We are barely awake when the train pulls into the Gare de Lyons. I pull on my jeans, pull a hat over yesterday’s curls, grab my bouquet, and follow Fernando out and up into the station. We have bowls of café au lait and croissants, warm, each one a thousand buttery crumbs, filling my mouth. I don’t know how many I eat, because I decide to stop counting after three. We are racing out the door into the Sunday Paris light, and we hear, “Les fleurs, les fleurs, madame.” I’d left my bouquet on the bar, and who was there to find it and run after me but that same French woman.
That same French woman must also live in the Latin Quarter where we are staying at Hotel des Deux Mondes because we see her at every turn. She is at Café de Flore in the morning, feeding bits of a jambon beurre to her fluff of a puppy on a leash, and she smiles and nods but never more than that. At five she is already sitting outdoors at Les Deux Magots with a glass of red wine, a little dish of picholine olives, the electric heaters tucked into the awnings warming her. We sit outside, too, sipping at Ricard, welcoming the evening. It seems everything she wants us to understand is contained in those gestures of smiling and nodding and as though she needs to know nothing more about us than she does already. We like having her nearby, and she seems to like having us nearby, and therein is benevolence.
Our days are undesigned. We walk until we see something we’d like to see more closely, and then we walk again until we want to sit or go back to bed or go early to lunch at Toutone so we can go late to lunch at Bofinger or to lunch not at all, so we can go at eight to Balzar for oysters and then to Le Petit Zinc for mussels at midnight. We crisscross the sprawl of Paris again and again, as though she were a tiny parish. When we run into our French woman at Museé d’Orsay, it seems strange enough, but when we find ourselves side by side with her in the Egyptian exhibition at the Louvre, I begin to think our meetings spookish. When she is already drinking tea at Ladurée in the Rue Royale as we come in for ours, I can’t decide who is following whom. Is she a Parisian keeper of the newly wedded, assigned to us for the honeymoon? Is that why she was there in the piazza when we waltzed on our wedding day? I wish one of us would say something about this chapter of accidents and flukes, but none of us does. When a day passes without seeing her, I begin to miss her. “How can you miss someone you don’t know?” Fernando asks. When two or three days more pass without seeing her I know we’ve lost her forever, or that perhaps she was simply some druidess figment, fond of middle-aged brides and waltzes and tiny green olives.
We have stayed a long time in Paris, a month of days and nights inside the rapture. Because it’s nearly time to return to Venice, I begin to wonder how that will feel. “Fernando, what do you think will happen when we return home?”
“Nothing so different,” he tells me. “We’re our own happiness. We’re the festival, and wherever we go our life won’t change much. Different backdrops, different people, always us,” he says, with eyes that look straight ahead but sneak back to check my response to his broad brush. Is he trying to tell me something without telling me again? What’s he saving up for me, behind that jauntiness? We decide to fly back to Venice rather than ride the train, and in the airport we see that same French woman in line for a flight to London. With my eyes I say thank you for her gentle chaperoning through these first days of marriage and she, with hers, says it’s been a pleasure. I can’t help but wonder about her next assignment, about the lucky couple to whom she’ll flash the silky comfort of that goddess smile. And, I wonder, too, about her finding real picholine in London.
It is November 21, and we are just awakening to our first morning back from Paris. I remember this is the Festa di Santa Maria della Salute, the feast recording the day when Doge Nicolò Contarini declared to the Venetians that, after twelve years of ravaging, the black death had been extinquished by a miracle of the Madonna. I want to attend services, to offer a new Venetian’s thanks to the Madonna and others, not only for past miracles but also for their unwitting role in convincing Don Silvano to marry us last month. I ask Fernando if he’d like to go, too, but he says the bank reentry promises enough ritual observance. I tell him I’ll go alone, that I’ll meet him at home for dinner.
