A Thousand Days in Venice (18 page)

When I find one, a man, still living and not blind, he barks, “I don't make wedding dresses.”

“It's not a wedding dress I want but a dress I will wear at my wedding,” I try to explain. A thought that makes perfect sense in English often travels poorly when translated literally into Italian, and the gruff voice wishes me a definitive good afternoon.

At last I find my
sarta
, a tinkling-voiced woman who says she's been making dresses for all the most beautiful Venetian brides since she was fifteen years old. She says two of hers were televised on Channel 5 and two more were photographed for Japanese magazines. Trying to calm her expectations I once again attempt the “It's not a wedding dress I want but a dress I will wear at my wedding” idea, but it fizzles as before. We make an appointment for
dialogo
.

Her atelier, a fifth-floor flat in Bacino Orseolo behind San Marco,
overlooks the dock where waiting gondeliers gather to smoke and eat bread stuffed with mortadella and hustle up business. After drama with the buzzer and drama with her assistant, who does not want to admit me ten minutes early, I climb up to Rapunzel's tower.
La sarta
must not have been making wedding dresses for long, since she doesn't look much older than fifteen and her assistant looks twelve. They invite me to sit and look through a portfolio of drawings while I try to tell them I want a plain wool dress, good fabric, classic design. When I mention the Mongolian flounce I get their attention.
La sarta
begins to sketch on a tissue pad with a stub of pencil and in seconds there emerge the dress, a sort of cape, even a hat, a toque-like thing that would have been perfect for Gloria Swanson. “No,” I tell them. “Simpler than that and with no cape, no hat. Just a dress.”

“Come vuole, signora
. As you wish,” she says, edging her chin higher. She takes my measurements, hundreds of measurements. Knee to ankle, straight; knee to ankle, bent. Shoulders, standing; shoulders, sitting. The circumferences of wrist, middle forearm, elbow, upper arm. I feel like I'm being measured for embalming. She shows me bolt after bolt, swatch after swatch of gorgeous fabric, and when I say I like something she tells me she doesn't have quite enough for the dress or that the house that makes that particular one is still closed for vacation so she can't yet try to order it and, even if she
could contact them, she knows they haven't made that fabric for years and it's unlikely they'd have anything left. Why is she showing me things I can't have? Because what fun would it be if she had fifty yards of the fabric I wanted most in the world? What thrill would there be in that? No chafe, no twinge of anguish. It would end up being only a dress and not a wedding dress. “A little suffering sweetens things,” she tells me.

I just sit there looking at her, thinking I am beginning to understand her, a fact that both terrifies and gladdens me. We settle on a piece of cashmere that feels like heavy silk. It is beautiful and just large enough. Bombastes asks the price and, of course, offends Rapunzel. She tells me to return in a week to discuss the
preventivo
, estimate, with her twelve-year-old assistant. Could I just telephone next week? “Signora, it's nicer if you can come here. The telephone is a little cold, no?” she corrects me again.

On my return, I climb up to the atelier, I sit and look at the embossed envelope with my name on it that sits in a tiny dish on the table before me. Do I pick it up and open it? Will the assistant read it to me? Do I take it home and read it and climb back up to the tower to say, okay?
La sarta
hands me the envelope and I feel free to look at the one line written on the paper inside.
Un abito di sposa
—seven million lire—about thirty-five hundred dollars at the current exchange rate. I could have two Romeo Gigli dresses plus Gucci boots
plus lunch at Harry's once a week for a year for seven million lire. She sees my distress. I tell her the price is much more than I can pay, thank her for her time, and begin to back out the door. Even if the estimate was inflated just to see how much I would bear—a demonstration of
furbizia innocente
—I am appalled. I can only think that I have lost a precious week. Walking down and out into the piazza, I am sorry for the fifteen year old and the twelve year old that they must find someone else to pay their rent for the next three months.

I decide to forget the Mongolian flounce and just find a dress, readymade. I try Versace and Armani and Thierry Mugler. I try Biagiotti and Krizia. Nothing. One day I go to Kenzo in the Frez-zeria, and as I leave the shop I pass by another called Olga Asta. Here the sign promises readymade as well as custom-made clothing. I tell the lady I am looking for a dress to wear to a wedding. Whose wedding I do not say. She shows me a string of
tailleurs
—nice little suits—one navy blue with a smart white shantung trim and a dark brown one with a matching silk blouse. All wrong and I am loath to even try them. I am already halfway through my exit song when she tells me she can make something for me, she can design and sew anything. Through a wince I ask, “What do you think about a simple white wool dress with a Mongolian flounce?”

“Sarebbe molto bello, molto elegante, signora
. It would be very beautiful, very elegant,” she says quietly. “We might even add a peplum
to accentuate your waist.” She shows me lengths of stuff actually sufficient to make a dress. We choose one, and then she asks me to wait while she climbs up to her atelier. It seems Olga Asta is also a furrier, and back down she comes with a hank of long white Mongolian lamb in a ruff round her neck. Motioning me to follow her out into the daylight, she shows me how the fur and the white wool are of the same creamy tint.
“Destino, signora, è proprio destino
. It is destiny, signora, absolute destiny.” I want to know the price of destiny. Fearing inflation, I'm still mum about the fact that I'm to be the bride. She sits at her desk and writes and looks up prices and telephones upstairs to the atelier. Following decorum she does not announce the price aloud but writes two million lire on the back of her business card and hands it to me.

