Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (36 page)

Cosgrove considered. “How big is Venice?”

“Very big for an old European city that hasn’t really grown in area for a thousand years. But not big in the modern sense. From end to end the long way it can’t be much more than from Fifty-third Street to the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“What was your route?” he asked, taking up his handmade fruit compote with sour cream dressing. The Strand Palace offers an eat-all-you-want buffet breakfast, and Cosgrove was probably the most appreciative customer in the hotel’s history. You could have fed Hannibal’s elephants on Cosgrove’s breakfasts.

“My route was . . . secret, of course. And I always came in first.”

“Tell me your route,” he suggested, “or I’ll kill you.”

Clamping some of that crazy uncooked-looking English bacon
between two toast triangles, I asked, “What happens when you reveal your secret route?”

“You instantly go into dust and blow away to nowhere.”

“Then I’ll tell you never.”

“I challenge you,” he said, so excited at the prospect that he actually stopped eating for a moment. “We’ll hold a championship when we get to Venice. I’m going to buy a map now, and then you’ll see.”

I suppressed his arrogance with a stately sarcasm, but I was thinking,
Good
, because any vital project not involving Virgil is healthy for Cosgrove. That’s my job: seeing him safely off to his secret routes.

The London-to-Venice plane trip is a breeze—little more than lunch, and you’re there. Cosgrove ostentatiously spent the time poring over his map of Venice, marking out determinations, possibilities, choices.

“Consider the complication of foot traffic,” I warned him. “Some streets are crowded, others empty. It makes all the difference on your time.”

“Like Oxford Street is so filled with people while no one’s on Great Marlborough Street, which is just one block to the south!”

“Right—but in Venice the streets change every thirty feet or so. Nothing’s parallel to anything. It’s all alleys, like the life you lead. They dwindle, turn, collide. A map is nothing. Venice is a mystery never solved, a lady of countless lovers, a place of reverent pagans. Do you dare?”

Cosgrove loves fancy talk. “I yes dare.” As an afterthought, he added in a spectral voice, “ ‘Redrum,’ ” another of his Great Moments of Movie Cinema, as the loudspeaker advised of our descent.

Zuleto had promised that we’d be met at the airport’s little harbor in one of his motorboats. He owns a small fleet catering to the upmarket tourist trade. Heading to the water, I glimpsed my name on a sign and, with a shock, saw all time fall away to nothing. Still fifteen,
so hot and too wonderful, Zuleto stood before me. The same wild eyes, those arms coming out of the shirt despite the brisk weather, the light and heart and weight of him. Impossible.

“Signor Mordden? I am Candio, and welcome to Venezia. My father—”

“Oh, of course,” shaking hands. “Candio, who else?” Zounds, my heart was beating. “Bon zorno.”

He smiled at my sally into the local tongue, then ordered his crew to load up our bags in, I noticed, irreproachable Tuscan.

“We’re going in a motorboat?” Cosgrove cried.

“Yes, this is—”

“Tutti pronti?”

“A
motorboat!
That’s what I call service!”

“I am Candio.”

Cosgrove bowed.

“Su, forza! Everyone hold on. We depart!”

Ropes flying, motor chugging, some shouting. And we stormed away.

“Wow!” said Cosgrove, so excited that he beat his hands on the gunwale, or whatever it was.

Satisfied with our takeoff, Candio returned to the etiquette of the trip. “My family is happily expecting your arrival, Signore, especially my doubting father.”

“It’s thrilling to return. To see it all again.”

Cosgrove was staring at the distant view, a riotous murmur of light and shadow bobbing in the lagoon directly before us. No, we were doing the bobbing. The past is still.

“What’s all that?” asked Cosgrove, pointing to it.

Candio smiled, and I was thirteen again, because, once more, I saw his father.

“All that,” said Candio, “is Venice.”

Cosgrove was staring, as all first-timers must, in thrilled disbelief. Houses, walls, towers, in the middle of a tiny sea. A floating city, floating like choices. When we steamed into the very
there
of
it, through the canal that passes the Church of the Jesuits, Cosgrove could not contain himself. He did a little cakewalk around the deck, calling out, “Cosgrove is here! Cosgrove is coming to town!”