On this day each year, six or eight gondolas perform as traghetti, transfer vessels, to ferry the celebrants back and forth across the canal from Santa Maria del Giglio to the Salute. I arrive at four and queue for the traghetto among quiet, almost orderly crushes of people who overload the landing stage. Almost all of them are women, and they stand up in the traghetto, twelve, fifteen of them at a time, tottering, leaning against one another and, without apology, casually linking arms to steady themselves. When it’s my turn I see that the gondolier who is hoisting people down onto the floor of the boat turns out to be my very own, my wedding-day gondelier and he lifts me in a wide arc from the dock down into the boat, saying “Auguri e bentornata. Greetings and a good homecoming to you.” Venice is a small town, after all. And now it’s my small town. The older ladies in the traghetto beam at this expression of allegria and, once I’m settled into the boat, I link arms, too, as though I link arms always. There is a sympathy out here on the wavy black water, in the rocking black boat.
We debark in front of the basilica, and I stand a while looking at her, lit as she is by the wake of powdered yellow light the sun just left behind. Raised up at the apex of the half-circle formed between San Marco and the Redentore on the Giudecca, Longhena’s great church rests upon a million wooden pilings sunk into the mud bottom of the lagoon. Round and immense and sullen, too big for her throne, she seems a grand robust queen sitting in a dainty garden. What conceit had a man to dream this temple, to suppose he could build it and then do it? I walk over to the narrow pontoon bridge that is flung out across the canal only on this one day each year. Venetians negotiate its swinging, shifting platforms, carrying gifts in thanks to this Madonna, who delivered their ancestral families from the plague nearly five hundred years ago. Once the offerings were loaves of bread or cakes stuffed with fruits, jam or salted fish, maybe a sack of fat, red beans. Now the pilgrims bring candles, each holding one like a prayer, the flames of the faithful lighting up the cold stones of the Virgin’s old house. Near the steps of the basilica, I buy a candle, a thick white one whose breadth is nearly too big for my hand to grasp. Without my asking, a woman lights my candle with the flame of hers. She smiles and melts into the crowds.
Generations of women walk together, sometimes three or four sets of linked lives, their connections chiseled into their flesh by the same artist. An old woman walks with her daughter, her granddaughter, her great-granddaughter, and I see the baby girl’s face in the great-grandmother’s face. The old woman’s legs, sticks in white stockings, are brittle, tentative under a pretty red wool coat. What’s her story? She wears a beret pulled low over straight silver hair. The woman who is her daughter has hair straight and silver, too, and the one who is her daughter has hair straight and blond. One of them has pulled the baby girl’s beret low over her blond head, and the four of them are beautiful. This is what I’ve always wanted, I think as I watch them. I’ve wanted to belong, to matter, to cherish and be cherished. I wanted life to be that romantic, that simple and safe. Is it ever that way? Is anyone ever sure? I wish my daughter was walking over this bridge now. I wish I was waiting for her. I would like to hear her voice, to hear our voices together in the dusky blue of this twilight, on our way to visit the Madonna. I would like to tell my daughter that she can be sure.
Inside, the basilica is a great ice cave draped in red velvet. The air is blue from the perishing cold, cold like the oldest cold, five centuries of cold trapped in white marble. No room to move, all of us touch, our breath blowing out in smoky clouds. Bishops and priests stand at every altar blessing the faithful, aspergillums of holy water lifted high above their heads. I try to move closer to a small side altar where a very young priest exuberantly sprinkles the congregation. Perhaps it is his first festival of the Salute, as it is mine, and I think his benediction would be particularly fitting. Feet swaddled in woolen socks, legs in thick suede boots to the knee, long shawl over long coat over long dress, Fernando’s World War II cossack hat with the earflaps down, I am Mother Russia, and still I am cold. I wonder how it must feel to be Venetian, to be part of this rite, to know that one’s blood and bones are descended from the blood and bones of those who have lived and died here for so long. How little I know about myself, I think, as I walk back down the steps and over to the traghetto.
