The Death of Small Creatures (5 page)

Two

The Gondolier Wears Nikes (August 2003)

The bridges in
Venice arch from one side of a canal to the other and pin together two distinct possibilities, one a network of cobblestone and narrow corridors at another. You may cross or turn back, and as a result you will be either here or there. The outcome will be the same: you will become at least remotely lost. The streets in Venice lead nowhere.

The bridges are arched so the gondoliers can pass under by tilting their heads downward while the gondola glides through. It's midday. I'm lying prone on hot cobblestone with my camera poised on an even keel with the canal. “Look,” I say. “Look at his red shoes.” I take pride in this observation and want to be rewarded for it.

I get the feeling that on the other side of one of those bridges I might bump into myself, my elusive twin. She exists perfectly. She is happy and dressed in silk. Her red scarf flutters into the balmy wind. There is a faceless man on her arm, her soulmate. He exists perfectly too. He exists for her.

Leigh takes a green bottle of beer out of his backpack, looks around and when the coast is clear takes a swig. “Oh yeah, look at that,” he says.

I snap a picture but the gondola slips past. I won't know until I get home and develop the film that I have captured nothing more than a river of milk and a flower box under an iron grate of a window across the way. A smear of red would have been enough, something that might have been a shoe, a blotch of insect blood, a wing of light refracted back into the lens, because no one will believe me now when I tell them I saw a gondolier in Nikes.

I will search for that gondolier as the day progresses. I will search for others in similar shoes but won't find any. An interval has passed that I'll never get back. It's one of those unremarkable snapshots that imprints itself on your brain—flowers against a white wall. I feel like I have missed something important. I will never be satisfied in life. You know life will never be what you once thought it could be. You didn't think it would require so much work.

Leigh will propose marriage to me in St. Mark's Square near the end of this day. I will not understand until that moment the implications of my answer, or how much I did and did not want authority over such a preposterous choice, though all my life I had been waiting for it. I will feel something inside me ignite like a flame, and the moment will crystallize around me. There he will be on bended knee.

Yes. No. Cross or turn back.

He is an older man, a good man. He owns a small boat with two sails. There is a void of open water beyond Discovery Island in Cadboro Bay I will never penetrate. I watch from the shore as he and his spinnaker get smaller and smaller and, rounding the peninsula, disappear. I will always be new to him. I tell myself he will always love me for my relative youth. I want him to teach me how to love him the way a good wife should.

I have been comparatively horrible, taken pleasure in hurting him, insulting him in public. I called him vacuous in front of my mother, and I said it like this:
vac-u-ousss
. In the shoe store I said he was nothing more than a cheap suit and tie. Some of the worst things I've ever done I've done to him.

Perhaps it's the current, how the gondolier plunges his staff into the water and shoves his vessel forward; the ease of its glide that slows your sense of time and makes you think gondolas all over this city move at precisely the same speed. You think you can reach out and catch one, but they move quickly. They have always been moving this way. One day when there are no more gondolas moving, Venice will hoist itself from the imagination of civilization and become a real place in time.

“Why are you hiding that?” I say. “Beer in Venice is like pop in North America.” The edge of my voice catches me. I am inflicted with the bitch I have become.

He says nothing. He has an older man's tolerance. He holds the bottle to his lips, the green glass rim, looks hard at the gondola as the gondolier bends his neck into his chest and angles his body at a forty-five-degree angle over the stern of the boat and disappears into shadows.

I'm thirsty. There will be only select moments in this day that I don't long for a drink of water; every twenty minutes another litre taken in and perspired out. Soon, thousands will die of heat exhaustion in France. I will feel shabby in cheap Mariposa dresses as we stroll around Paris during the final phase of our trip. I will come back hating a city I'm supposed to love. One night I will tell Leigh I hate him for looking at a young French girl in a white designer dress of such subtle yet superior quality I will want to cut my own skin. Instead, I will take off my cheap shoes and throw them at him from across Rue Lourmel.

Another night the most beautiful woman I've ever seen close up will saunter past us, sort of dancing along the curb and sidewalk, a twinkle in her eyes. I will have a strong impulse to cut part of myself away, my hair maybe, a finger, a toe, spurned by the knowledge that a more moderate alteration would be redundant, even laughable. But I will walk away from Leigh instead. I'll walk for three hours toward the lights of the Eiffel Tower, like travelling down a dark prairie highway toward the beacon of a distant town. The tower will seem close, then disappear, then close again as I round a corner. My heart will beat fast as I stroll the concentric circles of Paris increasingly lost—as if there are degrees of lostness—café after café, thirty-four degrees at midnight, the scent of hot concrete and roast duck in the air. It will feel like walking deeper inside, as though it is possible you'll turn a corner and feel your body disappear. I will realize the folly of life with one man, but each time the tower disappears I'll believe in love again.

“Where have you been?” he'll say when I return, and I'll think,
He loves me. Thank god he still loves me
.

That lost.

