by André Aciman
* * *
Then one afternoon, a miracle occurred. During a walk past the Piazza Campitelli, I spotted a sign on a door: AFFITTASI (to let). Unable to resist, I walked into the building and spoke to the portinaia, saying that my family might be interested in renting the apartment. When told the price, I maintained a straight face. That evening, I immediately announced to my mother that we had to move and would she please drop everything the following afternoon and meet me after school to visit a new apartment. She did not have to worry about not speaking Italian; I would do all the talking. When she reminded me that we were poor now and relied on the kindness of relatives, I concocted an argument to persuade her that since the amount we paid a mean uncle each month for our current hole-in-the-wall was so absurdly bloated, why not find a better place altogether? To this day I do not know why my mother decided to play along. We agreed that if we couldn’t persuade the portinaia to lower her price, my mother would make a face to suggest subdued disapproval.
I would never have believed that so run-down a façade on the Campo Marzio could house so sumptuous and majestic an apartment. As we entered the empty, high-ceilinged flat, our cautious, timid footsteps began to produce such loutish echoes on the squeaking parquet floor that I wished to squelch each one, as though they were escaped insects we had brought with us from Alberone that would give away our imposture. I looked around, looked at Mother. It must have dawned on both of us that we didn’t even have enough money to buy a kitchen table for this place, let alone four chairs to go around it. And yet, as I peeked at the old rooms, this, I already knew, was the Rome I loved: thoroughly lavish and baroque, like a heroic opera by George Friedrich Handel. The portinaia’s daughter was following me with her eyes. I tried to look calm, and glanced at the ceiling as though inspecting it expertly, effortlessly. I slipped into another room. The bedrooms were too large. And there were four of them. I instantly picked mine. I looked out the window and spotted the familiar street. I opened the French windows and stepped out onto a balcony, its tiles bathed in the fading light of the setting sun. I leaned against the banister. To live here.
The people in the building across the street were watching television. Someone was walking a dog on the cobbled side street. Two large, glass streetlights hanging from both walls of an adjoining corner house had started to cast a pale orange glow upon its walls. I imagined my mother sending me to buy milk downstairs, my dream scooter I’d park in the courtyard.
My mother had come well-dressed that day, probably to impress the portinaia. But her tailor-made suit, which had been touched up recently, seemed dated, and she looked older, nervous. She played the part terribly, pretending there was something bothering her that she couldn’t quite put her finger on, and finally assuming the disappointed air we had rehearsed together when it became clear that she and the portinaia could not agree on the rent.
“Anche a me dispiace, signore—I too am sorry,” said the portinaia’s daughter. What I took with me that day was not just the regret in her dark, darting eyes as she escorted us downstairs, but the profound sorrow with which, as if for good measure, she had thrown in an unexpected bonus that stayed with me the rest of my life: “Signore.” I had just turned fifteen.
* * *
I have often wondered what became of that apartment. After our visit, I never dared pass it again and crafted elaborate detours to avoid running into the portinaia or her daughter. Years later, back from the States with long hair and a beard, I made my next visit. What surprised me most was not that the Campo Marzio was riddled with high-end boutiques, but that someone had taken down the AFFITTASI sign and never put it up again. The apartment had not waited.
And yet the building I never lived in is the only place I revisit each time I come back to Rome, just as the Rome that haunts me still is the one I fabricated on my afternoon walks. Today, the building is no longer drab ocher but peach pink. It too has gone to the other side, and, like the girl with the blackamoor eyes, is most likely trying to stay young, the expert touch of a beautician’s hand filling in those spots that have always humanized Roman stone and made the passage of time here the painless, tiny miracle that it is. At fifteen, I visited the life I wished to lead and the home I was going to make my own some day. Now, I was visiting the life I had dreamed of living.