I see him then, beaver hat, long green Loden cape slung over his shoulders, looking like Caesar on the Rubicon. Quickly, I remember something I do know about myself. I know that I love this man with my whole heart. My husband steps up from the boat. “There you are,” he says. “I wanted to surprise you.” As if the idea of surprising me was just revealed to him.
Fernando is right in that nothing is so different in our post-marriage-posthoneymoon-in-Paris-settled-back-in-Venice life, nothing much, except he is hardly ready to live quietly ever after. He says it’s time we began the real work on the apartment. I’m feeling a Paris sheen and noticing a slowly growing comfort in the rhythms of my Venetian life. I have even grown affectionate toward the draped ruins and, at least for now, I am not convinced we must begin tearing apart the walls. He says winter is the right time to do it, that waiting at all means waiting another year, and that’s too long. I prefer to wait. I want to think about Christmas and then about spring. I tell him that I just want to live in peace and without a major project.
He says that’s just fine as long as I understand that the restructuring is inevitable. “We can’t pretend that just because it looks so beautiful in here right now all the structural work doesn’t matter anymore.” He’s right. And I know that somehow he feels a connection between the work on the apartment and his own personal weeding and scrubbing and that’s why he doesn’t want to wait. Exhilarated by the momentum of these past months, Fernando wants more of it. “It’s your project, though,” he tells me one evening, as though he is conceding Austria. “So you’ll have to decide when to begin.”
“At the least, let’s get the plan on paper,” I say, and so we write a list, room by room, meter by meter, of each phase of the work to be done. I see the extent of the whole tantalizing plot in black and white, and not even a minute passes before I feel the primal whip of the fire keepers. Since the beginning of forever, I have always seen to it that the larder was fat and the table serene. But fire keepers are also in charge of fixing up the house. Or, in my case, in charge of watching over those who fix up the house. And the next house, and the one after that. Without even applying, I’ve got my old job back, and I tell Fernando I’m ready.
I spend my afternoons looking at fixtures and appliances and tile and such, getting estimates for various parts of the work. In the evening Fernando and I go together to these suppliers, make final selections and contract the work. I try not to replay the laments and desperate tales of every foreigner who ever negotiated more than the dry cleaning of a raincoat in Italy. Those overblown stories about the everyday machinations of the Italian worker are the stuff of slapstick. Haven’t I just passed through the wickets all the way to my wedding? Still there is some uneasiness about this journey into the jackhammering of what’s left of the bathroom floor. I must remember that not only am I in Italy, I am in Venice, and surely the Princess will present a piquancy all her own.
The first thing to learn is that the whole Venetian enterprise is water-dependent. Venice was raised up a refuge, her inaccessability is her very reason to be. Not so much has changed over fifteen centuries, in that nothing can take the old girl by surprise. Everything and everyone travels her shimmery domain by boat. Even those persons and goods that would come upon her by air must then be plied over the water. Hence there is a surcharge on every potato, every nail and sack of flour, every lightbulb and flat of petunias for passage across the lagoon and canals. For travelers as well as citizens, Venice is the most expensive city in Italy, a fact justified by her watery situation, the same position that grants immunity to all lateness. Who is fool enough to argue with “La barca è in ritardo. The boat is late,” or “C’era nebbia. There was fog”? Even homegrown goods must traverse a canal or two, a rio, a riello. Water is the conduit, water is the barrier, and Venetians use both to their advantage. The woodworker who comes to replace a floorboard or the cement-dusted squad that comes to resurface your walls—all chant the water theme, and this affects how things get done.
We lose the first two weeks in January to “fog,” the third to “high water,” the fourth to “humidity.” On the last day of the month, work begins. That is, the tools of the preliminary destruction are delivered and the workers tramp from room to room, knocking on the walls, measuring, shaking heads, rolling eyes. It’s not as though they haven’t seen the job, studied the situation, approved the plans, but still they pace about like commanders in a war room. Their preferred way to smoke is to wedge a lit stick in the corner of the mouth and let it be. They talk, sneer, get on with things while the cigarette burns down to a long snake of undisturbed ash. Then they remove the butt of it and crush it under their heel. After all, isn’t the floor going to be replaced?
