To the Wedding (17 page)

Zdena takes from her bag a hairbrush with minute white globules on the end of its metal darts, and draws it once through her hair before placing it on her coat. Next, her new Slovak passport. Ninon’s last letter. A purse she has set aside for Italian money with its fantastic currency of hundreds of thousands. A packet of aspirins. A powder compact. A photo of Ninon at school.

Until recently, the annual problem for Venice was drinking water. The wells and cisterns often went dry. And so water had to be brought in barges across the lagoon from the river Brenta. The barges followed the same lane through the shallow salt waters as the motonave is now slowly navigating. But the water barges came in the opposite direction.

Again Zdena raises her head, touches her sunglasses and gazes towards the southwest. The motonave is going too slowly to create a wake. The water astern simply undulates, and in it the seaweed moves like hair. The imposing Santa Maria della Salute, built opposite the Doges’ Palace on the very tip of the Island of the Trinity, is now the size of Zdena’s cigarette lighter laid flat on the Kleenex packet.

I might call the Salute too a tama.

Forty years after Palladio’s death, The Plague returned
to the city of Venice. Within sixteen months fifty thousand people had died, their corpses burnt or ferried across the waters. Then, for a moment, the epidemic seemed to abate: a temporary reprieve. Hastily the authorities organised a competition for the design of another church and vowed that if the city was again spared, this new church would stand at the very entrance to Venice and its Grand Canal as a thanksgiving!

Baldassare Longhena, who won the competition, arranged an imposing monument with two domed octagonal rotundas, and with carved daylights and buttresses like gigantic abalone shells.

Yet to build this massive baroque tama on the very tip of the island so that it would be the first and last thing that any visitor coming across the water to the city would see, it was necessary to reinforce and give support to the soil. Otherwise the whole edifice ran the risk of drowning. So a million posts of oak and larch and elder were driven into the earth to make a wooden raft to support the stone building.

Today the Venetians call the Salute’s whorled buttresses her
orecchioni
, her big ears.

A comb. A lipstick. A green notebook. A shopping list. A pair of earrings. Some traveller’s checks. On this journey to her daughter’s wedding, Zdena wants everything to be tidily arranged and cared for. The contents of her handbag are the last touch. Like this she hopes that everything about herself will have a clear, crisp outline, which, when she meets her daughter, will offer and express confidence.
In her own way Zdena arranges for the same reasons as Baldassare Longhena and Palladio.

The ship’s officer, more and more intrigued by the behaviour of the foreign woman, strolls past her twice trying to make up his mind. The first time he smiled at her, but her response was to go to the ship’s railing and, holding her handbag upside down, shake it. Three gulls swooped near and their shrieks trailed behind them. Then they disappeared and she came back to her seat.

It’s hot, isn’t it, Signora?

Sorry, no Italian me, she replies in her inappropriately expressive voice.

You speak English?

Too hot for English …

Meticulously, Zdena puts things back into the bag. The ship is surrounded by the quiet and stillness of the lagoon, just as a person who leaves home on an early summer morning is surrounded by a new and endless day. The powder compact. The black diary. The stub of pencil. The Italian money.

The ship is sailing away even from me.

On the first pages of the diary, which she didn’t open, is written a note for Zdena’s dictionary. Her handwriting is small and very upright as if the letters were numerals:

“K. Kautsky. Karl. Born 1854 Prague. (Looked for his house but couldn’t find it.) A man’s long life of unceasing political struggle against exploitation, colonialism, war. (He had a beard like they all did.) Remained steadfast in his belief that History can have a sense. Marxist. (Was Engels’s
secretary.) During his life he had to flee into exile at least four times. (Four times he had to begin again.) When he was in his sixties, he laboriously came to the conclusion that violent revolution was unnecessary. In 1919 Lenin called him a renegade. After 1947 in our country (he died in 1938, exiled in Amsterdam) his name became synonymous with cowardice, craven ambition and counterrevolutionary plotting. To be bracketed with Kautsky by the State Prosecutor was tantamount to a demand for a death sentence.”

The motonave is out of my hearing, and the water makes no noise at all. All is silence now.

On a later page of the same diary Zdena has copied out an extract from an article she read in a newspaper. At the top of the page, in capital letters, written in pencil, is the word
Pain
.

“Those treated for the illness, states a doctor, are frequently not treated for their suffering and pain. Yet physical pain produces anguish which in turn increases the pain. The infections and parasites which the body cannot resist when SIDA has declared itself, provoke hellish itchings, nausea, cramps of the stomach, open sores in the mouth, migraines following radiotherapies, shooting pains along the legs, and all these, accompanied by a crippling fatigue, strike one after the other; consequently they shut every horizon and prevent the sick person from thinking about anything else—as well-meaning advisors sometimes recommend. Pain cuts off, isolates and paralyses. It also produces a feeling of total failure and defeat. Often, in
order for the pain of SIDA patients to be taken account of, their suffering has to reach such a paroxysm that it disturbs other patients and only then are steps taken to alleviate it …”

May I ask your mission, Signora?

Blow up your ship!

Ha! Ha! The Signora has a fine sense of humour.

The ship’s officer waits and then abruptly leaves as if he has remembered something he has to do.

