We are trying to find the right place to breakfast on the rocks along the dam in Alberoni early one Saturday in July. Stepping over and around poles and buckets and lanterns and armies of stray cats that besiege the fishermen, Fernando opens quietly, “You know that idea about selling the apartment? I think we should do it. It’s going to be beautiful when it’s finished, and Gambara says our investment in the renovation will permit an interesting gain for us.” Gambara is the real estate agent in the Rialto whom we finally went to see and who has come several times to look at the work-in-progress. Our consulting with Gambara was an exercise in collecting intelligence, we’d agreed, impressions and numbers to stash away for someday. Is it someday already? Fernando thinks me a revolutionary, but it’s he who is the anarchist.
“When do you decide these things? Am I always across the water when these holy flashes strike you?” I ask. All I wanted was to drink this cup of cappuccino and eat this apricot pastry while sitting on a rock in the sunshine. “How sure are you about wanting this?” I ask him.
“Sicurissimo. Absolutely sure,” he says, as though it’s steel.
“Have you thought about where you’d like to look for another house?” I try.
“Not exactly,” he says.
“I guess we’ll have to look in the quarters we can afford and hope we can find something we like. Probably Cannaregio or Castello, don’t you think?” I ask him as though it’s already steel with me, too.
“Remember when I told you if we sell our place I’d want to move somewhere totally different?”
“Sure I remember. Venice is totally different from the Lido, and we’ll find a house with a little garden so you can have roses, and we’ll have big windows with lots of light and some wonderful view, rather than having to look out at Albani’s satellite dish and the troll’s decrepit Fiat, and we can walk everywhere without having to be on the water half our lives. Believe me, Venice will be totally different.” I say all this very quickly, as though my speaking will prevent him from speaking, because I don’t want to hear what I think he is going to say next.
“I’m leaving the bank.”
It’s worse than what I thought he was going to say. Or is it better? No, it’s worse.
“I don’t know how much time we have before one of us dies or gets terribly sick or something, but I want to spend all of it together. I want to be where you are. I just don’t have another ten or twelve or fifteen years in me to give to this job.” He’s very still now.
“What would you like to do?” I ask.
“Something together. So far, that’s all I know,” he says.
“You don’t want to transfer to another bank, then?” I ask.
“Another bank? Why? I’m not looking for another version of this life. What would be the point of changing banks? One bank is just like another bank. I want to be with you. It’s not as though I’ll leave tomorrow. I’ll wait until we arrange things so that we won’t be hurt by my leaving. But please understand me when I tell you I am going to leave,” he says.
“But isn’t selling the house the last thing we do rather than the first? I mean, if we sell the house, where do we go?” I want to know.
“It will take years to sell the apartment. Gambara says the market is very slow. You know everything moves pian, piano here,” he says like balm. Everything except you, I think. My vision is fading and my heart is thrashing, climbing up into my throat. I flash back to the apartment and back to Saint Louis. I even think back to California. Didn’t I just arrive here? Isn’t Venice my home?
“Why do you want to go away from Venice?” I whisper at him.
“It’s less that I want to leave Venice than it is that I want to go somewhere else. Venice will always be part of us. But our life is not dependent on one place. Or one house or one job. I learned all that from you. I like this ‘always being a beginner’ idea, and now I want to be one,” he tells me. Fernando has never really moved and I don’t know if he even understands what it takes. The spiritual move, I mean. Have I made it all sound too simple? I do that. I’ve always cooked and smiled and curled my hair through tempests. A whistler in caves, a sparkler in the doom, I sauté red herrings. Have I, Pollyanna, inspired him to imagine us as bold children with apples and cookies and cheese tied up in a bandana, off to live in a boxcar, off to cut the opening-day ribbons on a lemonade stand?
My serenity is not built into our new smooth soon-to-be-painted-ocher walls any more than it has been built into other walls. I know we are all waterbirds, camped in stilt houses only a breeze above a coursing sea. And this thought has always excited as much as it terrified me. At this moment, though, I’m feeling only the part about the terror. I wonder how much of my serenity is swirled, if not in the walls, then into this sea and this lagoon, how much of it has seeped into this thin, rosy light, how much more of it hangs in these oriental fogs. I just don’t know right now. Or do I? Can I take it all with me once again? Will the whole of Venice become another room in my house?
And there’s another part to my terror, the thought of inventing the next era, some other way to live, some other thing to do. The little engine that always could. Am I a little engine that still can? And if I can, can he?