And yet despite such a stammering start, work proceeds nicely, even steps up toward briskness, with the men singing and whistling, their smoldering cigarettes all the while secure between their lips. When these men work, they work hard and well, but they are sprinters with no predisposition for long distance. After three hours each day, they’re at the finish line. Somehow the destruction phase eases into the reconstruction phase, and I’m thinking it’s going fairly well until I notice Fernando shuffling through the rubble on his way to the bedroom one evening. I already understand that the process terrifies him. He won’t be happy until the work is finished and at least twelve people have told him it’s magnificent. But there he is, lying crosswise on the bed, dead-bird eyes cast up, saying he just doesn’t like the damn apartment and nothing we do to improve it is going to make much difference to him.
“It’s small and cramped and there’s no light and we’re spending all this money for nothing,” he tells me.
“It’s small and cramped and there’s no light and we’re spending all this money, but it’s not for nothing. You’re the one who insisted we take the place down to its ribs. I don’t understand you,” I tell him, wishing I could be alone in a room with no sledgehammer, no buckets. Not a single bag of cement. No stranger. “Why don’t we just sell the place?” I take him by surprise. “Is there a sestiere in Venice where you’d like to live? Surely, if we tried, we could find an apartment, with a mansarda, a roof-top space, that we could fix up and both grow to love,” says the gypsy in me. My proposal disturbs him.
“Do you know the cost of real estate in Venice?” he asks.
“About the same as the cost of real estate on the Lido, most likely. Why don’t we go to see an agent and just get a reading on the market?” I ask.
He repeats “real estate agent” in the same tone he might say “Antichrist.” Why are Italians so afraid of asking questions? “If we sell this apartment I wouldn’t want to buy something else in Venice,” he says. “I’d want to really move, to move someplace totally different, away from here. Moving into Venice is not the solution,” he tells me.
Since I’m not sure what the problem is, I am also unsure that Venice is the solution. He doesn’t want to talk about it anymore because he knows if I understand what he really wants to do, I might just agree and then where would he be?
One thing seems clear. We can no longer live in the work site, and in late February we move to the hotel next door. The hotel closes officially from Christmas through Easter, but since two staff persons stay to keep an eye on things, the owners agree to rent us a bedroom and bath. We’ll have access to a pretty country-French-furnished sitting room with an old ceramic woodstove and a small dining room with a black marble fireplace. Our room will be heated, but the corridors and sitting and dining rooms will not. Because of insurance stipulations, we will not have kitchen privileges, as the two caretakers do. A hotel kitchen, equipped, spacious, sparkling, down the hall, and I’m not allowed to use it! Or is it that they are perfectly agreeable to my using it, but are obliged to tell me not to use it?
We bring only two suitcases of clothes, some books, and the Georgian candlestick that has gone where I’ve gone since I was fifteen. When we need anything else, we just go next door. Our bedroom is small and square with a very high ceiling. Flemish tapestries cover two walls, pink Murano sconces flank a large mirror, and pink moiré covers the bed and drapes the long window. There are good rugs, a heavy, dark wood armoire, a sleigh bed, pretty side tables. A burgundy velvet sofa faces the garden.
The solution to the kitchen problem is through the caretakers. They can use it, and so, if I use it with them, I will be only smudging the rules. I am beginning to think like an Italian. The first night I bring back things to cook from the Rialto and ask Marco, one of the caretakers, if he and his colleague would like to join us round our little black fireplace about nine. I tell him I’m braising porcini in sage cream and Moscato, that I’ll grill chestnut polenta with Fontina, that there are pears and walnuts and more Moscato for afterward. Smiling, he asks how I’m going to braise the porcini over the wood fire, knowing already I’m headed straight for the kitchen. I invite him to prep with me and Fernando joins us and then Gilberto comes in, finished with his painting session in the reception rooms, and soon we are all mincing and whisking and drinking Prosecco. That evening, and several evenings each week thereafter, until the proprietors come home, Marco, Gilberto, Fernando, and I keep good company round the little black fireplace in the small hotel.
