Sea Shells From The Adriatic And Roast Sardines

Venice is the fabled city. I know it from Shakespeare and from the movies. What will I see with my own eyes? Rain strikes my face as we disembark from the train. On the dock is an odd, slatted, wooden sculpture, triangular in shape—which I don’t have time to consider since we immediately board a traghetto for the Lido, where our group has rooms reserved in a cheap hotel.

The students, who have all slept on the train, are in the mood to take photographs; they rush outside of the glassed-in area to the bow of the boat and lean recklessly upon one another while their friends take pictures to document their arrival in the mythical city. They seem to take dozens of pictures of themselves at every historical site, using it mainly as backdrop for their mugging.

Nicoletta is busy counting heads; her general query is always the same: “Check for your roommates! Is everyone here?” Since no one speaks up, she assumes, fairly, that everyone is on the boat till we are well out on the canal, when someone shouts, “Oh, Clarita isn’t here!”

Her consternation is visible; she and Joe confer. What to do? Joe reminds Nicoletta that Clarita used to be in the Marines; Clarita will probably find her way to the hotel on the next traghetto. Though the students are all over eighteen, and in theory the teachers are not “in loco parentis,” both Nicoletta and Joe are concerned about the kids’ safety.

I turn my attention to the waterway, prepared for the great scenes of the Grand Canal, the palazzi on the waterfront, the carved facades I have studied in my guidebook “Venice & the Veneto.” Joe seems puzzled—we are in some kind of backwater place, passing unremarkable buildings, docks on which gas stations seem to be located, loading piers, industrial storage areas. He and Nicoletta confer again—“I think they’re taking us on a back way to the Lido,” she says. “It’s probably shorter this way.” She looks thoroughly frustrated. The students are still so busy making human pyramids and taking photos they haven’t noticed that we aren’t yet seeing the beauties of Venice. Oh well. Joe and Nicoletta assure one another there will be plenty of opportunities for everyone to experience the Grand Canal in all its aspects.

The Hotel Euclid at the Lido of Venice has an “ascensore” only to the fourth floor; however Joe and I have been assigned “una camera matrimoniale” on the fifth floor. We struggle up the narrow staircase, bumping our small suitcases behind us, and find ourselves in a room as small as a closet, damp and chilly on this rainy day, no heat in the pipes, and a bathroom that seems to serve in its entirety as a shower. The narrow “letto matrimoniale” is shoved against a wall; the mattress is rock hard. The towels in the bathroom are made of stiff, starched waffle-squares that scratch my face when I dry it. When I look out the window, I see only a clothesline hung with large white sheets that flap in the wind and block whatever view may be out there. I feel my good will sifting away; childish emotions, easily aroused lately, are creeping up on me: I want to blame someone. Why didn’t we get a good room? Why doesn’t the elevator go to our floor? Why isn’t the heat on? Why don’t we have a view of something? Anything! (Why didn’t I stay home? Not just home in Florence, but home at home, in California!)

Now that we have deposited our luggage, we are scheduled immediately to take a traghetto back to Venice. All this transporting of my body has begun to seem a major burden. (I remember one writer’s arch comment about travel; his body, he said, was the “valet for his soul.”)

A call to Nicoletta’s room confirms that Clarita has indeed turned up safe at the hotel. In fact, she got here somehow before the rest of us. But there’s another problem; Mai Jing, our Chinese student, neglected to bring any identification with her—neither visa nor passport nor credit card—and the hotel is forbidden to register anyone without proper ID. Nicoletta and Joe hurry back to the registration desk to argue that the girl is with our group, an authentic student, registered in the travel-abroad program. They plead for the clerk not to refuse her accommodation. He mumbles and grumbles, but finally sees that to refuse is more trouble than it’s worth to him.

The kids have been warned to drop their luggage and come right down to the lobby so we can sail off again to Venice. They’re not here, and Nicoletta has asked the desk to ring all of their rooms. While we mill around waiting, Marta says there’s a beautiful beach a five minute walk from the hotel—facing on the Adriatic Sea.