Staking out a large flat rock for us, he makes me a pillow with his sweatshirt and we sit together. I shiver in the July sun. Strangely feeble, its heat feels like new April heat, and the sea and the sky and his eyes are all the same blue. I feel feeble, too. I think of all those sinews and spines, the weeding and digging he’s done to get to this point. “Good for you,” I say through my shivers. Just as one can see the young face in a person who is old, right this minute I can see Fernando’s old face in his still young one. I think how much more I’ll love him then. I remember the four generations of women who walked over the bridge on the festival of la Salute. Young faces inside old faces. Old faces inside young ones. If we dare to really look, how much more we can see.
“There will be no pension available for twelve years,” he says, as though I didn’t know that. “It’s only an idea,” he says, which I know means, “It’s the thing I want to do most in the world. Today.”
We sit there on the rock without speaking. We are so tired from not speaking that we fall asleep and it’s nearly noon when we wake. We spend the afternoon and evening making fifty trips back and forth from the hotel to the work site, as though we can’t be certain which of the two environments is the better place to think. Sometimes we talk, but mostly we are silent. His part of the silence tells me he’s thoroughly convinced we should leave Venice. Still, I don’t understand his compulsion. If I could only be sure he understands his compulsion. Our finding each other has affected us almost reversely. It’s not as though we’ve come closer at all. It’s that each one has jumped the river into the other one’s woods. It’s O. Henry. I, the wanderer, full of tears and cornmeal crumbs, have become a nestling, while he, the sleeper, has become a rolling stone. He says no. He says it’s not that we’ve switched sides of the river, it’s that we’ve both jumped in. And he says I’m only tired from holding up the moon for him. “Now, I feel as though the two of us are more the same one. Strains healing, edges smoothing, if you’ll be patient, you’ll see,” he says quietly.
“Okay,” I tell him. I say we will proceed deliberately, shaping things carefully, letting the fates rest while we open and close our own doors.
“Patience,” we promise each other.
In the last days of September, the operai begin moving out their tools and equipment, bequeathing us nine months of detritus and a beautiful new apartment. We shovel and sweep and scour, and soon the little place is glowing. Mattesco comes to hang the drapes, and, piece by piece, we put things in order.
Though it is not yet officially for sale, it has become like my house in Saint Louis before, a place we are waiting to leave.
We comb through weekly journals and real-estate publications that post new business offerings and after supper we lay them out, read them to each other, tear, staple, stack, file, discard, then read, again, the ones we’ve saved. Fernando is convinced we should find a small hotel, a country house with a dozen rooms, a place where we can live as well as work. “But can you really see us as innkeepers?” I ask him, fondling the one newspaper that deals exclusively with restaurant opportunities.
“Yes. I absolutely can. One of us speaks English, one speaks Italian, and this is already a plus. If you can transform the apartment, think what we can do together to transform any other ruin, make it comfortable, inviting, romantic, a place travelers could come home to. I know it will be hard at first because we’ll have to do everything ourselves, but we’ll be together,” he tells me.
I want to show him an entry I’ve found in the restaurant journal. I have begun to see in him some reserved but freshly piqued interest in food. He’s ordering more courageously in restaurants, walking over from the bank to meet me at the Rialto some mornings so we can shop together for supper and then sitting in our little kitchen, watching what I do with the white eggplant he’s chosen. He’ll crane his head round my shoulder as I tip handfuls of tiny golden mushrooms into a pan, sizzling them up in sweet butter scented with sharp, wild onions one of the market farmers had dug up along the banks of the river Brenta. Fernando says the mushrooms smell like the forest where he used to walk with his grandfather. He buys a rosemary plant and tends it like a just-born baby. Still, I fear it’s too soon to open discourse on the possibility of our spending the future heaving stockpots and easing our Wusthofs across oiled carborundum stone. I move in more frugally. “It would be nice if we could offer guests the option of staying to dinner, don’t you think?” I say, barely sprinkling the seed.
But the stranger doesn’t hear me. Deep in road dreams, he’s measuring distances on his maps. First to second knuckle is one hundred kilometers. “I’ll take every Friday off so we’ll have four three-day weekends every month to travel.”
“How can you do that?” I want to know.
“What are they going to do, fire me? We can reach almost any destination in the north in less than ten hours,” he tells me, hopping and skipping his bent finger across Italy like a chess piece.
We read about a small hotel for sale in Comeglians on the sun-forsaken edges of the Friuli near the Austrian border, and we go to find it. We’ve agreed our territory is everything north of Rome, and so we drive three thousand feet up onto the lonely stone stretches of the Carnia, where the temperature on an August Friday at high noon registers thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. The first thing I notice are all the signs that say legna da ardere, wood to burn, along the rough, serpentine roads. I try to imagine February. We’re lost, and we stop to ask the way at the tobacconist who is also the grocer, the cheesemaker, and the local grappa distiller and who at this moment is hacking a wedge from a great wheel of hard, whiffy Carnian cheese. Thrusting his javelin-like tool between our heads he says, “Sempre diritto, always straight.” One of the few interregional commonalities among Italians is how they give directions. They agree all destinations are reached by a straight line. I already miss the sea.
