The Farewell Symphony (45 page)

Now the horizon line was thickening and filling in with fantastic detail. We could see the pure spire of San Giorgio on the left, the lifted gold ball of the Dogana gleaming straight ahead of us and over on the right all the layered complication and panoply of the Riva degli Schiavoni, the church where Vivaldi was composer, the house where James finished Portrait of a Lady, the hotel where Georges Sand and Proust stayed, the Oriental filigree of the Doge's Palace, suspended over a low, columned walkway, the soaring monument topped by a saint and crocodile, behind it the green-roofed ten-story brick campanile and, just to the right and beyond, the great clock with its two Moors striking the hours, both with bare asses and big dicks. And as the drone of our motors shifted softer, the hollow roar of thousands of milling human beings flowed in on us, the tumult of voices and shoes striking stone, the mufiled busyness that suggested an undressed opera stage where a director was rehearsing a crowd scene with

extras in street clothes. Guides with raised, colored umbrellas were trying to keep their difl'erent groups together (Joshua called them the pecore). Faintly, in the distance, an out-of-tune cafe orchestra was playing a palm-court version of "Strangers in the Night."

As we approached the landing a dirty old lady thin and wren-like, with famous blue eyes, wearing dirty sneakers, her hair styled by an eggbeatcr, cried out, "I'm lost. I can't remember a word of Italian." Panicked, she looked at us all, one after another. "I lived here years ago and now I've come back to die but even though I once spoke Italian as well as English now I'm like the girl in Three Sisters who can't remember how to say 'window' in Italian and I have a reservation at the Ambasciatori Hotel but I don't know how to get there, I'm utterly disorientated." She spoke in the fluty accents of an English duchess. Her voice and her scatty non-sequiturs made me realize that she must be an aristocrat, but the Italians were all laughing at her and suddenly I hated them for their beasdy conformism. All they took in was a crazy old woman with Luna Park intonations and eccentric, soiled clothes. Their duchesses, I thought sourly, are surely as well dressed as a tailor's dummy and as well behaved as prize fowl.

I offered my services as cavaliere servente to the old lady, got her calmed down and led her to her hotel. "You're my angel," she cried. "I prayed for an angel and here you are." The handsome adolescent crew member was laughing at us as we left and I thought he was as flawless and ignorant as the unwounded must always be.

Joshua was there at the cafe where we'd agreed to meet, wearing a lapis-blue shirt so tight that when he sat down it buckled between buttons to reveal litde moon shapes of tanned flesh. He was bronzed as Pontiac, his hair sun-whitened, his manner so relaxed it was almost Dada goofy. He was eating a raspberry gelato that turned strawberry red where he licked it.

That evening I saw the handsome young sailor washing down the taxi where it was moored in front of the Salute Church. We spoke. His name was Giovanni. Now he was barefoot and wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt and shorts. He told me he admired the way I'd helped the crazy old lady; the flat, neutral way he said pazza and sporca ("crazy" and "dirty") made the words sound like colorful but not particularly judgmental adjectives.

And then I began a new life battered by channeled water and wild, unfocused sunlight. Joshua put me in a storage room converted into a bedroom on the ground floor beside the front door. In the small hours of the morning the water's rhythm slowed down so much that it seldom lapped

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the mossy steps; it sounded like a domestic animal so tranquil it was in danger of dying. The wind died down and an eerie stillness stepped in as though the melodramatic princess had at last been transformed into the dull girl stirring the cinders.

Comforting, acrid smoke lazily lifted away from the small burning eye of the anti-mosquito coil. I dreamed I was a slave held belowdecks in a cage; the ship was marooned in the hot horse latitudes. I was being slowly smoked, like bacon. . . .

When I awakened, children were running up and down the narrow stone walkway beside the rio just outside my window and two workmen were unloading tiles from a small barge. They talked to each other in the thick, blurred accents of the Veneto, voices that slowed and ran down at the ends of sentences like a record on a wind-up Victrola. I couldn't understand a word but the voices sounded childish, wheedling.

