A Thousand Days in Venice (23 page)

The Biblioteca Marciana, the Venetian National Library, is another room in my house. A room that is, gratefully, not under construction. The library is located inside a sixteenth-century palazzo designed by Jacopo Sansovino and was constructed to house the Greek and Latin collections bequeathed to Venice by Cardinal Bessariono of Trebisond. Sitting square on the edges of the stone-flagged Molo and the Piazzetta, it looks toward the Doge's Palace and Basilica San Marco. The library's spare, severe Ionic and Doric columns are neighbors across the Piazzetta with pink and white Gothic arcades and the smoky glitter of Byzantium, all of them behaving nicely together in a sort of architectural cordiality at the entrance to the earth's most beautiful piazza.

I have spent more hours inside the dank solemn space of the library than anywhere else in Venice besides my own bed in our apartment or my rented one at the hotel next door. I'm determined to learn to read better and better in Italian. I've come to know the stacks and files, where certain manuscripts and collections are shelved, and even what's behind some of the funny little doors. Free
to wander about its three-quarters of a million volumes, I have come to know the particular and merciless cold that saturates its spaces in autumn and winter and to love its smells of damp paper, dust, and old stories. I know which sofa sags less than the others, which lamps actually have bulbs, which writing table gets the warmth of a space heater, and who among my companions reads aloud, who sleeps, who snores. I read-stumble-read history and apocrypha, chronicles and biographies and memoirs in my new language, often in an archaic form of my new language. Librarians, Fernando, dictionaries, my own curiosity, the will to imagine I could understand something of the ancient consciousness of Venice and the Venetians are my spurs.

On Fridays I don't go to the Marciana at all. I don't write or read a word. I don't even go to market or to Do Mori. I simply walk. More peaceful now, I revel in the gifts of whole, golden mornings with no one else's claim scrawled across them. I remember the days when, if an hour stretched out all mine, I would grab it and run, gorging on its moments as I would an apronful of warm figs. Now I have the feast of hour after hour, and so I choose a neighborhood and explore it as carefully as if I'd just acquired it in a game of blackjack. I walk in the Ghetto and in Cannaregio, or I stay on the water and debark in some unusual post.

One day in the Campo Santa Maria Formosa, I stop to buy a sack
of cherries and sit on the steps of the church. Legend says a bishop from Oderzo founded this church after a majestic woman with majestic breasts,
una formosa
, appeared to him and said he should build a church there and wherever else he saw a white cloud brush the earth. The good bishop built eight churches in Venice, but only this one is called after the formidable lady. I like this story. At the base of Santa Maria's baroque bell tower there is a grotesque—a medieval
scacciadiavoli
, devil chaser. The old bell and the even older grotesque are at ease together, the sacred and the profane taking the sun.

When it's too cold to stay outdoors all day, I ride out to the islands, to Mazzorbo and Burano, or to San Lazzaro to sit in the Armenian library—but I don't read. I sit there happily among old Mechitar's manuscripts and the soft padding about of the monks and I think. Sometimes I feel as though I've lived here forever. I think about what I've read, tried to read, understood, not quite understood. I think about the sadness Venice wears, that faint half-mourning that becomes her. And sometimes I see her naked, her sad mask loosed a moment and look straight into a face that's not sad at all. And I begin to understand she's done the same for me, loosed
my
sad mask, so old I wore it like skin.

In my readings I often come upon some ripple of lust, some small scrap of it, lust being a historic Venetian impulse. Sexual, sensual,
and economic hungers drove la Serenissima. A place of arrivals, brief soujourns, debarkings was Venice when she was new as much as she is still. A stopping-off place like no other, the insubstantialness of Venice bewitched. A sanctuary for indulgence. In the fifteenth century more than fourteen thousand women were registered with the city governors as licensed and tax-paying courtesans. A volume was published each year, serving as a guide to the hospitality of these women. It presented short biographies, the family and social alliances, education, and training in arts and letters of each courtesan. The book assigned each one a number, so that when the king of France or an English noble, a soldier waiting his billet on the next Crusade, a mirror-maker in from Murano, a Carthaginian trafficking in pepper and nutmeg came to town and sought some feminine succor, he could send a porter round to the lady's often sumptuous address, requesting an audience with number 203, or 11,884, or 574.