I say,
“Benone,”
just like Don Silvano and set up a series of appointments for fittings. I tell her the date on which I'll need the dress, and she flinches not at all.

I shake her hand and tell her how happy I am to have found her, and she says,
“Ma figurati
. Don't be silly, a bride-to-be must have exactly what she desires.” I never asked how she knew I was the bride, but I was glad she did. After the third or fourth fitting, I ask her to just finish the dress. I am sure it will be perfect and will come to fetch it on the afternoon before the wedding. She agrees, and I wonder why everything can't be so clean and straight, and then I
remember what Rapunzel told me and I am happy for the suffering that sweetens things.

Fernando decides the Hotel Bauer Grunewald will be the scene of our wedding lunch. His longtime friend and client Giovanni Gorgoni is the concierge there, and, early on, he told Fernando,
“Ci penso io
. I'll think of everything.” So, according to the stranger, our reception is planned, a fait accompli.

“What is the menu?” seems a reasonable question from a bride who is a chef about her wedding lunch.

“It's a fabulous menu with hors d'oeuvres and Champagne on the terrace and five or six courses at table,” he tells me, as though it was really information.

“
What
five or six courses?” I beg.

“It doesn't matter, it's the Bauer Grunewald, and everything will be wonderful,” he says. I can't decide whether this is
bella figura
or
furbizia innocente
at work, but I would really like to meet with these folks who are to feed us on our wedding day. He says I worry too much, but if I'd like to see a copy of the menu, he'll ask Gorgoni for it. I want to tell him I've planned parties for Ted Kennedy and Tina Turner, but I don't. He'd tell me this is different. I know it's different, but I'd just like to be part of things.

One morning we meet by chance in Calle Larga XXII Marzo. He's just picked up the menu from the Bauer, and he hands it to me with great brio. It's an undusted fin de siècle beauty, full of odes to Rossini and Brillat-Savarin, and I see he has said yes to a fish course that raises the price of lunch by fifty percent, to three baked pasta dishes with the same sauce, to “house wines” without knowing from whose house they will come, and a wedding cake sullied with a plastic gondola. I feel my sabre rattling. I look a little off to the left as I tell him
I
want to cater our wedding. Does he want to see my menu? He rolls his eyes until I think he's going to have a fit, and I crumple the menu and stuff it in my purse. I have one more bullet.

“Wouldn't it be lovely to have something a little less formal? We could all go out to Torcello and sit under the trees at Diavolo.” I'm thinking of my sweet waiter with the salmon-colored cravat and the pomaded hair parted in the middle, the same waiter who brought us cherries in iced water at the end of our first lunch together on Torcello. The stranger kisses me hard and long on the lips, leaves me standing in the middle of the
calle
, and heads back toward the bank's main office for a meeting. I know the kiss says I love you with my whole heart, and I know too that it says we will not traipse out to Torcello with the priest and the pageboys and Armenian monks and a delegation from the British Women's Club to sit under the trees
and be served by the waiter with the salmon-colored cravat. Most clearly of all it says you will not cook for your own wedding.

Why do I let him dismiss me like this? Without deciding to, I step inside Venezia Studium and buy a small, pleated white silk pouch finished with a tassle and suspended from a long satin cord. At least I can decide what purse I'll carry to my wedding lunch. I feel better, my perspective back in focus. The marriage is more important than the event to me, and I know that's why I just let the stranger fly. And besides, he's having so much fun. Anyway, if the Bauer's propaganda is at all true, even the Aga Khan and Hemingway suffered through the same bloody meal.

Fernando asks me to meet him one morning at a travel agency where he has already booked us on the night train to Paris. “Why do we have to go to Paris on a honeymoon when we live in Venice?” I ask him.

“It is precisely because we live in Venice that we are going to Paris,” he says.

My big job is to choose the hotel. When he tells me we're going to the printer's to look at paper and typeface for our invitations, I can't believe it. We're inviting nineteen people!

“I'll get some wonderful paper and envelopes and use my calligraphy
pens. We can use wax and a seal, if you'd like. They'll be personal and beautiful,” I tell him.

“Troppo artigianale
. Too homemade,” he says.

The printer's workshop is an ink-smudged dream scented with hot metal and new paper, and I could stay there forever. The printer sets stacks of albums before us and says,
“Andate tranquilli
. Take your time.” We look through all the books, and then we look through all the books again and the stranger places his finger on a page full of engravings of Venetian barques. He likes one with a couple being rowed down the Grand Canal. I like it too, and so we order it in a dark Venetian red on woven silky paper of the palest green. We go to take an espresso at Olandese Volante while the printer prepares the estimate. When we return, the printer is off working and a little folded-up piece of paper addressed to us waits on his desk. The cost will be six hundred thousand lire. That's three hundred dollars for nineteen invitations. When the printer comes back to us he is apologetic for the cost and explains that the lowest amount of paper he can order is for 150 invitations. Even though we need only nineteen, we must pay for 150.

“Let's choose another paper,” I say.

“But the lowest lot is always 150,” says the printer.