A Thousand Days in Venice (7 page)

I'd always fought to keep dismantling my pile, to sort and reject as much of the clutter as I could. Now, even more, I made myself
look back straight into that which was over and done with, and that which would never be. I was determined to go to Fernando, and if there was to be some chance for us to take our story beyond this beginning, I knew I would have to go lightly. I was fairly certain the stranger's piles would provide enough work for both of us.

Except with my children, I had little conversation with anyone during those last months in Saint Louis. It was my own counsel I wanted to keep. There were two exceptions. Misha, my friend from Los Angeles, came to visit, condemning my intentions to marry Fernando, placing them neatly into the ranks of midlife crisis. Milena saw things differently. My best friend, a Florentine who had been living in California for more than thirty of her then fifty-six years, Milena was characterisically severe and talked mostly with her eyes. Trying to read her by telephone was maddening. I would have to face her if I wanted to know what she was thinking about my news. I went to Sacramento to visit, and only then, sitting in front of those sharp, dark eyes, could I feel her acceptance. “Take it in both your hands and hold tight to this love. If it comes, it comes only once.”

When I told her about Misha's cynical predictions, Milena called him a two-penny prophet whose oracles might even be true. And, with eyes looking far away, chin tilted up, mouth pursed, she banished
Misha's gloom with a wave of her beautiful brown hand. “If this is love, if there is even the possibility that this is real love, what do you care? What will it cost you to live it out? Too much? Everything? Now that it has presented itself to you, could you dare to imagine turning away from it for anything or anyone?” She lit a cigarette and pulled at it fiercely. She had already finished talking.

“Did it ever happen to you?” I asked. Her cigarette was nearly a stub by the time she answered.

“Yes, I think it did happen once to me. But I was afraid the sentiments would change. I was afraid of some form of betrayal and so I walked away. I betrayed
it
before it could betray me. And maybe I thought life inside that intensity would suffocate me. So I chose a sort of pleasant, safe compromise, an emotion less than passion and more than tolerance. Isn't that what most of us choose?” she asked.

“I find the
intensity
beautiful. I've never felt more serene than since I met Fernando,” I told her. She laughed.

“You would be serene in hell. You'd start cooking and baking and redecorating. You are your own serenity. It didn't come from nor can it go away because of Fernando,” she said. Milena's cancer was diagnosed that next fall. She died on the night of Christmas, 1998.

Too quickly, too slowly, June arrives, and on the night before departure, Erich comes to stay with me. The house is as empty as a barn. On my bedroom floor we make two pallets of the packing quilts left behind by the movers, cover them with fresh sheets borrowed from Sophie, finish the last of the Grand Marnier, and talk away the night, liking the echoes that our voices make in the empty house. Next morning we say good-bye easily enough, having settled that he will come to Venice for the month of August. The shuttle driver, Erich, and two neighbors heave my baggage into the van. My new minimalism seems to have gained weight.

It takes half an hour to wheel and drag everything into the terminal and over to Alitalia. The overweight fees are too terrible to pay, and I wish I had heeded Fernando's good advice about bringing only what is
indispensabile
. There is nothing to do but unpack and stage an auction right here in front of check-in.

The ticket agents unzip and unbuckle while I pull out treasures. I inaugurate the event. “Would anyone like this Limoges chocolate set?” Then, “Here's a suitcaseful of hats, winter hats, straw hats, veils, feathers, flowers. Anyone for hats?” Soon there is a gathering of travelers and passersby, some just gaping, some happily, incredulously taking things off my hands. I am offering up a case of '85 Chateau Montelena cabernet and a trunkful of shoes when the captain of my flight saunters by with his equipage. We recognize each
other from different lives: his as an occasional guest at the café, mine as “that lady chef.” He stops. I offer an abridged recitation of my story and, after a short conference with an agent, he motions me to follow him, bending down to whisper, “Everything will be taken care of.”

A steward ushers me into the first-class waiting room, another sets down a tray with a bottle of Schramsberg Blanc de Noir and a flute. One pops the cork, pours, hands me the glass by its stem. I'm impressed. At twenty-second intervals I sip, fiddle with my shiny new Casedei sandals, take my hair down, and tie it back up again. I keep trying to remember to breathe. A woman of, perhaps, fifty, wearing a Stetson, alligator boots, and capri pants sits down next to me, avoiding the other six tenantless leather couches.

“Are you a woman in transformation?” she begins. I'm not sure I've heard her correctly and so I just continue to spit-polish my shoes while flashing her a smile of welcome.

She asks me again, and this time I have no choice but to believe my ears and so I answer her, “Well, I think we all are. I hope we all are. I mean, isn't life, itself, transformation?” She looks at me with craven pity, tilting her head, preparing to illuminate my innocence, when I am rescued by an attendant and escorted up into the penthouse of the 747, far away from my original coach position.

I am fed and coddled by the staff and given much attention from
the four Milanese businessmen who are my cabin companions. After everyone is settled down, chocolates and cognac duly consumed, the captain opens his microphone with wishes for all our sweet dreams. He adds that, in honor of the American woman who is going to Venice to be married, he will take the liberty of singing an old Roberto Carlos song. At thirty thousand feet, all husky and sensual, he croons.
“Veloce come il vento voglio correre da te, per venire da te, per vivere con te
. Fast as the wind I want to run to you, to come to you, to live with you.”

