Thump. The first carriageful of suitcases is thrust through the swinging doors from the baggage claim out into the horrid yellow and black of Malpensa airport. The good captain had seen to it that all my things, except those already given away, arrived with me. Thump. A frontier guard, shepherding things, leaves his automatic weapon dangling from his belt as he forces one cart after another out into the arrival area while I look on. “Buona permanenza, signora,” says the guard sotto voce and barely moving his mouth. “A happy stay for you, my lady. I hope he is a true gentleman.”
“How do you know that a man is waiting for me?” I ask him.
“C’ è sempre un uomo,” he answers with a salute. “There’s always a man.” I sling two carry-ons over squared shoulders and follow my bags out into the crowd of those waiting. I hear him before I see him.
“Ma, tu sei tutta nuda,” he is saying from behind a sheaf of yellow daisies, yellow, like the Izod shirt he wears loose over green plaid slacks. He looks like a technicolor anchovy, so thin—small almost—standing among the others behind the cordons. Blueberry eyes set in sun-bronzed skin, so different from his winter face. I am going to marry that stranger there in the yellow Izod shirt, I say to myself. I am going to marry a man whom I’ve never known in summer. This is the first time I’ve walked toward him while he stood still. Everything around him in sepia, only Fernando is in color. Even now whenever I come upon him, meet him in a restaurant, under the clock tower at noon, at the potato lady’s table in the market, in our own dining room when it’s full of friends, I flash back to that scene and, for half a moment, once again only he is in color.
“But you’re all naked,” he is saying again, crushing me into the daisies he still holds tight to his chest with one hand. My legs are bare, stretching up from my new sandals to a short navy skirt and a white T-shirt. He’s never seen me in summer either. We stay fixed, quiet for a long time in that first embrace. We are shy. We are comfortably shy.
Most of the bags and cases we fit into the the car’s trunk and backseat, neat as fish in a tin. What’s left he secures to the roof with a length of plastic rope. “Pronta?” he asks. “Ready?” A blithe transfiguration of Bonnie and Clyde off to burgle the romance of our lives, we race northwest at eighty miles per hour. The air conditioner is blasting out great puffs of icy air, the windows are rolled down, inviting in the already hot, wet air outside. He must have both.
Elvis purls out his heart. Fernando knows all the words but only phonetically. “What does it mean?” he wants to know. “I can’t stop loving you. It’s useless to try.” I translate lyrics that I’d never before paid attention to, words he’d been listening to forever. “I’ve missed you since I was fourteen,” he says. “At least that’s when I began to notice that I missed you. Maybe it was even earlier. Why did you wait so long to come to me?” There is about all this a sensation of mise-en-scène. I wonder if he feels it. Could anything really be this good? I, who think Shostakovich a modernist, belt out “I can’t stop loving you” into the great plain of the Padana stretched out flat and treeless over Italy’s unlovely industrial belly. Perhaps this is the date I was always expecting to have.
Two and a half hours later, we take the exit for Mestre, the belching, black-breathed port that warehouses petroleum for all of north Italy. Can it be true that Venice lives cheek to cheek with this horror? Almost immediately there is the bridge, the Ponte della Libertà, the Bridge of Liberty, five miles of it, raised up a scant fifteen feet and hurled out over the waters, riveting Venice to terra firma, dry land. We’re nearly home. It’s high noon under a straight-up sun, and the lagoon is a great smashed mirror that glints and blinds. We eat thick trenchers of crusty bread laid with ruffles of mortadella, lunch from the little bar in the car park while we wait for the ferry that will carry us to the Lido.
It is a forty-minute cruise on the Marco Polo, traversing the lagoon and slicing down the Guidecca Canal to the island that is called Lido di Venezia, the beach of Venice. Thirteen hundred years ago fishermen and farmers lived here. I know that now it is a faded fin de siècle watering hole where, during its heyday, European and American literati came to rest and play. I know that its village of Malamocco, once the Roman settlement of Metamaucus, was the eighth-century seat of the Venetian republic, that the Lido is the stage for the Venice Film Festival, and that there is a casino. And Fernando has told me about it so often, I can imagine the tiny church there, and, in my mind, I can see its plain red stone face looking out to the lagoon. I know that Fernando has lived on the Lido for nearly his whole life. More than this, I have yet to learn.
