“Wanting the lavender ink but being afraid it would leak in the suitcase.”
“Wait a minute. Is that old clunker of a stapler you use at home the same one from your father's office?”
“Of course.”
For two easy days we drive about, returning at night to our little outpost of fantastic food. The hallway of the inn is lined with family photographs—men home from war, babies in arms, group portraits. We love this intimate atmosphere and the warmth the family projects as we come and go. Townspeople gather in the bar, banging glasses, watching soccer on TV, exchanging the news about the daughter's first communion and the idiot who backed into the sycamore at the post office. We participate peripherally, briefly, in the ongoing life of this place. Ed tells them we'll be back to try the fall menu someday. As we leave, he looks sorrowfully into the dining room.
The primo approach to Venice is not Marco Polo airport or the train; having driven around in the Veneto, and stopped in Chioggia, I've absorbed a new sense of this watery location. I'd always thought of Venice as a risen place which not long ago was sinking and might sink again. Wandering in the Veneto, I absorbed the real geographical sense, and I'm more awed than ever. The land under Venice is often little more than the sandbars I used to wade to at St. Simon's Island. The feat of establishing an empire on this marshy archipelago shows that the settlers were strong on imagination. They wove willow dikes to keep away the sea. What madness! Foundations were built on wooden poles, driven all the way through the water and silty land to the packed clay substrata. The hundreds of tiny islands were later linked by bridges, giving the impression of canals carved out of a single island. Some waterways were filled in, further changing the reality of the actual topography.
Instinct tells me that by learning to “read” the watery map, I may be able to feel my way toward the source of this place's hold on my imagination. I know already that it's not only Venice's extravagant beauty that pulls me. My clues toward a solution may begin with the realization that Venice's origins are against all rational thinking: Build your church—or your insurance company—on a rock.
Ed and I park in a remote garage, leaving most of our luggage in the trunk, and board a boat, which crosses a flat stretch of water and soon enters the Grand Canal. Holy Toledo! Holy of holies! Memory has abstracted the city into watercolor scenes. The reality of the dips of the boat, the working gondolas laden with fruit and cases of acqua minerale, the construction barges piled with boards and sacks of concrete, the mind-stopping, stupendous, fairy-tale, solid beauty of the palazzi lining the canal and reflecting in the water—I stand at the rail biting hard on the knuckle of my right forefinger, an old habit that returns when I am knocked silent. The beauty does not just pass before your eyes. It ravishes. I begin to feel the elation that a traveller experiences when in the presence of a place supremely itself.
Arriving in Venice seems like the most natural act in the world. Is it this way for everyone? The place is so thoroughly known through film, photographs, calendars, books. Is there another layer to this easy familiarity?
I'm feeling a rush of memories and I want them to end by the time my foot steps out on the fondamenta. Venice was “our” city, my former husband's and mine. Although we went only twice, we'd loved the small flower-filled hotel, where we pulled the mattress off the bed when it squeaked. Our gondolier had a piercingly sweet voice and glided through canals, ducking under bridges. Well, yes, he did sing “O Sole Mio,” but he also had a good fling with “Nessun Dorma.” At the early morning market, a vendor built a ziggurat of ripe white peaches. Every fish in the Adriatic seemed to be lined up glassy-eyed on ice, ready for the women with their baskets, and restaurant owners trailed by minions who balanced crates on their shoulders. Because I am cursed with a bird phobia, I hovered under the arcades of the Piazza San Marco while my husband walked among the thousands of pigeons then came back to describe the piazza from the perspective I never will see. We found the paper store with blank books bound in vellum and marbled paper. We tried the pasta with squid in its own ink. I loved the cycle of Saint Ursula paintings by Carpaccio. Ursula, lying there in a tall bed, dreaming, while the angel bringing the palm of her martyrdom steps through her threshold. Four years later we returned with our daughter and had the pleasure of being in her happy company on those canals. She wore a straw gondolier hat, ran to pet cats who wouldn't be petted, left her drawstring pocketbook on a vaporetto and cried for the loss of a dozen pieces of broken glass she'd collected on the trip. Odd what fragments of memory stay. I don't remember how she liked the lagoon, the bridges, the piazza. She loved the hotel tub's brass swan handles and spout. Strange how memory can reach around years and reconnect to the place and time where old loves are still intact. The memory rush subsides.
