The Politics of Washing (8 page)

In Venice, where the dialect is still alive and well, people often move back and forth between Italian and Venetian. In parent and teacher meetings at the school, the discussion might well be carried out with one person speaking Italian, while the other speaks in dialect. At one such meeting, the news that there is to be a teachers’ strike the following week is communicated in dialect, which is why, on the day of the strike, my children and I are the only people standing outside the locked school door. And if I knew nobody and spoke neither Italian nor Venetian, how would I be able to find out what is going on – what could I do? Would I wait there for an hour in the cold? Would I, having no idea of the working of any schools, let alone Italian ones, assume the school has closed permanently and then not go back until
summoned
by the social services?

There are moments when I feel confused, embarrassed, plain stupid – when everyone except me seems to understand perfectly what is going on. Looking at these young women, I think how it would be to feel really alien; multiplying to the power of a hundred my fleeting awkwardnesses and insecurities, I try to imagine being adrift in a sea of signs you cannot read, finding yourself surrounded by strangers, with strange faces, mowing sounds or gestures you cannot begin to decode, because this is a culture of which you have no knowledge whatsoever. I wonder too how it feels on the skin, to these Bangladeshi girls from their hot, crowded towns or dusty villages, who find themselves in this damp, grey, stony, silent, bewintered city in the sea, wrapped up in autumn mists, the pale faces of the people hurrying past them on the street, private and closed.

‘And how do you like living in Venice?’ one of the teachers asks the
plump girl in the sparkly wrap, ‘– how is it? – good?’

The woman is all pointy eagerness as she leans across the table, urging the girl on with her straining smile. But the girl, who arrived in Italy only a few months ago, does not understand, and her cousin, sitting beside her, dressed in Western clothes, translates the question. The teacher waits, smiling, smiling. The girl nods seriously. ‘Si’.

‘Ah …’ The teacher exhales, satisfied and sentimental, as she relaxes back into her seat, content with the answer she so badly needed.

Now she turns her attention to the cousin. ‘And tell me, Amina,’ she says, ‘where do you live in Pakistan – oh!!’ she claps her hand to her mouth, looking at her colleague, wide-eyed, mortified, ‘my first gaffe! I mean –’ she turns back to Amina, pink and breathless, ‘I mean – Bangladesh!’

The Filipina woman produces a tub of noodles and as we eat them off plastic plates, the red-haired teacher moves around the table, photographing everyone, assiduously recording Senegalese and Bangladeshi women eating Filipino noodles. I remember all those occasions I have attended over the years, both as a teacher and as a parent –
community
events, family days, workshops – when other well-meaning people clicked away and filled albums or pin-up boards with photographs that were always happy mixes of black and white; old and young; male and female. And, I wonder, are the notice boards in the Houses of Parliament covered with friendly photomontages of grey-suited ministers meeting, talking, ‘brainstorming’? Are the coffee tables of Downing Street scattered with albums of merry get-togethers?

The people who consider themselves to be running the serious side of life tend to meet in rooms without photographers; do not, on the whole, feel it necessary to shore themselves up with snapshots of the evidence – might, indeed, prefer to hide it.

All the same, despite my cynicism, the sweet Filipino noodles taste good and, in one of those convoluted, surreal tricks of association that history will deal out, make me too a little homesick for the familiar-unfamiliar flavours that centuries of Imperialism have made British.

The door opens again and someone else enters the room. A man,
in his early fifties; baggy, well-pressed jeans hang off narrow hips and a strand of black hair has been smoothed carefully across his white scalp. He wears a spanking new tee-shirt and carries a briefcase. He approaches us beaming in the same, slightly fixed way as the
red-haired
woman, who rises quickly to her feet, minutely inclining towards him in the beginning of a bow.

‘Can I introduce you all to the headmaster?’ Her hands are clasped at chest level.

‘Please, please,’ the headmaster nods, smiling: we must all stand at ease. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you; I just wanted to say hello.’

And, wreathed in smiles, he retreats, in his immaculate leisure wear, and content, it seems, to have made an appearance.