Joshua was transformed by Venice. In New York he was so blind he was always frightened crossing a street or walking through a dubious neighborhood at night (and which neighborhood wasn't dubious?). But in Venice cars were banished and the steps were bordered by litde white stones. He and I wrote in the mornings, the air redolent with espresso. Joshua could never sit still more than five minutes, nor could I. He'd be out on the back balcony inspecting the indigo-blue morning glories; for Joshua, their delicate beauty was contrasted with the military vigor of the Italian word for "climbing," rampicante, which he loved to say. He had to hold the local Venetian paper, // Gazzettino, an inch away from his eyes in order to read it. Or he'd show me the "disgusting" photo of the Pope with the count and countess, the owners of the apartment, who let it when they went away every summer to the Dolomites.

I dropped my ballpoint and it rolled downhill; the marble floor was cracked and it tilted dramatically away from the Zattere side and toward the Grand Canal. The ceiling was low but painted a greyish-white and faded pink; the vices and virtues were ensconced along the cornice above their names in Latin; interchangeable and bored maidens alternating with amusing male caricatures stuffing their mouths or dozing or lustily grabbing a wench. The lesson to be learned was that vice was active, fun and individualized, virtue impassive and impersonal.

Joshua would adjust the heavy shutters, their hinges unoiled and complaining; for a moment he'd be a dark shadow pressed against bars of light, like a cat stretched out on piano keys.

We'd cat a green salad, wedges of fontina and gorgonzola and translucent slices of prosciutto, red and thin as a hematological slide, and dark, wind-dried beef, bresaola (so hard for us to pronounce with its gende growl of unfolding vowels). Sometimes we'd laugh ourselves sick pretending to he middle-class Italian matrons who could scarcely stand each other but elaborately feigned mutual affection (''Carissimar). I think the idea was that we were fiercely competitive—and conformist—housewives, each sure that her kitchen was even more casalinga than the other's. It wasn't as though we were satirizing women we actually knew; we were simply performing a vaudeville routine ad nauseam (the nausea, too, made us laugh).

America was a country of broad streets and well sprung automobiles, of sealed elevators emitting Muzak and huge shopping carts gliding on rubber wheels up and down wide supermarket aisles, but here we were crossing the choppy Grand Canal on a traghetto manned by a gondolier and queuing up at the pasticceria to buy half a kilo of freshfettuccine and, at the drogkeria, black olives, artichoke hearts in oil, bits of pimento and a crumbling block of grana. American life, it seemed, was contrived to minimize contacts with other human beings, whereas here Joshua and I were in love with the delicatessen clerk, a neat family man named Giorgio, slender, with well scrubbed hands, his body wrapped in a white apron as he sliced our ham or reminded us to take a small carton of heavy cream (Josh lingered over the double n of panna as though he were munching manna itself).

In the afternoons Joshua would dash across the curved, wooden Ac-cademia Bridge and squeeze past the pecore on his way heading toward what the German guides kept calling "Sanmarkplatz" He'd hurry along under the arches in the square toward the Piazzetta, on his right the dimly lit hand-painted rooms of a cafe, on his left the badly tuned orchestra sawing its way through a Viennese waltz. It was such a pleasure to live in a historic city, the most beautiful in the world, and to treat what Byron had called "the drawing room of Europe" as just another obstacle course. It was the ultimate luxury to be racing for the speedboat while the echoing voices of hundreds of people rang hoUowly off stone. The Japanese gawked at the bell tower (no one had told them the original had collapsed early in the century). Storekeepers cranked egg-brown awnings out against the noonday sun, pigeons descended on a living St. Francis proffering bread crumbs who was posing for his picture, and the gilded domes

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of the Basilica hovered above the bejeweled mosaics in the three tympanums like the setting sun and a half-moon over sparkling waves.

Joshua was heading for the Cipriani pool, which was so expensive he cotild afford to invite me only two or three times a season. When I did go it was like entering a society hospital. Tanned, deep-voiced, friendly but discreet bagnini accompanied us like orderlies from Josh's locker to the lounge chairs he designated. The boys draped the chairs in immense downy white towels. Waiters brought us iced drinks. We'd position ourselves away from the side of the pool closest to the changing rooms, the side reserved for South American dictators, Mafia godfathers, deposed royalty and Milanese millionaires. We were out among "the young," that is, those over forty but under sixty, the well exercised woman who ran the dress shop next to Harry's Bar, the always amusing, relaxed curator of Peggy Guggenheim's museum (he was from Oklahoma) and the divorced baroness who ran the "Save Venice" committee. There, standing at the shallow end of the pool with her diamond-encrusted hands resting on the edge, was an American woman burdened by the possession of a fifteenth-century palace her family had bought a centun,- ago; her exhaustion from maintaining so much splendor seemed well expressed by her slim, heavily freighted fingers.

