A Thousand Days in Venice (12 page)

Usually, the whole stiff ambience makes me smile. It's a bad
Mr. Roger's Neighborhood
episode, and I comfort the little hurts that it sometimes inflicts by remembering it isn't
his island
, anymore than it is his house for which I'd come to live with Fernando. I take to
composing little songs, teaching them to him in English so that, at the least, we can poke fun at the perfect precision of each encounter. He likes this, wickedly enlarges upon it. But if I dare protest some particularly bewildering response or event, he perceives aggression and changes flags, haughtily defending his island. “But who do you think you are that you can judge or try to change a culture?
Quanto pomposa sei
. How pompous you are.”

I try to tell him that I don't mean to judge. I'm not trying to change anything about these people or their culture. I am only trying not to have to change anything about myself or mine. He can seem some holograph image, a stranger, fading and finding form, fading and finding form. Is Fernando's journey away from the
bella figura
, which he will freely tell you he detests, just too new? One step forward, many steps backward. Even now—right now—that the road behind him is long, still he dances the old dances. And I dance mine.

And when he is neither defending the Lido nor making a meal of the place, Fernando tells me stories of how it used to be here, how, until the early sixties, the Gran Viale was banked in swanky sidewalk tea rooms with morning-coated waiters and string quartets where Austrian and French soubrettes lingered in hats with veils, their consorts in crumpled white linen suits. I am forty years too late. Now there are only taverns with pizza ovens. The only exotics I see on the
avenue are sun-seekers from Düsseldorf in short shorts and plastic sandals. And the only person with a hat is me. Except for the brief postwar civility of the tea rooms, nothing much had happened on the Lido since Byron, in short pants, was wont to charge a chestnut stallion into its waves, dive into the lagoon, and backstroke through the blue-green waters of the Grand Canal.

Everyone with some place to run escapes the Lido in boats each day, as though it were the tenth circle of hell, while those who remain are condemned to swift survival forays into the shops, then back behind the shutters for daytime sleeps and television vigils. Despite the shortcomings of this island, I keep trying to find the chocolate side of the Lido. In some ways this seems easy to me because it is surrounded by the sea—
I
am surrounded by the sea; pieces of its beach are like other rooms in my house. It loosens the sun in the morning and lures it back beneath its bosom at night. But even the sea, with its sulks and tempers and complexions, cannot rouse this sandy little fiefdom from its torpor. Although there is the beach ladies' dance.

Until now, I'd spent less than a total of forty minutes of my life actually lying still under a hot burning sun. Here, I live in a culture that mandates all females roast their skin. I didn't even own a bathing suit. Once the dacha, as we continue to call the apartment, is in order, I go off to Milan to exchange some papers with the American
consulate and to buy an Alaia, bias-cut, one-piece, beautiful. If I can't
be
an Italian, at least I will
look
like one. Tied up in a white pareo, shaded in Versace, a pearly pink mouth sealing my disguise, I wait until ten (beach ladies don't rise early), walk across the street, this time sashaying straight through the sanctum of the Excelsior Hotel and out to the sands. There waits hell's eleventh circle.

Women lie in the sun and smoke in front of their cabanas for three hours in the morning, sleep for two hours at home after lunch, return to the beach to lie in the sun and smoke for three hours in the afternoon, until their husbands join them at six-thirty for
aperitivi
at the hotel bar. Still at the beach, they shower, with a cigarette pinched between their lips; they dress with a cigarette pinched between their lips, and, smoking still, they go off to dinner. She, with skin like a crinkled russet leaf and weighted by a kilo of gold and jewels, seems more exhausted than he. The bathing suit goes to live in the bottom drawer of my bureau.

Beach life archived, I think about cooking. In the few weeks that have passed, we've mostly supped early and modestly, in little
osterie
in Venice after I meet Fernando each evening at the bank. Sometimes we've gone home to change clothes before carting a basket of bread and cheese and wine and chocolates down to the seaside rocks for a ten o'clock picnic. But tonight, Fernando will sup at home.

