A Thousand Days in Venice (22 page)

“It's small and cramped and there's no light and we're spending all this money for nothing,” he tells me.

“It's small and cramped and there's no light and we're spending all this money, but it's
not
for nothing. You're the one who insisted we take the place down to its ribs. I don't understand you,” I tell him, wishing I could be alone in a room with no sledgehammer, no buckets. Not a single bag of cement. No stranger. “Why don't we just sell the place?” I take him by surprise. “Is there a
sestiere
in Venice where you'd like to live? Surely, if we tried, we could find an apartment,
with a
mansarda
, a roof-top space, that we could fix up and
both
grow to love,” says the gypsy in me. My proposal disturbs him.

“Do you know the cost of real estate in Venice?” he asks.

“About the same as the cost of real estate on the Lido, most likely. Why don't we go to see an agent and just get a reading on the market?” I ask.

He repeats “real estate agent” in the same tone he might say “Antichrist.” Why are Italians so afraid of asking questions? “If we sell this apartment I wouldn't want to buy something else in Venice,” he says. “I'd want to really move, to move someplace totally different, away from here. Moving into Venice is not the solution,” he tells me.

Since I'm not sure what the problem is, I am also unsure that Venice is the solution. He doesn't want to talk about it anymore because he knows if I understand what he really wants to do, I might just agree and then where would he be?

One thing seems clear. We can no longer live in the work site, and in late February we move to the hotel next door. The hotel closes officially from Christmas through Easter, but since two staff persons stay to keep an eye on things, the owners agree to rent us a bedroom and bath. We'll have access to a pretty country-French-furnished sitting room with an old ceramic woodstove and a small dining room with a black marble fireplace. Our room will be heated, but the corridors and sitting and dining rooms will not.
Because of insurance stipulations, we will not have kitchen privileges, as the two caretakers do. A hotel kitchen, equipped, spacious, sparkling, down the hall, and I'm not allowed to use it! Or is it that they are perfectly agreeable to my using it, but are obliged to tell me not to use it?

We bring only two suitcases of clothes, some books, and the Georgian candlestick that has gone where I've gone since I was fifteen. When we need anything else, we just go next door. Our bedroom is small and square with a very high ceiling. Flemish tapestries cover two walls, pink Murano sconces flank a large mirror, and pink moiré covers the bed and drapes the long window. There are good rugs, a heavy, dark wood armoire, a sleigh bed, pretty side tables. A burgundy velvet sofa faces the garden.

The solution to the kitchen problem is through the caretakers. They can use it, and so, if I use it with them, I will be only
smudging
the rules. I am beginning to think like an Italian. The first night I bring back things to cook from the Rialto and ask Marco, one of the caretakers, if he and his colleague would like to join us round our little black fireplace about nine. I tell him I'm braising porcini in sage cream and Moscato, that I'll grill chestnut polenta with Fontina, that there are pears and walnuts and more Moscato for afterward. Smiling, he asks how I'm going to braise the porcini over the wood fire, knowing already I'm headed straight for the kitchen.
I invite him to prep with me and Fernando joins us and then Gilberto comes in, finished with his painting session in the reception rooms, and soon we are all mincing and whisking and drinking Prosecco. That evening, and several evenings each week thereafter, until the proprietors come home, Marco, Gilberto, Fernando, and I keep good company round the little black fireplace in the small hotel.

Gilberto is an extrordinary cook, and when he takes a turn at the burners, he roasts ducks and pheasant and guinea hens, stirs up thick wintry concoctions of lentils and potatoes and cabbages. One evening he announces we will have only dessert. He makes
kaiserschmarren
, delicate crèpe-like confections cut into ribbons and swathed in wild blueberry jam. He passes a bowl of thick cream and a bottle of iced plum eau-de-vie purloined from the hotel's private larder, and when we finish every jot, I am grateful I don't have to climb over thirteen bridges and ride over the waters to get to our bed. When no one cooks, we roast whole heads of garlic and small purple onions over the fire, charring them until they collapse, sprutzing them with good balsamic vinegar, feasting on them with fresh white cheese, trenchers of crusty bread, and good red wine. We live for nearly nine months in the hotel, at first like voluptuous stowaways, then as proper guests, sitting at table with the others, and, once in a while, exchanging mysterious smiles with Gilberto and Marco.