Her handbag arranged, Zdena goes to the railing and gazes into the still lagoon water that reflects nothing. The ship, changing direction, creates a momentary breeze which lifts a lock of hair from her damp forehead.

She walks to the bows and waits there, letting the breeze cool her face; later she returns to her bench.

There, she opens her bag, which is now in perfect order, and finds the diary and the pencil stub. On the page for June 6 she writes in her upright handwriting: Let these days never end, let them be long like centuries!

I
wanted to ask them in the hospital in Bologna to tell me the truth—as if there was another truth! I stopped myself for I knew there was only one truth—which is my death.

Straightaway I hear a second voice, whispering. It crosses my mind that Gino speaks like a man who, bent over what he’s working at with his hands, is suddenly prompted to look up and smile at a passer-by who has stopped to watch him. And I’m that passer-by.

This
lucioperca
, Gino is whispering, this five-kilo lucioperca is going to be the first dish of the wedding feast.
Aunt Emanuela has already been cooking dishes for three days. I have invited my stall-holder friends and a rock group from Cremona.

I caught the lucioperca this morning and I want to cook him myself. The aunt is the only one of the family who can hold a live eel and cut its head off with one blow from a little axe. She talks to it. When I try, the eels twist themselves round my arm. Yet I want to prepare the lucioperca myself, for he is my surprise.

Ninon has her secrets—like the secret of all she’s going to wear under her wedding dress, which I shan’t see till tomorrow night, and the lucioperca is my secret which Ninon won’t see till we sit down at the wedding table after I’ve carried her across the bridge and she has probably kicked her silver shoes off and one of the girls has put them on her feet again and we are married.

I’m going to make a
pesce lesso
in aspic. Eighty-three centimetres long. Even Father will raise an eyebrow, for the lucioperca looks metallic—green like oxidised bronze, then copper, then silver … A metallic fish from the depths.

They call him the owl-fish because of his extra large eyes and he has them because he lives in the night at the bottom of the river, two, three, three and a half metres down. He never comes to the surface. They live in gangs, these fishes, on the riverbed. You and your rivers! Ninon says, angry. Gino, she snaps when I come home at midday, what did you find? A frog, I say and I jump like one, a big bullfrog. For months she hasn’t been able to laugh with
me and this morning she did. She laughs with her whole body at me imitating the frog, and only her eyes still look perplexed at her own laughing.

To know where the big fish are, you have to know the river, you have to feel the river’s instincts. The fish are doing exactly the same thing in their way. More times than not, they outwit you,
le carpe, i lucci
.

Can you see there, where the silver scales go a little darker like a narrow path, along his flank? That’s called his lateral line and with it he listens to the river.

I tell Ninon she has a lateral line too and I trace it with my finger. With her it begins under her ear, goes under her arm, circles the little hill of her breast, runs down the steps of her ribs, keeps equidistant between navel and hip, slips by the border of her
bosco
and tears down the soft inside of her thigh to her ankle. For months she couldn’t laugh. For months she wouldn’t let me near her.

You have two lateral lines, I tease her, left and right and they have eyelashes all the way along them!

You’re going mad, Gino, she says, this fucking illness has sent you out of your mind.

So I hold her in my arms and tell her how under the silver scales there are pores which have little buds like our taste-buds in the mouth, only these ones on the lateral line have tiny tears at their ends and around the tear duct there are lashes, some soft and some stiff and they record every quiver in the current, they send messages about any change in the water, the slightest stir of another body moving, or a stone diverting the flow of water. The lashes
are real, I tell her, no madness. Ninon has eyes which are sometimes green and sometimes golden.

I told a doctor I met in the market about the dates and her last lymphocyte count and, according to him, the
medico
in Parma, we can perhaps count on two, three, three and a half years of clapping—provided she has things to clap for! After that the sickness begins. Nobody can be sure.

Tie together the court-bouillon of bay leaves and thyme and fennel, add white wine, peppercorns, sliced onions and a little lemon peel. The fish saucepan is Aunt Emanuela’s—you could cook a tuna in it.

It’s the biggest lucioperca I’ve ever seen caught anywhere. I knew they were there, the big carnivores, this morning. Don’t ask me how. Up against the bank where a larch had fallen into the river and had been shaved by the water of all its bark. A bad place for casting, for the line could easily tangle with the tree. Be careful, I told myself. Go slow. Me, the crazy man watching his line sink, one, two, three, three and a half metres down till the little lead earring touched the riverbed. I was using a cunning sliver of roach as bait and this I played, jerking the bait to jump like a living gudgeon, little leaps along the silt, as if wounded, never allowing the line to go too slack, little leaps like from one black note to another on a piano, and Lucioperca believes it’s a wounded gudgeon, he opens his enormous mouth and he swallows the hook. The carnivore outwitted. Then the fight is to stop him winding me round the tree. Each time I forestall him. Foreseeing his
every move. I forget everything else. Look at him now on the kitchen table!

We’re going to live the years with craziness and cunning and care. All three. The three Cs. Matteo, the boxer, says I’m mad. He says I’m throwing my life away. That’s what most people do, I say, not me.

The fishes, I tell her, listen through their flanks to the river they were born into. I told her this and she fell asleep, smiling.