A Thousand Days in Venice (13 page)

Three hours later I am hollow with that hunger and so, when Fernando
falls asleep, I creep out of bed and cook a whole pound of fat, thick spaghetti. I drench it with butter scented with a few drops of the twenty-five-year-old balsamic vinegar that I'd carried, coddled like a Fabergé egg, from Spilamberto to Saint Louis to Venice. I grate a wedge of Parmesan over the pasta until my hand gets tired and then ornament the silky, steamy mass with long grindings of pepper. I raise the shutters in the dining room to let in moonlight and midnight breezes, light a candle, and pour wine. Serving myself over and over again, I devour the pasta, I absorb it, smelling, tasting, chewing, feeling the comfort of it explode again and again. Revenge flutters, and so I twirl it rebelliously, round and round on my fork exactly the way Fernando told me not to twirl it. Finally Lucullus has dined with Lucullus.

I sit there, exhausted, one hunger sated, the next hunger bristling. Fernando can eat like Prufrock till the end of time if that pleases him, but I'm going to cook and I'm going to eat like me. What was it he called me,
pomposa?
Just look at who's being pompous? I've sat still for more “suggestions,” counsel, and downright direction during this past month than I had during my whole life. He doesn't like my clothes, he doesn't like my
modo d'essere
, my style of being, he doesn't like my cooking. My skin is too white, my mouth too large. Maybe he did fall in love with a profile instead of with me. I feel like I've drunk the potion from the
wrong little vial. Fernando is diminishing me, erasing me. And I have indulged him.

Smiling through the process, I have been trying to honor the old pact I'd made with myself about understanding his need to lead. But I never made a pact about even the softest form of tyranny. I know he believes he is helping me. Perhaps he even sees himself as my Svengali, a kind of savior. Have I been so agreeable because I fear discord will turn him away? The
fresh, just unrolled space
of this new life, am I trying to color it in too perfectly? Am I trying to compensate for what I'm still holding onto as sentimental failures so he won't leave me, too? There is so much that is beautiful about loving Fernando and being loved by him, but I miss myself. I loved me so much more as a woman than I do as a withering moppet in demure surrender. I will not stay on this island nor in this house, courting the local unconsciousness. Culinary or otherwise, I tell myself, patting my happy, turgid belly. I prefer to link up with the fugitives who ride over the water to Venice each morning than to stay napping with the anchorites. I clear away all traces of my sins and slip back into bed. The stranger never hears my crying.

Next morning I am resolved to wake up the sleeping voluptuary in me. After packing the stranger off to the bank with the empty briefcase he insists on carrying everywhere, I race about the apartment scraping candle wax and plumping pillows, perform an abbreviated
toilette
, pay a visit to Maggion and one to the sea, and then fairly run the half-mile to the boat landing to catch the vaporetto at nine o'clock. I am going to market.

The Rialto, literally “high river,” is the place, some are convinced, where the first Venetian settlement grew up. It was there that from ancient times the world's merchants came to trade and, still now, it remains the bawdy heart of Venetian commerce. The sentimental symbol of the Rialto is a peaked bridge, stretching its familiar colonnades and arches over the canal, every pilgrim's point of reference.
And ploughing toward it through sunstruck summer light or the cold smoke of a February fog on the prow of a slow boat, eyes squeezed to the past, one finds old Shylock, cloaked, plumed, brooding.

I'd always found time to stroll the markets at the Rialto during past visits to Venice, thinking it charming if not quite as splendid as other of Italy's
mercati
. Now, though, it is my own, and I want to know it as an intimate. The first thing to discover is how to enter the marketplace from its backstreets rather than from the bridge and its avenue of silver and jewelry shops, kiosks hung with cheap masks and cheaper T-shirts and wagons that lure tourists with waxed apples and Chilean strawberries and cracked coconuts bathing in plastic fountains. It is further down the row that wagonsful of fruits and vegetables announce the market's genuine seductions. And hidden behind these sits the handsome edifice of the sixteenth-century tribunal of Venice.