After the boatman guides the car onto the ferry, Fernando kisses me, looks at me a long time, then says he is going up on deck to smoke. His not inviting me to come along perplexes me, but vaguely. If I really wanted to go upstairs, I would go. I lean back then and close my eyes, trying to remember what I knew I must be forgetting. Was there no work waiting? Nothing left undone? No. Nothing. I have nothing to do, or perhaps is it that I have everything to do? The car leans into the swells of the sea. Maybe it’s only me keen to feel some sort of rhythm. There is nothing else at this moment but a crisp, fresh, just unrolled space to color. I feel a not unpleasant but curious sort of shift in equilibrium. I feel it. One foot is still six thousand miles away. Just as the boat bumps itself into the jetty, Fernando returns to the car, and we drive off the boat.
In a breezy drive about the island he points out landmarks, personal and cultural. I try to remember how long it’s been since I really slept and I compute fifty-one hours. “Please can we go home now?” I ask from my trance. He turns off the Gran Viale Santa Maria Elisabetta, the broad avenue that follows along the seaside of the island, onto a quiet street behind the Film Festival theaters and the very worn chic of the Casino, and then into a narrow vicolo, alleyway, framed in old plane trees whose leaves reach across to each other in a cooling arcade. A great iron gate opens onto a drab courtyard lined in skinny, one-Italian-car garages. Above them rise three levels of windows, most all of which are sheathed in persiane, corrugated metal privacy curtains. Exactly as he promised it, home is inside a postwar concrete bunker. There is no one there except a very small woman of indeterminate age who darts about the car in a kind of tarantella.
“Ecco Leda. Here is Leda, our sympathetic gatekeeper,” he says. “Pazza completa. Completely crazy.” She is gazing upward, beseeching. Is she emotional because of our arrival? In fact she offers no greeting, neither uttered, shrugged, nor nodded. “Ciao, Leda,” he says, without looking at her or introducing us. Leda gargles out something about not leaving the car in front of the entryway too long.
I try, “Buona sera, Leda. Io sono Marlena. Good evening, Leda. I’m Marlena.”
“Sei americana?” she asks. “Are you American?”
“Si, sono americana,” I tell her.
“Mi sembra più francese. You seem more French to me,” she says, as if she means Martian. We unload, she continues the tarantella. Much as I try, I can’t resist furtive peeks at her. She is a Faustian troll with black-olive eyes hooded like a hawk’s. Over the next three years I will never once hear her laugh, though I will hear her grizzly shrieks and see her fists extended to the heavens more times than I wish to remember. I will learn too that she wears teeth only to mass. But here, now, I romanticize her. All she needs is some tenderness and a warm bitter-chocolate tart, I think.
As we shove and pull my bags along the corridor to the elevator, a few people are in arrival or departure. Buon giorno. Buona sera. The dialogue is stingy. We might be hauling cadavers in burlap bags for all they care. On the last trips out to the car, I notice more than one person cantilevered out of as many just-unsheathed windows. L’americana è arrivata. The American has arrived. Holding out for a scene from Cinema Paradiso, I wait for at least one black-stockinged, kerchiefed old woman to come forth and press me to a generous bosom scented in rosewater and sage. But there is no one.
Elevators are announcements, and, as much as do entry halls, they tell the house’s story. This one, its atmospheric composition oxygen-free after fifty years of carting smoking human cargo, is three feet square, paved in linoleum, and painted a shiny aquamarine. Its cables screech and creek under the weight of more than one of us. I read that it is approved to transport three hundred kilos. We send the bags up alone, a few at a time, while we race up three flights to meet them at the apartment door. We do this six times. Fernando can no longer avoid opening the door. He braves it with, “Ecco la casuccia. Behold the little house.”
