Living as a couple never means that each gets half. You must take turns at giving more than getting. It’s not the same as a bow to the other whether to dine out rather than in, or which one gets massaged that evening with oil of calendula; there are seasons in the life of a couple that function, I think, a little like a night watch. One stands guard, often for a long time, providing the serenity in which the other can work at something. Usually that something is sinewy and full of spines. One goes inside the dark place while the other one stays outside, holding up the moon. I know I must not lean on Fernando right now. Reckonings, hungers, irregular verbs, these are mine alone to fathom while he uses his energy to come clean with himself, to do his own weeding and scrubbing and digging clear down to China. He has work to do, so I’ll provide the peace. As much as I want him to love me, I want Fernando to love himself.
I think he also wants to love himself. He is not only awakening, he has taken up the cudgels. “In order to breathe, he must break all the windows,” said Virginia Woolf about James Joyce. I try to imagine what she would say of Fernando. I say he’s a Mamluk with reins between his teeth, wielding twin scimitars, robes flying, gold jangling, riding like hell across hot sands into the French phalanx.
“Let’s tear down the walls,” he says figuratively one morning, “all of them, and while we’re at it, let’s smash in the doors.” I think he is saying, I want to breathe. “New bathroom, hah. New furniture, hah. Everything that ever happened before was surreal,” he says. “I’ve had a sort of hand-me-down life that never fit, that was never my own. Now I feel like a Jew ready to walk out of Egypt,” he says quietly.
Lord! Why is he always so heavy?
“Can you keep up with me?” he wants to know, sparklers lighting up his eyes. “For example, did you know that we’re getting married on October 22?” It is now early September.
“Of what year?” I want to know.
We had begun the hesitation waltz with the Ufficio Stato Civile on the Lido six weeks earlier. Loins girded, hearts stout, we would accommodate the state’s gluttony for declarations and submissions and disclosures; we would fill the works with signatures and testimonies and stamps and seals. We would have our license to be married. On the first Saturday morning visit, as we climb the stone stairs up to the tiny city hall next to the carabinieri barracks, I believe I am a pilgrim fit to travel through the prickly wilderness of the Italian bureaucracy. Armed in patience and calm, shielded by my portfolio full of papers stamped by the palermitana in Saint Louis, viciously, repeatedly, with the great inked seal of the Italian state, I am near to the finish. Only details remain, it will be a piece of cake, I think, as we stand in line to see the secretary. Fernando tells me to smile rather than try to talk. He says the bureaucracy is always more indulgent to the helpless, and so I am meek as Teresa the Little Flower. The secretary tells us that la direttrice is, of course, occupied and asks why we hadn’t fixed an appointment. Fernando assures her that he has called, left telephone messages and two hand-delivered written messages beseeching la direttrice.
“Ah, certo, siete voi. Lei è l’americana. Ah, yes, it’s you. You’re the American,” says the secretary, looking me up and down. She wears white jeans, a U-2 T-shirt, and forty bangle bracelets and carries a pack of Dunhill’s and matches in case she needs to light up during the twelve-yard voyages she makes from her office to la direttrice’s office. We sit and wait, grinning at each other. “Here we are,” we say, “getting things under way.”
From nine-thirty until nearly noon the Little Flower and the stranger wait, he breaking the vigil at half-hour intervals with an espresso from the bar down on Sandro Gallo. Once he brings back espresso for me, china cup and saucer and spoon, an almond croissant all on a small tray. “Simpatico,” the secretary says of Fernando, before she tells us to come back next Saturday.
The next Saturday and the Saturday after that pass in much the same way, modified only by our taking turns to go to the bar. Four Saturdays pass without our seeing la direttrice. This is an island of seventeen thousand citizens, sixteen thousand of whom are on the beach every Saturday in summer while the rest are at home watching Dallas reruns. Who can be in there with her? On the fifth Saturday, the Little Flower and the stranger are shown directly into her office. La direttrice is gray. She is all gray. Her skin, her lips, her hair, her baggy linen dress are all the color of ashes. She exhales a gray cloud, extinquishes her cigarette, and holds out her large gray hand in welcome, I think, but, in fact, to take my portfolio. She turns each page as though my documents repel her, as though they are blueprints soaked in hell broth. She smokes. Fernando smokes. The secretary comes in to file a sheaf of papers, and she smokes. I sit there trying to distract myself by looking at the print of the sacred heart of Jesus. I say “Jesus,” and wonder how long it will take for me, a pink-lunged woman who has chased and captured free radicals and religiously swallowed antioxidants for ten years, to die of secondhand smoke. The direttrice’s glasses fall repeatedly from the end of her nose, so she picks up Fernando’s, which he has laid casually on her desk, but these do not appear to help.
She closes the portfolio and says, “These papers are old and without value. The laws have changed.” The Little Flower gives forth a short shriek.