Many high waters have washed through Venice since then. Now I am back. With Ed. A different life. We'll make our own way here. I look over at Ed and have to laugh. He has the deep-space stare. “Venice,” I say and he nods.
He's already tan, and leaning on the rail in his yellow linen shirt, with the pure glory of Venice racing behind him, I think he looks like someone I'd like to run off with, if I already hadn't. The prospect of days with him roving around Venice: bella, bella. As we enter the widest part of the Grand Canal, it seems to tilt. Soon we're bumping into the dock. “Heaven. Unbelievable.”
“Yes, if there's no Venice in the real heaven, I don't want to go there.”
The hotel, a former convent tower, faces a harmonious piazza which used to be water but somewhere along the way was filled. Tower means romantic and also narrow. The frou-frou furniture and tiny room seem very Venetian to me. Ed looks somewhat like Gulliver in this Lilliputian space.
We've arrived in time for the shadow rounds. An Italian friend in Cortona told us about the Venetian late afternoon “bar-hopping” custom. Tucked away in the neighborhoods are small bars, often with a counter opening to the street. Neighbors gather for an ombra, shadow, a half-glass of wine. The “shadow” comes from the original gathering place in the shadow of San Marco. People visit, sip, then wander on to the next bar. Often those who join don't know each other outside this custom. “He's a friend from the shadow rounds,” Venetians say to each other. Antipasti are laid out on the counter, savory nibbles somewhat like tapas: polenta squares with fish inside, moleche, tiny grilled crabs eaten whole, fried anchovies, and various preparations of baccalà, dried cod. They visit two or three then go home. The groups keep reconfiguring. We stop at one bar with so many delicious antipasti that we decide to stay for dinner in the back room. We try the sarde in soar, fresh sardines in a sweet and sour sauce, a dish the old Doges must have enjoyed. Venice has a bad reputation for restaurants but in the neighborhoods, the authentic dishes and the freshest seafood are served in intimate trattorie. The classic Venetian repertoire includes calf liver with onions (forget college dining room liver and onions); risotto or pasta with squid in its ink; that great comfort food risi e bisi, rice and peas; as well as fish with red radicchio, both grilled; fish soups; various shellfish with pastas; fish, fish, fish. Venice and Sicily, opposite in most ways, share the boon of the sea, and the intricate use of seasoning and spices supplied by the history of domination by many nations.
We leave the map in the room. We just walk. Walk and walk. Away from the main sights, the Venetian neighborhoods are endlessly appealing. We happen upon a squero, a yard where gondolas are made and repaired. A man brushes on black paint and I remember that once, before plague and sumptuary laws, gondolas were decorated in many colors. I want Ed to see Carpaccio's nine paintings of the Legend of Saint Ursula. She's sweetly asleep in a four-poster bed, a little dog on the floor, potted plants on the windowsills. The other side of the bed is conspicuously empty. She has, I remember, rejected Conan as her groom in favor of virginity. At her door, the hesitant angel will cross the threshold, touch her shoulder and hand her the palm of martyrdom. Irrationally, I say, “She's still sleeping, all these years I've been gone.”
When we find ourselves at the quay where you catch a boat for the islands, we jump on. The ports of call ten or twenty minutes away are remote from Venice in time and space. Poor little reedy islands barely out of the water—this is what supports the splendors of Venice, too. We pass Murano, don't stop at a farm island, and disembark at Torcello.
