The Politics of Washing (18 page)

Adults and children have gathered around the kite-flyers, heads back, necks arched, marvelling at the neat aerobatics and feeling themselves airborne and flying up there too in that bright spring sky. Everything is simple and good.

Then the door of the hut opens and two soldiers saunter out. They are both in full uniform, one elongated and weasely, the other (coming up no higher than his colleague’s shoulder) square and porcine. Their skin is pallid and their heads close shaven under those caps. They stroll indolently towards the kite-flyers, gun holsters bumping on their hips, relishing the
High Noon
approach and the gratifying prospect of wielding power.

The kite-flyers, by comparison, are wind and water – small, slim men, dark-skinned, with long black hair streaming as they run, offering up their treasures to the sky. They come, perhaps, from Syria or Iran, or further east again.

When the soldiers arrive, the diamond kites slide down from the sky, like charmed snakes. They lie inert on the stones of the Ghetto. I watch as documents are taken from coat pockets. I see the slow flick through pages; the weighty look at photo, then man, then photo again; the peering at names and other foreign data that are meaningless except for their being foreign. It takes a while. At a certain point, it must dawn on the two soldiers that there is nothing whatsoever amiss. The time for retrieving their dignity is suddenly tight, so they thumb some more and look and compare some more, until it is unavoidably up. Then they hand back the documents, turn on their booted heels, and retreat to their hutch.

The children and happy parents gather again, the kite-flyers offer up their dancing kites once more, and for another little while, life is good in the Campo del Ghetto.

T
HERE IS A
constant flow of people in and out of Venice; there are many beachings and innumerable brief landings and sometimes the strangest combinations of individuals wash up together on these island shores.

One sunny afternoon in April, Roland has two friends over to play after school. Apart from the fact that they are all nine years old, these three children have very little in common. Bai is a sturdy boy who has recently arrived in Venice with his mother from one of the easternmost points of the ex-Soviet empire – Kyrgyzstan. He has almond Asiatic eyes, a perfectly round, coffee-coloured face and a thick, black, shiny fringe. He is strong and smiling and talks with the plaintive lilt of a native Russian speaker. When I first met cheerful Bai, I could not have guessed at his troubled story. His mother’s face, her forehead creased into lines of deep anxiety, of grief even, was a bleak testimony to what had brought them to Venice. She and her husband had decided that they could no longer raise a child in their violent and troubled homeland.

‘I couldn’t even play in the square outside my house,’ Bai tells us cheerily, over lunch. ‘There were too many guns. They were always shooting people in my street. My friend was shot.’

So Bai’s mother has brought her youngest son to Venice, while her husband stays on in Kyrgyzstan, with the intention of joining them as
soon as he can find work.

Her grown-up daughter has left too, and gone to live in Turkey with her husband and baby. Bai’s is a family scattered by violent civil unrest to different corners of Europe. Now, his mother works as a
house-keeper
and companion to a rich old Venetian woman. Bai has to stay away from the house for as long as possible every day, out from under his mother’s feet and away from her employer’s ear shot. This is why he is often at our house.

Our other guest is Dea. She too has recently arrived in the city. Her father, an Italian-American writer, famous for various high-
profile
Hollywood screenplays, has decided to bring his family to Europe for a year while he works on his next film. They have rented a floor of a palazzo on the Grand Canal (practically next door to Bai’s
mother’s
employer). Dea, Roland and Bai are in the same class at school. Dea is wilful and feisty and funny. Roland, Dea and Bai are, all three, forces to be reckoned with. This, after all, is what they really have in common.

‘We’re going to catch crabs,’ they announce, after lunch.

There is a great, teeming life of crabs in the canal near to our house. The smallest can be 2 centimetres across, the largest might reach a width of 10 centimetres. They scuttle and bounce up and down the stone walls, among shifting fronds of pale green weed, like miniature aquatic absailers. Roland’s stories of derring-do at this time mostly revolve around how many tens of these hapless creatures he has managed to scoop up in an afternoon and he, Dea and Bai are
well-armed
for the hunt, with nets and plastic boxes.

The crabs are, in fact, edible and, in the right season, when their shells are soft, are prized as a local delicacy,
moeche
. They are caught and then left to scramble about for a couple of days in a tub filled with milk, which they thoroughly absorb into their bodies. When they are finally deep fried and eaten whole, they are a rich dish. Today, the kids just throw them back in the canal.

