The Politics of Washing (19 page)

Barbara, the student au pair, addresses me formally because I am twenty years her senior. This is an unavoidable fact, a neutral fact – an accident of history – and is to nobody’s discredit. She, as a young woman, is merely according me the respect I deserve as an older woman. I have lived longer than she has and am the mother of several children. I bear more responsibility and therefore have more authority and deserve more respect.

It strikes me as a decent enough social equation. Every one of us, after all, must pass through the same hoops; each of us is born, grows up, takes on responsibilities, gains experience and accrues, in the process, the right to be respected, a right that is then formally enshrined in the building blocks of the language – its grammar. It’s hardly a democratic right, but there’s a kind of fairness in it: you earn your colours by living and getting older. What is being expressed here is not class distinction, but social difference. So what’s my problem?

There is a profound, perhaps even pernicious, error common in the Anglo-Saxon-based, English-speaking cultures. This is the idea that informality is equivalent to equality; that anything casual and apparently unstructured is somehow inherently democratic. So, there is the illusion that the laddish or charming or earnest politician, say, is just like any other bloke on the street, while the plain fact remains that anyone that hungry for power and attention is, to put it politely, a breed apart. As David Cameron jokes in an open-necked polo shirt in Cornwall, Afghanistan of course continues to burn. In Italy, they know that all of this boy-next-door stuff is dangerous nonsense. That is why Berlusconi’s tours around the peninsula on his luxury yacht were an intrinsic part of his electioneering and of his popular appeal. While this may not be preferable, it is at least an unashamed acknowledgement that although he undoubtedly wished to be the People’s Man,
Berlusconi was definitely not a Man of the People.

And, of course, I cannot pretend to be Barbara’s equal, or not, that is, in the sense of being the same as her. Which brings me face to face with what I suspect is the deeper reason for my feelings of awkwardness when she refuses to recognize me linguistically as her peer.

As I chat with this young woman, twenty years my junior, I do so under the illusion that I am hardly much older than her. So that when I invite her to address me as ‘tu’ I assume that it would seem as natural to her as it does to me. It doesn’t. Barbara, who is not in my head, sees me for exactly what I am: a middle-aged mother of four, old enough to be her mother. She has no difficulty with the fact that we are neither contemporaries, nor friends. What I take for her friendliness is, in fact, politeness: basic, decent, irreproachable good manners. Barbara forces me to slough off the pitiful illusion that I am Forever A Girl.

So the Italian ‘tu’ and the ‘lei’ work together to correct the dual fantasy of equality and immortality. Brilliant. But I keep on getting them wrong; they are still not properly lodged under my skin. In the middle of a spectacular row, in Italian, with Alberto, I become so incensed, so enraged, that there are no words for my spluttering anger. So how, my Anglo-logic reasons, inflamed with fury, can I possibly address this vile man in the intimate ‘tu’ form? I understand ‘tu’ as soft and friendly; clearly ‘lei’, the formal ‘you’, is the only way to speak to someone you hate. I launch into the ‘lei’. It backfires. For some seconds he is bemused, then he begins to laugh.

‘What are you talking about?’ he asks.

I’m not sure, but it feels, obscurely, right. My wrathful logic strikes Alberto, however, as hysterically funny; it is a kind of personal and linguistic gobbledegook. The argument fizzles out.

Later, I try to understand how my use of ‘lei’ must have sounded to this native Italian speaker. I imagine a British couple in the middle of a violent row. Suddenly the woman who is screaming at her husband ‘You fucking bastard!’, morphs, without warning, into a character in a Jane Austen novel and starts addressing him instead, with froideur, with hauteur, as ‘Mr Bennett’.

It would, I can see, be hard to keep a straight face.

W
HEN
P
IETRO
C
ASOLA
announced, in 1495, that everything there was to say about Venice had already been said, he slipped on the banana skin of history. His mistake – a common one – was radically to underestimate both the dead and those not yet born. That is how he became a dupe of modernity.