But most afternoons I had free. I roamed the city and tried to imagine myself into the lives of the family whose flame-shaped window framed a noisy canary cage or the man who sold vegetables ofi" a flatboat or the waiter who sauntered out of Florian's bearing drinks of every color and who always looked impeccable in black bow tie, white jacket and red epaulettes. At every turn there was a surprise, a walkway wide and gracious or narrow, laced through arches smelling of cat urine. Or tliere was a sudden explosion out into one of the few squares with trees, San Giacomo dell'Orto. The great patient herds of daytrippers plodded wearily along as dieir leaders barked at them through bullhorns, but I ricocheted off them into the wide, almost deserted square of Campo Santa Margherita, where I bought fruits and vegetables at several outdoor stands—blood oranges from Sicily, fennel bulbs from the Veneto (fennel, or foiocchio, was the word for homosexual for some reason)—before I darted into a church to stare up at a huge painting on canvas glued to the ceiling, detailing in delirious perspectives the patron saint's martyrdom. Or martyrdoms, since he refused to be killed the first several times Diocletian's executioners went at irim and only finally permitted his head to be cut off; his blood ran white as milk and the tree to which he was bound sprouted olives.

On one of my lonely jaunts I ran into the boy who'd been on the boat. He wasn't wearing his uniform and I asked him if he was enjoying a day off. He said that he'd been fired.

"Not enough work?" I asked.

We were standing on the half-moon bridge over the Rio di Fornaci in front of Josh's building. If I looked to my right I saw two other small bridges and beyond them a noble one that continued the wide walkway of the Zattere with its pontoons where families ate pizza and ice cream. Nearby was the house where John Ruskin had lived.

"They let me go," he said. Apparendy he didn't want to explain why, but at the same time by dwelling on the mournful fact he seemed to be appealing for sympathy.

"Well, come with me to the Zattere," I said, "and I'll buy you a lemon ice."

He hesitated, and I thought he might be reluctant to be seen with a foreigner who was also a man twice his age.

"You live there, don't you?" he exclaimed, happy for a moment, pointing to the shutters covering the three windows of Josh's salotto. When I nodded, he said, pointing to the smaller windows under the roof on the opposite side of the rio, "And I live there!" An old woman scuffled past us, a net bag for groceries over her arm; I recognized her as Olga Rudge, the violinist who'd lived for years with Ezra Pound (Joshua had pointed her out to me before).

When I started to lead Giovanni across the bridge, he stopped, turned twice in place, then spat over his left shoulder. I said nothing, for though I loved to ask unsettling questions of self-assured people I at least knew enough to leave the vulnerable mercifully alone.

Giovanni and I began to spend every afternoon together. I'd wake in the morning and look across the rio and there his sun-burned kid's face would be, smiling over the geraniums on the windowsill. Once while we were walking along the Zattere he confided in me that he had a terrible mania. He couldn't say the numbers "three" or "seven" but had to resort to "two plus one" and "six plus one." He couldn't cross a bridge without turning and spitting. He was at all times vulnerable to the attacks of evil spirits unless a friend (and here he turned his huge eyes on me) would take responsibility for him, in that way becoming a sort of spiritual lightning rod.

I resolved to be Giovanni's friend and never to touch him. Sex—or so at least he claimed—was no problem for him and he regularly seduced

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the Swedish girls who stayed in the pemione next door. In every way he seemed touchingly average except for his mania, but it was so severe and obvious that everyone, especially the other kids, made fun of him.

Once, when we were walking along the Zattere beside the hospital for the incurabili, Giovanni said, "Would you like to see me swim? I'm a great swimmer," and he instantly stripped down to dark brown shorts and plunged into the water, the wide, choppy Canale della Giudecca where cruise ships sometimes anchored and where the vaporetti crossed back and forth to three churches that Palladio had built—San Giorgio, the Zitelle and the Redentore. I felt a touch of embarrassment as though I was this kid's uncle and I'd permitted or even encouraged him to do something dangerous. But what I mainly felt was desire for his body—he didn't even have hair under his arms, the hollows as nacreous as the lips of a nautilus shell, and when he crawled away from me the trapezoids were furled against his back like a scarab's wings.