Although Bai and Roland are old hands at crabbing, it occurs to me that Dea is new to the game so I should, at least for the first time, go down to the canal with them and keep an eye on the proceedings. I
roll up my newspaper, push my reading glasses up onto my head, and wander after them, with the intention of leaning against a wall in the sunshine and catching up on the news while they fish.

But as we reach the water’s edge, it comes to me in a flash that this is, quite simply, impossible. I must follow the crab fishing with unswerving attention; the newspaper must remain rolled; the reading glasses perched on top of my head. Why? Certainly not for fear that my beloved son might come to harm in the torpid waters of the Venetian Lagoon; neither am I worried for the little Kyrgyz boy, whose mother has left home and husband to bring him to safety in a foreign land. No, the phantom that so suddenly, so violently, rears its head is the terrifying apparition of the massed forces of the Hollywood legal system.

Thirteen years into chaotic motherhood and four children down the line, and I have never before this moment gone into a sweat of anxiety about any child’s health and safety. Not even a light perspiration. Now, I am darting up and down the waterfront inches behind the oblivious Dea as she leans vertiginously, perilously over the edge to scoop up crabs.

‘There’s one!’ she shouts to the boys, then darts suddenly to right or to left, as sideways scuttling as any of her quarry. And I, hovering at her side, am plucking pathetically at her silky fur gilet and whispering desperately in her heedless ear, ‘Careful, Dea! Not too far, Dea! Oooh – no, Dea, you’re too close to the edge!’

A simple fall in the water, I calculate, followed by a bedraggled fishing out (sodden gilet, howling princess), would be headline stuff, possibly even a court summons. A blow to the body on stone or boat would, unquestionably, bring life imprisonment. Concussion … broken limbs … brain damage – extradition, Death Row, lethal injection. And as I dart and clutch and implore, the tourists pass by, wandering happily, post-prandially, towards the famous art collection nearby.

Many of them stop, and there are multi-tongued exclamations of delight at the charming sight of two small boys and a girl scooping up crabs and depositing them in Tupperware. The crabbing has created an
international waterside traffic jam, a Babel of sentimentality and clicking cameras.

How blissfully unaware they are, these holidaymakers, of the mind-boggling complexities of geopolitics, of class, of vicissitude and privilege embodied in these three kids who are innocently fishing in the most beautiful city in the world, on a warm April afternoon. And as for me, it is at this point that I see how, despite my best liberal instincts, my worthiest anthropologizings, I – running scared before a vision of the law – have a great deal more in common with the frantically scuttling crabs, side-slipping and intent on escape, than with any of the human beings present here.

That is, I suppose, when my spectacles slip off my head and sink gently into the dim silt of the canal and I shriek:

‘OK! That’s it! We’re going home!’

I
N THE NEXT
calle
to us there lives a very old woman. Her mumbly old chin bristles with the beginnings of a beard and age has left her sexless, formless: a bag-of-potatoes, cartoon granny, bundled up in a shabby man’s overcoat. She is the Cassandra of Dorsoduro: its ranting, warning prophetess.

In the morning, she positions herself against railings at the point where a busy thoroughfare opens into a small
campo
. She leans heavily on the handle of her shopping trolley, glaring through heavy-rimmed glasses at the passers-by – enemies and allies alike. Stapled to the front of her trolley is a large sheet of paper, covered in thick, black capital letters – an obsessively insistent calligraphy which fifty per cent of the people who pass her could not read. They are the enemy.

‘VENEZIA – HAS BECOME A HOTEL – WE VENETIANS ARE LIKE THE PIGEONS – A RACE OF LOSERS – TO BE EXTERMINATED – VENEZIA IS NO LONGER THE HOME OF THE VENETIANS – BUT ONE ENORMOUS B&B –’

… and so on, each half-literate dash a crie de coeur, unnoticed by the crowds that flood past, babbling in every language under the sun but Cassandra’s.

Cassandra: ancient, furious, impotent, mad, right – and the happy, oblivious faces of holidaymakers who, if they notice anything at all, see a funny old bag lady – a woman who feeds the stray cats perhaps? – a comic aberration among smooth marble, witty ironwork and the languid lap of water.

T
HERE IS ONE
small Italian word that triggers deep anxiety in me. It is a word that forcefully reminds me of my alien status in this country because it carries on its narrow shoulders a whole system of behaviour, an entire social order that I do not fully understand. Understand, that is, in the way I understand my mother tongue – the way I live its glancing ironies, its quirks and trip-wires, its serendipities and its assumptions about who is what and where: the complete world it gives to me.

This troublesome little word is ‘tu’ and its accomplice – the only slightly larger ‘lei’. They are, respectively, the informal and formal second person singular for which the English language now has only one word: ‘you’.