‘Because I am alive and conscious now,’ this logic seems to go, ‘the reality to which I am witness must be the definitive one.’

This is the logic of children (when I am not there, nothing is there) and of infantile despots: ‘Before me: nothing.’

Casola was a man of the Renaissance, the breeding ground of the modern world. All around him thinkers and artists were re-defining and re-expressing the world in terms of their own individual and human consciousness. What happened subsequently in European history could not have occurred without this first, critical shift in point of view. When Michelangelo sculpted God in the shape of a perfect man, did he have any idea that his act of exquisite devotion was part of a fundamental undermining of God’s hegemony in Western civilization?

God and the gods offered us heaven, reminded us of Arcadia, but once human beings took the helm it followed that we had also taken into our own hands the possibility of perfection; we could (at least) aspire to the creation of perfection: heaven on earth, and once that was possible a whole new raft of problems started to shift and blunder downstream and the twentieth century cut its devastating swathe through history as the century of hellish Utopias.

Not every culture in the world has sloughed off history with as much alacrity as our own. What modernized Europe came to perceive as the chains of the past, others continued to value as roots, and integral to their living identity.

In spring, my friend Gloria comes to visit me in Venice. Gloria is Bolivian; on her mother’s side, she is Spanish in origin; on her father’s side, she is Aymara Indian. She has the oval face, long straight nose and almond eyes of an indigenous Andean.

One morning, I take Gloria to visit one of my favourite Venetian palazzi, an ancient building, heavy with the odour of the past, in which even the walls reveal the strata of centuries of change: fragments of fresco, stripped back to plaster, to brick, to wood.

Slowly, we walk together from hall to silent hall, savouring the shadowy tapestries and unfolding spaces until we finally emerge into daylight and on to the
loggia
or terrace. The great trunk of wisteria that twists up the front of the building showers the
loggia
with a cool, violet explosion of flowers. The courtyard below is full of April sunshine, warming the stone pavement. Gloria and I sit down on a bench, in the shade of the wisteria, and breathe in its sweet and heavy scent.

‘I would love to live here,’ I say.

Gloria shudders and shakes her head.

‘I wouldn’t. There have been too many lives here. Think of all those people! Century after century, living and suffering here.’

All swept up in my lazy, hedonistic dream of a Real Estate Heaven (you can get anything you desire, if you just have the money), I have seen in the palazzo, merely, a gorgeous thing that I wish to possess. What Gloria sees are other people’s real lives stretching back from where she happens to be standing in time. She feels the ghosts of them crowding in, hears them telling their stories – their true stories. Her sense of herself, her aesthetic, her emotions are bound up not only with what is happening to her now, but also with what has come before her. Her sense of history is of an unfolding story in which she and all of humanity are active participants. Her relationship to the world around her comes from an understanding of time that is fundamentally
different
from mine. To Gloria, the dead are her parents, the unborn – her children. I, by contrast and entirely unconsciously, see myself, as had Casola, riding the crest of Time’s Wave. Had I been alive eighty years ago, I might have expressed this childlike belief in modernity in the conviction that I could help to create a brave new world. I might, like my liberal, optimistic, perhaps naive grandparents in the 1930s, have joined the Communists. Now, in 2009, all of that has soured: the twentieth century saw the tragic corruption of high ideals into murderous ideologies; now, we are witness to a meltdown into decadence: Utopian
idealism has been appropriated by consumerism. We no longer aspire to creating heaven on earth; we now believe that we can buy it.

And so back to Venice, where the living city continues to fight an ever-weakening rearguard action and its stones are sold to tourists for a long weekend of Mini Break Heaven.

W
HEN
M
ARY
J
ANE
comes to visit, she draws my attention to something I have not noticed before about the tourists in Venice.

‘It’s white tourism,’ she says. ‘You hardly see any black people here.’