“Old? These were prepared in March, and it is August,” I tell her.
“Ah, cara mia, in six months everything can change in Italy. We are a country in movement. The government changes, the soccer coaches change, everything changes as much as nothing changes, and you must learn this, cara mia. You must return to America, establish residency, wait one year and refile your documents,” she says without condolence. The Little Flower wilts, fights a faint.
From beyond my swoonings I hear Fernando saying “Ma è un vero peccato perchè lei è giornalista. It’s really a shame because she is a journalist.” He tells her I write for a group of very important newspapers in America, that they have assigned me to chronicle my new life here in Italy and to write a series of articles about my experiences, about the personalities who help me to find my way. Especially, he tells her, the editors are interested in the story of her marriage. She has deadlines, signora, deadlines. These articles will be read by millions of Americans and those personalities about whom she writes are bound for celebrity in the States. La direttrice removes Fernando’s glasses and puts back her own. She does this exchange several times while I look at Fernando with a mixture of awe and disgust. He has lied through his long white teeth.
“You know I would like nothing better than to help you,” she says really looking at us for the first time. I do not know that, I think. Now, pressing hands to temples she says. “I must go to the mayor, to the regional administrators. Could you write here the names of these very important newspapers?”
“I will write everything for you, signora, and deliver it on Monday morning,” he promises. She tells us to return next Saturday, then we shall see. I begin to understand that it is not so much that the Italian bureauacracy is, itself, twisted, as it is twisted by those who administer it, who inlay and torture it, with their own set of corruptions, personal as thumbprints. There is fundamentally no Italian bureaucracy, only Italian bureaucrats. Fernando decides to tell la direttrice the Associated Press itself has assigned me this series of articles, and hence it is possible that hundreds, thousands of newspapers across America will pick up the stories. He writes all this in a telegram. I think it is diabolical. I pray it works. La direttrice telegrams in response. The troll delivers it, the easy-to-open, resealable envelope still warm from her manipulations.
“Tutto fattible entro tre settimane. Venite sabato mattina. All is possible within three weeks. Come on Saturday morning.”
“What do we do when she asks to see the articles?” I want to know.
“We’ll tell her that America is a country in movement, that assignments change, that everything changes as much as nothing changes, and that she must understand this, cara mia.”
The state feels good in our pockets, but the indulgence of Mother Church remains suspended. We had learned from a single terse audience at the Curia in Venice that the sanction of the church can only be gained—if it is to be gained at all—through a mysterious investigation “that satisfies the bishop of the couple’s avowed intentions to live within the church’s laws.” The searching of Fernando’s spiritual past would be easy, but why did they need to minister the Inquisition on my behalf? Did they want the names and addresses of my churches and priests in New York and Sacramento and Saint Louis? Did they have some great papal Internet where all they had to do was punch up my name and check on my every spiritual peccadillo? And I hope these “avowed intentions to live within the church’s laws” did not include birth control directives. Even if I had only hours of fertility left, I wanted no one to tell me what to do with them. I am broken by too many laws, old laws, new laws.
“We have permission from the state, the city hall is beautiful, let’s just get married there,” I say.
The stranger says no. Though he has tiptoed about behind the last pew of the church all his adult life, now he wants ritual, incense, candlelight, benedictions, altar boys, white carpets, and orange blossoms. He wants high mass in the red stone church that looks to the lagoon.
On a suffocating July evening we sit in the sacristy waiting for Don Silvano, the curate of Santa Maria Elisabetta. Once we get through the social groundings and chatter, the priest says something about how nice it will be to have us “young people” as communicants. I can only wonder at the average age of his congregation. We must attend classes every Tuesday evening, along with other prospective couples, to be instructed in the “moral imperatives inherent in a Roman Church—sanctioned marriage.” Lord! What about our own moral imperatives? Why does he make it sound as though we would have none without his telling us we must? He has the sweet round face of a country preacher and punctuates each phrase with benone, great good, but still he speaks in sermons.
We had begun our instruction classes late in July. One Tuesday when we arrive, the priest takes us aside, tells us our papers are not sufficient, that the Curia has denied us permission to be married in the church. What is lacking, we want to know. “Well, for one thing,” he says to me, “your certificate of confirmation is still missing.”
“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen my certificate of confirmation. I don’t even know if I was ever confirmed a soldier of Christ,” I tell the priest. We go to walk along the sea, and Fernando says it was a grave mistake to admit I was unsure of having been confirmed. I should only offer information necessary for their search and simply let them keep working at it. “But it’s probably a wild-goose chase. Isn’t it better to just receive the sacrament of confirmation now?” We go back to Don Silvano with the idea, and after he says benone two or three times, he tells us that I’ll have to join the next confirmation class, which will begin its studies at the end of September, and, if all goes well, I can walk down the aisle with a group of ten year olds to receive the sacrament in April. April? On the way home I ask again why we can’t be happy with a civil marriage. Fernando just smiles.