Never mind Venice, never mind the canals—I want to see an ocean. Don’t we have ten minutes? I convince Joe to come with me, I guarantee they won’t leave without him. I pull him along till we are running in the rain. The rain on my face, the wind in my hair feels like the return of blessed freedom I have lost. I want to see something I want to see. I want not to check in with the group, adhere to some schedule, do what was planned for everyone! (I’m here and I have needs!) I need to dispel my sense of disappointment with our room, with the weather, with the weightiness of lugging myself around. What I want most now is to see the ocean! I want to hold a seashell in my hands.

And then we’re there, at the edge of the Adriatic on this cold, gray day. Striped canvas dressing room-tents, closed up tight, flap quietly in the wind. A bird shivers at the end of a flattened-out wave, dips his beak into the receding foam. I breathe deeply of ocean smells, of salt spray. I let my eyes soak up the endless blue-gray of the water. After the crowds everywhere, the density of Florence, the intensity of being with forty other people for so many hours, this emptiness is a balm. I drink it in. I calm myself. I find a seashell on the beach, then another. I fill the pockets of my jacket with seashells, see that Joe too is gathering a few beautiful mussel shells, black on the outside, pearly within.

Okay. I’ve had this moment. I’m back in balance. Once I know I can speed along on my own track, if only briefly, I’m ready to clank and bang along once more with the freight train of the group.

I think because we prepare mentally for certain moments, fantasize about them in so many ways and for so long a time, that when they finally come, we are bound to be overwhelmed with disappointment. Seeing the Grand Canal in Venice at long last, with its great palaces rising shoulder to shoulder from the greenish-muddy waters, is a blow to my imaginings. On this cold and rainy afternoon, the vista seems shabby, devoid of color, without variety or beauty. In California (I think without charity) they would have taken a wrecking ball to these old crumbling places and built modern condominiums in their places. The cracked stones and peeling paint offer an ominous lesson: those who built these ostentatious structures are long dead. Their money, their power, their distinction have been reduced to these last remnants fading beside the rank waterways.

By some queer twist of logic, this thought cheers me up. Those old guys are dead and gone, but look who’s here! We are, a happy lot of tourists, souvenir vendors, shopkeepers, gondoliers, traghetto drivers, babies, dogs and cats, everyone with open eyes, alive and sensitive to experience. Looking at it this way, I decide it’s quite thrilling to be here, now, in this movie set of Venice.

The living get hungry. We are all famished after our long train trip and many exertions. As soon as we arrive on the dock, we agree we must go in search of nourishment. Nicoletta calls the students together and gives a few instructions: “This is Venice. The shopkeepers and restaurants know what they have here and make you pay dearly for it. Be sure to budget your money for the weekend, and make sure you know in advance the cost of what you order in any of these local trattorias. We will meet at the Academia, the museum, at 3 PM sharp, and I’ll distribute your tickets for entrance into the museum at that time. Any of you who want to join us for lunch, please come along.” (By “us” she means the grownups (or the old folks): the two teachers and me and Mrs. Pedrini, who by default tend to travel together.)

Most of the students head out on in twos and threes; they have already formed strong attachments and created their own little groups. A romance has begun, in fact, among two of our students, Phil and Sara, and they form the core of a clique that tends to follow them around, out of envy, and support, and a need to tease and torment. Phil is a tall, good-looking kid with light brown hair, and Sara a dark-eyed, statuesque young woman with a black braid down her back. They, in some way, are playing out all of our private fantasies: to be young and in love in Italy.

There is no menu in Due Torri trattoria in Dorsoduro. What I see are six or seven tables in the long narrow shop; on the walls are photos of a soccer team and paintings of the holy virgin. Mai Jing, Marta, and Clarita have followed us inside. We choose two adjacent tables and Mrs. Pedrini immediately orders “vino per tutti.” Nicoletta asks the man wearing an apron what he is serving today, and a conversation ensues in Italian. “Roasted sardines,” Nicoletta translates for us. “And pasta alla bolognese.”

Joe and I are wondering what roasted sardines look like, how they are eaten. (We are familiar with sardines packed in a can the usual way—“like sardines.”) The proprietor, a jovial kind-faced man, indicates that you hold the sardines up to your mouth between two fingers, by head and tail, and eat them as you might play a harmonica. He pretends to play a tune on his mythical sardine.

