A Thousand Days in Venice (11 page)

Once more defying Fiorella, I walk quickly—again, as though to an appointment—up the Merceria to Calle Fiubera, over Calle dei Barcaroli and Calle del Fruttarol and out into Campo San Fantin. Outside the Taverna della Fenice I sit sipping cold Prosecco and feeling a strange sort of consolation. Some balmy caress from the wine, from the sweet, wet air on my skin? The old Princess provokes a shivery farawayness in me. And yet I do not feel out of place; I feel oddly at home. I drift more than I walk on the return, stopping, peering into angles, touching the worn surface of a wall or a great brass lion's head guarding a small palace and masquerading as a door knocker. I am beginning to understand the rhythmic game of capture and release one can play with Venice. Light into shadow and back into light, amid her musty, pinched alleys I drift. As I have sometimes drifted through life. And so it is sheepish and starving that I arrive an hour and a half late for my table
.

Fernando interrupts, “And after dinner did you go to San Marco?”

“Yes,” I say.

I come through the Piazzetta dei Leoncini and look, full-face, into the piazza. A long, broad moonlit ballroom it seems, with the brooding domes of the basilica its portal. The walls are grand arches flounced in white canvas; its floor is stone smoothed by rains and lagoon waters and a thousand years of the strolling, dancing, marching feet of fishermen and courtesans, of white-breasted noblewomen, of old doges and hungry children, of conquerors and of kings. There are a few people walking, a few more sit outside at Quadri. It is from Florian that the music comes. The ensemble plays “Weiner Blut,” and two couples of a certain age dance unselfconsciously. I take a table near them and stay there, sipping American coffee, until there is no one left dancing or sitting or playing a violin. I leave lire on the table so as not to disturb the huddle of waiters taking off their ties and lighting one another's cigarettes. I am unsure of the way back to the horrid little room over the Sottoportego de le Acque, but it is only a few mistaken turns onto silent
calli
before I find Fiorella's hotel
.

One day I ride out to Torcello to walk in the long meadow grasses and rest in the seventh-century dimness of Santa Maria dell'Assunta. I sit under the pergola at Osteria al Ponte del Diavolo to eat risotto with hop shoots, served by a waiter with pomaded hair parted in the middle and a salmon-colored silk cravat
.

“Where we ate on your first weekend here,” says Fernando.

I see dozens of churches and the sublime paintings that hide in some of them, never setting foot inside the Accademia or the Correr during that first
visit. My research of the
bacari,
wine bars, is rather intermittent and spontaneous. As I come across one, I stop in and sip Incrocio Manzoni or a tumbler of Malbec or of Recioto, always with some sort of wonderful
cicheti,
appetizers. I like the barely hard-boiled halves of eggs, their yolks orange and soft and ornamented with a sliver of fresh sardine and the tiny fried octopus dressed in oil, thumbnail-sized artichokes in a garlicky bath. I find it easy, really, to avoid the Venice of which I had been so long diffident. She presents a clear choice between stepping into or away from cliché. Her heart's blood rushes just beneath her artifice. Just like mine, I think. Venice wants only a little pluck as the price of entry onto her sentimental routes
.

I don't know how long he'd been sleeping, why I never noticed the quiet clicking of his snore. Anyway, I was happy for the chance to have heard my story. Carefully I walk him to bed, thinking he is gone for the night, but, once there, he props himself up on his elbows, “Will you tell me
everything
tomorrow night?”

The stranger has less trouble staying awake for our baths. And early on we find our best talking takes place in the tub. For two people so full of mysteries as we are, there is a spiritual intimacy between us that needs no coaxing. As it was from that first evening in Saint Louis, I'm the bath maker. I pour in handfuls of green tea salts and sandalwood oil, too much foaming pine, and a drop or two of musk. I always make the water too hot, and I'm always submerged among the bubbles and steam when Fernando enters the
bathroom. He lights the candles. It takes him a full four minutes to adjust to the water as his pale skin blooms crimson.
“Perché mi fai bollire ogni volta?
Why do you wish to boil me each time?” During one bath time the subject is cruelty. I want to tell him more about my first marriage.