‘Tu’ and ‘lei’ belong to a linguistic system in which social difference is both negotiated and declared in public. To a Briton, and I suspect to other English speakers such as Americans and Australians, this is an awkward business, revealing as it does anxieties and hypocrisies about our societies that we might prefer not to confront.

I first begin to understand something of this while I wait for my children in the cavernous and unlovely
calle
outside the elementary school. Here, I sometimes chat with a girl who works as an au pair for one of the other mothers. Her name is Barbara. She comes from a small Veneto town, about an hour away by train. She is in her early twenties and is studying Italian literature at the University of Venice.
She is a pleasant, friendly young woman.

After several weeks during which she addresses me with the formal ‘lei’, I say to her, one day, casually, taking it as a given: ‘Let’s use “tu”.’

I know that as the older person, it is for me to make this move and I assume that this is all that is needed to put things between us on a less formal linguistic footing. To my surprise she looks stricken.

‘Oh no,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t.’

I persist, still not fully understanding.

‘You know it really doesn’t mean anything to us English. We don’t use these different forms and it doesn’t come naturally to me.’

But, of course, the opposite doesn’t come naturally to Barbara either: the linguistic shift that would allow me to relax would make her profoundly uncomfortable. Indeed, it is clear from her reaction that she is almost physically incapable of getting her tongue around the words when speaking to me. Of course, I give in – what else can I do? – and we settle with an even more awkward situation in which I address her as ‘tu’ and she continues to use ‘lei’ for me.

But what is this discomfort of mine? Why should this little word have such power?

What makes me squirm, I begin to think, is that I hear the lei/tu distinction as an overt statement of hierarchy – of my elevated status in relation to Barbara.

A significant amount of our collective social energy in Britain is taken up with trying to hide, deny even, the class divisions that rend our society like ancient, but still active, fault lines. I remember my grandmother, Pamela. Born in 1913, she was the only child of a British Raj engineer, a tall, handsome man named Reginald, with handlebar moustaches and a stiff white collar. I have a picture of Reginald and my great-grandmother Olive on their wedding day, in Southsea, in 1908. It is a group photograph, complete with bridesmaids, matrons of honour, best man and assorted relations, and is a magnificent, Edwardian extravaganza of white lace, big hats, bursting bouquets. This is upper-middle-class Imperial Britain in its last throes, but displayed at its finest.

Despite being born into this world, my grandmother had an
instinctively egalitarian temperament. She rejected the forms and strictures of her Victorian parents and became a painter of bohemian leanings, who interested herself in people for their own sakes and was warmly responsive to their personal qualities, and yet, whenever she spoke about someone, almost the first piece of information to come out of her mouth was where he or she stood in the byzantine
structures
of the early twentieth-century British social order into which, willy-nilly, she had been born.

Mr Briggs, she might have said, was a lovely man: lower middle class, a sensitive gardener, the best of neighbours, and a talented amateur painter. She was blithely unconscious of the acute inner pressure to say not only what kind of a person Mr Briggs was, but also where he stood on the scaffolding of society and therefore, by
extension
, where he stood in relation to her.

In modern Britain, this story is not over: up and down the land, these hierarchies, shored up by a divided and divisive education system and by the subtleties of accent and idiom, are in places as ingrained as they were one hundred years ago. They are imprinted on our collective consciousness like photographic negatives; they are part of the DNA of our culture. We operate by them, we are intensely aware of them, but most of the time we do not dare to speak their name.

It is from this world shot through with the denial of social
distinctions
that I come. But now, I find myself in Italy, where the informal and formal second person singular leave no one in any doubt about their relation to the person with whom they are talking – and it makes me nervous. None of the fake chumminess of the universal ‘you’ here; no brushing under the carpet of social forms: it is all out there in that one little word.

But that is the real question: what exactly is all out there?

It is true, of course, that all human beings recognize and express status of one kind or another, but even having acknowledged this the British class system ranks right up there for its elaborate, ingrained and divisive hierarchy. Italy, of course, has its aristocracy and its vast discrepancies of wealth, and all the distinctions these create, but despite that it seems to me a more egalitarian society. It differs from
Britain in two critical ways: first, that there is no significant private school sector and, second, that an individual’s accent does not tell you what social class they belong to, but quite simply from which part of the peninsula they come. The ‘tu’ and the ‘lei’ do not, therefore, reveal hidden divisions in the society; what they usually signify is something simpler: degrees of familiarity and formality.