Fortunately, the present, like the noonday sun here, always intrudes upon the past. Only seconds after I come to a stop before the building, a budding indifference takes hold of me and I am hastening to start on one of those much-awaited long walks I already know won’t end before sundown. I am thinking of ocher and water and fresh figs and the good, simple foods I’ll have for lunch. I am thinking of my large seventh-story balcony at the Hotel de Russie, looking over the twin domes of Santa Maria di Montesanto and Santa Maria dei Miracoli, off the Piazza del Popolo. This is what I’ve always wished to do in Rome. Not visit anything, not even remember anything, but just sit, and from my perch, with the Pincio behind, scope the entire city lying before me under the serene, spellbinding light of a Roman afternoon.
I am to go out tonight with old friends to a restaurant called Vecchia Roma on the Piazza Campitelli. On our way, I know we’ll walk past my secret corner in the Campo Marzio—I always make sure we take that route—where I’ll throw a last, furtive look up at this apartment by the evening light. An unreal spell always descends upon Rome at night, and the large lampadari on these empty, interconnecting streets beam with the light of small altars and icons in dark churches. You can hear your own footsteps, even though your feet don’t seem to touch the ground but almost hover above the gleaming slate pavements, covering distances that make the span of years seem trivial. Along the way, as the streets grow progressively darker and emptier and spookier, I’ll let everyone walk ahead of me, be alone awhile. I like to imagine the ghost of Leopardi, of Henri Beyle (known to the world as Stendhal), of Beatrice Cenci, of Anna Magnani, rising by the deserted corner, each one always willing to stop and greet me, like characters in Dante who have wandered up to the surface and are eager to mingle before ebbing back into the night. It is the Frenchman I’m closest to. He alone understands why these streets and the apartment up above are so important to me; he understands that coming back to places adds an annual ring and is the most accurate way of measuring time. He too kept coming back here. He smiles and adds that he’s doing so still, reminding me that just because one’s gone doesn’t mean one loves this city any less, or that one stops fussing with time here once time stops everywhere else. This, after all, is the Eternal City. One never leaves. One can, if one wishes, choose one’s ghost spot now. I know where mine is.
The Sea and Remembrance
I had hopes of heading off to the Lido by way of the Grand Canal this afternoon, but the water taxi I hired at the railway station has taken a strange turn. This will most likely spoil what I’ve been fantasizing about for months: taking in breathtaking views of all my favorite palazzi lining the city’s waterway on the Grand Canal, before passing St. Mark’s and then heading away from Venice at twice the speed toward the Lido. A long and narrow island some twenty minutes from the city, the Lido faces Venice and its lagoon on the western side; on the eastern side, where the Lido’s shoreline dips into the Adriatic Sea, are its magnificent beaches.
As we’re threading our intricate way through an unusually narrow canal not far from the train station, we keep slowing to negotiate rights of way—with another water taxi, with a gondola, and then with the large industrial barges stationed along the side of the canal that haul bags of cement, steel rods, and stone, even the rumbling debris of several buildings under renovation. I finally muster the courage to ask the driver how long he thinks our ride will take. But he is busy greeting friends on either side of a narrow bridge and doesn’t hear me. Not that he could if he tried: there’s too much going on—too many jackhammers, too much yelling. Venice is regentrifying before my eyes. “Molto trendy,” someone had told me in Rome. “Venice is very trendy.” The word trendy is trend
y this year—Italians are using it constantly, sometimes in the superlative: trendissimo. “You’ll have to be patient,” my taxi driver answers me at last.
A few more turns and I find myself totally lost. To counter my driver’s grimace and show it doesn’t faze me in the least, I affect the weary nonchalance appropriate to jet-lagged travelers arriving too late to argue with underlings. Not a good beginning. I don’t want to let my exchange in the water taxi spoil my arrival, but it has already dispelled the glistening Turner-Ruskin-Monet-Whistler moment I had choreographed for myself. I am reminded of Gustav von Aschenbach, the stiff, fastidious, well-groomed, unbohemian writer in Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, who arrives in the city and is taken to the Lido not by vaporetto, as he had requested, but by gondola: a minor altercation ensues between the incensed German tourist and the headstrong gondolier, until the passenger is finally persuaded that there is really nothing to do but sit quietly and wait till he reaches his destination. In Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film adaptation of Mann’s novella, Aschenbach’s arrival in Venice is accompanied by Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which is ideally suited to the occasion. Tension and premonition are brewing beneath, but on the surface is only the most serene, unruffled strains of Mahler’s Adagietto strumming to Mann’s “splashing of the oar as the wave struck dull against the prow.”