I open with, “I betrayed my first husband. He was a patient man who waited for me to provide a clear-cut reason so he could leave me. He couldn't just say, I don't love you, I don't want this marriage, or you, or these children. He told me these things only many years later. At the time, what he did was to reinforce my clearly pathological insecurities about being a lovable person.

“He's a psychologist. He's also cunning. And what he did was stop talking to me. He withdrew, leaving me to stumble and tremble, to wonder what was happening. And when he did talk, mostly it was to ridicule and threaten. He seemed to enjoy his immense capacity to frighten me.” Fernando's face is no longer red but very white. Each phrase seems to need five minutes of translation, then another eternity for him to take it in. At least the water is cooling. But I'm crying.

I continue, “I didn't even understand what depression was, but depressed I must have been. I was pregnant with Erich during the worst of it. Perhaps I knew then that his father was already gone from us. It was my little girl, Lisa, who got excited by the baby's first
kick. It was she, her head in my lap, who rejoiced at his rumblings, translated them for me. She and I sang to the baby, told him how we already loved him, that we couldn't wait to hold him. Still, somehow, Erich was born knowing about sadness.”

Now Fernando is crying too, and he says he needs me to be in his arms, and so we slosh out to the bedroom and lie down.

“Soon after Erich's birth, there were moments when I confronted my husband, telling him I was lonely and frightened. ‘Why are you so cruel,' I'd ask him. ‘Why don't you hold your daughter? Why don't you hold the baby? Why don't you love us?'

“But he was just biding his time waiting for that exit cue. So I provided it, Fernando, I provided just the perfect reason to make him go away. I met a man and fell madly for him. I thought him kind and sensitive. I saw him infrequently, but I was certain his passion was an expression of love. ‘Ah, so this is what it's like,' I'd think. When my husband followed my well-laid tracks, I still believed he'd fight for me. But he was gone in three days. Still it would be okay because the other man really loved me. He really loved me, I was sure.

“I couldn't tell my lover by telephone, though, so I got on the train and we met for lunch and I said, ‘He knows. He knows everything, and now he's gone and we're free.'

“‘Free to do what?' he asked me, without taking the cigarette from his mouth.

“‘Free to be together. I mean, that's what you want, isn't it?' I asked him. He was a master at hesitation. Through a fresh puff of smoke, I heard him say, ‘Fool.' He must have said other things, but that's all I can remember. I got up from my chair and careened to the ladies' room. I stayed there, being sick, for a very long time. The woman who tended the rest room was waiting for me when I finally came out of the toilet, a wet cloth in her hand. She told me to lean on her, to sit. I tried to laugh, saying that perhaps I was pregnant. ‘No. This is a broken heart,' she told me. The French say that women die only from the first man. For me, death came twice in the same week.”

We lay there quietly until Fernando got up on his knees and, looking down at me, his hands on my shoulders, he said, “There isn't an agony in this world more powerful than tenderness.”

As often as I give the stranger reasons to cry, I seem to give him even more reasons to laugh. I tell his colleague at the bank, a man from Pisa, that I find
i piselli
among the kindest folks in Italy. Unfortunately what I really say is that I find
peas
to be among the kindest folks in Italy.
Piselli
, peas. The citizens of Pisa are called
pisani
. Signor Muzzi is clever enough to not react to my gaffe and loquacious enough to recount and embroider the story so that
l'americana
causes tittering among staff and clients.

Unembarrassed, I am happy to have caused this burlesque. Concentrating so much on day-by-day rejoicing, I hardly notice the malaise that is settling on me: a suggestion of sadness, a bruise that comes and goes and returns, nostalgia. This feeling is not tragic, nor does it contradict the fullness of this new life. It is mainly that I miss my own language. I miss the
sounds
of English. I want to
understand and be understood
. Of course, I know the salves. Apart from time itself, there is the English-speaking community, members of which
are dispersed all over Venice. I need a chum. And perhaps there is something else: I miss my own ebullience.