At sunrise I am still awake. The little cabin is washed in new June light, and I pretend to breakfast as though it is any normal morning. The balladeer masquerading as our captain announces our descent over Milan. I sit there in tremors, emotions tumbling, colliding, an icy free fall from one life into the next. I clutch the seat arms as though they and the quick hard beating of my heart could force the great hulking machine down faster or make it stay still. A last attempt at control, perhaps. I'd descended upon Italy so many times before, a traveler, a visitor with a return ticket. I have time only to wipe my face dry, to take my hair down and put it up one more time. We touch ground with the gentlest
thump
.

Thump
. The first carriageful of suitcases is thrust through the swinging doors from the baggage claim out into the horrid yellow and black of Malpensa airport. The good captain had seen to it that all my things, except those already given away, arrived with me.
Thump
. A frontier guard, shepherding things, leaves his automatic weapon dangling from his belt as he forces one cart after another out into the arrival area while I look on.
“Buona permanenza, signora,”
says the guard sotto voce and barely moving his mouth. “A happy stay for you, my lady. I hope he is a true gentleman.”

“How do you know that a man is waiting for me?” I ask him.

“C' è sempre un uomo,”
he answers with a salute. “There's always a man.” I sling two carry-ons over squared shoulders and follow my bags out into the crowd of those waiting. I hear him before I see him.

“Ma, tu sei tutta nuda,”
he is saying from behind a sheaf of yellow daisies, yellow, like the Izod shirt he wears loose over green plaid
slacks. He looks like a technicolor anchovy, so thin—small almost—standing among the others behind the cordons. Blueberry eyes set in sun-bronzed skin, so different from his winter face. I am going to marry that stranger there in the yellow Izod shirt, I say to myself. I am going to marry a man whom I've never known in summer. This is the first time I've walked toward him while he stood still. Everything around him in sepia, only Fernando is in color. Even now whenever I come upon him, meet him in a restaurant, under the clock tower at noon, at the potato lady's table in the market, in our own dining room when it's full of friends, I flash back to that scene and, for half a moment, once again only he is in color.

“But you're all naked,” he is saying again, crushing me into the daisies he still holds tight to his chest with one hand. My legs are bare, stretching up from my new sandals to a short navy skirt and a white T-shirt. He's never seen me in summer either. We stay fixed, quiet for a long time in that first embrace. We are shy. We are comfortably shy.

Most of the bags and cases we fit into the the car's trunk and backseat, neat as fish in a tin. What's left he secures to the roof with a length of plastic rope.
“Pronta?”
he asks. “Ready?” A blithe transfiguration of Bonnie and Clyde off to burgle the romance of our lives, we race northwest at eighty miles per hour. The air conditioner is blasting out great puffs of icy air, the windows are rolled
down, inviting in the already hot, wet air outside. He must have both.

Elvis purls out his heart. Fernando knows all the words but only phonetically. “What does it mean?” he wants to know. “I can't stop loving you. It's useless to try.” I translate lyrics that I'd never before paid attention to, words he'd been listening to forever. “I've missed you since I was fourteen,” he says. “At least that's when I began to notice that I missed you. Maybe it was even earlier. Why did you wait so long to come to me?” There is about all this a sensation of mise-en-scène. I wonder if he feels it. Could anything really be this good? I, who think Shostakovich a modernist, belt out “I can't stop loving you” into the great plain of the Padana stretched out flat and treeless over Italy's unlovely industrial belly. Perhaps this is the date I was always expecting to have.

Two and a half hours later, we take the exit for Mestre, the belching, black-breathed port that warehouses petroleum for all of north Italy. Can it be true that Venice lives cheek to cheek with this horror? Almost immediately there is the bridge, the Ponte della Libertà, the Bridge of Liberty, five miles of it, raised up a scant fifteen feet and hurled out over the waters, riveting Venice to terra firma, dry land. We're nearly home. It's high noon under a straight-up sun, and the lagoon is a great smashed mirror that glints and blinds. We eat thick trenchers of crusty bread laid with ruffles of mortadella, lunch from
the little bar in the car park while we wait for the ferry that will carry us to the Lido.

It is a forty-minute cruise on the
Marco Polo
, traversing the lagoon and slicing down the Guidecca Canal to the island that is called Lido di Venezia, the beach of Venice. Thirteen hundred years ago fishermen and farmers lived here. I know that now it is a faded fin de siècle watering hole where, during its heyday, European and American literati came to rest and play. I know that its village of Malamocco, once the Roman settlement of Metamaucus, was the eighth-century seat of the Venetian republic, that the Lido is the stage for the Venice Film Festival, and that there is a casino. And Fernando has told me about it so often, I can imagine the tiny church there, and, in my mind, I can see its plain red stone face looking out to the lagoon. I know that Fernando has lived on the Lido for nearly his whole life. More than this, I have yet to learn.

After the boatman guides the car onto the ferry, Fernando kisses me, looks at me a long time, then says he is going up on deck to smoke. His not inviting me to come along perplexes me, but vaguely. If I really wanted to go upstairs, I would go. I lean back then and close my eyes, trying to remember what I knew I must be forgetting. Was there no work waiting? Nothing left undone? No. Nothing. I have nothing to do, or perhaps is it that I have everything to do? The car leans into the swells of the sea. Maybe it's only me
keen to feel some sort of
rhythm
. There is nothing else at this moment but a crisp, fresh, just unrolled space to color. I feel a not unpleasant but curious sort of shift in equilibrium. I
feel
it. One foot is still six thousand miles away. Just as the boat bumps itself into the jetty, Fernando returns to the car, and we drive off the boat.