Within moments, however, we’re on none other than the Grand Canal itself—which means that the lagoon is still quite a stretch away and we haven’t even reached St. Mark’s yet. Suddenly I experience both the joy of averting a confrontation with the driver and the absolute bliss of catching sight of an expanse of seawater I’ve given up hope of ever seeing again. From here, even I could steer our way to the Lido. I am almost tempted to ask the driver to let me handle the wheel for a few seconds. But I’d better not. Better sit back and let this water city, like all water cities, take its time and come to me.
Water cities have a way of seducing us, though it’s always difficult to know why, and explanations vary with each city. Perhaps it’s the fact that when afternoons grow too hot and the air too thick, you can always turn your back on your day-to-day life, utter an exasperated “Enough with this,” pull out a bathing suit stashed somewhere in your desk, and dash off to the nearest beach. Unlike in cities where beaches lie an hour from home, in Venice water is available before you ever long for it: the lines between work and play, downtown and resort town, blur. Here, water is a part of life, of who you are, of everything you take for granted, of what you do, eat, and smell. Water cities are like conditional, transient homes; they are our romance with the sea, with time, with space, with ourselves.
Marseille, Barcelona, Trieste, Istanbul—each romances the Mediterranean in its own fashion, mostly by embracing the sea in sweeping C-shaped bays that date back to antiquity. But none has gone beyond romance and literally consented to everlasting matrimony, as Venice has. Here, the nuptials of city and sea are celebrated each year on the Sunday after the Feast of the Ascension, when the doge of Venice throws a symbolic ring into the sea a short distance from the Lido. Where the sea is, so is the city.
There is no spot in Venice where one can’t see the sea, or is not aware of it, or does not worry about it or respond to it. At dawn, at night, in winter and summer, and during the quieter hours of the afternoon, you can always hear the lazy slap of water lapping the stone walls of the canals, licking and ticking like the pulse of the city. As for the smell, it never goes away. Even in the morning, when fresh air is hauled in like produce from the mainland, the smell is there: between sea salt, marine growth, and diesel fuel, something brackish always hovers over Venice.
The smell is more pungent here than anything in Genoa, Naples, or Rimini, perhaps because Venice is all standing water: slushy, bilgy, dirty—an open sewer, some have remarked. The back alleys of Venice, narrow and grubby, spill easily into the canals, and many a time you can catch an elegant Venetian picking up his dog’s droppings in a newspaper, rolling up the contents, and then, instead of throwing them away in the many overstuffed rubbish bins along the city’s campi, tossing the little package with grandiloquent menefreghismo right into the Grand Canal.
The lavish palazzi lining the canal are no better. Although they may spell more opulence per square inch than anywhere in the world, and their ancient glass panels may shimmer—reminders that the one thing wealth likes best is to be stared at and envied—each is dangerously close to going under. Everything is so frail here. Palaces stand together like majestic old dowagers with rotting teeth and magnificent hairdos who do not fall partly because they’ve learned to lean together for support but also because, despite their squat, wizened forefronts, they possess the weary certainty of the aging rich who know that they’re not going anywhere. You, however, are just passing through.
But this is no Potemkin village. The façades of the palazzi don’t come close to what’s inside. And yet beyond their stately interiors are dark, barren courtyards to remind you that Venetian wealth has humble and makeshift origins. Their bricks are ingots of history, cluttered, crammed, packed together; if each one could speak, Venice, despite its reputation for inventing the art of sotto voce, would be the loudest city on earth. Unlike Neapolitans, Venetians are by temperament quiet (they have to be; they live on top of one another) and secretive. It is why the city exudes something at once cagey and sinister—its “hateful sultriness” and “stagnating air,” in Mann’s words. Here, after all, excelled that literary genre called the unsigned denunciation. This is a place made for Pulcinella, pantomime, and Henry James. Bruised and brooding characters, speaking in half-whispers, thrive along gloomy calli, the intricate side alleys.
