A Thousand Days in Venice (16 page)

We play “I knew a woman, I knew a man” most nights coming home on the boat, and the game seems to ease away the banker and bring forth Fernando. Back at home, refreshed by our bath, his martini, his Prufrock supper, he remembers how to laugh.

One autumn Saturday morning Fernando chides my use of the familiar form
tu
in addressing a gentleman to whom he introduces me as we stand on the deck of a vaporetto. The man is about sixty-five, handsome, suave in his foulard and silk suit. A flicker of strain, something sharp passes between them. Had I blundered so badly? As we walk through Venice Fernando grows silent, surly even. I am perplexed that a
tu
rather than a
Lei
could grieve him so. This almighty
bella figura
thing? Finally we sit inside at Florian, and he begins to speak. He tells me the story of the man on the vaporetto. He is a doctor who has kept offices on the Lido for as long as Fernando can remember. He says his mother had been the doctor's mistress. It was
an alliance that splattered out over and smothered a dozen years of his childhood. He says it was as though someone else—someone more important than his father or his brother Ugo or himself—lived in their house. Never discussed, this unnamed tyranny destroyed them. There was no mercy from the Lidensi. Vicious and tormenting, they proclaimed the scandal the great cuckolding of its time. His father withdrew to one part of the house, entered into a protracted illness, and took years and years to die of heart problems, both organic and sentimental.

“You still grieve for him,” I say.

“Not
still
,” he says quickly. “I grieve for him because now I
can
, unfrozen, unlocked by the lady in the long white coat. I'm content we saw Onofrio, and I'm more content you gave him the
tu
. But I'm sorry for my father. I'm sorry he went into his long, dark night “a man,” a silent, suffering
bella figura
. He left me with the torch. It was my turn to become quiet and choked and brave and without needs of my own. I was to be the next generation, the next virtuous bearer of old miseries. I won't do it, I won't be another man like my father, stepping over the cracks, lurking about the spaces of his own life like a visitor, fearing more to disturb, to offend, to be
too present
than he feared to die.”

As long as that dying was, he said, his brother's death in the same year happened in an instant.

Having long ago fled the Lido and his counterfeit family, Ugo had been a diplomat in the service of the European Parliament in Luxembourg. He was forty when he died from a heart attack. “The echoes feel like bricks on my chest,” Fernando says. Ugo and I spoke only once about the affair, one night when he was fifteen and I was twelve. We were alone in our room, lying in our beds in the dark and smoking. I asked him if it was true, and all he said was yes. Until now, I've never spoken to anyone else about it.”

“Tell me about Ugo,” I say. “What was he like?”

“He was like you. Irrepressible, enchanted by things, he lived on the edges of his moments. He could fit a whole life inside an hour. Everything that happened to him was an adventure. I would go down to the ferry to meet him whenever he came back for a few days. He drove a two-seater Morgan with the top down even in winter, and he wore a long white scarf. He kept Champagne in the boot and a red felt case with two Baccarat flutes. The day we met and you pulled out that goblet from its little velvet pouch and your silver flask of cognac, my heart turned over.”

We didn't say anything for a long time until he raised up his head and looked at me hard. There was no stranger in his gaze. There was only Fernando.

Living as a couple never means that each gets half. You must take turns at giving more than getting. It's not the same as a bow to the other whether to dine out rather than in, or which one gets massaged that evening with oil of calendula; there are seasons in the life of a couple that function, I think, a little like a night watch. One stands guard, often for a long time, providing the serenity in which the other can work at something. Usually that something is sinewy and full of spines. One goes inside the dark place while the other one stays outside, holding up the moon. I know I must not lean on Fernando right now. Reckonings, hungers, irregular verbs, these are mine alone to fathom while he uses his energy to come clean with himself, to do his own
weeding and scrubbing and digging clear down to China
. He has work to do, so I'll provide the peace. As much as I want him to love me, I want Fernando to love himself.

I think he also wants to love himself. He is not only awakening, he has taken up the cudgels. “In order to breathe, he must break all the windows,” said Virginia Woolf about James Joyce. I try to imagine what she would say of Fernando. I say he's a Mamluk with reins between his teeth, wielding twin scimitars, robes flying, gold jangling, riding like hell across hot sands into the French phalanx.

“Let's tear down the walls,” he says figuratively one morning, “all of them, and while we're at it, let's smash in the doors.” I think he is saying, I want to breathe. “New bathroom, hah. New furniture, hah. Everything that ever happened before was surreal,” he says. “I've had a sort of hand-me-down life that never fit, that was never my own. Now I feel like a Jew ready to walk out of Egypt,” he says quietly.

Lord! Why is he always so heavy?

“Can you keep up with me?” he wants to know, sparklers lighting up his eyes. “For example, did you know that we're getting married on October 22?” It is now early September.

“Of what year?” I want to know.

We had begun the hesitation waltz with the Ufficio Stato Civile on the Lido six weeks earlier. Loins girded, hearts stout, we would accommodate the state's gluttony for declarations and submissions and disclosures; we would fill the works with signatures and testimonies and stamps and seals. We would have our license to be married.
On the first Saturday morning visit, as we climb the stone stairs up to the tiny city hall next to the carabinieri barracks, I believe I am a pilgrim fit to travel through the prickly wilderness of the Italian bureaucracy. Armed in patience and calm, shielded by my portfolio full of papers stamped by the
palermitana
in Saint Louis,
viciously, repeatedly, with the great inked seal of the Italian state
, I am near to the finish. Only details remain, it will be a piece of cake, I think, as we stand in line to see the secretary. Fernando tells me to smile rather than try to talk. He says the bureaucracy is always more indulgent to the helpless, and so I am meek as Teresa the Little Flower. The secretary tells us that
la direttrice
is, of course, occupied and asks why we hadn't fixed an appointment. Fernando assures her that he has called, left telephone messages and two hand-delivered written messages beseeching
la direttrice
.