Gilberto is an extrordinary cook, and when he takes a turn at the burners, he roasts ducks and pheasant and guinea hens, stirs up thick wintry concoctions of lentils and potatoes and cabbages. One evening he announces we will have only dessert. He makes kaiserschmarren, delicate crèpe-like confections cut into ribbons and swathed in wild blueberry jam. He passes a bowl of thick cream and a bottle of iced plum eau-de-vie purloined from the hotel’s private larder, and when we finish every jot, I am grateful I don’t have to climb over thirteen bridges and ride over the waters to get to our bed. When no one cooks, we roast whole heads of garlic and small purple onions over the fire, charring them until they collapse, sprutzing them with good balsamic vinegar, feasting on them with fresh white cheese, trenchers of crusty bread, and good red wine. We live for nearly nine months in the hotel, at first like voluptuous stowaways, then as proper guests, sitting at table with the others, and, once in a while, exchanging mysterious smiles with Gilberto and Marco.
I walk over to our apartment each day, but the workers are almost never there. I’m learning another fact that affects the Italian work ethic. The working-class Italian, the average small businessman, wants less from his life—from his earning life—than do many other Europeans in similar situations. What a working-class Italian can’t do without he usually already has. He wants a comfortable place to live—whether rented or owned makes little difference to him. He wants an automobile or a truck or both, but they will be modest. He wants to take his family to Sunday lunch, up to the mountains for a week in February, and down to the sea for two weeks in August. He wants to offer a good grappina from the Friuli to his colleagues when it’s his turn on Friday afternoon. He’d rather have money in the bank than in his wallet because he’d never spend it anyway. What he needs costs relatively little, so why should he work longer or harder to get more when he thinks himself already well-off enough?
The Italian knows that speed—say, the fitting in of another appointment or hurrying to finish something he can finish tomorrow—will give him not more satisfaction but less, if such preposterous acts interfere with his rituals. An espresso and a chat with friends will always come before the installation of your baseboard. And he knows that because you are such a lovely person, you would applaud his sense of values. When he watches a soccer match rather than work on your estimate, he knows you’ll have expected him to do just that. If he uses your down payment to clear a debt rather than buy materials for your project, he is only practicing a sort of triage, the addressing of the severest need first. In the end this will serve you, as it has his customers before you and will serve those after you. Italians have learned about patience more than almost anyone else. They know that, in the end, a few months, a few years, one way or the other, will not cast long shadows over your well-being nor enlarge it. The Italian understands wrinkles in time.
And then there’s the whole idea of service, which, in Italy, has never quite caught on. Here a customer base is often generations old, and, for better or worse, its numbers will rise and fall only with the birth and death rates. In Italy “cutting edge” refers to one’s knives, good and sharp enough to carve up a salame thin as paper. There was enough innovation during the Renaissance to last another thousand years or so. Ancestral inventiveness suffices here, and few feel the need to improve on it. Who could even think to improve the wheel or a straw broom or the lead plumb that tests the straightness of a wall? Besides, if something goes amiss, the Italian can look to heaven and curse his entire lineage for thwarting him. There is always destiny to blame for any red marks that an evil accountant might enter on one’s annual report. Anyway nonna, grandmother, and everyone else has more sympathy for a whiff of failure than for the smell of new money. Except in sports, the greater sympathy in Italy is reserved for the vanquished. The celebrity Fantozzi has long been the essential, irresistible, benign bungler in Italian film. His is the preferred identity of the working-class Italian male, including even some bankers.