We docked at the Salute just as my family did all those years ago. Candio’s men saw us to our pensione, two or three doors down from where we all had lived, and no sooner had we checked in than Cosgrove ran off to discover his routes and I, after a fast phone call, went out into the street to meet Zuleto.

This time it really was he, surprisingly trim and youthful nonetheless. He gave me the operatic hug typical of an Italian male greeting a long-lost brother and led me to a café on the Zattere, new to me, where we each ordered un macchiato—coffee with a blip of milk. Then he launched into a tirade about la tedesca.

Italians are the least racist people in Europe and very tolerant of the quirks they perceive in other nationalities. But Venetians have very, very long memories. They speak of Napoléon (one of their very few conquerors) as if they’d seen him last Thursday. So the German presence in Italy during the Second World War—especially after 1943, when the Italians vaulted Mussolini and tried to surrender, and the Nazis invaded to make war as much upon the native population as on the Allies—remains an extraordinarily bitter experience. It is so not only for the Italians who lived through it but also for their children, raised on tales of German atrocities.

Zuleto didn’t mind Candio’s dating the girl. But to
marry
her? Bring her into the family? Corrupt his biological line with Angst, Weltanschauung, and Verfremdungseffekt?

“He is young, he is stupid, he is stubborn,” Zuleto complained. “Ostinato, eh?” he added, banging his left wrist against the side of his head to portray inflexibility. “When you are young, you want to marry every girl you make love to.”

“Did you?”

“Doesn’t everyone? Didn’t you?”

I’d never come out to Zuleto, by the way. Was I supposed to? Such as now? But this wasn’t about me: I’m the listener.

“Tell me,” I said, “are you against this because you think the girl’s no good for him? Have you actually met her?”

He sighed, held his right hand up, palm in and fingers extended. “One,” he said, waving his thumb, “she is older than Candio. That is never good for a man. Two,” waving the index finger, “she is bossy and that is worse for a man. Three,” at the middle finger, “she does not even speak Italian.”

He said this in the tone you’d expect for “She does not even wear clothes when she enters a church.”

“Well,” I said, “she isn’t Italian.”

“She speaks
English
, doesn’t she? That’s how she and Candio converse. He’s dating a woman in English! And why, amico mio of the old days? Why?”

He leaned over for a field goal.

“So
I can’t understand what they’re saying!”

A sip of coffee.

He got his hand up again and said, “Four, she is too tall for him. And, five, la xe una mozzina.”

“She’s a what?”

“You don’t know this word? It means . . .” He paused, to render it in the simplest Tuscan: “Ella fa la civetta con tutti.”

“Oh, a flirt.”

Zuleto rested his case with a look: the eternal father, so utterly disappointed.

Then he smiled, sanded my hand upon the table, and said, “Amico, you are here again. It is so amazing.”

I nodded. It
was
.

“Except,” I said, “if I’m going to be any help, I have to ask this—if she weren’t dating Candio, would you find her attractive?”

Out poured a torrent of denials, protestations of injured honor, appeals to our lifelong friendship, exclamations of innocence, and mai, mai, mai, mai, mai, mai.
Never
. Two beats. Then he said, “Ma già, I’d fuck her if she wanted to, but she isn’t my model.”
Type. “Ste picole bele scagazzere forestiere,” he added, trying to look blasé. These cute little foreign know-it-alls.

But even though it’s not about me, maybe it’s cowardly not to confront my old friend with my old truth. He’ll be wondering about my relationship with Cosgrove, anyway, won’t he?

“Aimò,” he breathed out, a meaningless expression of despair. “But surely you will help?”

“Come, let’s take a walk so I can scope out this incredible place, and we’ll discuss possibilities.”

“Alla Piazza?” To St. Mark’s Square?

“Bene,” I agreed.