I remembered seeing the
pretori
, judges, gowns flying, liberated from their benches for a quick coffee or a Campari, edging through heaped-up eggplants and cabbages, dodging ropes of garlic and chili peppers, to settle back again behind the solid doors of the tribunal and resume the cause of Venetian justice. Once I saw a priest and a judge, their skirts billowed up behind them, bending over a vegetable cart, Church and state, tête-à-tête, picking through the string
beans. Even such folkloric scenes, though, would not draw me up and down through the bridge's daily carnival. I try debarking from the vaporetto one stop before the Rialto at San Silvestro. I walk under a tunnel and out into the
ruga
, stepping directly into the dazzle of the market.

I hear it, feel it, the shivery pull of the Casbah, another call of the wild. I walk faster, faster yet, tilting left past a cheese shop and the pasta lady, finally braking in front of a table so sumptuously laid as to be awaiting Caravaggio. I move slowly, touching when I dare, trying a smile now and then, knowing neither where nor how to begin. I walk to the
pescheria
, fish market, a clamorous hall full of the stinging, dizzying perfumes of sea salt and fish blood where every writhing, slithering, slinking, swimming, crawling, sea-breathing, jewel-eyed creature that would be hauled up from the Adriatic glitters on thick marble pallets. I look in on the
macellerie
, butchers, who are cutting nearly transparent steaks behind their macabre curtains of rabbits, wild and tame, hung from their hind legs, with tufts of fur left clinging at their haunches to serve as proof that they are not feline.

Perhaps the most Venetian of all the
botteghe
in the Rialto is Drogheria Mascari, a shop still trafficking in spices. An ounce of cloves, a fistful of
pepe di Giamaica
, allspice berries, nutmegs big as apricots, foot-long sticks of cinnamon bark with a hot-sweet
perfume, black chestnut honey from the Friuli, teas, coffees, chocolates, fruits, candied or drowned in liqueurs. I longed to pull paper and coins from the small black purse hung across my chest and place the money into the merchants' rough hard hands. More horrible than it was when I had no money to buy these things, this is another sort of hunger. I want everything, but, for now, I am alone with a baroque appetite. I buy peaches, ripely blushing, small bouquets of maroon-veined white lettuces, a melon whose perfect muskiness totters on the edge of mold.

The shoppers are mostly women, housewives of all ages, all physical proportions, and a rather universal voice pitched somewhere beyond a scream. They propel
carrelli
, market carts, lined in large plastic bags, and one is convinced, fast and well, to stay clear of them. There are clusters of old men engaged in—among other things—the sober trade of arugula and dandelion greens and other bouquets of wild grasses tied up with cotton string. The farmers are sublime hucksters, rude, sweet, mocking. They are showmen taunting in slippery dialect and theirs is a whole other language for me to learn.
“Ciapa sti pomi, che xe così bei.”
What's he saying? He is offering me a slice of apple?
“Tasta, tasta bea mora; i costa solo che do schei
. Taste, taste, pretty black-haired lady; they cost so little.”

Not so many mornings pass before smiles are swapped, before I can ask one or another of them to bring me some mint or marjoram
the next day, to save a quart of blackberries. There is Michele with a fluff of blond curls and a flushed face to set off his thick golden chains, and Luciano, architect of the Caravaggio table, and the ginger lady with her long cracked nails and the green woolen cap I would see her wear in summer and winter. They are all of a seductive society, collaborators in a crack theater troupe. One holds out a single, silky pea pod or a fat purple fig with honeyed juices trickling out from its heat-broken skin, another whacks open a small, round watermelon called
anguria
and offers a sliver of its icy red flesh from the point of a knife. To upstage the watermelon man, another cuts through the pale green skin of a cantaloupe, holding out a salmon-pink wedge of it cradled on a brown paper sack. And yet another one shouts, “The pulp of this peach is white as your skin.”