There are twenty bedrooms and eight bathrooms in the stone-and-wood chalet-style hotel, a small bar to one side, and, on the other, an immense fireplace, round and low, with an unsheltered hearth—a fogolar in the Friulano dialect. The fire is spent, but the scent of last night’s woodsmoke greets us.
The signora wants to sell because, since regional and state funding for road building slid off the docket in the late seventies, there have been no workers from Tolmezzo and Udine and Pordenone who would come to sleep in her twenty beds and sit with tumblers of grappa round the fogolar, who would eat ten kilos of sausages and ten more of beefsteak in an evening and a whole cauldron full of polenta that the signora had made from white cornmeal and poured out, steaming, onto a thick wooden board set close by the fire. She says she’ll give me her recipe for the sauce of sheep’s intestines and red wine that’s delicious with polenta. Fernando asks about tourism, and she tells him that people mostly stay in and around Tolmezzo or San Daniele del Friuli, that there’s nothing much to bring them into Comeglians, but that with a little patience the workers will be back. “Vedrai. You’ll see,” she says as we wave good-bye to her from the car.
We are exploring a bit in Verona, having heard about a locanda with eight rooms for sale in Via XX Settembre, when, over a glass of Recioto at the Bottega del Vino, a man dressed in whisky-colored suede who’d been candidly eavesdropping on our Esperanto, introduces himself. He says he’s meeting some American friends for dinner and invites us to join them. Plausible in New York, this is outrageous and invasive behavior, a stab in the elegantly woven Veronese reserve. But we consider it over another glass of wine and half an hour’s preamble to our life stories before gracefully refusing and exchanging business cards. When he leaves, the barman tells us our companion is a count, a gentleman farmer, a champion horseman whose estate is up in the hills of Solferino in Lombardy. We say, “How lovely,” and go off to Al Calmiere to eat pastissada, smoked horsemeat braised in tomatoes and red wine. Back in Venice, the count has already left us a message.
We are invited to spend next weekend on his farm, and we accept. He has an eighteenth-century villa with a half dozen cottages and paddocks and barns scattered over the velvet, silken lands where the Gonzaga were once lords. The count invites us again and again. He asks us to come for a weekend of riding and hunting, to cook, if we wish, that we’ll go to the markets and the cheesemakers, the winemakers, that we’ll collect provisions for a four-day feast. I look to Fernando, who surprises me as well as the count with a vigorous, decisive, “Perché no? Why not?”
The count’s guests are mostly English, with a German couple and two Scotsmen. Aproned and scrubbed, Fernando and I roll out dough for tortelli and plump them big as teacup saucers with roasted pumpkin and crushed amaretti, crisp almond macaroons, and slivers of mostarda, fruit preserved in mustard oil. We set beef to marinate in an old gray crock and drown it in Amarone; we make buckwheat polenta with braised quail and risotto the way the rice farmers once made it in the fields. Each day’s lunch we seal with the heel of a Franciacorta and a thick, runny wedge of Gorgonzola, drizzled with the count’s wild thyme honey.
The guests ride and eat and drink. By the third day, everyone, except the Scotsmen, leave off riding for long sleeps broken only by the call to table. The whole event is luscious. When the count offers us a home and lucrative positions, we listen, but we tell him it’s our own adventure we’re after and not a portion of his. These few days seem to have empowered Fernando. He’s talking about developing knife skills, and asking about the difference between naturally cave-aged Gorgonzola and the sham kind that’s shot full of copper wires to accelerate the formation of it’s whiffy green veins. He seems invigorated.
For three, sometimes four days of each week we race over the autostrada and curl up mountain roads and careen back down them to skim past vineyards and groves of olives, alongside tobacco fields and sheepfolds and sunflowers toward the next city, the next hill-town, the next medieval village. We drive through the Tuscan hills of Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Piero della Francesca, pink sand slopes buttoned in black cypress, the red Siena earth just turned and waiting, the powdery light, a watercolor landscape of mulberries, figs, olives, and vines. If I can’t look at the sea, I want to look at this. But we don’t find a house in Tuscany.