I set off on foot across Ponte delle Quattro Fontane onto Via Sandro
Gallo on my way to the
quartiere popolare—
the working-class neighborhood on the Lido where Fernando says I'll find better things less expensively than in the shops nearby. This is perhaps true, but it is also true that long lengths of hot, sun-licked avenue lie between each merchant. I make visits to the dairyman, the butcher, the fishmonger, the fruitman (who is different from the vegetable man, who is different from the herb seller). Flour, olive oil, pancetta from the
gastronomia
. I, the newly arrived Philistine, ask for
lievito
, yeast, at the bakery. With round eyes the baker's wife says she does not sell yeast, she sells bread. She says the bread is baked at the
forno
, oven, which is located at the other end of the island. Her post is only a dispensary. Does she know where I can find yeast, I ask. Yeast for cakes? Baking powder? It is this you desire, no? she tests me. “No, signora, yeast for baking bread,” I say. My intentions cause her chest to heave. I buy bread to diffuse her agony. I forgo the
pasticceria
, only a few hundred yards further on and recommended by the wine seller, giving thanks for the nearness of Maggion. Half a day later, muscles twitching from the weight of sacks hauled three miles and up three flights of stairs, I am sunburnt, triumphant, and ready to begin.

Heretofore I have lit the stove only to brew coffee. I discover that the burner I'd been using is the only one that functions, the others wooshing out mostly air. The single window is sealed shut, and the twelve square inches of floor space invite only a discreet sort of
swaying from the waist up. Except one for prepping grapefruit, there are no knives, and it seems mine fell among the goods given away at the airport. I think about the hundreds of cooking classes I've taught, my bantering on the subject of a well-equipped home kitchen. I hear my sassy self telling the students, “Adequate space, fine tools, and equipment are fundamental. But if one is really a cook, one can cook in a tin can with a wooden spoon.” I was wrong. I need more than a tin can, and much more than this tin-can-of-a-space. And dammit, I need more than a wooden spoon.

Still, I make a batter for enormous golden squash blossoms and stuffing for a veal breast with pistachios and pancetta and Parmesan and sage. Plumped and tied up in cotton string, I braised the veal in butter and white wine and I let it rest and cool in its pan juices. There will be an iced soup of roasted yellow tomatoes adorned with a pair of anise-grilled prawns to begin, a wedge of Taleggio—ripe, runny—white figs, and meringues from Maggion at the finish. We dine slowly. Fernando is curious about each dish, wanting to know components and methods. He asks how long it has taken me to prepare the supper, and I tell him it took three times longer to shop than to cook.

“You mustn't think I expect you to set a table like this each evening,” he says. I wonder if he is saying, You mustn't expect me to
eat
like this each evening. Sure enough he continues, “I prefer
simplicity
.
Besides,” he continues, “you have so much to do, a wedding to plan, the renovation to oversee, a language to learn.” I understand. There is a detour on the way to his heart that totally evades his stomach.

“But I'm a cook. You can't just tell me not to cook,” I wail.

“I'm not telling you not to cook,” he tells me through his teeth. “What I'm saying is that your idea of everyday cooking is my idea of festival cooking,” he says, as though festival cooking is profane.

Why is it so peculiar that I want to
cook, really cook, every day?
He thinks that once, perhaps, twice a week seems more correct. Other nights we could eat a simple
pasta asciutta
or a salad and some cheese,
prosciutto e melone, mozzarella e pomodoro
. We could go to eat pizza. He persists. The kitchen is so small, so
unprepared
for serious cooking, he says. It is he who is
unprepared
for serious eating, I think. That I would bake bread terrifies him more than it did the baker's wife.