One morning, while waiting for two veal chops at the
macellaio
, I hear a woman say,
“Puoi darmi un orecchio?
Can you give me an ear?” How nice, I think. She wants a conference with her butcher. Perhaps she wants him to save scraps for her cats, to procure a fat capon for next Saturday. Sebastiano descends from his sawdusted stage and his lemon-oiled wooden block, disappears into the sanctum of his cold room and returns holding up high a great rosy flounce of translucent flesh.
“Questo può andar bene, signora?
Will this be okay, ma'am?” She
approves with pursed lips and half-closed eyes. Sold. One pig's ear.
“Per insaporire i fagioli
. To flavor the beans,” she justifies to no one in particular.

Perhaps my favorite market visit is with the egg lady, who always sets up her table in a different position, her shiftings dependent, I come to understand, on which way the wind is blowing. She seeks to protect her hens. Hers is a fascinating act. Each morning from her farm on the island of Sant'Erasmo she transports five or six old biddies inside a cotton flour sack. Once at market, she nestles the sack of fluttering hens under her table, bends down low and begins warbling in dialect.
“Dai, dai me putei, faseme dei bei vovi
. Come on my little babies, make beautiful eggs for me.” Every once in a while she opens the sack for a quick search. On her table is a pile of old newspapers torn into neat squares and a reed basket with a high-arched handle in which she places each new egg with the gentleness, one imagines, of a Bellini Madonna. On the days when she brings two, even three sacks of hens, the basket is almost always full. Other mornings see it with only a few. As they are sold, she wraps each egg in newspaper, twisting both ends so that the confection looks like a rustic prize for a child's party. If one wants six eggs, one waits while she fashions the six prizes. When the old reed basket is empty and a customer comes forward, she asks him to be patient, to wait only a moment, as she bends to her covey in whispery cheer. Damp,
then, with the triumph of a midwife, she presents the warm, creamy-shelled treasures.

An ancient named Lidia brings fruit to sell. Always swaddled in layers of shawls and sweaters, an all-season costume that seemed to suffocate her spare self in summer and leave her in shivers in the winter, she has apples and pears in autumn, peaches, plums, apricots, cherries, and figs in summer, and in the interim, Lidia plies her bounty sun-dried. I loved to go to her in the thick of the Adriatic winter when, in a hugger-mugger of fogs, the market seemed a tiny kingdom in the sky. It was then that she would tend a quiet fire in an old coal scuttle, keeping it close enough to comfort her legs and feet, every once in a while roasting her hands back into circulation. Lidia buried apples deep in the heaps of smoldering ash. And just when the hot flesh sent perfumes of solace up through the mists, she'd take a long fork and pull one forth, blackened, burst, soft as pudding. Carefully peeling away its cindery crust, she would eat the pale, wine-smelling flesh with a small wood-handled spoon. One day I tell her about a lady I know in the market in Palmanova up in the Friuli. I tell her that she, too, roasts apples in her foot-warming fire, each red beauty cuddled up in a leaf of savoy cabbage. When the apples are soft, she discards the charred leaf that keeps fruit from ash and eats them between elegant nips from her rum flask. Lidia thinks this fillip with the cabbage leaf a travesty. As for the rum
chaser, only the Friuliani, she says, could suffer so brutish a concoction. A rustic aesthete in a beaver vest, she asks who but they could abide the stench of burning cabbage.
“I Friuliani sono praticamente slavi, sai
. The Friuliani are practically Slavs, you know,” she confides.

The hours I spent in the custody of this society linger, crystalline, as they will for all my days. They taught me about food and cooking and patience. I learned about the moon and the sea, about war and hunger and feasting. They sang me their songs and told me their stories and, over time, they became my chosen family and I their chosen child. I feel the rough touches of their gnarly hands and their wet, sour-breathed kisses; I see the rheumy color of their old eyes that changed as the sea changed. They are Venice's downstairs maids and butlers, the ones content with their portion in this life, descendants of Venetian women who never wove pearls in their hair, descendants of Venetian men who never wore satin breeches or sipped China tea at Florian. These are the other Venetians, the ones who rode the lagoons from their island farms to market, day after day, stopping only to fish for supper or to say prayers in some country church, never even once having walked in Piazza San Marco.