Ambition is an illness in Italy, and no one wants to catch it. At least, no one wants you to know that he has caught it. If the saints and angels had desired him to be rich, rich he would be by now, he tells you. Hence workers in Italy are not less reliable, less efficient, or more cunning than workers are anywhere else. They are, instead, Italian workers, functioning according to a perfectly acceptable Italian rhythm and attitude. It is we outsiders who refuse to accept this. When an Italian rolls his eyes in mock horror at another Italian’s casual approach to a day’s work, there is also a sort of pride in his look that says, “Some things, thank God, will never change.”
Fernando is delighted with the nightly recountings of my newly burnished takes on his countrymen, and he tells his own set of stories about the inner workings of the Italian banking system and its splendidly played farces. He laughs, yet a wisp of rancor lingers when he’s quiet. I don’t ask him about it, since he seems only tentatively at peace with his work-in-progress crises.
We have chosen large black and white marble tiles to cover the walls and the floor. Fernando wants them laid straight, while I think it might be interesting to place some of them on the diagonal. I sketch, and he crumples my paper and says the effect will be too contemporary. I drag him to the Accademia and Correr to illustrate how time-worn and classic black and white on the diagonal is, and he says okay. But he won’t give in on the new washing machine, which he desires to be positioned exactly where the old one sat, thus carrying on the tradition of colliding with it each time we open the door. I want one of those wonders of Milanese design, a washer slim as a suitcase that lives inside a handsome cabinet. He says these machines only wash two pairs of socks at a time, that their cycles last three hours, that they are wholly impractical. I want to talk about form over function, but he says I can just drape the big machine the way I drape everything else, and so it’s the big machine that we order.
I am reading a biography of Aldo Moro, the Italian prime minister who, in the sixties and into the seventies, preached, among other things, a “historic compromise” between the church and the communists. He called for a coincidenza of the virtues of authority and reform, what he termed “converging parallels.” How sublimely Italian, at once civilized and yet socially and mathematically impossible. Each faction rolls straight ahead, alongside the other faction, and both talk across the void between them about their impending coexistence, all the while knowing it will never be. Just as in a marriage.
I ogle and fondle bolts of fabric all over Venice, but, like all the good Lidensi, I must content myself with choices from the goods stacked up in the garage next to the laboratory of Tappezzeria Giuseppe Mattesco in Via Dandolo. The entire inventory seems to be white, off-white, creamy white, pale yellow, or mint green sheer cottons and polished cottons, though there are a few flowered chintzes in shades of lilac and red and pink and an occasional maverick bolt of tapestry. Since we have only a few windows with which to work and three pieces of furniture that need slipcovering, I want some opulent satin and velvet stripe, cinnamon, bronze. I want to know why I can’t buy fabric elsewhere from which Signor Mattesco can make our drapes and slipcovers, and Fernando tells me it’s because, years ago, Mattesco bought out an overstocked mill up in the Treviso, hundreds and hundreds of bolts of the same fabrics, and ever since, he has been measuring and cutting and stitching up the same bargain-priced drapes and slipcovers for everyone on the island. He says working with Mattesco on Mattesco’s terms is a sort of local ordinance.
I think this is a fantastic story but it turns out to be almost true, and so I feel less terrible about never having been invited into any of my neighbor’s houses. Now I know in all of them flutter the same white batiste curtains bordered in little wine-colored balls. At least that’s what Mattesco tries to push off on me. I dig about in his garage for days until I find a cache of ivory brocade. It is heavy and lush and smells profoundly of mold. He is so happy to get rid of the forgotten stuff he says two days in the sun will cure it, and it does, nearly, or enough so that we can use it.
Signora Mattesco is the seamstress. She has white skin and white hair and wears a pristine white smock as she sits at her machine in a sea of white cloth. She looks like an angel and seems confused, sad even, about my not wanting the border of little wine-colored balls.
