A Thousand Days in Venice (19 page)

“I understand. But surely another paper might be less costly,” I try. The stranger is not budging. He wants the dark red boat on the pale green sea for six hundred thousand.

“Okay, then let's take all 150,” I suggest.

“And what will we do with 150 invitations?” Fernando counters.

I look to the printer for solution, but he is shaking his head in despair.

“Can't you just print nineteen or twenty-five or something like that and leave the rest blank so we can use them as notecards?” I ask gingerly. He doesn't understand my question. I revert to charades. Fernando lights a cigarette under the No Smoking sign.

Finally the printer says,
“Certo, certo, signora, possiamo fare così.”
I am amazed he has said yes. Fernando is close to angry that I asked for something so extrordinary. He says I am
incorreggibile
. He says I am like Garibaldi in eternal revolt.

All we have left to think about are rings and flowers and music.

One night we ride across the water to meet with an organist who lives near the Sottoportego de le Acque, a whisper away from Il Gazzettino. I like the circle I'm making. Il Gazzettino was my first Venetian hotel, and now I'm about to climb the stairs next door to see the man who will play Bach at my wedding. When I mention this to the stranger, all he says is “Bach?” We ring the bell and meet Giovanni Ferrari's father, who thrusts his head out the second-floor window and tells us to come up, that his son is still with a student. Papà Ferrari looks like an old doge, locks of wild white hair escaping from his tight wool cap, his neck and shoulders muffled
in a big paisley shawl. It is the end of September and nearly balmy outdoors.

Two candles burn on the mantle of a fireplace. I love that these are the only light in the great salon. As my eyes adjust, I see that sheet music is helter-skelter, everywhere. It sits in precarious piles on chairs and sofas; boxes of it line the walls and block pathways. The old doge floats off into some other room without saying anything more, and so we just stand there in the candlelight among Frescobaldi and Froberger, being careful not to trip over Bach. I gasp when Giovanni comes out from his studio.

He is the old doge in youth. Or is it the same man in a slightly changed costume? The same long thin face, with the same high-arched nose, wool cap, scarf, he says how pleased he will be to play for us, that we must only select the pieces. By now I know better than to think he really means there is some choice in the matter. The stranger is getting ready to dance with him, and I just watch and listen. Giovanni asks what we would like, and the stranger says we have complete faith in his taste; he says it is traditional to play such and such, and the stranger ends with, “Of course, those are exactly what we'd hoped for all along.” Quick, smooth, conventional. Each one has saved the other's face as well as his own. No one talked about money. This is a world away from any other world, I think as we walk back in the silence of the Sottoportego.

I remember this silence and the horrid hotel and Fiorella's smile and running up and down over a hundred bridges in my thin snake-skin sandals. During that time in Venice, it was as though Fiorella was trying to mother me. “Sei sposata? Are you married?” she wanted to know.

I told her I was divorced, and she clicked her tongue. “You shouldn't be alone,” she said.

“I'm not alone, just not married, that's all,” I told her.

“But you shouldn't be traveling alone,” she pressed.

“I've been traveling alone since I was fifteen.”

She clicked her tongue again and as I turn to leave she said,
“In fondo, sei triste
. Deep down, you're sad.”

I didn't have the language to tell her it wasn't sadness she sensed in me. Only my separateness. Even in English it's difficult to translate “separateness.” I broadened my grin, but she was still looking beyond it. I raced off, and she yelled at my shoulders,
“Allora, sei almeno misteriosa
. Well then, at the least, you're mysterious.”

I look up to the window on whose sill I sat on that long ago and first afternoon. I ask the stranger to stand there under the window with me, to hold me.

We choose very wide wedding bands, brushed gold, heavy, wonderful. And the florist is so excited about us wanting baskets rather than vases of flowers that she takes me to a warehouse down by the train station where we find six white-washed Sicilian beauties, tall, with arched handles. She says she will fill them with whatever is most beautiful in the markets on the morning of the wedding. She says the Madonna will see to it that we have magnificent flowers. I like that she and the Madonna operate on such a familiar basis. I ask if she thinks the Madonna might send a few golden Dutch iris on October 22. She kisses me three times. I begin to wonder if this exchange has been too simple and if I'm having too little suffering. But on the day before the wedding the stranger provides.

It is nearly time to meet him at the bank, and I have already gone to collect my dress and the lacy stockings I'd ordered at Fogal. I'd also decided to take the white tulle bustier I'd been eyeing at Cima.
The tribe at the market and Do Mori staged a sort of bridal shower for me this morning, and so my market sack is full of roses and chocolates and lavender soaps and six newspaper-wrapped eggs from the egg lady, who also offered precise instructions that Fernando and I should each drink three of them, raw and beaten up with a dose of grappa, for strength. I'd gone to sit at Florian for a while, and the bartender there, Francesco, introducing his latest cocktail, passed round a taste to everyone in the little bar. Vodka and cassis and white grape juice. They said
auguri
so many times I was embarrassed, and when they said, “We'll see you tomorrow,” I think they meant they would see us here in the piazza when the stranger and I and the wedding party make the traditional promenade through Venice.

As I walk to meet Fernando, I notice something is missing: I can hardly remember the last time I felt the weight of the pest on my heart. Sometime over the last month or so I'd left it behind, confounded it for good. Or is that I've just passed it onto Fernando?

When we meet, the stranger is pale, his eyes are fixed in his well-practiced dying-bird stare. I must remind myself he is only being Italian. On this day before his wedding, surely he is due his quotient of angst. He doesn't ask about my dress or my day or my sackful of roses. He doesn't even look at me. I think it's just jitters, and so I say, “Would you like to be alone for a while?”