She is right. The same is true of the inhabitants, which strikes me as strange really, in a city that must once have been a racial and cultural melting pot on the scale of contemporary New York or London. Just look at the paintings of 400 to 500 years ago, where turbaned Turks and Moorish merchants and sailors and servants rub shoulders with the native Venetians.

In one of Carpaccio’s great, thronging scenes of fifteenth-century Venetian life, a black gondolier leans against his oar. He was probably a slave. And then, of course, there is one of the most famous – if fictional – Venetians of them all: Shakespeare’s Othello, who was no slave, but a general in the Venetian army.

Nowadays, virtually the only people of African origin on the streets of Venice are the so-called Vu-compra – the illegally employed, often Somali, vendors of fake designer bags and sunglasses, who wander in small groups, strikingly visible with their shining black skin and great height, head and shoulders above the crowds, lugging their bundles of contraband goods and speaking in bubbling, rounded vowels that are unintelligible to most of the people around them.

One evening I am at a talk in Ca’ Rezzonico, one of the great Venetian palazzos and now its museum of the eighteenth century. Recently restored, it is a gleaming monument to power and money; the vast salons are decorated with trompe l’oeuil marble columns,
mythological
scenes, gods and maidens looking down from vertiginous balconies, painted statues breaking into monochrome life.

The talk is taking place in the ballroom and the lecturer’s voice ricochets off the marble floors and stuccoed walls so that I, with my foreigner’s ear, fail to catch half of what he is saying. Eventually, I give up straining to hear and pass the hour studying the absurdly grandiloquent space around me. This is when I notice the black men. They are placed at intervals around the ballroom. They are about a metre high and carved from ebony. With one hand, they raise aloft a sort of tray, suitable, perhaps, for a single vase. Their bodies are perfectly athletic and artfully displayed, a hand on a hip, one knee slightly bent, the magnificent gleaming torso turned so as to reveal the musculature at its very best. It is an alluring, slightly feminine pose, but what it showcases is pure masculinity. Up to this point, one might describe them as having a certain erotic camp. But these statues are not eighteenth-century erotica, they are eighteenth-century pornography. What makes the difference? The shocking addition of perfectly carved wooden chains that hang around their necks and down to a shackle on their wrists.

As I look at them, I wonder about the kind of guests the family Rezzonico would have entertained in this salon in its heyday. There were unlikely to have been many Africans, but surely, every so often, there would have been a Moorish ambassador or merchant – or general – present. What would they have made of these fashionable, lascivious images of black flesh displayed around the hall? Would these carved slaves have been considered offensive? Of course not. An image of this kind would have had little or no impact on any black grandee strolling through the state rooms of this palazzo in his finery. Just as the carvings inhabit a limited aesthetic space somewhere between grotesquerie, pornography and erotica, so the subjects of the carvings – black slaves – would have been outside the consciousness of the rich and noble who
looked at them, and this separation had little to do with the colour of their skin. All that counted here was the absence of freedom and status, not as individuals, but as chattels.

None of this is news: shared skin colour never was a guarantee of fellow feeling or proof of common experience. I think of my own inability to connect with or understand the gypsy beggars. I think of other much, much worse crimes.

Mary Jane is right; the vast majority of people in this once richly cosmopolitan city are white skinned and of European descent. This means that Venice is not, at this point in its history, truly a metropolis. Now, in the early twenty-first century a city is, by its very nature, multi-ethnic, socially multifaceted. This is no longer Venice’s story. The city has become a village resort, to which the wealthy of the world flock for their pleasure.

A significant proportion of the cosmopolitan life that still survives here is essentially unintegrated, culturally and politically; it is to be found among the immigrants, legal and illegal, who serve and service the city and who live either outside or below the resident social classes. There are, on the streets of Venice, people who come not just from other places, but from other worlds – and they are here not for pleasure, but through tough necessity. Most of them cannot afford the rents in the city and migrate every night to Mestre or Marghera to sleep under cheaper roofs.