There is a bottega in San Lio where a father and son pound and carve, twisting thin sheets of metal into chandeliers, lamps, and candlesticks, rubbing the beauties with woolen cloth dipped in gold paint. We’ve been watching them at work in their window, stopping in to visit and chat once or twice each week for months before we even begin to explore what we might like to have them make for us. They and we are happy for one another’s company, and all of us know there is no hurry about deciding anything. Venetians like to stretch certain encounters out as thin as a wasp’s wing, to unroll them pian, piano, ever so slowly. Why scurry, why settle something before it needs to be settled? If enough time passes between the settling and the finishing, one might find one’s self not needing what it was one settled on and someone else finally finished. And anyway, where is the joy in endings? I swear I am beginning to understand Venetians. I continue to think about Rapunzel and the Italian truth that without suffering and drama nothing is worth having or doing. Without the rubble and the screaming and Fernando’s dead-bird eyes, I would have only a bathroom rather than a black-and-white marble-walled and -floored room, where I will take candlelit baths with a stranger.
The Biblioteca Marciana, the Venetian National Library, is another room in my house. A room that is, gratefully, not under construction. The library is located inside a sixteenth-century palazzo designed by Jacopo Sansovino and was constructed to house the Greek and Latin collections bequeathed to Venice by Cardinal Bessariono of Trebisond. Sitting square on the edges of the stone-flagged Molo and the Piazzetta, it looks toward the Doge’s Palace and Basilica San Marco. The library’s spare, severe Ionic and Doric columns are neighbors across the Piazzetta with pink and white Gothic arcades and the smoky glitter of Byzantium, all of them behaving nicely together in a sort of architectural cordiality at the entrance to the earth’s most beautiful piazza.
I have spent more hours inside the dank solemn space of the library than anywhere else in Venice besides my own bed in our apartment or my rented one at the hotel next door. I’m determined to learn to read better and better in Italian. I’ve come to know the stacks and files, where certain manuscripts and collections are shelved, and even what’s behind some of the funny little doors. Free to wander about its three-quarters of a million volumes, I have come to know the particular and merciless cold that saturates its spaces in autumn and winter and to love its smells of damp paper, dust, and old stories. I know which sofa sags less than the others, which lamps actually have bulbs, which writing table gets the warmth of a space heater, and who among my companions reads aloud, who sleeps, who snores. I read-stumble-read history and apocrypha, chronicles and biographies and memoirs in my new language, often in an archaic form of my new language. Librarians, Fernando, dictionaries, my own curiosity, the will to imagine I could understand something of the ancient consciousness of Venice and the Venetians are my spurs.
On Fridays I don’t go to the Marciana at all. I don’t write or read a word. I don’t even go to market or to Do Mori. I simply walk. More peaceful now, I revel in the gifts of whole, golden mornings with no one else’s claim scrawled across them. I remember the days when, if an hour stretched out all mine, I would grab it and run, gorging on its moments as I would an apronful of warm figs. Now I have the feast of hour after hour, and so I choose a neighborhood and explore it as carefully as if I’d just acquired it in a game of blackjack. I walk in the Ghetto and in Cannaregio, or I stay on the water and debark in some unusual post.
One day in the Campo Santa Maria Formosa, I stop to buy a sack of cherries and sit on the steps of the church. Legend says a bishop from Oderzo founded this church after a majestic woman with majestic breasts, una formosa, appeared to him and said he should build a church there and wherever else he saw a white cloud brush the earth. The good bishop built eight churches in Venice, but only this one is called after the formidable lady. I like this story. At the base of Santa Maria’s baroque bell tower there is a grotesque—a medieval scacciadiavoli, devil chaser. The old bell and the even older grotesque are at ease together, the sacred and the profane taking the sun.
When it’s too cold to stay outdoors all day, I ride out to the islands, to Mazzorbo and Burano, or to San Lazzaro to sit in the Armenian library—but I don’t read. I sit there happily among old Mechitar’s manuscripts and the soft padding about of the monks and I think. Sometimes I feel as though I’ve lived here forever. I think about what I’ve read, tried to read, understood, not quite understood. I think about the sadness Venice wears, that faint half-mourning that becomes her. And sometimes I see her naked, her sad mask loosed a moment and look straight into a face that’s not sad at all. And I begin to understand she’s done the same for me, loosed my sad mask, so old I wore it like skin.