From the dock we follow a brackish canal to the remains of a settlement. The deserted town gives me the feeling that all the inhabitants have fled. Malaria did devastate the population but that was centuries ago. The Romanesque-Byzantine church of Santa Fosca was a latecomer to the island in the eleventh century. If I could draw, I would take out my pastel pencils right here and sketch its delicate arched portico. The cathedral, oldest building in the whole Venetian lagoon, was started in 639. From then until the fourteenth century, Torcello thrived. Twenty thousand people lived here, most of them raising sheep and making wool. Not until the early eleventh century were the mosaics laid in the floor of the cathedral. Others later were added to walls, including the standing Madonna holding the Infant, in a field of golden tesserae. Of the thousands and thousands of Madonnas, this is definitely one to see. So is the Last Judgement, with its spooky mosaic skeletons.
After the fourteenth century, Torcello began a long slide into its current decline. I read that sixty people live here but we don't see anyone except at makeshift tents where touristy souvenirs are sold. “What a great place to make a movie.” Ed is looking at a wild garden filled with statues, the exotic rounded forms of the cathedral, the blond light.
“What kind?”
“One with nothing of modern time in it. We're in a serious warp. But look, that casa is being restored. Maybe some of the workers who commute from Mestre to Venice will move here. Instead of breathing factory fumes they could have land. It would be a great place to live.”
“If you had a boat.”
“And a garden, and a wine cellar, and a good library.”
“Next time I'd like to spend the night at the locanda. Even the few tourists would take the last boat back to Venice. Islands at night. . . .” He doesn't finish his sentence.
Crowded, lively Burano is the polar opposite of Torcello; it's jarring to arrive after the quiet, and then impossible not to love the bright houses along the canals. I find myself taking pictures of a flowery balcony on a purple house, fishing nets draped to dry over the prow of a yellow boat, a woman in a blue-framed window shaking out a red tea towel. All the colors you'd never paint your house look marvelously festive here. It's as if every resident rushed off to a giant paint sale for bargains on pumpkin and lavender. Many awful paintings must have commenced with a day-trip to Burano. The village feels buoyant and playful. We have a picnic on the grass overlooking the water, then board the boat that plies these islands, passing San Michele, the cemetery, on the way back to the landing.
Standing near the prow, I realize I have my face out for the smell of marshes. Across pale green water, Venice, shimmering in diluted sunlight. Lulled by the slap of waves against the hull, I recall the stunning opening of one of my favorite books, Nabokov's Speak Memory: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).” I was rereading him last night and felt the charge of that passage.
Is the passion for seeing what remains of the past a bridge to “the prenatal abyss”? All this took place before you. And look, you can touch so much that preceded you. All the clear markers which ultimately led to you, your brief moment in a crack of light. I'm floating. Venice is all alluvial light. Riding the waters. I'm mesmerized by the nacreous sky and the marshes and the Venice of. . . . I'm searching. Yes, here, ah, yes, the Venice of the slippery pass, the watery link to the preconscious.
My mind come to rest; this is what I've been trolling these waters to find. The watery city takes me there as the cities on land cannot, cannot, with their divisible reality of streets under our feet and tires, their exits and entrances so spatially broken. Venice is simultaneous, like all time before we existed. Because we are swimmers. The slick creatures of land and water. And the scent of marsh drifts deeply into the medulla, that old hard-pack.
Now, I finally notice: The gondoliers stand as they work the water. They cross from one side to the other side. Death in Venice, Thomas Mann wrote; so, of course, of course we recognize that “strange craft . . . with that peculiar blackness which is found elsewhere only in coffins.”
But no, the gondoliers don't look like Charons on the River Styx. Instead, they walk the water, miraculously. The shape of the gondola shares more with the treble clef than with a coffin. The death connection is preconditioning, received knowledge, not experienced knowledge. This water is too glorious, a swabbed silver light streaking rose-gold, tesselate and far, far from death. But now I understand why Shelley, Mann, McCarthy, Ruskin, travel articles, films—all the ways I pre-experienced Venice—never got to the Venice I sensed under my skin. Death is what they called the mystery of Venice's allure. For me, they had it backwards. For birth we cross through the waters.
From a distance, the gondoliers appear as somnambulists, the black silhouettes of the gondolas propelled across the waters of the unconscious by dreams.