Should a courtesan's business lull, she would go for an afternoon to stroll. In wide, fluttering crinolines, red-blond hair woven with gems, white unsunned skin safe under a parasol, she would troll the piazza and the
campi
, beckoning this one with a deep curtsy, another one with the quick fluttering of her fan or a half-moment's baring of her breast. A Venetian courtesan wore
zoccoli
, sandals built up on twenty-inch pedestals—stilts, really—which served to keep her
frock from wet and soil while raising her up from the crowds, identifying her.

The Venetian aristocracy and the merchant class, along with the clergy, partook of the sophisticated social ministrations of these goddess spies who kept state secrets, if only for a while, and told truths, if not all of them. These women were as often the wives and daughters of the nobility as they were those of a policeman or a stone-mason. Sometimes they were young women who'd been parceled off to convents by their middle-class, dowry-fearing fathers. These unwilling postulants often violated their vows by secret and not-so-secret forays into this other, this less chaste sisterhood. The convent of San Zaccaria became celebrated for its libertine nuns, for the conspirings and plots they birthed along with a bevy of illegitimate children. Under the inquisition of a bishop's council, one of these nuns is said to have offered up the defense that her service to the church was greater than her sin upon it, she, after all, having kept as many priests as she could from a slip into homosexuality.

Whatever lust now titillates the Byzantine core of a Venetian he will often reserve for travelers rather than his neighbors. There is a
locandiere
, owner-manager, of a simple
pensione
and a four-table
osteria
who hasn't tuned up his menu for thirty years. Each morning he cooks the same five or six genuine, typical Venetian dishes. The food he doesn't sell on a given day he nicely sets apart and conserves.
Next day he cooks again, presenting the just-made dishes to his daily customers and the more mature rice and peas or pasta and beans or fish stew to passersby. Hence, the couple from New Zealand is eating the same type of food as are the two Venetian matrons who sit next to them. It's just that the New Zealanders' food is seasoned with two or three days' worth of patina for which the
locandiere
is wont to charge them thirty percent more than he does the ladies from
Sant'Angelo
whom he will see again the next day. He knows he'll never see those New Zealanders again and isn't Venice, herself, enough to content them? What do they know from pasta and beans, anyway? A merchant of Venice often sees himself separate from his product, be it fish or glass or hotel rooms. He is neither diminished nor enhanced by his own slipperiness, by his asking vulgar fistfuls of lire for yesterday's fish, slipperiness being another form of masquerade and masquerade being his birthright. The prostitute nun, the ermine-cloaked beggar, the doge who signed a pact on the day of his coronation that left him virtually powerless, these particularly Venetian forms of minor key harmony have given way to less reckless expressions of “coexistence,” sometimes in the form of “pot A and pot B” of pasta and beans.

We are trying to find the right place to breakfast on the rocks along the dam in Alberoni early one Saturday in July. Stepping over and around poles and buckets and lanterns and armies of stray cats that besiege the fishermen, Fernando opens quietly, “You know that idea about selling the apartment? I think we should do it. It's going to be beautiful when it's finished, and Gambara says our investment in the renovation will permit an interesting gain for us.” Gambara is the real estate agent in the Rialto whom we finally went to see and who has come several times to look at the work-in-progress. Our consulting with Gambara was an exercise in collecting intelligence, we'd agreed, impressions and numbers to stash away for someday. Is it someday already? Fernando thinks me a revolutionary, but it's he who is the anarchist.

“When do you decide these things? Am I always across the water when these holy flashes strike you?” I ask. All I wanted was to drink
this cup of cappuccino and eat this apricot pastry while sitting on a rock in the sunshine. “How
sure
are you about wanting this?” I ask him.

“Sicurissimo
. Absolutely sure,” he says, as though it's steel.