Once the noodles have been despatched, it is time for the main business of the afternoon: the Senegalese contingent is to show us their national costume. They go to the back of the hall and, in shafts of dust-floating light cast from a high window, start taking from their bags folded pieces of bright, patterned cloth. They slip off their
high-heeled
shoes and begin, deftly, to wind these lengths of fabric around their hips, soon immersing their jeans in rainbow swathes. Then they take scarves and knot them around their heads, so that the stiff organza-like fabric makes turbans, or extravagant wimples – brilliant head dresses that draw these tall young women taller still: a smiling,
chattering
band of Amazons in this dim place. Their pleasure in themselves and their clothes fills the room like the sun.

When they have finished, they preen and parade a little, humorously, self-consciously, for us, the seated white women, old enough to be their mothers, looking on.

‘Will you show us one of your dances? Please!’ says the red-haired teacher.

‘Oh yes,’ her colleague urges them, ‘please dance!’

Good-humoured, obliging, barefoot, the Senegalese girls lift up their big skirts in both hands and slap jauntily up on to the stage. A tape is pushed into a cassette player and the volume is turned up full, so that the big, bold, blaring sound of Youssou N’Dour blasts into the
dank Adriatic afternoon. Then, the dance begins.

If the Italian women are hoping for some traditional display, they are disappointed. These colourful natives do not oblige with a dramatized story or ritual sequence. It is clear from the start that they are making it up as they go along.

The African girls begin to sway, vaguely at first, to the trumpet call of their man Youssou. They seem unsure which way to go. But then, suddenly, they know. Elbows go spiky-perpendicular to hips, skirts are hoiked up to reveal bent, splayed knees and they cluck and rollick and splutter in a wild, raunchy, chicken-staggering walk. They lift their tops to reveal their navels, pelvis thrust forward, muscles rolling in impromptu belly-dances. They strut and wink and shake their stuff; they prance and stagger, self-satirizing, laughing uproariously in their gorgeous, ungainly, unbridled display of comic sexuality. It is a dance to draw men and they are a scrumptious coven of colour and flesh, of loose hips, of elbows akimbo, breasts high, headgear fabulously aloft, and everything ablaze for this row of ageing European women or, is it, in defiance of them?

The red-haired teacher titters and glances sideways at her
colleagues
, somewhere between delight and unease. They exchange looks of self-satisfaction (the enablers, the co-ordinators), amusement and uncertainty because, there is no doubting it, in these ten minutes of misrule, five Senegalese girls have the last laugh – Big Time.

A
T HALF-PAST TEN
every morning, the street door bell rings. If I am at home and get to the door phone in time to ask, in the clipped, wary tone I have learnt from the Venetians: ‘Chi e?’, the postman’s
disembodied
and despairing voice comes back: ‘La posta’, dragging out all his vowels like a Venetian Eeyore who knows that everything will go to the bad, if it hasn’t already.

Occasionally I see him in the street; he is an earnest-looking, middle-aged man with thick, black-framed glasses; he has a bookish,
weary look and is visibly ill-at-ease in his fluorescent yellow
Poste Italia
tabard.

If I am not at home to sign for a recorded delivery, he leaves a card on the bench in the hall. Providing a place for the dumping of such odds and ends is the only purpose now served by the two elegantly carved marble seats that flank the wide entrance. Sometimes the boys upstairs leave their Ninja Turtle backpacks on them; or a sheaf of advertisements for the Panorama Megastore in Mestre might end up there.

What purpose these benches have ever served, even in their eighteenth-century heyday, is not obvious. They certainly imply grandeur; they suggest a charming young girl in a Longhi painting resting for a moment to catch her breath or adjusting the satin bow on her shoe, before she sallies forth into the street. The truth is, I suppose, they were never more than ornamental; probably, school bags and shopping have always been dumped on them.

