A Thousand Days in Venice (20 page)

I push my hair up at the nape of my neck and secure it high on the crown of my head with barrettes to which the florist has attached red sweetheart roses and baby's breath, all of which tumble and tangle among the softening black curls. I leave the ringlets at the sides to hang as they will, thinking it's all very French Empire. The old baroque pearls go in my ears, and I'm ready to get into my dress. I step into it and pull it up around my hips—good. I begin sliding in
my arms, but they move into the sleeves only halfway. Something must be stuck, a thread must need cutting. I examine the sleeves, and there is nothing amiss except that they are an inch too narrow to contain my arms. Do I have fat arms? I do not have fat arms. If anything, they tend toward thinness. La signora Asta must have had a vision while she was finishing the sleeves. Now what do I do? I begin mentally searching the armoire. What do I have that I could pretend I intended to wear to my wedding? There's a white satin slip dress but no jacket, and that would be a scandal at high mass—and anyway it's October out there. There's the lavender silk taffeta with the bustle and the train and all the poufs that I bought in the fifth-floor designer close-out salon in the Galleries Lafayette in 1989, just in case I was ever invited to a ball. This is not a ball. I run to find the body oil to rub on my arms to make them slippery but I can't find the body oil, so I use olive oil, extra virgin, but it doesn't help much. I am crying and laughing and trembling, still wondering why I am alone. Some princess I am, with no one near to help me. God help me. It's my wedding day.

It requires a Houdini sort of shimmying, but finally the dress is zipped and though I cannot raise my arms beyond my waist, I think it's beautiful. I spray Opium on my arms to cover the scent of olive oil, and I'm ready. One tiny detail we seem to have overlooked. How will I get to the church? So elementary is this question we have
forgotten it altogether. There is no posied chariot to take me to my wedding and I would walk, but I know Fernando would be horrified. I dial for the taxi and head down the stairs past the troll and out under the gallery of yellowing elms. I sing “Here Comes the Bride,” but I don't cry.

I have always understood that the bride should not enter the church until all the guests are inside. In Italy it is, quite naturally, the opposite. The groom and the wedding party wait inside, the guests wait outside to greet the bride and follow her inside the church. I am making the
tassista
, the lady taxi driver, nervous because I am a bride, and she feels the responsibility as she might for a birthing mother and, too, because I refuse to get out of her car until no more guests are standing outside the church. She never says a word that might help me to understand Italian custom. She only drives. She is a very small woman and her head, when she is ensconced behind the wheel, is flush with the seatback. Each time I tell her I can't yet stop in front of the church, that she must make another turn around the block until the guests are all inside, she slides a little further down on the seat until her arms are stretched up almost straight and her head is not visible at all. Another
giro
. Another
giro
. Finally there is no one left outside the church. The
tassista
, verbal at last, says that's because they probably all went home. But I am satisfied. I step from the taxi and up to the church doors. I can't get them opened, the
damn medieval things. Stuck shut they seem, and my sleeves are so tight I can't raise my arms to get a good grip. I put my flowers down on the steps, yank open the doors, pick up my flowers, walk through the tiny vestibule and come upon my wedding.

“Lei è arrivata
. She's arrived,” I hear whispered everywhere. Giovanni Ferrari caresses Bach up from the organ. The white-washed baskets are full of pink hydrangea and red roses and golden Dutch iris, which I know have come directly from the Madonna. The air is opal twilight blazing with the flames of a hundred white candles and a single dazzle of sun from the lapis lazuli window. Two black-bearded Armenian monks in silver silk robes are chanting, swinging pots of frankincense and sending thick musky plumes floating up over the altar, and I think this church is another room in my house.

Everything is misty through tears that won't fall, and the only person I see clearly is Emma from the British Women's Club in turban and pearls. Two hired pageboys in white britches and stiff pink jackets bestrew rose petals before me, and I walk slowly, very slowly, toward the blueberry-eyed stranger standing there in swallow tails in the frankincense fog.

Don Silvano holds out two hands to me. He bends down and says,
“Ce l'abbiamo fatta
. We did it.” This is a gesture of welcome, of affection, a gift to me, I think, and perhaps a quiet message to the curious Lidensi who have filled the little church to its rafters, who have
come to see
l'americana
be wedded to one of them. The tears are free now and, weeping, I sit next to the stranger, also weeping, on a red velvet sofa. Neither of us can really look at the other for fear of some greater weeping, but when we say our vows we look anyway, weep anyway. Giovanni is playing “Ave Maria” and Don Silvano is crying, too. Is he thinking of Santa Maria della Salute, I wonder?

“Una storia di vero amore”
he says, as he presents us to the congregation. Giovanni cries and plays as though he is Lohengrin himself, and all the faces we pass along the aisles are wet and shiny and shouting
“Ecco gli sposi, viva gli sposi
. There's the bride and groom, long live the bride and groom.” I hadn't seen them in the church, but there outside the door is a contingent of Venetians who came over the water to see us be married. People from the shops, staff from Florian, chums from Do Mori and the market, a librarian from the Venetian National Library, one of the threadbare
contessas
who is a client of the bank, the
sarta
who had the vision while she was finishing my sleeves. Even Cesana is there, snapping away, and everyone is crying and throwing pasta and rice and my husband, who was once the stranger, is slapping at the pockets of his gray velvet vest trying to find a cigarette. I think, perhaps, this is how the world should end.

