily as we try t
o stabilize our little craft in the wash of one of these juggernauts. ‘They might get around to doing something about those things when one ploughs into Piazza San Marco. Until that happens, there’s just too much money to be made. The ecosystem of the Lagoon, the foundations of the city, can go to hell if there’s money to be had.’

  I am doing all I can to stay upright when the wash from a speeding taxi hits the side of the sandolo and I plump ingloriously down on my bottom.

  Eventually, we get across and enter a canal that cuts through the island of the Giudecca. Our oars slice the still water with a lovely ease and we slip out the other side of the island, into the South Lagoon. Ahead, stretching into the distance, are little islands, some abandoned, some inhabited. Cormorants stand on the big wooden posts or bricole that mark the channels of the Lagoon. The lone birds raise their black wings and sit motionless, like small vampires, poised, cape aloft, at the foot of a bed. Sometimes, a small, busy coot pops up through the glassy surface of the water, as though diving upwards from an underwater world.

  As the oars move gently and rhythmically in and out of the water, I notice an irritating, distant buzzing sound. The noise increases until we see a motorboat bearing down on us, skimming along the aquatic highway between the bricole. There is a young man at the wheel. Our sandolo starts pitching heavily and Alvise gestures furiously at the boat to slow down; the young man skids by, grinning and shouting.

  ‘Perh!’ Alvise snorts. ‘They’ll destroy Venice with their motorboats. They’re no better than the cruise ships.’

  As the sandolo stabilizes again and the noise dies away, Alvise says to me, ‘Put down your oar for a moment and look over there.’

  The summer afternoon has a bright, lemony clarity. In the distance, the city is laid out, a miniature archipelago, its towers and domes afloat on the sea. In this pristine light, the strung out peaks of the Dolomites seem preternaturally close. ‘Once, you would have often seen the Dolomites like that. Nowadays, the pollution tends to obscure them. You know,’ Alvise says, leaning on his oar, looking out across the water, ‘the Lagoon has been like this for a thousand years and it could stay like this for another thousand – if we want it to.’

  We talk about Venice’s chances of survival, not as a mere monument, but as a living city. He takes the oar and stirs it gently in the water so that the boat begins to turn again, very slowly. ‘Shall I tell you something?’ he says, smiling. ‘The numbers of people speaking Venetian dialect is growing now and do you know why? All the immigrants who come from Eastern Europe to work in Marghera and Mestre are learning it, because that’s how everyone communicates in those factories. Tell that to the Lega Nord,’ he laughs, ‘it’s the foreigners who are putting new life into our dialect!’

  We are now moving along the back of the Giudecca with its invisible gardens, its convents, monasteries, churches and boatyards; the cranes and winches and broken-down boats awaiting repair – the old Venetian mix of industry and melting, melancholic beauty.

  ‘There are so few Venetians left now,’ I say, ‘I know it sounds silly, but sometimes I feel guilty just being a foreigner here.’

  Alvise shakes his head.

  ‘You say that, but who are the Venetians anyway? Those boys speeding in their motorboats? The carabinieri who play Formula One drivers across the Lagoon? The landlords who drive the residents out with their tourist rents? Or close down the corner shop to let their premises at twice the rate to some guy selling glass made in China to the tourists? They’re not Venetians, because they don’t give a damn about Venice. They’ll suck every last drop of blood out of this city. The real Venetians are the people who live here and help put new life into the community and love this place.’ He pauses, then looks straight at me. ‘You’re a Venetian,’ he says.

  Epilogue

  MOVING ABOUT OUR planet in aeroplanes, we get confused into thinking things like this: ‘Nowhere on earth is further than twenty-four hours away’, which might be a useful way of seeing the world, if time and distance were really so easily measurable; but what about the date you never lived flying to Australia, or the day you lived through twice, coming back in the other direction? What about the split second in your life when something was said or done or thought that changed you forever?