Having found the
Poste Italia
card, I must now go and retrieve my package. Only a few metres off the tacky tourist jangle of the Rialto bridge, an unobtrusive entrance, on a narrow
calle
, leads into the vast, grey stone courtyard of the Central Post Office. Three tiers of open galleries run around the quadrangle and in the centre there is a marble well. The covered courtyard is cast in a permanent, monochrome stillness. The only clue that you have entered anything other than the palace of Jadis, Queen of Narnia, frozen in time, are the twisted red cord ropes, looped between brass stands, suggesting an official occasion for which crowds might imminently have to be lined up and organized.

Parcels must be fetched from an office in a far corner of the courtyard. Someone has rigged up a brown curtain across most of the window. It is the kind of curtain you might find in a heap at a jumble sale, smelling of mould. Through the window I see many wooden pigeon holes filled with packages and I watch as a tall, bearded, slightly bent man in a cardigan rifles through them hopelessly. As usual, there are several other people in the office; as usual, serving the public seems to be the least of their worries and they sit back on their chairs and chat among themselves.

After a long time, the bearded man finds my parcel. Now, I must head to another department in order to pay a bill. Making for the second floor, I walk up a great, empty stone staircase. It is unlit and unadorned. Again, there is no sign that I am either in a post office or, indeed, in the twenty-first century. The staircase is stripped of any detail of its past, and all that remains is the massive, sixteenth-century armature of the building.

Once at the top of the stairs, I push open a swing door, more
suggestive
of 1955 than 1555, and enter a space that is, at last, reassuringly like the kind of post offices I know. Here, there are the Formica
counters
and the capable, severe-looking women perched behind glass and processing the endless forms and receipts that make up so much of the substance of official Italian life. In another serpentine corral of cords and posts, the people wait, silent and passive in the inevitable queue. Every so often, it nudges wearily forward.

Because the spaces of Venice – both public and domestic – have been recycled so many times, over so many centuries, they are
generally
, in some way or another, ill-fitted to their current purpose. Public spaces are often very grand, but because they now house more compact enterprises and are run by many fewer people than were once needed, they seem echoey and empty. On the other hand, private apartments can be warren-like and cramped, even in the finest buildings.

But the fact is, for all its unlikely appearance, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi makes, in some ways, a fitting enough home for the Central Post Office. Built as a warehouse, market place and accommodation for the Slav and Germanic merchants trading in Venice in the sixteenth century, it still has a thoroughly practical purpose – processing the flux of letters and consignments in and out of the city.

In the early morning, the post boats are tied up outside and bundles of letters are handed down to the postmen who then distribute them around the
sestieri
or boroughs (literally: the sixths) of Venice. And in this office, on the second floor, people are queuing in the longest of
traditions
: supplicants, applicants, individuals who need something from the system and are required to wait, until officialdom is ready to issue a permit, an authorization, a rubber stamp.

Still, I think, as I go back down the staircase, my business done, it would be a mistake to assume nothing at all is different: the very pitch of the stairs on which I am walking gives the lie to that. These wide, marble steps force me to slow down, hobble me somehow, into a more ceremonious or respectful descent than a purpose-built, twenty-first-century post office building might require. No smart, quick, clickety-clackety trot down to street level here; the building imposes its own ancient rhythms, gives a clue to the kind of slow-stepping, low-voiced, confidential confabulations between foreign merchants as they came down, shoulder to negotiating shoulder.

Despite the fact that it continues to be used for practical business, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi is no longer a place where deals are brokered. It has gone down the scale of influence, become far less important, with its despairing, cardiganed clerks and wish-you-were-here postcards taking the place of trafficking, bartering, strutting merchants, convening in Venice from all around the globe. Its next planned
incarnation
as a Benetton-financed shopping centre is not, in this sense at least, news.

The uneasy relationship between the Venice in which a few thousand people live out their daily lives and the Venice that is an impossibly beautiful stage set, to which the whole gawping world flocks, is played out in the bricks and mortar of the city. Even when it is engaged in a thoroughly modern enterprise, the drag of past glories seems irresistible because, somehow, however hard it tries, Venice cannot be modern.