“Ah, certo, siete voi. Lei è l'americana
. Ah, yes, it's you. You're the American,” says the secretary, looking me up and down. She wears white jeans, a U-2 T-shirt, and forty bangle bracelets and carries a pack of Dunhill's and matches in case she needs to light up during the twelve-yard voyages she makes from her office to
la direttrice
's office. We sit and wait, grinning at each other. “Here we are,” we say, “getting things under way.”

From nine-thirty until nearly noon the Little Flower and the stranger wait, he breaking the vigil at half-hour intervals with an
espresso from the bar down on Sandro Gallo. Once he brings back espresso for me, china cup and saucer and spoon, an almond croissant all on a small tray.
“Simpatico,”
the secretary says of Fernando, before she tells us to come back next Saturday.

The next Saturday and the Saturday after that pass in much the same way, modified only by our taking turns to go to the bar. Four Saturdays pass without our seeing
la direttrice
. This is an island of seventeen thousand citizens, sixteen thousand of whom are on the beach every Saturday in summer while the rest are at home watching
Dallas
reruns. Who can be in there with her? On the fifth Saturday, the Little Flower and the stranger are shown directly into her office.
La direttrice
is gray. She is all gray. Her skin, her lips, her hair, her baggy linen dress are all the color of ashes. She exhales a gray cloud, extinquishes her cigarette, and holds out her large gray hand in welcome, I think, but, in fact, to take my portfolio. She turns each page as though my documents repel her, as though they are blueprints soaked in hell broth. She smokes. Fernando smokes. The secretary comes in to file a sheaf of papers, and she smokes. I sit there trying to distract myself by looking at the print of the sacred heart of Jesus. I say “Jesus,” and wonder how long it will take for me, a pink-lunged woman who has chased and captured free radicals and religiously swallowed antioxidants for ten years, to die of secondhand smoke. The
direttrice
's glasses fall repeatedly from the end of
her nose, so she picks up Fernando's, which he has laid casually on her desk, but these do not appear to help.

She closes the portfolio and says, “These papers are old and without value. The laws have changed.” The Little Flower gives forth a short shriek.

“Old? These were prepared in March, and it is August,” I tell her.

“Ah,
cara mia
, in six months everything can change in Italy. We are a country in movement. The government changes, the soccer coaches change, everything changes as much as nothing changes, and you must learn this,
cara mia
. You must return to America, establish residency, wait one year and refile your documents,” she says without condolence. The Little Flower wilts, fights a faint.

From beyond my swoonings I hear Fernando saying
“Ma è un vero peccato perchè lei è giornalista
. It's really a shame because she is a journalist.” He tells her I write for a group of very important newspapers in America, that they have assigned me to chronicle my new life here in Italy and to write a series of articles about my experiences, about the personalities who help me to find my way. Especially, he tells her, the editors are interested in the story of her marriage. She has deadlines, signora, deadlines. These articles will be read by millions of Americans and those personalities about whom she writes are bound for celebrity in the States.
La direttrice
removes Fernando's
glasses and puts back her own. She does this exchange several times while I look at Fernando with a mixture of awe and disgust. He has lied through his long white teeth.

“You know I would like nothing better than to help you,” she says really looking at us for the first time. I do
not
know that, I think. Now, pressing hands to temples she says. “I must go to the mayor, to the regional administrators. Could you write here the names of these very important newspapers?”

“I will write everything for you, signora, and deliver it on Monday morning,” he promises. She tells us to return next Saturday, then we shall see. I begin to understand that it is not so much that the Italian bureauacracy is, itself, twisted, as it is twisted by those who administer it, who inlay and torture it, with their own set of corruptions, personal as thumbprints. There is fundamentally no Italian bureaucracy, only Italian bureaucrats. Fernando decides to tell
la direttrice
the Associated Press itself has assigned me this series of articles, and hence it is possible that hundreds, thousands of newspapers across America will pick up the stories. He writes all this in a telegram. I think it is diabolical. I pray it works.
La direttrice
telegrams in response. The troll delivers it, the easy-to-open, resealable envelope still warm from her manipulations.

“Tutto fattible entro tre settimane. Venite sabato mattina
. All is possible within three weeks. Come on Saturday morning.”

“What do we do when she asks to see the articles?” I want to know.

“We'll tell her that America is a country in movement, that assignments change, that everything changes as much as nothing changes, and that she must understand this,
cara mia
.”

The state feels good in our pockets, but the indulgence of Mother Church remains suspended. We had learned from a single terse audience at the Curia in Venice that the sanction of the church can only be gained—if it is to be gained at all—through a mysterious investigation “that satisfies the bishop of the couple's avowed intentions to live within the church's laws.” The searching of Fernando's spiritual past would be easy, but why did they need to minister the Inquisition on my behalf? Did they want the names and addresses of my churches and priests in New York and Sacramento and Saint Louis? Did they have some great papal Internet where all they had to do was punch up my name and check on my every spiritual peccadillo? And I hope these “avowed intentions to live within the church's laws” did not include birth control directives. Even if I had only hours of fertility left, I wanted no one to tell me what to do with them. I am broken by too many laws, old laws, new laws.