In the early evening, I'm still reflecting. We're having a glass of wine at a bar right on the Grand Canal. Is it always shimmering and clear? Probably it smells like garbage in August. The waiter is solicitous, friendly. “How can they stay nice when they have to put up with so many tourists?” The American at the next table has banged his glass to get the waiter's attention. His friends are pretending they're going to push each other's chairs into the water. And they're adults.
“Tourists are how they live. They're used to us. Imagine what it's like in July, with crud bobbing in the canals. We'd all be in a mob, sweltering, and oozing garlic sweat.”
Since it's April, the throngs have not yet arrived, but enough of the world's masses are here to make me want to avoid the main sights. They're often the unappealing kind of tourists in caps and shorts, trailing McDonald's junk behind them. I cross my arms and look sullenly at my neighbors, who are having a fine time.
When I turn my chair so that I can face the water directly and watch the gondolas pass, I observe the oddest thing: The faces of the tourists who are being ferried by the palazzi, the Ca'd'Oro, the lacy Gothic windows, landings lapped with moss, and the umber and old rose facades reflecting and lifting and breaking in the brushed blue water, the faces have gone blank. Their edges soften. Their eyes are full of beauty and the limpid light is on them. They are changed by what is seeing them. They step out of the gondolas like new beings.
All the restaurants we choose are in remote neighborhoods. We get lost and found over and over. After dinner, almost midnight, the calli fall silent; our footsteps echo and we find ourselves whispering. Sleeping cats on windowsills and doorsteps don't even look up. Back at the hotel, the desk clerk tells us about Padania, the separatist group dedicated to seceding from Italy. Today they've hijacked a ferry—although they paid the fare!—and loaded a panel truck painted to look like an armored vehicle. They drove across Piazza San Marco, waving guns. They were shortly arrested. “Carnevale. They think it's carnival time,” he shrugs. Around four, we awake to the sound of “Hut, uno, due, tre, quattro,” and rhythmic marching. We look out onto the campo and see about twenty Padania men in black, goose-stepping around—surreal flashback to the Fascist thirties. Th
ey look well-trained to me but Ed says it doesn't take much talent to goose-step. “I was dreaming,” Ed remembers, “of ice skating down the Grand Canal, doing figure eights in Piazza San Marco then I was gliding backwards underneath bridges I had to duck under.”
“What do you suppose that means?”
He's falling asleep again. “Venice on ice. Iced Venus. Venus and Venice. Us in Venice.”
Now I can't sleep so I read about Lord Byron's wild liaisons with Venetian women, his afternoons of study on the island of San Lazzaro, where Armenian scholars still live, and his swims from the Lido to the end of the Grand Canal. Ed has a talent for sleep. When his head touches the pillow, he's gone. I wonder if Lord Byron's back was as sexy as Ed's, if his luminous skin was as healthy and alive to the adoring wife of some Venetian merchant. Way back in the prenatal abyss—Byron's actual body in the cold; he shakes water from his eyes and sees the palazzi at sunrise, his lame leg trying to work against the tide. Almost, I can feel the current rush and the strain in his muscles. Impossible to read—my eyes are still printed with Venice and the wattage of the bedside lamp rivals a nightlight. Nothing is harder to hold than the reality of the past. My daughter's lost red pocketbook full of treasures. My book slides to the floor but Ed doesn't move. Briefly, I contemplate diving into a canal myself. Although I probably would have to have my stomach pumped, it would be something to add to my résumé.
Deeper into the Country
BATS ARE BACK, SWOOPING ERRATICALLY ABOVE us. They don't seem to fly but to scatter like dark confetti in gusty wind. I used to be afraid one would land in my hair, but after hundreds of dinners under their flight path, I trust their echolocation. I remember seeing an x-ray of a bat in anatomy class. The bones look like a homunculus hidden inside the leathery body. D. H. Lawrence described a bat as “a black glove thrown up at the light, / and falling back,” and its wings “like bits of umbrella,” but I can imagine only the rudimentary trapped human, fated to eat its weight in bugs. Since they share Bramasole with us, somehow folding themselves into cracks between stucco and stone, they now seem like friendly presences.
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