Within the space of a few years, James, Proust, and Mann felt the dark pull of the city, which stirred their lofty aesthetic sentiments as well as their appreciation for abject sleaze. Venice, wrote Mann, is “half fairy tale, half snare,” a bifurcation echoed in Jan Morris’s description: “half eastern, half western, half land, half sea, poised between Rome and Byzantium, between Christianity and Islam, one foot in Europe, the other paddling in the pearls of Asia.”
Facing the Adriatic Sea, the Lido could be considered the result of the pragmatic Venetian imagination gone wild; it began as a successful pre–World War I financial venture that produced two of Europe’s finest hotels, a leisurely lifestyle quite unlike the fretful pace found in Venice, and a small beach-resort town where people come to swim by day and party by night. It is difficult to imagine a Lido without Venice playing host to it, but once you’ve seen the Lido (which not all tourists know they should), it becomes equally difficult to imagine a Venice without the beaches.
I first saw the Hôtel des Bains and the Excelsior years ago. I had taken the vaporetto directly from the train station, disembarking at the Piazzale Santa Maria Elisabetta on the Lido, on what must have been the very same spot where, in Visconti’s film, the tricky gondolier lets off Aschenbach before absconding back to Venice. From the dock, I had followed Aschenbach’s path down the Gran Viale Santa Maria Elisabetta, “that white-blossoming avenue with taverns, booths, and pensions on either side [of ] it, which runs across the island diagonally to the beach,” as Mann described it, until I reached the shore, not far from the Hôtel des Bains, which is situated on the Lungomare Marconi.
The Hôtel des Bains looks out to the Adriatic Sea, as does the Excelsior, another equally majestic hotel on the same lungomare, or promenade. Both reflect the wealth and grandeur of a world whose inhabitants would just as readily have booked first-class tickets on the Orient-Express or sailed out of Southampton on the Titanic. The Hôtel des Bains is built in a sober and understated Art Nouveau style, while the Excelsior, which opened its doors in 1907, is more flamboyant, with a long Moorish-Venetian façade. No more than a ten-minute walk apart, the two are connected by a shuttle bus that makes a perpetual loop between them. A tiny canal from the lagoon leads to the Excelsior’s private dock, from which a water taxi departs every thirty minutes, shuttling betw
een the Excelsior and the Hotel Danieli, near St. Mark’s Square.
Along with the Danieli, Venice boasts three other superb hotels: the Cipriani, the Gritti, and the Bauer. Normally, a city will give birth to tourist establishments. On the Lido it’s the other way around. The Hôtel des Bains and the Excelsior essentially created the Lido. Lord Byron rode horses on the empty stretches of beach, and there is an old Jewish cemetery here. But whatever the character of the island before the hotels, it was permanently changed by the tourist industry. Here, before World War I—Europe’s rudest awakening ever—the pre-1914 royalty and high society came to summer and partake of swimming, a fad that had seized the Western imagination in the latter decades of the previous century. Here, flush from a great day on the beach, where they had bathed and dried themselves and lounged on striped chaise longues under rows of canopies, members of the high bourgeoisie spiffed themselves up and waited for dinner to be served, doing their utmost to convince others and themselves that their blood had acquired a tinge of blue.
Those days are long gone. We may come to Venice and the Lido chasing sepia memories from bygone days, but we will never find the same setting, the same habits, the same patter of waiters’ deferential footsteps. Yet we are reluctant to replace our daguerreotype vision of Visconti’s stylishly choreographed breakfast scene at the Hôtel des Bains with the dressed-down, barefoot, come-as-you-are, all-you-can-eat mêlée of parents and children that it is today. In the back of our minds, we still hope that the miracle will occur: sitting alone on the veranda facing the sea one evening, we’ll somehow find ourselves drifting into the stately grandeur of a fin de siècle world—a world unaware that it is hurtling toward the conflict that will end it. Thomas Mann’s novella was published in 1912. The guns of August came two summers later.