I feel squeezed by this northern stance of
bella figura
, the keeping of the façade, the quick strangling of spontaneity for the sake of a necessary deception that Italians call “elegance.” It prescribes a short list of approved questions and answers. Fernando is my
scudiero
, my shield bearer, protecting himself and me from “foul whisperings.” Whenever we are in public he moves about mincingly, trying to distract me from cultural mortification. It's no use. Too often I feel like a middle-aged Bombastes with very red lips. Unimpressed by, insensitive to my own blunderings, I talk to everyone. I am curious, I smile too much, touch and peer and inspect. It seems the stranger and I are comfortable only when we're alone together.

“Calma, tranquilla,”
he says to me, the generic warning against every behavior that is not short-listed. Archaic posturing among people who seem to care less than a fig about each other—this nonverbal patois is their real language, and I cannot speak it. It was just as Misha had said it would be.

Born and bred in Russia, Misha had emigrated to Italy as a newly graduated medical doctor and worked in Rome and Milan for nearly ten years before settling in America. He and I first met when we both lived in New York. We became closer friends after he transferred to Los Angeles and I was up in Sacramento. Misha always had
lots to say. He came to visit me in Saint Louis just after I'd met Fernando and our first lunch together was long and angry.

“Why are you doing this? What is it you want from this man? He has none of the obvious merits women are likely to race across the earth to cling to,” he said in his Rasputin voice. He went on about the perils of exchanging cultures, about how I would be surrendering even the simple joy of discourse. “Even when you learn to truly think and speak in another language, it is not the same as engaging in native fluency. You will neither
understand nor be understood
. That's always been so fundamental to you. You who love words, who say wonderful things in that small, soft voice. There will be no one to hear you,” he said. Though it was clear this was a soliloquy, I tried to jump in.

“Misha, I'm in love for the first time in my life. Is it then improbable that I would want to be with this man whether he lives in El Paso or Venice?” I asked. “I'm not choosing a culture. I'm choosing a lover, a partner, a husband.” He was ruthless.

“But who will you be there, what will you be able to do? The Mediterranean culture in general and the Italian culture in particular operate on a different standard of impressions and judgments. You're not nineteen, you know, and the best they'll think about you is that you ‘must have once been a beauty.' It will be important if you can make them think you have money, which you don't. Nothing
else much will matter. This is an eccentric sort of move you are making and most will be wary of you and ask, ‘What is it she wants here?' It is inconceivable for them even to consider purity of motive because they contrive so. Every move is staged to effect a countermove. I don't suggest this is singularly Italian, but I do suggest that the intensity of this sort of posturing is as rampant there today as it was in the Middle Ages. Clever as you are, you'll still be too childlike for them. There's too much of Pollyanna in you for their tastes. That you are an eternal beginner, if that can be contemplated at all, will seem frivolous to them. Better that your Fernando were a rich old arthritic bastard. Then they might understand your attraction to him,” he pounded.

“Misha, why can't you simply acknowledge my happiness, even be happy for me?” I asked.

“Happy—what is ‘happy'? Happiness is for stones, not for people. Every once in a while our lives are illuminated by something or someone. We get a flash and we call it ‘happiness.' You are behaving spontaneously, and yet you will be judged contrarily because you can only be judged by their standards, which do not embrace spontaneity,” he concluded slowly, deliberately.

“I don't care how I'm judged,” I said.

“Everyone cares how they are judged,” he said.

I'd tried to listen to him back then, but mostly I'd tucked away
his gloom as though looking at it would make me feel foolish and frightened. And bringing his gloom forward now does make me feel foolish and frightened.

Timidly, Fernando begins to introduce me to one person or another whom we happen upon in the street, on the ferry boat or the vaporetto, at the newsstand on Sunday mornings or when we stop to drink an Aperol at Chizzolin or to sit at Tita over iced metal cups of
gelato di gianduia
. On the weekends we drive out toward Alberoni, stopping at Santin to take the island's best coffee, to eat warm pastries stuffed with rum and chocolate, and later in the evening, when the place is even more crowded, we go again for crisp little ricotta tarts and flutefuls of Prosecco. But this is a place where no one really wants to talk with anyone else. Either people are alone and they like it that way or they come to perform, to talk
at
the crowd. And as the bar goes, so goes the island. I will learn that those Lidensi whom he called his friends were nearly all “five-phrase” companions, their affection demonstrated in chance meetings with discourse that opens on the weather and closes with airy kisses and a promise to call. But no one ever calls anyone on the Lido.