In the popular imagination, the name Venice summons up many images and historical memories: precious gems, palazzi, lavishly dressed aristocrats dancing at carnevale balls. Or it calls up visions of rich spices, glorious paintings, velvet, opulence in all its forms. Conversely, it can also summon the opposite images: disease, pestilence, death. But one image that seldom forms when the magic name of Venice is invoked is poverty, though poverty is surely to be found among the palazzi and noble homes of La Serenissima. There is the unwilled poverty of old people, forced to survive on meager state pensions, and there is the willed poverty of wealthy people who have given in to the mad vice of avarice. These two forms have it in common that they remain invisible, hidden behind the doors of buildings and the doors of shame.
The only form of poverty on public display, to both residents and tourists, is that presented by the beggars of the city, though the fact that their poverty is public in no way ensures that it is true. For years, a number of beggars have served as fixed markers in various parts of the city, though as so often has happened in modern times, the local workers are being driven out by the influx of, as it were, immigrants.
First, the locals. There remains, often huddled on Ponte San Antonio, but a few hundred meters from the Rialto, a grizzle-haired man in his sixties who holds the stump of his severed arm in his lap like a puppy. The other hand is raised above his head to beg alms of each passerby. A seasonal worker, he is to be seen only in the cold weather but never wearing a jacket, no doubt because this adds shivers to the general effect of the tableau.
Rumor has it that he lives on Burano, where he is said to own many houses. At Christmas, my friend Roberto gave him 5,000 lire, not because of his poverty but to compensate for his lack of pride in making such a spectacle of himself.
There is the woman with the dark hair said to have been a teacher until a man broke her heart twenty years ago, ever since which she has shambled up and down Strada Nuova, head lowered in despair, feet slowed by whatever drug the doctors of the public health system decided to give her. During these two decades I’ve watched her age. I’ve seen the rings under her eyes darken, her hair grow long and then short as someone cuts it for her or, for all I know, she cuts it off herself with a knife.
Sometimes she stops people and asks for a thousand lire or a cigarette. I don’t smoke, so I always give her the note, placing it in her hand while smiling and trying to meet her eyes. Once, out of the house without my bag, I could find only 500 lire, but she refused it. “Mi servono mille lire,” she insisted, pained to be refused. Not angry. Pained. How much better anger would have been.
Another shambler is the egg-shaped young man in overalls, often with painted face or wildly dyed hair. The local mythology is that he went to the East years ago, left as a bright young man and returned in that piteous state, his brain left behind, sacrificed to the drug gods of India. He has stopped asking for money and seems calmer these past few years. Sometimes he can be seen sprawled in a doorway, smiling at the people who pass him by, no more threatening than a cat.
Memory still holds the image of my special favorite, the white-haired woman who stood for years at the bottom of Ponte delle Erbe, not far from the Casa di Cura of the Ospedale of SS Giovanni e Paolo, where she was said to live. Wearing her bedroom slippers and dressing gown, she moved with the sun during the day, gradually taking herself and her outstretched hand farther down the canal and toward Campo Santa Marina. Every six months or so, she would disappear for a day or more and then return to her post, hair newly cut and permanented. She’s been gone for years now but people still remember her and speak of her with great fondness.
The new ones lack charm and are devoid of all imagination or flair. Most of them are Gypsies, and most of these seem to be of the same band or family, for I see them arriving in a group, punctual as German factory workers, striding up Strada Nuova from the train station every morning a bit after nine. At Campo Santi Apostoli they separate, each going to his or her work place, later to reconvene for a picnic lunch in Campo Santa Maria Nova.
What strikes me about them is their tremendous organization: they all seem to display the same signs, usually painted by hand but sometimes generated by computer and printed in letters as large as headlines, each bearing the same carefully created grammatical errors. “Ho tre bambino.” “Sono profogo dal Bosnia.” And there is always that old standby, the equivalent of the incremental repetition so favored by the Beowulf poet—“Ho fame.” That’s hard to misspell. Though these people have been here for as long as I can remember, they became Bosnian refugees a few years ago. Meant to be Muslims suffering for their faith, each of them places at the bottom of their begging hat or cup a holy card with a garishly painted Madonna.
A few months ago, there was a general change in tactic, surprising in Italy, the one country said still to worship the baby. In a week, all of the babies, either on the shoulder, at the breast, or trailing dirtily behind their mothers, all of them disappeared. And were replaced by puppies.
The Italians? They give, dropping a few hundred lire into the cups or hats, often a thousand lire, sometimes more. Mothers hand money to their children and tell them to take it and give it to the beggar. I have no idea if the puppies are more remunerative than the babies. For Italy’s sake, for all our sakes, I hope they aren’t.