We walked in silence at first, down the Zattere to Rio Terà Antonio Foscarini, one of Venice’s many streets that was a canal centuries ago, when you couldn’t get around without a boat. We were heading for the Accademia Bridge, one of only three ways on foot over the Grand Canal. In some cities, you are hardly aware of geography—London, Rome, Paris, Moscow, and many other places are really just a collection of districts on either side of a river. But in San Francisco you have hills and the omnipresent bay, in Petersburg you have the ever-threatening sea, and in Venice you have the canals and bridges and the tiny, ever-surprising walkways. Add to this the boats, the weird old architecture, and the realization that the town was raised not on islands but, mostly, upon wooden pilings driven into the watery mud, and you have a city that never stops telling that you are
somewhere
. Yes, the façade is man-made, but the substance is nature. Venice isn’t a clearing in the woods. Venice is a lake.

“So, my friend?” Zuleto at length asked me, as we scaled the big bridge.

“I will say three things. One, Candio is extremely goodlooking and will have a lot of access to women.”

“And is also very heavy in the pants, like me.”

That gave me pause for all of a microsecond. You have to go along with these salty confessions if you pal around with Italians.

“Two,” I went on, “you cannot tell someone with the need not to have the need.”

“Long and thick, with a big head that is always slightly pointed and continually dripping.”

“Three, no parent can assume that his offspring have signed a contract to put up with him for life. You can alienate your own flesh and blood, you know.”

“Oh, this
never
! Candio will be furious, but he must always forgive.”

We broke off, ambling through Campo Morosini.

“They don’t always forgive,” I finally said.

“Ma,” he said. “In casa, comando
mi.”
In my house,
I’m
the boss.

The next day, at the crack of noon, both Zuleto and Candio whisked Cosgrove and me off to tour the western half of the lagoon, at my request.

“No, to the east,” Zuleto had protested. “Mazorbo, Burano, history, amazement, as you will see.”

“I’ve done that already,” I said. “I want to see the crazy parts.”

“Yes!” Cosgrove agreed.

“La Laguna Morta,” I said. The Dead Lagoon, an alternate Venice that never happened, all seaweed and slimy, deserted mudflats. “And Chioza!”

“Not Chioza!” Zuleto and Candio said together, throwing up their hands.

“Si, Chioza.”

They exchanged a look, and Candio gave his dad an encouraging or perhaps commiserating slap on the shoulder as they set about launching the boat, and I thought, They really are incredibly close, like best friends. None shall part them, including la tedesca.

Chioza (“Chioggia” in map Italian) is much older than Venice. It is rectangular and orderly in its structure, unlike the fish-shaped,
chaotically fashioned Venice. Seniority leads the Chiozoti to arrogance; Venetians in retaliation look upon Chioggians as underpeople. “Sti pizoti,” Venetians call them: They even piss funny.

We made a stop in the Dead Lagoon, the boat’s motor cut to lull as we contemplated sullen clumps of clay just below the water’s surface, desiccated greens, and ooze.

“It’s Venice taboo,” said Cosgrove.

“So Venice itself must have seemed,” said Zuleto, “in the very olden days. The terror of barbarians? Subito, presto, an escape into the lagoon! We live in the open on islands, like birds. We evade the German hordes.”

Candio pulled down his right cheek below the eye in that universal Italian gesture meaning, “Yeah, right.”

“So next what?” asked Cosgrove.

On we sped to Chioza. An Italian city without an opera house is a nowhere indeed, and that’s Chioza: boats and fish, not music lovers.

Cosgrove adored it. “They finally have cars here!” he noted. Automobiles are, indeed, one of the few distinguishing features of the place. It’s a dreary Venice, without landmarks or, apparently, any sort of public life. I don’t think I saw a single café. They do boast one oddity, a type of boat that is very colorfully painted up with emblematic designs.

“Si, el bragozo,” Zuleto explained, nodding at one as we pulled up and Candio saw to the rope. “In fifteen hundred years, Venice has given the world painting, music, democracy, double-entry bookkeeping, printing, the carnival, the gondola. If Venice didn’t invent it, Venice perfected it. In the same time, this is what Chioza gave the world—the bragozo.” He gestured as one glided past us. “A fishing boat with funny pictures.”