“Have you thought about where you'd like to look for another house?” I try.

“Not exactly,” he says.

“I guess we'll have to look in the quarters we can afford and hope we can find something we like. Probably Cannaregio or Castello, don't you think?” I ask him as though it's already steel with me, too.

“Remember when I told you if we sell our place I'd want to move somewhere totally different?”

“Sure I remember. Venice
is
totally different from the Lido, and we'll find a house with a little garden so you can have roses, and we'll have big windows with lots of light and some wonderful view, rather than having to look out at Albani's satellite dish and the troll's decrepit Fiat, and we can walk everywhere without having to be on the water half our lives. Believe me, Venice will be totally different.” I say all this very quickly, as though my speaking will prevent him from speaking, because I don't want to hear what I think he is going to say next.

“I'm leaving the bank.”

It's worse than what I thought he was going to say. Or is it better? No, it's worse.

“I don't know how much time we have before one of us dies or gets terribly sick or something, but I want to spend all of it together. I want to be where you are. I just don't have another ten or twelve or fifteen years in me to give to this job.” He's very still now.

“What would you like to do?” I ask.

“Something together. So far, that's all I know,” he says.

“You don't want to transfer to another bank, then?” I ask.

“Another bank? Why? I'm not looking for another version of this life. What would be the point of changing banks? One bank is just like another bank. I want to be with you. It's not as though I'll leave tomorrow. I'll wait until we arrange things so that we won't be hurt by my leaving. But please understand me when I tell you
I am
going to leave,” he says.

“But isn't selling the house the last thing we do rather than the first? I mean, if we sell the house, where do we go?” I want to know.

“It will take years to sell the apartment. Gambara says the market is very slow. You know everything moves
pian, piano
here,” he says like balm. Everything except you, I think. My vision is fading and my heart is thrashing, climbing up into my throat. I flash back to the apartment and back to Saint Louis. I even think back to California. Didn't I just arrive here? Isn't Venice my home?

“Why do you want to go away from Venice?” I whisper at him.

“It's less that I want to leave Venice than it is that I want to go
somewhere else. Venice will always be part of us. But our life is not dependent on one place. Or one house or one job. I learned all that from you. I like this ‘always being a beginner' idea, and now I want to be one,” he tells me. Fernando has never really moved and I don't know if he even understands what it takes. The spiritual move, I mean. Have I made it all sound too simple? I do that. I've always cooked and smiled and curled my hair through tempests. A whistler in caves, a sparkler in the doom, I sauté red herrings. Have I, Pollyanna, inspired him to imagine us as bold children with apples and cookies and cheese tied up in a bandana, off to live in a boxcar, off to cut the opening-day ribbons on a lemonade stand?

My serenity is not built into our new smooth soon-to-be-painted-ocher walls any more than it has been built into other walls. I know we are all waterbirds, camped in stilt houses only a breeze above a coursing sea. And this thought has always excited as much as it terrified me. At this moment, though, I'm feeling only the part about the terror. I wonder how much of my serenity is swirled, if not in the walls, then into this sea and this lagoon, how much of it has seeped into this thin, rosy light, how much more of it hangs in these oriental fogs. I just don't know right now. Or do I? Can I take it all with me once again? Will the whole of Venice become another room in my house?

And there's another part to my terror, the thought of inventing
the next era, some other way to live, some other thing to do. The little engine that always could. Am I a little engine that still can? And if
I
can, can
he
?

Staking out a large flat rock for us, he makes me a pillow with his sweatshirt and we sit together. I shiver in the July sun. Strangely feeble, its heat feels like new April heat, and the sea and the sky and his eyes are all the same blue. I feel feeble, too. I think of all those sinews and spines, the weeding and digging he's done to get to this point. “Good for you,” I say through my shivers. Just as one can see the young face in a person who is old, right this minute I can see Fernando's old face in his still young one. I think how much more I'll love him then. I remember the four generations of women who walked over the bridge on the festival of la Salute. Young faces inside old faces. Old faces inside young ones. If we dare to really look, how much more we can see.