I walk over to our apartment each day, but the workers are almost never there. I'm learning another fact that affects the Italian work ethic. The working-class Italian, the average small businessman, wants less from his life—from his earning life—than do many other Europeans in similar situations. What a working-class Italian can't do without he usually already has. He wants a comfortable place to live—whether rented or owned makes little difference to him. He wants an automobile or a truck or both, but they will be modest. He wants to take his family to Sunday lunch, up to the mountains for a week in February, and down to the sea for two weeks in August. He wants to offer a good
grappina
from the Friuli to his colleagues when it's his turn on Friday afternoon. He'd rather have money in the bank than in his wallet because he'd never spend it anyway. What he needs costs relatively little, so why should he work longer or harder to get more when he thinks himself already well-off enough?

The Italian knows that speed—say, the fitting in of another appointment or hurrying to finish something he can finish tomorrow—will give him not more satisfaction but less, if such preposterous acts interfere with his rituals. An espresso and a chat with friends will always come before the installation of your baseboard. And he knows that because you are such a lovely person, you would applaud
his sense of values. When he watches a soccer match rather than work on your estimate, he knows you'll have expected him to do just that. If he uses your down payment to clear a debt rather than buy materials for your project, he is only practicing a sort of triage, the addressing of the severest need first. In the end this will serve you, as it has his customers before you and will serve those after you. Italians have learned about patience more than almost anyone else. They know that, in the end, a few months, a few years, one way or the other, will not cast long shadows over your well-being nor enlarge it. The Italian understands wrinkles in time.

And then there's the whole idea of service, which, in Italy, has never quite caught on. Here a customer base is often generations old, and, for better or worse, its numbers will rise and fall only with the birth and death rates. In Italy “cutting edge” refers to one's knives, good and sharp enough to carve up a
salame
thin as paper. There was enough innovation during the Renaissance to last another thousand years or so. Ancestral inventiveness suffices here, and few feel the need to improve on it. Who could even think to improve the wheel or a straw broom or the lead plumb that tests the straightness of a wall? Besides, if something goes amiss, the Italian can look to heaven and curse his entire lineage for thwarting him. There is always destiny to blame for any red marks that an evil accountant might enter on one's annual report. Anyway
nonna
, grandmother, and
everyone else has more sympathy for a whiff of failure than for the smell of new money. Except in sports, the greater sympathy in Italy is reserved for the vanquished. The celebrity Fantozzi has long been the essential, irresistible, benign bungler in Italian film. His is the preferred identity of the working-class Italian male, including even some bankers.

Ambition is an illness in Italy, and no one wants to catch it. At least, no one wants you to know that he has caught it. If the saints and angels had desired him to be rich, rich he would be by now, he tells you. Hence workers in Italy are not less reliable, less efficient, or more cunning than workers are anywhere else. They are, instead,
Italian
workers, functioning according to a perfectly acceptable
Italian
rhythm and attitude. It is we outsiders who refuse to accept this. When an Italian rolls his eyes in mock horror at another Italian's casual approach to a day's work, there is also a sort of pride in his look that says, “Some things, thank God, will never change.”

Fernando is delighted with the nightly recountings of my newly burnished takes on his countrymen, and he tells his own set of stories about the inner workings of the Italian banking system and its splendidly played farces. He laughs, yet a wisp of rancor lingers when he's quiet. I don't ask him about it, since he seems only tentatively at peace with his work-in-progress crises.