We have hardwood
floors and red walls in our apartment. I walk on tiptoes because of the people who live below. I think this makes me a compassionate person and take pleasure in my goodness, but really it's a learned behaviour from girlhood. I feel light and airy as I do it. Sometimes I catch myself, and as my socks sweep across the floor I realize I'm getting older and farther from the truth. It's good to be quiet. It's possible everything can break.

There is no large red rug in the middle of the living room, something to soften the edges I've repeatedly said. There is a large ugly painting of three fish about to intersect on the wall above the dining room table. I hate this painting because I know the fish will never meet. The table is a relic from his old life. I have seen photographs of his slender ex-wife kneading dough on its surface. His children painted pictures there. His youngest child, a daughter, is named after a Linden tree. His second son, a loganberry. His first son, Grant, embodies his father's legacy. I have named no one over the course of my life, except my beloved cat, a pet ant and a snail. Spoofer. Anty. Snail.

On the backsplash above the kitchen sink Leigh has nailed into the wall a fish-shaped cutting board; it has a chrome head and tail but the middle is made of wood. Above that is a magnetized knife rack and a dozen sharp knives of varying sizes pointed downward. This makes me nervous while I wash dishes. I think that fish is in peril. Leigh likes chrome objects because they make a place look clean, he says, and small wooden boxes of any kind. I can understand a fascination with boxes. He likes to put objects inside them. He can always find things that way. I don't know why he likes fish because I haven't yet thought to ask.

He painted the walls and didn't bother to tape off the edge where the wall curves into the white ceiling. He takes pride in his craftsmanship. It took him a week and three coats of paint. I also made love to him during this time, in love with the precision of his eye and the control of his wrist, the red speckles of paint in his hair and the scent of turpentine on his hands. I made love to him like he was a tired husband spent with labour and pride, as if it has always been me he came home to at night. That made me proud and spent too. I have never felt more like a good wife.

This is what we've cultivated together. These are the objects of our work—tolerance, fidelity and faith. Four red walls and space enough to move. These things are true.

In a window
behind us, an elegant display of Murano glass gleams in the late afternoon sun. I will touch no glass objects this day, though I want them badly, even just one. But they are too expensive and too delicate to be transported back home anyway.

I will later learn of the men of the night,
l'uomo di notte
, the Glass Masters who still, after centuries, spend their hours in solitude accompanied only by their thoughts and the cultivation of their art. I will read of the work required in the process:
the specific characteristics of glass in the way it solidifies, the workable thermal interval in which the Glass Master gives shape to his vision. The finished product will retain the rigidity of a solid body while maintaining the transparency of liquid. There is a chemical composition for coloured glass. It takes time and work. Refined nitrate. White earth. Red lead. When it is baked, cover it a little at a time with twenty-two pounds of copper, then add in four times another three hundred pounds of nitrate.
It becomes a beautiful celeste.

A hummingbird. A flower. A ship.

There are so many versions of the truth.

The light has deepened, softened the edges of the city's ochre walls and its milky canals into a state I can only call singular. I have, after hours of walking and sweating, acquired a sense of purpose.

“Let's go for a gondola ride,” I say.

As Leigh's brow crinkles with hesitation, and I see myself standing there in a posture of longing, the light sharpens and I understand for a moment why Venice doesn't really exist. I know what his answer will be.

There are various theories as to why all gondolas are painted black, the most credible of which is a sumptuary law passed in the mid-sixteenth century to eliminate competition among the aristocracy competing for the fanciest rig. The gondola is flat-bottomed and thirty-five feet long. The keel curves toward the right, causing it to list in that direction. The oar is curved allowing the gondolier to use different strokes to turn right and left, and go forwards or backwards. Only now do I regard this as an object of perfection. Its only flaw is its inability to safely navigate open waters—it's restricted to narrow places.

“Let's save our money for Paris,” he says. “We have two weeks to go.”

We decide to find a water taxi instead, a more affordable method of exploration. At some point later this day we pass a local woman in a red peasant dress standing in her doorway. She tosses crumbs to pigeons in a vacant courtyard. I take her picture but it feels like a sin, a kind of conspiracy, because I realize I don't want to know anything about her. I get the feeling only one of us is real. In another courtyard we'll find a man dressed like a Pulcinella, who like a Harlequin is a silly servant who sometimes takes on contradictory personalities—stupid and astute, bold and cowardly. Dressed in a white coat constrained by a belt, a long hat and a black mask, he will tilt his head and extend his hand as I hurriedly take his picture too.

The water taxi takes the long route in the wrong direction into the industrial ramparts of Venice then veers back to the tourist centre, back to St. Mark's Square, back to the proposal, perhaps in the same manner as the doge as he set his sights on the Rialto. Columns and cranes hack the sky, and a single stream of smoke dissipates into the winds above the Adriatic. The noise and activity of the tourist centre recedes as we round a peninsula. Soon there is only open water and a dark steely light on the horizon, and I think,
This is not Venice, this is utterly Venice.

I wonder what's out there.