“No one bakes bread or desserts or makes pasta at home,” he says. “Even grandmothers and maiden aunts queue in the shops rather than cook and bake.” We are a
modern culture
, he tells me over and over again. On the Lido this means that women have been liberated from the kitchen into the
salotto
to watch television and play canasta, I think. “We have some of the finest
artigiani
in all Italy who make these things so we don't have to make them,” he says. Next he's going to tell me on which days the Bo-Frost truck passes by the
bunker, that icy provider of the beach ladies' lunch, the ever ready purveyor of perfectly rectangular foods. I wince, but he does not propose the Bo-Frost solution.

Throughout these discourses I know he means well, that he wants only to help me adjust to the new realities. There are no longer forty hungry guests who would come to supper each evening as they had at the café. There are no children, no extended family to sit at our table. And Fernando has already told me that here friends and neighbors eat at their own tables. I feel like the Little Red Hen in menopause. This will all pass, as soon as the wedding is over, the apartment properly renovated, the weather cooler. The stranger will be hungry and, from somewhere, I would collect a few takers for supper once in a while. I'll get a job in a restaurant. I'll open my own restaurant. If I'd had my knives, I would have thrown them down. Fernando pulls me up from my silent anger by tartly announcing, “Tomorrow evening, I'll cook for you.” I can't wait, I think sourly. Later, in bed, I plot how to better present my culinary self to the stranger.

I had spent nearly twenty years working with food, dreaming about it, writing about it, teaching other people how to work with it, chasing it over far-flung continents, paying the rent for a well-lived life with the often considerable spoils gleaned from a career based on it, a career he thinks to have been a
jobette
, a very nice sort
of paid hobby. I'd been the trusted architect of others' as well as my own gastronomically fired dreams. More than once I'd bet the farm and kept it, relying on what I knew and felt about food. I will say all this quietly and over time. I will even pull out my scruffy briefcase full of printed testimony, saved over the years from magazines and newspapers. But when I do, all the stranger has to offer is, “Now that you are ‘without language,' you think the way to communicate is with food.” Prattle.

For me, food is far beyond the metaphors for love and sentiment and “communication.” I do not demonstrate affection with food. Less noble than that, I cook because
I
love to cook, because
I
love to eat, and if someone is near who also loves to eat, all the better. The truth is I have always cooked for crowds, even when there were no crowds—for the crowds I, always and still,
wished
there to be. My children say I once made a pumpkin soup, that I roasted a surfeit of jack-o'-lanterns into caramelized softness, mixed the flesh with cognac and cream and a few scrapings of nutmeg. There were gallons of it, they say. After a week's worth of suppers, they watched me add shreds of Emmenthaler and just-cracked white pepper and egg yolks to what was left. They say I folded in whites whipped to stiffness and turned the mass into buttered, crumbed molds, three very large molds, they say.
Voilà
, savory pudding. I remember that it was wonderful, even on the second and third nights. Lisa will tell
you it was then that her skin began to turn orange. In the end I scooped what was left of the pudding into a work bowl with some ricotta and a few tablespoonsful of grated Parmesan and made gnocchi: pumpkin gnocchi with sage butter and roasted pumpkin seeds is how
their
story ends, though
I
remember one more night in the great pumpkin episode. Yes, I'm sure we had those gnocchi, at least once, au gratin with cream and tiny dollops of Gorgonzola. Plenty from spoils. It is naive, perhaps, but all this suits me, this pull toward domestication. This is the oldest thing I know about myself, the first thing, really. Except for the loneliness.

The next evening the stranger stands by the stove like the duke of Montefeltro, in purple silk boxers. Bringing out a balance, he measures 125 grams of pasta, for each of us. I am going to marry a Venetian J. Alfred Prufrock who measures out his supper in grams! He pours tomato puree into a small, thin, beat-up old pan rather than one of my little copper beauties. He adds salt and big pinches of dried herbs that he kept in a tin on top of the stove.
“Aglio, peperoncino, e prezzemolo
. Garlic, chili, and parsley,” he says, as though he believes it. The pasta is good, and I tell him so, but I am still hungry.