In my readings I often come upon some ripple of lust, some small scrap of it, lust being a historic Venetian impulse. Sexual, sensual, and economic hungers drove la Serenissima. A place of arrivals, brief soujourns, debarkings was Venice when she was new as much as she is still. A stopping-off place like no other, the insubstantialness of Venice bewitched. A sanctuary for indulgence. In the fifteenth century more than fourteen thousand women were registered with the city governors as licensed and tax-paying courtesans. A volume was published each year, serving as a guide to the hospitality of these women. It presented short biographies, the family and social alliances, education, and training in arts and letters of each courtesan. The book assigned each one a number, so that when the king of France or an English noble, a soldier waiting his billet on the next Crusade, a mirror-maker in from Murano, a Carthaginian trafficking in pepper and nutmeg came to town and sought some feminine succor, he could send a porter round to the lady’s often sumptuous address, requesting an audience with number 203, or 11,884, or 574.
Should a courtesan’s business lull, she would go for an afternoon to stroll. In wide, fluttering crinolines, red-blond hair woven with gems, white unsunned skin safe under a parasol, she would troll the piazza and the campi, beckoning this one with a deep curtsy, another one with the quick fluttering of her fan or a half-moment’s baring of her breast. A Venetian courtesan wore zoccoli, sandals built up on twenty-inch pedestals—stilts, really—which served to keep her frock from wet and soil while raising her up from the crowds, identifying her.
The Venetian aristocracy and the merchant class, along with the clergy, partook of the sophisticated social ministrations of these goddess spies who kept state secrets, if only for a while, and told truths, if not all of them. These women were as often the wives and daughters of the nobility as they were those of a policeman or a stone-mason. Sometimes they were young women who’d been parceled off to convents by their middle-class, dowry-fearing fathers. These unwilling postulants often violated their vows by secret and not-so-secret forays into this other, this less chaste sisterhood. The convent of San Zaccaria became celebrated for its libertine nuns, for the conspirings and plots they birthed along with a bevy of illegitimate children. Under the inquisition of a bishop’s council, one of these nuns is said to have offered up the defense that her service to the church was greater than her sin upon it, she, after all, having kept as many priests as she could from a slip into homosexuality.
Whatever lust now titillates the Byzantine core of a Venetian he will often reserve for travelers rather than his neighbors. There is a locandiere, owner-manager, of a simple pensione and a four-table osteria who hasn’t tuned up his menu for thirty years. Each morning he cooks the same five or six genuine, typical Venetian dishes. The food he doesn’t sell on a given day he nicely sets apart and conserves. Next day he cooks again, presenting the just-made dishes to his daily customers and the more mature rice and peas or pasta and beans or fish stew to passersby. Hence, the couple from New Zealand is eating the same type of food as are the two Venetian matrons who sit next to them. It’s just that the New Zealanders’ food is seasoned with two or three days’ worth of patina for which the locandiere is wont to charge them thirty percent more than he does the ladies from Sant’Angelo whom he will see again the next day. He knows he’ll never see those New Zealanders again and isn’t Venice, herself, enough to content them? What do they know from pasta and beans, anyway? A merchant of Venice often sees himself separate from his product, be it fish or glass or hotel rooms. He is neither diminished nor enhanced by his own slipperiness, by his asking vulgar fistfuls of lire for yesterday’s fish, slipperiness being another form of masquerade and masquerade being his birthright. The prostitute nun, the ermine-cloaked beggar, the doge who signed a pact on the day of his coronation that left him virtually powerless, these particularly Venetian forms of minor key harmony have given way to less reckless expressions of “coexistence,” sometimes in the form of “pot A and pot B” of pasta and beans.