We talk with every real estate agent and tourist officer we can find, every fruitseller, baker, and barman we meet. We stalk and prowl and shadow those we think might inform us. We wave down farmers from their tractors and, over the grinding of their motors, they point us to ruins in far-off fields. And just when we’re tired and hungry enough to cry, we find some small osteria at the edge of an unlit gravel path that traverses a wheat field and are fed a great golden tangle of pasta by a lady who’s been rolling it out there twice a day for half a century.
We don’t find a house, but we find a handmade sign that says, “Oggi cinghiale al buglione. We follow the sign to a renovated stable and a farmer’s wife who sits us down on wooden benches while she braises a boar’s haunch with garlic and tomatoes and white wine over an olive wood fire. We eat and drink with people who have never seen Venice or Rome, who have never lived anywhere but the place where they were born. We don’t find a house, but we find a mill in a chestnut grove driven by a wooden paddlewheel powered by a stream that’s been roiling since the mastodons. We find grape growers who still celebrate the harvest and the crush with torchlit suppers among the vines, and olive farmers who harvest the green-purple-black almost mature fruit by hand and press it between ancient stones turned round and round by a mule. The oil is green as grass and full of tiny, stinging bubbles. It smells like roasted hazelnuts, and, when the oil is spilled out over hot wood-roasted bread and whispered with sea salt, it tastes like the only food in a perfect world.
Bruised from trekking through rains and heat and climbing crumbling stairs, we keep going, week after week, until more than a year has passed. Still, there is no small hotel, no farmhouse-to-renovate, no place to work, and no place to live. It’s Christmas Eve, and we are heading back to Venice after another of our journeys when Fernando veers off the road. “How would you like to spend Christmas in Austria?” he wants to know, reaching for one of our six hundred map books.
“We can be in Salzburg by six.” We’re prepared enough; an overnight bag always waits in the trunk. What about our presents and the tortellini and the turkey with the walnut pesto stuffed under his skin waiting back in Venice? He says we’ll have Christmas all week. At least I’m wearing new boots and my green velvet hat. He is telling me there is sure to be snow, and I’m saying, “Let’s go,” and when we arrive at the Weisses Rossl, a string quartet is playing “Silent Night” in front of a crèche across the way. It snows.
Fernando was right, I think, as we walk back to the hotel after midnight mass. Surely these have been journeys to find the next part of our lives, but more, they have been journeys toward the center. We have been married for two years. I try to remember life without him and it’s like trying to remember an old film I thought I’d seen but perhaps never did. I ask him if he’s sorry we didn’t find each other when we were young, and he says he would never have recognized me when he was young. And besides, he was too old when he was young, he says.
“I feel the same way,” I tell him, remembering when I, too, was so much older.
We decide to go to New York to meet up with the children, to visit friends. On the day before our departure, we walk in the Rialto and Fernando says, “Let’s stop in and tell Gambara to put the apartment on the market. Maybe we have to approach the change from another direction.” We sign up the apartment and go home to finish packing.
Packing and unpacking, it’s all we do. We are a touring company. My secret to serene travel is to wear everything I can’t afford to lose, and because it’s February, this task is easy. I am layering a tweed vest over two thin cashmere sweaters over a silk shirt, a long wide suede skirt over slim leather pants when Gambara rings to say he will be coming by at eleven with a potential buyer, a Milanese named Giancarlo Maietto who wants a beach house for his retired father. At eleven we’ll be somewhere over the Tyrrhenian Sea I tell him, and he says to leave the keys with the troll and to call him the next day from New York.
But we don’t call him on the next day, or on the day after that. On our third day in New York we are tucked in at Le Quercy behind plates of duck confit and potatoes that are dark gold from a fast, hot dalliance with a pint of duck fat. A bottle of Vieux Cahors is close at hand. Fernando says he feels guilty for not calling and wants to call right then, even though it’s seven-thirty in the morning in Venice. I am wholly absorbed in duck thighs and wine and, through eyes half-closed, I wave him on to the telephone. My face and hands are glossy with duck fat when he returns to the table to say, “Gian-carlo Maietto bought the apartment.” I exchange my clean plate with his, still full of confit, and I continue to eat. “What are you doing? How can you eat when we don’t have a place to live?” he whines.
“I’m living in the moment,” I tell him. “I may not have a place to live, but right now I do have this duck, and before you put it up for sale I’m going to eat it. And anyway it was you who said perhaps change must come from another direction—and so it did. It’s all going to be fine,” says Pollyanna through lips ornamented in two purply points, a sensualist’s mustache earned from deep drinking the Cahors. The return of Mr. Quicksilver. Will he always resist more than two palmy days in a row?
