A Thousand Days in Venice (15 page)

After everything is done, I take a dish of pudding and sit down between my fishmonger and Roberto and I notice Donato, the captain of the tax-control force with the good appetite, conferencing with the guitarists and nodding my way. Ruggero asks for attention and the room quiets. A slow, taunting
Gelosia
, Jealousy, is throbbing out from the guitars and, without so much as asking, Donato is kissing my hand, leading me, flushed from the burners and with chocolate on my breath, to tango between the tables. Thank goodness for those lessons Misha gave me as a present so many years ago. All
those Tuesday nights with Señora Carmela and the clammy-palmed computer prodigies from IBM. The languid glide, the abrupt, explosive half-twist. (“Restraint, restraint my loves,” warned Señora Carmela. “Black arched, neck elongated, chin up, higher, higher, eyes direct, unblinking, smoldering,” she'd say in an almost menacing whisper.) I've never tangoed anywhere but in the Poughkeepsie middle school gym. Now I am gliding and half-twisting in the arms of a picaresque official of the state who is moving beautifully in tight, gray uniform pants. I should be dressed in something smooth and red, my hair should smell of roses rather than fried onions, and I don't think I'm smoldering nearly enough. Donato is smoldering somewhat more than enough though, and Venetians are on their feet, cheering. Fernando senses it's time to go.

While the guests slide deeper into their cups, we say a quiet good-night to Ruggero and head for the beach. We go out through the bar and see that a group of old men, their backs to us, are huddled around the huge bowl that held the hot fudge pudding, scraping at what is left with teaspoons, licking their fingers clean just like all-American boys. We hear one of them say,
“Ma l'ha fatto l'americana? Davvero? Ma come si chiama questo dolce?
Did the American really make this? But what's the name of this dessert?”

But there can't be a party every day. One morning I lay facedown on the fancy ocher-draped bed under the lace
baldacchino
, weeping. What is the matter with me? Fernando says it's low blood pressure. He thinks my seeing a doctor is self-indulgent, but I search the directory anyway. I learn that professional listings are not culled under specific headings. One must know the name of the doctor in order to find his or her number. I'm lost. I stop by the tourist office, and the folks there assure me that the only English-speaking doctor in Venice is an allergist. They tell me he's
simpatico
. I take their word for it and set off for his office in San Maurizio. Small, weary, chain-smoking, he interviews me from the velvety charcoal depths of a Napoleonic-era chaise longue that is positioned far across the cavernous room from my straight-backed wooden chair.

He asks, “Do you have a normal sex life?” I am perplexed. Is he suggesting I have an allergy to sex?

“I think it's normal. For me, that is,” I tell him.

After a pause to converse with his housekeeper over the composition of his lunch, he stands nearby, fingers pressed to my pulse, and says, “E-e-et is only that you are scarry,
cara mia
.” I hope he means, “It is only that you are scared, my dear.” I ask his fee, and he looks shocked that I would sully this tête-à-tête by speaking of money. Months later, there arrives his bill for 350,000 lire, about 175 dollars, a very special fee reserved for rich American ladies.

As I walk through the city, I begin to notice American travelers. They seem better looking than all the others, the nasaly timbre of their voices almost Pavlovian for me. As though all of them are dear friends, none of whom quite recognize me there in my Venetian surroundings, I am eager to speak to them. I sit in a café or stand on line at a gallery entrance, sleuthing for some way to engage them. Some one of them almost always gets around to asking how long I've been in Venice, or where I am going next, naturally thinking I am a traveler, too. When I tell them that I live here, that I will soon be married to an Italian, the swapping of compatriotic sympathies shifts. A wealthy friend once told me that as soon as a person discovers how much she's worth, that person's attitude toward her changes, categorizing her first as “portfolio” and second as “woman.” When I tell my story, I am shuffled from the category of an American into that of an exotic and certainly I am no longer one of them. I've gone
to the other side. I am good for supper recommendations, the name of a
farmacista
who'll hand out antibiotics without a prescription, or maybe an extra room for a guest in my house.

I consider joining the ranks of the British Women's Club of Venice. Perhaps they could soothe the malaise. I learn they are eighty sisters bound by a collective disenchantment with life in Italy, life with their Italian husbands. Most live on
terraferma
, the mainland, as far away as Udine and Pordenone and, hence, must trek in over the waters for this monthly commingling of Englishness. Many of them came to Italy as girls, sojourning for a summer among the dark-eyed boys, perhaps spending a year at university in Rome or Florence or Bologna, each having been a huntress on the scent of her own quarry. On the Lido I find only three.

Always wearing a turban and ropes of fake pearls, an eighty-two year old named Emma had married a Venetian city guide twelve years her junior, who soon forsook her to run off with a former paramour. Though her story is half a century old, she speaks of it like a fresh wound. Caroline, a fiftyish blond with a wonderful half-inch gap between her front teeth, rushed about her corner of the island, from baker to butcher as though bandits waited beyond the milk shop. A victim of the torpors, I think she was. I can't remember the name of the tall, sallow woman, hair shorn rather than cut, who lived near the church in San Nicolò. I was in the entryway of
her home once and saw her wedding photo, the strange sweet pose of a gangly, freckled girl and a round-faced boy whose wavy pompadour barely brushed up to his bride's chin. Each time I would meet them walking about the Lido I would recall the photo and smile. I think they were still in love.

The group's president is also the wife of the British consul. She is a
siciliana
who croaks out her English in a hoarse Transylvanian accent. By the time I arrive, her husband, a small dull chap, has already been advised that the funding needed to keep the consulate plushly housed on the
piano nobile
, first floor, of a sixteenth-century palazzo across the
calle
from the Accademia is soon to end. For now though, up its grand marble staircase, inside its mahoganied seclusion, the sisterhood still gathers to tipple and munch and stir up tribal rancors. Though I find some of them charming, their familiarity with one another will be hard to penetrate. Besides, I am not so certain that twenty years from now I would like to be among them, fretting over Italy's capricious supply of gingerstem biscuits.