“Absolutely not,” he answers almost in a whisper, as though I'd suggested he take a walk over glowing coals.

“Would you like to go home and take a long bath and I'll fix you a
camomilla?”
I try again. He just shakes his head. “Are you sad we're getting married?” I ask him.

“How can you say such a thing?” he says, eyes flashing back to life. He is quiet on the
motonave
and doesn't break his silence even as we walk. When we reach the corner of the Gran Viale and Via Lepanto, he says, “I can't go home with you right now. There are some things I have left to do. Cesana forgot to write us in and now he can't make it tomorrow because he has another wedding. I have to talk to someone else.” Cesana was to be our photographer, another old friend and client who had said,
“Ci penso io
. Leave it to me.”

“Is that what's making you so desperate?” I ask

He shrugs but doesn't answer. I tell him we can always find someone to take a few pictures, but he will not be comforted. “And I haven't yet gone to confession,” he says. He begins a convulsive defense. “I've been meaning to go for weeks but I just never found the right moment. I don't believe in confession and absolution, anyway,” he says. He is justly uneasy, I think, since thirty years have slipped away since he's heard the awful sliding of a confessional screen, but it was he who wanted all this, he who reinvented the truth to make it all happen, and now, seventeen hours before the ceremony, it's
dogma he wants to discuss? I say nothing because he is talking enough for both of us. When he's finally quiet, I say I'll go on ahead to the dacha and wait for him.

“I'll have tea and a bath ready,” I offer once again.

“I told you, I don't want tea or a bath,” he says, a little too loudly and leaves me holding tight to the wedding dress and the roses. I change and run down to the beach, trying to understand what it was he couldn't say. After a while, he comes loping along and we sit on the sand, legs tangled and facing each other.

“Old ghosts?” I want to know.

“Very old ghosts,” he says, “and none of whom I invited to my wedding.”

“Gone back where they belong?” I ask.

“Si. Si, sono tutti andati via
. Yes. Yes, all of them gone away,” he tells me as though it's true.
“Perdonami
. Forgive me.”

“Wasn't it you who told me there isn't an agony in the world as powerful as tenderness?” I ask.

“Yes, and I know it's true,” he says pulling me up to my feet.

“I'll race you down to the Excelsior. We'll have our last glass of wine as sinners. Wait a minute. I just went to confession. Does this mean we can't sleep together tonight?” he asks.

“Let's call Don Silvano and let him decide,” I say over my shoulder, getting a head start on the race.

He still gets to the hotel first and holds his arms out to catch me, kissing me and kissing me so I can hardly catch my breath.

“Do you remember the first moment when you knew you loved me?” he asks.

“Not exactly the
first
moment. But I think it might have been when you walked into the living room from your bath the night you arrived in Saint Louis. I think it was the knee socks and the slicked-back hair,” I tell him.

“I know when it happened to me. It was on the first day I saw you in Vino Vino. As I walked back to my office from the restaurant, I tried to put your face together in my mind but I couldn't do it. After all those months of seeing your profile almost every time I closed my eyes, I couldn't find you. I dialed that number and asked to speak to you, but I had no idea what I wanted to tell you. All I knew was that when I looked at you I didn't feel cold anymore. I didn't feel cold anymore.”

We had decided the most romantic thing would be to get up with the sun on our wedding day, to walk along the sea together, to drink coffee, to separate, and meet in church. Days before, we arrange it all with the concierge at the little hotel next door to our building, telling him Fernando needs to rent a room for half a day. The
concierge asks no questions. The stranger takes his clothes and an overnight bag and sets out along the ten yards past the troll to the hotel. The whole thing feels silly and strange and exciting. I go off to Giulio, the hairdresser on the Gran Viale and ask him to make tight ringlets all over my head with a curling iron.
“Sei pazza
? Are you crazy? All this beautiful hair. Let me do something classic, a chignon, an upsweep with these antique combs,” he says flailing two huge picks laid with fake stones that are less antique than he. “No, I just want curls, and I'll do the rest,” I tell him. It takes more than two hours, and he has mourned each squeezing of the hot, steaming contraption. When he finishes, I look like Harpo Marx, but I say, “Fine,” and he says
“Che disperazione
. How hopeless.” He gives me an old blue scarf to cover my head for the walk home.

I am wishing that Lisa and Erich were with me. Erich had spent August with us, he and I racing about the islands, eating veal cutlets and drinking icy wine at every lunch, staying hours inside Palazzo Grassi and behaving as though we were on vacation together, as we did when he and Lisa were younger. Lisa has been sweet, supportive, but she has kept apart. My whirling about during those last months in America exhausted both my children, especially Lisa. By this time in a life, mothers are supposed to have settled down,
mellowed
, accepted their lives. Here I was, going the other way, tearing everything apart, packing it all up, and starting yet once again. I was
always gypsy mom. And now, I'm gypsy mom in a gondola. I think it was also the pure speed at which everything unrolled. It's one thing to follow a Venetian, and another to marry him four months later.

“Why can't you wait at least until Christmas?” Lisa asked.

“I can't, honey. Fernando arranged everything so quickly there wasn't really an opportunity to consider your schedules. Things are different here. And because I don't speak the language very well yet and because of the bureaucratic miasma, I just didn't have very much to say about when or where,” I said.

I know how weak this summary is, how uncharacteristically powerless I sound. Wimp, gypsy mom in a gondola. As I walk up the stairs to the apartment and run my bath and begin to dress, the ache for them, the longing to look at them, to touch them, comes in great heaving paroxysms. I should be walking down the aisle with them; we should be marrying the stranger together.