Unlikely though it may at first seem, Venice is still a frontier town: a possible first port of call for people entering the European Union, often illicitly. I know people from Romania, Moldavia, Kyrgyzistan and they are not tourists. These are some of their stories.

W
E
DECIDE
,
IN
January, to postpone the twins’ birthday party until the warm weather comes and we can hold it outside, in the park. Which is why, having waited so long, when the May day arrives and it is dull and drizzly, I am determined not to cancel. That – and the fact that I am
English, not Italian, and think a little rain never hurt anyone. Besides which, I have cooked the pizzas and made a cake in the shape of a pirate’s chest, stuffed with chocolate coins and now leering bulbously in several directions.

The phone calls begin early in the day, at least five hours before the party is due to start.

‘Hello, this is Paola, Fosca’s mother. Is the party still on, with the weather like this?’

‘Oh yes. Obviously if it’s raining …’

‘Oh, yes, obviously. OK then, let’s hope it clears up.’

Just about every mother in the class rings at some point during the decidedly variable afternoon, but I remain cheerfully, resolutely, stubbornly Anglo-Saxon about the weather and the importance of sticking to our plans.

So, at three o’clock, we set off for the park. I carry the unsteady pirate’s chest and Lily drags a shopping trolley full of drinks and cups and plates and Tupperware boxes. She is also trailing a large bunch of bright balloons that seem, on that grey, deserted waterfront, only to advertise our folly.

As we make a slow progress over the bridges, my mobile rings. It’s Paola again.

‘I’m so sorry, but with this weather, I’m afraid Fosca won’t be able to come to the party.’

We labour on. When we arrive at the park, it is empty. The rain, which is coming down quite hard now, is dripping from the dark trees; the balding grass is dissolving into mud patches. We choose a spot under an umbrella pine, next to a low wall, on top of which we spread floral paper cloths and lay out the pizza, crisps, cupcakes and, of course, the treasure chest. Then we rig up balloons on the pieces of broken neo-classical statuary that lie around our chosen picnic spot. We have, I think proudly, stepping back to survey things, made a good job of it: there is a cheerful, making-do-in-spite-of-the-odds look to it: an eccentric little bower of English partyishness in this gloomy afternoon park. Cath Kidson would be proud of us.

At a quarter-past four, the sun, as if taking pity on us, comes out.
In a beautiful clean sweep, the dank little park is transformed into a sparkling place: the sky is washed clean, the air warm again. This is Italy of course and May has only been temporarily eclipsed. As if by sympathetic magic, and only one hour late, a band of children races through the gates, carrying presents and ready for action.

‘Oh, the rain!’ smiles one of the mothers, when I apologize, as though personally responsible for the weather. ‘Nothing would have stopped us from coming!’

I could kiss the woman.

So the children play among the trees, and the flotsam and jetsam of renaissance masonry and we, the mothers, sit chatting and eating cake in the sharply lovely late afternoon sunshine.

After a while, I notice that a young woman is sitting slightly apart from the others. I know that she is nanny to one of the children. We have talked a couple of times, making arrangements for playing or picking up children; she is from Moldavia. I move over to sit with her.

She is an attractive, high-cheekboned woman in her late twenties; her expression is severe and closed.

‘How do you like living in Venice?’ I ask her.

‘It’s OK,’ she says, unsmiling. ‘But I miss my children.’

‘You have children? How old are they?’ I don’t mean to sound surprised.

‘They are nine and four. I haven’t seen them for a year.’

‘Why so long?’

‘I need 2,000 euros in my bank account so that I can get into Italy to work. Even if I just go back to Moldavia for a holiday, I must show the Italian authorities I still have the money in my account. I can’t afford to do that. I have to send all the money back to my husband, for the family.’

I have only a sketchy idea of where Moldavia is.

‘So wages are higher in Italy than in Moldavia?’ I ask.