Thus we all happily order roasted sardines—without a menu, without a price. We count on Nicoletta to guide us; this is her Italy.

The meal is delicious, though there is the problem of a thousand tiny bones, none of them soft enough to be edible. The “primo piatto”—a huge plate of pasta and meat sauce—has already filled me up, and Mrs. Pedrini’s wine has clouded my perception so that when I hear a cry from the next table, where three of our students sit, I think at first it must be a cry of exuberance or laughter. But no, Mai Jing is screaming something at Marta: it sounds like, “I have my rights. You mind your own business. You don’t know what you’re saying!”

Nicoletta turns to the girls sternly; she will not stand for a scene. “What’s going on?”

Mai Jing continues to cry. Marta yells something in return. Clarita tries to clarify the problem: Mai Jing asked the waiter for hot red pepper to put on her sardines, and Marta said, “Oh you’re so spoiled, you always have to have things your way. This isn’t China. In Venice they don’t put hot pepper on everything.”

Nicoletta says fiercely, “That’s enough.”

But Mai Jing is beyond control. “I may be foreigner, I may be Chinese, but still, I am human being. You—” she accuses Marta, “you are lousy. You are lousy person.” Mai Jing’s sobs are heart breaking. Her whole body shakes. She is trembling and sobbing. I go over to her and put my arms around her. “Of course you are a human being,” I whisper in her ear.

“I want to go home,” she cries to me.

“Home to China? Or to California?”

“Home to California. Here I do not have my regular foods. Everything is strange, I understand nothing, I didn’t bring passport, they don’t want me in hotel.” Her words dissolve into a new outbreak of sobs.

“Oh—I know just how you feel!” I tell her. “I sometimes wish I could go home, too. We’re all in a strange country here, it’s so mysterious and frightening.” I say this with such feeling that I think I might cry myself.

“Yes,” she agrees, pressing her head against me. “It’s terrible here. No one likes me. No one wants to share my room at the hotel. The girl who has to be with me says she will sleep in the lobby instead of be with me. She doesn’t like my clothes I wear, or the country where I come from.”

Mrs. Pedrini, who has joined us and is now standing with us, says, “I’ll be your roommate, darling girl. Don’t you worry a bit.” She fishes in her purse for some chocolates. Nicoletta is frowning upon all of this. She says something apologetic to the proprietor, who looks quite worried at the commotion.

Mrs. Pedrini tries to get Mai Jing to eat her plate of sardines, but they do look quite awful now, dead little fish with whitened eyes and greasy tails. Mai Jing pushes the plate away with disgust and bursts into a new round of tears.

Suddenly the proprietor appears with a plate in his hand. He sets it down in front of Mai Jing—a portion of fragrant, steaming fried potatoes. He beseeches her by getting on his knees in front of her, smiling his sweet warm smile. Fried potatoes, who can resist this wonderful food? Even I am overcome by the aroma. “Mai Jing, could I have one of your potatoes?” I ask. Still sniffling, she nods her head. She realizes we are all staring at this delicacy before her. She lifts the plate and offers it round, to Mrs. Pedrini, to Nicoletta, to Clarita…but not to Marta. “Not you,” she says. Marta utters something that sounds like “Oh fuck!” and gets up and leaves the restaurant. But then Mai Jing begins to calm herself. She eats one piece of fried potato. Then another. The owner comes over with a little jar of hot red pepper. Mai Jing smiles up at him. The man is an angel.

In a few moments he serves us all espresso coffees. His wife comes forth from behind the counter and delivers the bill. Heaven knows what all this will cost. But Nicoletta examines the “conto” and proclaims a very modest price for each of us.

“Grazie, grazie,” we all say as we leave the Due Torri. Mai Jing bows her head shyly, but there’s a little smile on her face.

“Molto benissimo,” I add to the owners, who stand smiling, their arms linked. Though I’m not exactly sure of what I said, I know it conveys the right idea. My heart is flooded with love for Italians and especially for this kind man and his wife. I’m ready to take on the rest of Venice now.