  Daily life in Bangladesh or Tahiti or Botswana or New Guinea is going on at this moment, just as your daily life is, and mine, but we are separated by more than space. I have threaded my way along an Old Delhi street, beating a path among hawkers and merchants, pickpockets and mendicants and fat, wealthy women dressed in silk, and thought ‘this place is medieval’, which was, in fact, from where I stood, no metaphor. The silver bullet of an aeroplane that crosses seas and continents conveys us not only through space but also through time. Through a wall of something finer and more elastic than a spider’s web and less comprehensible than the narratives of time or space we think we understand. Our uncertain place in space makes all of us into ghosts. Accidents of birth mean that each one of us is a fugitive in history, lucky or unlucky in the lottery of geography and circumstance.

  I grew up loving the stories of C.S. Lewis. They are full of movement between different places and times; a wardrobe that opens into elsewhere takes you from inside to outside, from summer to winter, from childhood to adulthood and back again. In The Magician’s Nephew Lewis invented ‘the Wood between the Worlds’ where you find yourself outside time and between places, in a land without history. The trees soar majestic and artificial like the nave of a gothic cathedral and are rooted in a flawless, mossy carpet scattered with countless, identical pools. There are no signposts and no clues: each pool is a looking-glass portal into another world. You hold your breath, you jump and you might emerge … anywhere.

  It is with thoughts such as these in mind that I travel. Wherever you are on earth, imagination and attention can reveal what was there – literally – all the time. In any ancient city, in any part of the world, you might pass an unremarkable door set into a wall, glance through it and find a hidden universe unfolding, like an Escher drawing, into arcades, cloisters, gardens. Stepping into a church or a temple or a synagogue, we will come across archaic ceremonies, gorgeously enacted for – as often as not – practically no one. These are ritual routes of access to the past that will bring us into contact with other realities which do not exist in time-frames we can easily understand.

  One winter evening in Venice, as I walked past a university library, I looked through the windows at students bent over desks, reading in the glowing pools of light cast by their lamps. It occurred to me, in that unremarkable moment, that I was witnessing human habits and values of scholarship going back in an unbroken line to Alexandria, to ancient Athens, to Babylon and Mesopotamia. Then, two academics hurried by. They were deep in conversation, and as they passed I heard one say urgently to the other: ‘What you must take into consideration are the hermeneutics of Byzantium.’

  Those scholars could have been ghosts from another Venice, unwinding its life alongside the Venice in which I found myself, though they were dressed in grey suits, not black robes. There is nothing mysterious here: type and tradition, curiosity and endeavour have longer historical trajectories than the few decades of an individual life.

  For several centuries now, human beings, in different parts of the world and at different times, have become obsessed with narratives of modernization: the great spring cleaning of civilization. In the twentieth century, the dream of a utopian future mutated into a nightmarish totalitarian present. The idea of progress will always limit human development if it is not leavened with a sense of time’s peculiarities – its timebends – as Arthur Miller called them – its movement backwards and forwards, up and down, in and out, everything, in fact, that makes up its grand, woven tapestry.

  When I became part of real daily life in Venice, I learnt to relish the relationship between the antique fabric of the city and the modern lives unfolding in it. I began to imagine a new manifesto that is, predictably enough, as
old as the hills. Might the traditions and ancient narratives of humanity offer us silk routes into the future – or pools – or wardrobes – or whichever metaphor you prefer? Human conventions and customs, manners and behaviour, artefacts and artistry and buildings are all portals we can find in our daily life that reveal, if we stop to look and listen hard enough, our once and future world.

  Taking the lived-in, day-to-day Venice as a model might it be possible to refigure the way our culture thinks both about the trajectories of individual lives and of society as a whole? If life and society were seen as something more than a mere banal jog forwards through time, towards extinction, would we be more mindful of who we are and what really matters? And might Venice be allowed to free itself from fantasy and become again, if not exactly ordinary, at least real?

  Copyright

  © Polly Coles 2013

  First published in Great Britain 2013

  This edition 2013

  ISBN 978 0 7198 0993 4 (epub)

  ISBN 978 0 7198 0994 1 (mobi)

  ISBN 978 0 7198 0995 8 (pdf)

  ISBN 978 0 7198 0878 4 (print)

  Robert Hale Limited

  Clerkenwell House

  Clerkenwell Green

  London EC1R 0HT

  www.halebooks.com

  The right of Polly Coles to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988