At first I can’t see a thing except the outlines of cartons and cardboard boxes, which seem to be stacked everywhere. Universal Flood aromas lie thick in the air. With the flicking on of an overhead bulb Fernando illuminates the space, and then I know it’s a gag. I hope it’s a gag. He has taken me to an abandoned space, some third-floor storage room just for laughs, and so that’s what I begin to do. I just laugh and giggle, “Che bellezza. How lovely,” cupping my face in my hands and shaking my head. Perhaps this is where the black-stockinged old lady comes forth to press me to her bosom and lead me to my real house. I recognize my handwriting on one of the boxes, and it becomes clear that this is my real house. Scoured of all vanities, it is the lair of an ascetic, the mean hut of an acolyte. Savonarola could have lived here, all of it bespeaking reverence for a medieval patina, undisturbed by the passing of time or someone’s rifling about with a dust cloth. I have come to live in the shuttered-up gloom of Bleak House. I begin to understand the real meaning of Venetian blinds.
The space is astonishingly small, and I think immediately that this is good, that a tiny bleak house will be easier to reform than a large one. Fernando hugs me from behind. I go about lifting the wretched persiane, letting in air and sunlight. The kitchen is a cell with a Playskool stove. In the bedroom there is a bizzare oriental carpet covering one wall, a collection of very old ski medals hang from rusty claw-shaped hooks and, like ashen specters, tatters of curtains float over a windowed door that opens to a cramped terrace piled in paint cans. The bed is a double mattress on the floor, a massive and ornate burled-wood headboard leans against the wall behind it. There is perilous walking in the bathroom, what with missing and broken tiles and the great girth of an ancient washing machine dead center between the sink and the bidet. I notice the washer’s hose empties out into the bathtub. There are three other tiny rooms whose stories are too terrible to tell. There is no evidence of preparation for his bride’s arrival, and he is neither fey nor apologetic when he tells me, “A little at a time, we will make things suit us.”
Over and over again he had talked with candor about where and how he lived, that the where and how were passive symptoms of his life, that the apartment was the space in which he slept, watched television, took a shower. If I am reeling from first-sight shock, it’s the fault of my own glossing over. This is neither more nor less than an honest homecoming. It’s good that Fernando knows it is for him I have come to Italy, not for his house. Houses are easier to find than are sweet strangers, I think. I think again, this time to a man I knew in California. Jeffrey was an obstetrician, successful, madly in love with Sarah, an artist, starving, who was madly in love with him. After years of fencing, he set Sarah aside for an ophthalmologist, extremely successful, whom he married almost immediately. His rationale was unembarrassed by sentiment. With the doctor, he said, he would have a better house. That is, Jeffrey married a house. This thought soothes me. All this aside, I miss my French canopied bed. I want to drink a good wine out of a beautiful glass. I want a candle and a bath. I want to sleep. As we set about clearing a space on the bed, he says once again what he’d said way back in Saint Louis. “You see, there are un pò di cosette da fare qui, a few little things to do here.”
A sickle moon shows in through the tiny, high-set window in the bedroom. I focus on it, trying to quiet myself for sleep. I’m still on the airplane or maybe in the car, on the ferryboat. I have moved through each leg of the day’s odyssey at descending speeds. It’s as though, at some point during the journey from there to here, a lapse of sorts has occurred, a short death, during which one era passed the keys onto the next. Rather than being delivered to the edges of a new life, I am already inside it, through the looking glass and center stage. Sensations are untethered. I can’t sleep. How could I sleep? Now it’s me lying here in the Venetian’s bed. Fernando sleeps. His breath is warm, constant on my face. Searching for rhythms? Here is a rhythm I think. Very softly I begin to sing. “I can’t stop loving you.” A lullabye. If it’s so that dreams dreamed just before waking are true, what are dreams dreamed just before sleeping? I fall into half-dreams. Half-true?