‘Yes. No one who works in Moldavia can afford the cost of living there. What I earn in one week here, I would earn in one month at home. The shops in Moldavia base their prices on what foreign workers send back. It has become impossible to live in Moldavia and work there.’

She never once smiles, but she talks freely, in this sun-filled park, bouncing with happy kids, none of them hers. She is a mother forced, not only to live apart from her children, but, in a vile twist of economic irony, to endure the spectacle of other, united mothers and children, and to be, herself, the carer of another woman’s son.

W
HEN
K
ATERINA COMES
to clean, I like her immediately. She is small and wiry, with high cheekbones, black eyes and straight black hair. She has a humorous, indignant manner and is visibly a woman of extremes. She is tough and generous and bossy. On the first morning, she tells me her story:

‘Eight years ago, I needed to get work. I couldn’t afford to live in Moldavia any more. I paid 1,200 euros to some smugglers to get me into Italy. The journey took three weeks. There were ten people in my group and a guide. We travelled with our rucksacks on our backs, that was all.

‘They put us in coaches and took us to the Austrian border. Then we had to walk through Austria. Mostly, we went through the forests, to avoid being seen. We would walk all day, and at night we would stop and the guide would dig up food and bedding that had been left buried in the earth or in piles of leaves by the last group to pass through. I was so tired, I would not lie down to sleep because I was afraid that I would never get up again.

‘Sometimes, the border guards shot at us, or pretended to, trying to scare us. We would panic and run. I hurt my foot running.

‘I can never look at sweetcorn now. I can’t bear it. For three days, we walked through the maize fields and those plants cut our faces to pieces.

‘When I got to Venice, I was lucky because my sister was already here. She was looking after an old lady who was senile, so she could smuggle me into the house at night, to sleep. In the days, I would walk around the city looking for work. Or I would sit in the parks.

‘Then, someone – I don’t know – a neighbour or another Moldavian maybe – told the old woman’s daughter, about me, so I had to leave that house. Other Moldavian women took me in. I stayed in many different places. There is a whole network of Moldavians working in this city. Some are good people; some are not. Like everywhere. I have known some very good people and some very bad people in my life.’

The Eastern European housekeepers and carers gather in the park near to our house every Sunday afternoon. They sit on the benches under the tall lime trees. At first I do not distinguish these respectable-looking middle-aged women, gossiping on the benches, from any other Italian matrons of the same age. Then, as I am walking with the children to the playground one day, I see two women, one of whom is brushing the other’s hair, and I looked closer.

Italians only do what they consider to be
outside
things in public. They do not eat on the street, except for ice creams; they do not do their hair, except perhaps to flick it back glamorously or pat it into place. They emerge from their houses turned out for public, not private, life. They are made up, buttoned up, ready to face the day-lit world. There is, therefore, something disconcertingly intimate – almost, you might say, naked – about these ageing women hairdressing on the park bench.

That is when I realize that they are not Italian at all; that they do not have comfortably besuited husbands in tow, or grandchildren in buggies; they only have each other. And of course, this is when I notice that they are physically different too: heavier, more solid, with square faces and fairer complexions and staider, cheaper clothes. They are from Romania, Moldavia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and other ex-Soviet countries, and they are in Venice to work.

On another Sunday afternoon, I watch a small group of these women standing in a circle near the stone fountain and singing. As they sing, they bow rhythmically to each other and clap their hands in time to the melody. I feel sure that this is the ghost of a dance they would, under other, more relaxed circumstances, marry to their rousing, repetitive, defiant and melancholy anthem.

The same women appear on warm evenings near our local
vaporetto
stop. They sit their ample behinds on the stone ledge of the raised
campo
that looks out across the Grand Canal. Placed at intervals between them are wheelchairs, in which droop the ancient wisps of human beings for whom they care. The women chatter and laugh over the heads of their fragile charges and I detect shreds of cruelty – relief at being able to disregard their duty and talk in their own language; at being, for now, in the majority, free to gossip about home and their resentments.