Each afternoon at five-thirty, I meet Fernando at the bank. I like having this rendezvous, even though his humor is almost always cranky at this hour. One evening, he tells me he needs five minutes
to arrange some papers and asks me to wait in his office. He closes the door after him, and so I sit there in the big, fancy room he dislikes so because of its isolation from all the action. Its walls frescoed with coquettish nymphs, its green marble fireplace, a photo of us in Saint Louis, the scents of old leather and cigarettes and my husband's cologne, I like it here. Riffling through a financial journal, I think how very much I like it here, and I step out of my brown tulle collottes. Using a chair to boost me, I drape the pretty things over the telecamera. I sit there, then, on his desk, legs swinging out from my thin silk dress, and I wait, the marble of his desktop cold under my thighs.

Leaving the bank, we walk to the boat station. Now that we are dining more at home, Fernando begs off our after-work strolls, wanting the apartment's comfort. His feet hurt, his eyes burn, he hates the heat or the cold or the wind or whatever else the skies might be offering, he rips open his third package of cigarettes, and I fall in love again, happy that another day's wars are ended for him. He has begun to resent the bank or, more, his own noble sort of devotion to it. Safe in its communist embrace, its dependents can work or not work and still pocket the same spoils at month's end. He wishes to sit all day among his Aperol-breathed cohorts but his conscience rubs. Apart from a threadbare
contessa
or two whose accounts he has tended for quarter of a century, his clients are mostly
hand-to-mouth merchants in the neighborhood. He frets over them, pushes back due dates, and adjusts regulations to keep wolves in fedoras and cashmere coats from their doors. He cares deeply about these people, but not much about the institution of the bank itself. He says that since our life began, his work leaves him bloodless. He says he wants to restore furniture and learn to play the piano, to live in the countryside somewhere, to have a garden. He says he's beginning to remember his dreams. Lord. Like a blueberry-eyed bear feeling new muscles and rubbing his eyes at the spring light, Fernando is plotting his own
risorgimento
.

On the
motonave
back across the water, we sit always on the top deck, never minding the weather nor how empty or how peopled it might be in any other part of the boat. Wearing a vacant Chauncey Gardner smile, he looks mostly out to the water, turning to me once or twice as though to make certain I am still present. He may recount some buffoonery enacted by a colleague or, more often, his directors. In a poignant gesture, he lifts up of a hank of my hair and kisses it.

This evening on the boat he greets an old man, introduces him to me as Signore Massimiliano. The man has laughing silvery eyes, and he holds my hand in his two hands and looks at me for a long time before he walks slowly to the exit. Fernando tells me the man was a friend of his father's and that, when he was a boy, Massimiliano used
to take him fishing along the Riva Sette Martiri for
passarini
, tiny fish Venetians like to fry and eat, bones and all. He says that when he was about ten or eleven and spending a lot of time playing billiards in the Castello rather than going to school, Massimiliano sat with him one day and asked him if he'd prefer to marry a girl who liked boys who shoot pool or boys who read Dante. Fernando says he asked him why he couldn't marry a girl who liked boys who shoot pool and who also read Dante and the man told him it wasn't possible, so he said he'd prefer the girl who liked boys who read Dante, of course. Massimiliano looked at him and asked, “Don't you think you'd better be getting ready for her?” Fernando says the man's words hit him like rocks, that he read Dante day in and day out, waiting for this girl to come along. He says how strange it is, sometimes, which conversation or event stays with us while so much else melts fast as April snow. Yes, I tell him.

I say I knew a woman who went to see
Man of la Mancha
on Broadway and then walked from the theater down to Chelsea, back uptown to her apartment, and packed everything she wanted from her life there while her husband slept. “She told me she climbed into bed and she slept, too, for a few hours and later, from the airport, she called her boss to say good-bye. She went to Paris that morning to think, and she's still in Paris, thinking. But she's fine, she's better,” I tell him.

He says, “I knew a man who told me he'd betrayed his wife throughout their long marriage because the Madonna appeared to him on the night before his wedding and absolved him of all future guilt. For forty years he went peacefully into the night to prowl. He said the same dispensation was valid for his sons.” It is my turn.

I tell him, “I knew a woman who was being crushed by her husband's philandering, and when her doctor told her if she didn't leave him she would die, she asked him,
‘But what about all that history? We've been together for almost thirty years.'
The doctor asked her, ‘And so you're aiming at thirty-one? You will sustain your rage, using time as a defense against fear and indolence. In the great stash of defenses, time is the one least imaginative,' he told her.” His turn.

“I knew a man who said, ‘Some people ripen, some rot. We grow, sometimes, but we never change. Can't do it. No one can. Who we are is fixed. There isn't a soul who can unfix another soul, not even his own,' he said.”

I tell him, “I knew a man who sat with his freshly estranged wife outdoors at the Saloon near Lincoln Center and, over fried zucchini, he asked her if she'd loved him, and she said, ‘I can't remember. Perhaps I did, but I just can't remember.'” He looks at me hard and shoots my own words back at me.

“I know a woman who says it's only at three o'clock in the morning when anyone can measure things. She says if you love yourself
at three o'clock in the morning, if there's someone in your bed that you love at least as much as you love yourself at three o'clock in the morning, if your heart is quiet in your chest and neither muses nor shades crowd the room, it probably means things are well. It's the hardest moment to lie to yourself, three o'clock in the morning, she told me.”