So on this morning in September, when the stranger announces we’ll be married in October, I am wordless as stone. Is he forgetting it took six weeks just to get through the state’s papers. The church could take months. Years.
When I find my voice I want to know, “Are you going to use the Associated Press story on Don Silvano?
“Not at all. I have an idea much better suited to him,” he says.
Fernando tells Don Silvano he wants to be married on October 22 because that was the day in 1630 when la Serenissima sent out the decree that a great basilica would be built along the Grand Canal, dedicated to the Virgin Mother in thanks for her deliverence of Venice from the plague. Santa Maria della Salute, it was to be named. Saint Mary of Health. He has pulled at the old priest’s heartstrings. “Che bell’idea,” he says. “Such sympathy is rare. That a man desires to combine his sacred marriage with the sacred history of Venice is something the Curia must consider. And besides, the certificate of confirmation is bound to appear sooner or later. I will offer my personal testimony to the bishop. Are you certain you don’t want the ceremony to be on November 21, on the festival of la Salute?” he asks.
“No. I want October 22 because it was when the whole idea was initiated. It was the beginning. This is about beginnings, Father,” says the stranger.
“October 22 it will be,” says the priest.
“You just lied to a priest,” I tell him, as he pulls me across the avenue and onto the vaporetto. He lets out a long loud whoop, and I realize, this is the first time I’ve ever heard the stranger scream.
“I did not lie! I do want us to be married on that day, which is indeed the day when the government gave Longhena the go-ahead to begin construction on la Salute. It’s all true, and I’ll show it to you later in black and white in Lorenzetti. And besides, Don Silvano was waiting for me to insist, he was waiting for me to give him something with which he could battle the bishop on our behalf. I had to choose a day and be aggressive about it or else nothing would happen for ages. I understand how things work and don’t work here. Furbizia innocente, innocent cunning, is all it takes to live in Italy,” he tells me. “The church, the state, and everyone in between can be compelled by the smallest stab at ego or sentiment. In the end we Italians are Candide more than we are Machiavelli. For all our historical reputation as fabulists and libertines, we are more often soft-touch emotional bunglers always looking about to be admired. We hope to keep duping the world and even each other, but we know who we are. And now let’s just be quiet and revel in the fact that we have a wedding date,” says the stranger.
He takes me to La Vedova behind Cà d’Oro for supper and Ada, whom I’ve known since my first trip to Venice, makes hand-rolled whole-wheat pasta in duck sauce and liver with onions. We drink an Amarone from Le Ragosa, and we never stop smiling. When Ada sends round the word that we’re getting married in October, every shopkeeper and local who comes through the door insists on another brindisi, a toast. No one understands when we drink to the health of la grigia and il prete, the gray one and the priest.
One evening we pack our supper basket and drive down to the murazzi, the great wall of rocks planted by the Lidensi in the sixteenth century to shield the little island from the tempests of the sea. I tie up the wide skirt of my old ballerina dress, and we hike across the stones high above the water, looking for one smooth and flat enough to be our table. We set things up, and by the light of a candle burning in a pierced tin lantern, the Adriatic crashing and booming all around us, we eat quail stuffed with figs and girdled in pancetta and roasted on branches of sage, holding the birds in our hands, devouring the scant, sweet flesh down to the bone. We have a salad of fresh peas and butter lettuces and leaves of mint, all dressed in the quail-roasting juices, some good bread, and a cool Sauvignon from the Friuli. Is it really Prufrock sitting next to me, gently licking quail juices from his fingertips?
He sings “Nessuno al Mondo,” and two fishermen who sit roasting clams and smoking pipes way below on the beach yell bravo up to the rocks. We talk about the wedding, and then Fernando tells me the story of the Festa della Sensa, the marriage of Venice to the sea. On the Feast of the Ascension, the anniversary of the day when the Virgin Mary was to have ascended into heaven, the doge, dressed as a bridegroom, would board the great gilt royal galley rowed by two hundred sailors and embark from the port on the Lido. A procession of flower-wreathed galleys and skiffs and gondolas rowed behind him until they reached San Nicolò, the point where the lagoon flows into the Adriatic. Then the patriarch stood on the prow and blessed the sea with holy water, while the doge cast his ring into the waves saying, “In sign of eternal dominion, I, who am Venice, marry you, o sea.”
I like the symbolism, even if it is a bit of hauteur, that the doge “who is Venice” thinks he can tame the sea by marrying her, I tell Fernando. And did someone dive in to retrieve his ring, or did the pope give him a new one every year? I ask.
“I don’t know about the ring, but I do know I’m wiser than the doges,” he says, fiddling with the lantern, “and I would never think to tame you.” Hmm, I wonder. I pull on my sweater and sip at my wine. I am happy to be marrying the stranger at this time in my life.