By the end of our first week in New York, the offer, the counteroffer, and the countered counteroffer have been proposed and accepted. Maietto will pay only a sliver less than our pitilessly high asking price. Because he knew we were not yet hard-pressed to sell the house, Gambara told Fernando to shoot for the stars, and he did. Back in Venice we meet with Gambara who tells us Maietto wants possession in sixty days, but we ask for a ninety and Maietto agrees. On the fifteenth of June we will leave. To go where, we must yet divine. We tell ourselves we must be diligent, keep looking. If we come up empty, we’ll put our things in storage and rent a furnished place in Venice until we come up flush. That’s what we say, but Fernando has the sighs, the angsts, and on the morning he’s due back at the bank he asks if I’ll take the early boat with him and walk with him to work.
We walk right past the bank as though he forgot it was there, and when we meet one of the tellers outside he throws him the keys to the safe and says, “Arrivo subito. I’m coming right away.”
We walk out of San Bartolomeo, past the post office and over the Ponte dell’Olio, and he’s not saying a word. The Princess is beautiful this morning, peeking from behind her March veils. When I ask him if he doesn’t think so, too, he doesn’t hear me. We stop in at Zanon for an espresso and then rush over the Ponte San Giovanni Crisostomo, as though this was the way to the bank rather than away from it. We’re almost running now, along the Calle Dolfin and over another bridge into Campo Santi Apostoli, full of children screaming their way to school, and then into Campo Santa Sofia and onto Strada Nuova. He says nothing until we come up to the vicolo that leads out to the Ca’ d’Oro landing stage. And then all he says is, “Let’s go back.” We ride but we don’t debark at the next stop, which is the bank, so I think we’re going home. Instead we get off at Santa Maria del Giglio, and he says, “Let’s go into the Gritti for coffee,” as though it’s our habit to take a ten-thousand-lira espresso in Venice’s most plush hotel.
He doesn’t sit with me at the little table in the bar but plunks down a fresh package of cigarettes and his lighter and asks the waiter to bring a cognac. “Only one, sir?” asks the barman.
“Yes. Only one,” he says, still standing. To me he says softly, “Smoke these, drink this, and wait for me right here.” He has perhaps forgotten I don’t smoke and that I like my cognac after dinner rather than at nine-thirty in the morning! He’s gone in a flash. But where? Has he gone to call Gambara and kill off the sale? Could he even do that if he’d wanted to?
Half an hour, perhaps thirty-five minutes pass, and he reappears. He is dazed and looks as though he’s been crying. “Ho fatto. I did it. I walked over to Via XXII Marzo to the main office and climbed the stairs up to the director’s office, and I walked in and I sat down and I told him I was leaving,” he says, tracing his every move to assure himself he’d really made each one of them. Always in control of his bella figura, now he is unselfconscious in this Lilliputian space among the barmen and the concierge, three men drinking beer and a woman puffing on a very large cigar. He proceeds with his story. “And do you know what Signor d’Angelantonio said to me? He said, ‘Do you want to write your letter here, now, or bring it to me tomorrow? As you wish.’ ‘As you wish,’ was all he had to say to me after twenty-six years. Well, I did as I wished,” he says. He tells me he sat down in front of a manual Olivetti and pecked out his salvo, that he tore it from the rollers and folded it in three and asked for an envelope, which he addressed to d’Angelantonio, who still stood a yard away behind a desk.
I have learned these tempests of his are not tempests at all but only the last quick darts of lightning that come after long, seething reflection. Fernando’s passages are nearly always silent and nearly always private. I understand this, and still he staggers me. I reach for the untouched cognac and try to begin lining things up in my mind. I think the story goes something like this. I come to Venice and meet a stranger who works in a bank and lives on the beach. The stranger falls in love with me and comes to Saint Louis to ask me to marry him, to ask me to leave my house and my work and come to live happily ever after with him on the fringes of a little island in the Adriatic Sea. I, too, fall in love and I say I will, and so I do. The stranger who is now my husband decides he no longer wishes to live on the fringes of a little island in the Adriatic Sea nor work in a bank, and so now neither he nor I have a house or work and we are beginning at the beginning. Incredibly, I am at ease with all of this. It’s only the whiplash way in which he moves that stings. What happened to patience? Then again there has been not one prudent act in this story.
I drink a ten o’clock cognac, and I cry and laugh. It’s the old terror-and-joy two-punch, once again. Anyway, what does it matter that we are doing everything backward and sideways? In ten minutes I’ll have found my wind. Still I ask him, “Why today and why without our having talked about it?”
“Sono fatto cosi. This is the way I am,” he says. A clean self-acquittal, unambiguous, selfish I think. Fernando is Venetian, a son of the Princess. And on both their faces folly and courage look the same, bleeding into this morning’s muslin light.