We have chosen large black and white marble tiles to cover the
walls and the floor. Fernando wants them laid straight, while I think it might be interesting to place some of them on the diagonal. I sketch, and he crumples my paper and says the effect will be too contemporary. I drag him to the Accademia and Correr to illustrate how time-worn and classic black and white on the diagonal is, and he says okay. But he won't give in on the new washing machine, which he desires to be positioned exactly where the old one sat, thus carrying on the tradition of colliding with it each time we open the door. I want one of those wonders of Milanese design, a washer slim as a suitcase that lives inside a handsome cabinet. He says these machines only wash two pairs of socks at a time, that their cycles last three hours, that they are wholly impractical. I want to talk about form over function, but he says I can just drape the big machine the way I drape everything else, and so it's the big machine that we order.

I am reading a biography of Aldo Moro, the Italian prime minister who, in the sixties and into the seventies, preached, among other things, a “historic compromise” between the church and the communists. He called for a
coincidenza
of the virtues of authority and reform, what he termed “converging parallels.” How sublimely Italian, at once civilized and yet socially and mathematically impossible. Each faction rolls straight ahead, alongside the other faction, and both talk across the void between them about their impending coexistence, all the while knowing it will never be. Just as in a marriage.

I ogle and fondle bolts of fabric all over Venice, but, like all the good Lidensi, I must content myself with choices from the goods stacked up in the garage next to the laboratory of Tappezzeria Giuseppe Mattesco in Via Dandolo. The entire inventory seems to be white, off-white, creamy white, pale yellow, or mint green sheer cottons and polished cottons, though there are a few flowered chintzes in shades of lilac and red and pink and an occasional maverick bolt of tapestry. Since we have only a few windows with which to work and three pieces of furniture that need slipcovering, I want some opulent satin and velvet stripe, cinnamon, bronze. I want to know why I can't buy fabric elsewhere from which Signor Mattesco can make our drapes and slipcovers, and Fernando tells me it's because, years ago, Mattesco bought out an overstocked mill up in the Treviso, hundreds and hundreds of bolts of the same fabrics, and ever since, he has been measuring and cutting and stitching up the same bargain-priced drapes and slipcovers for everyone on the island. He says working with Mattesco on Mattesco's terms is a sort of local ordinance.

I think this is a fantastic story but it turns out to be almost true, and so I feel less terrible about never having been invited into any of my neighbor's houses. Now I know in all of them flutter the same white batiste curtains bordered in little wine-colored balls. At least that's what Mattesco tries to push off on me. I dig about in his garage
for days until I find a cache of ivory brocade. It is heavy and lush and smells profoundly of mold. He is so happy to get rid of the forgotten stuff he says two days in the sun will cure it, and it does, nearly, or enough so that we can use it.

Signora Mattesco is the seamstress. She has white skin and white hair and wears a pristine white smock as she sits at her machine in a sea of white cloth. She looks like an angel and seems confused, sad even, about my not wanting the border of little wine-colored balls.

There is a bottega in San Lio where a father and son pound and carve, twisting thin sheets of metal into chandeliers, lamps, and candlesticks, rubbing the beauties with woolen cloth dipped in gold paint. We've been watching them at work in their window, stopping in to visit and chat once or twice each week for months before we even begin to explore what we might like to have them make for us. They and we are happy for one another's company, and all of us know there is no hurry about deciding anything. Venetians like to stretch certain encounters out as thin as a wasp's wing, to unroll them
pian, piano
, ever so slowly. Why scurry, why settle something before it needs to be settled? If enough time passes between the settling and the finishing, one might find one's self not needing what it was one settled on and someone else finally finished. And anyway, where is the joy in endings? I swear I am beginning to understand Venetians. I continue to think about Rapunzel and the Italian truth
that without suffering and drama nothing is worth having or doing. Without the rubble and the screaming and Fernando's dead-bird eyes, I would have only a bathroom rather than a black-and-white marble-walled and -floored room, where I will take candlelit baths with a stranger.