On the ride in the water taxi, we sit outside as we did that first day we met when Fernando rode with me to the airport in breezes blowing just as cool. I pull the same little glass out of its velvet
pouch, pour out cognac from the same silver flask. We sip, and the boat lurches and slaps down through the lagoon, the water spraying our faces just barely dried of tears. Cesana directs the water-taxi driver to stop on the island of San Giorgio for photographs, and Fernando slips one leg, up to the knee, into the lagoon. Cesana shoots the scene. We debark in the Bauer canal, step directly into the wedding gondola and are rowed back out into the Grand Canal. Trailing us in another gondola, the great-girthed Cesana leans and wobbles and shoots. Our gondolier shouts to Cesana, “Where shall I go?” Cesana tells him to follow the sun.

Guests on the terraces of Hotel Europa e Regina and the Monaco, as well as our own at the Bauer, wave and shout, and for a moment I float above the little tableau, believing, not believing it is my tableau. This is happening to all of us, I think. This wedding, these spangles of sunlight, this glissade through blue water, the old sweet faces of the palazzi looking down, this pink-washed peace is for all of us. This is for every one of us who was ever lonely. How I wish I could give away pieces of this day like loaves of warm bread.

The call has gone out to all the gondolas in that part of the canal to gather in front of the Bauer, and soon eighteen, twenty boats have made a circle around us. The gondoliers serenade us and their passengers, who thought only of a ride down the canal but find themselves instead a chorus in the spectacle of a wedding.

It is magnificent out on the hotel terrace, but we are invited inside into a plain white room with no windows, where there are no flowers, where there is no music, for a lunch that no one, save Cesana and the silver-robed monks, really eats. I think of Hemingway and the Aga Khan.

It is ancient Venetian custom for a bride and groom, priest and, sometimes, wedding party to walk from church to reception and back to the bride's house, passing along the way those people and places that have been and will continue to be their life, the priest officially presenting them to their city as husband and wife. Because we live on the beach rather than in the city, we choose to stroll from the Bauer down Salizzada San Moisè into Piazza San Marco and, finally, out to Riva Schiavoni and the boat back home.

I begin to say good-bye to people outside the Bauer, but soon I understand that no one is leaving us. Our guests, the two pageboys, Emma, arm in arm with the two monks, Don Silvano, Cesana, and, now, Gorgoni, the Bauer's concierge, will walk in formation with us on our wedding day. I think we are a beautiful parade. As we come through Ala Napoleonica, the orchestra at Florian stops mid-song and begins to play “Lili Marlene,” and by the time we are all there in front of the café the orchestra has begun the “Walzer dell' Imperatore.” It is five in the afternoon, and every table outdoors is full. People are on their feet snapping photos, shouting, “Dance, you
must dance.” And so we dance. All of Venice must be here in this great crowd around us, and I wish we could all dance together. My husband is holding me, and I think, no,
this
is the way the world should end.

As we are walking away, a woman steps into our path. In Italian heavily accented in French she says, “Thank you for giving me the Venice I had hoped to find.” She is gone before I can respond.

Having stayed too long at our own wedding, back home we have minutes to prepare ourselves for the ride to Santa Lucia to catch the eight-forty train to Paris. I pull the rose-covered combs from my hair and stuff them inside
Larousse
, where they are still. Jeans, a short black cashmere sweater, black leather jacket for me. Fernando keeps his tuxedo shirt, adds jeans and his old flight jacket. I grab my bouquet, and we're off again on the water. Francesco is at the train gate to wave us off, to hand me our wedding gift. We board in a confusion of smoke and rain, and I see that same French woman who spoke to us on the piazza racing by. She waves and grins. Fernando says he hopes the pageboys and Emma and the monks have not decided to follow us to Paris. We find our compartment, heave in our bags, and close the door behind us as the train begins to chug-chug away to France. “We're married!” we scream.

We are also exhausted. I strip down to my white lace bustier and climb up into bed while Fernando lights a candle. Two minutes after
he's settled up there with me, he says, “I'm hungry. I'm so hungry I won't be able to sleep. I'll have to get dressed and go out to the dining car.”

“Better yet,” I tell him, “look inside the carry-on bag.” Francesco had packed up two dozen tiny sandwiches—thin curls of roasted ham on soft oval rolls with sweet butter—and a big sack of crinklecut potato chips, and half a Sacher torte. He'd stuffed a bottle of Piper Heidsick in a vacuum bag with four ice packs. Glasses, napkins. When he'd asked me what I wanted for a wedding present, I'd told him it was this exact supper I wished for and that if he could bring it to the station when he came to see us off, it would be the perfect gift. Fernando unzips the bag and says, “I love you.”

We spread everything out on the bottom bunk, and we eat and drink and climb back up top. Finally I know the real way the world should end.

We are barely awake when the train pulls into the Gare de Lyons. I pull on my jeans, pull a hat over yesterday's curls, grab my bouquet, and follow Fernando out and up into the station. We have bowls of café au lait and croissants, warm, each one a thousand buttery crumbs, filling my mouth. I don't know how many I eat, because I decide to stop counting after three. We are racing out the door into the Sunday Paris light, and we hear,
“Les fleurs, les fleurs, madame.”
I'd left my bouquet on the bar, and who was there to find it and run after me but that same French woman.

That same French woman must also live in the Latin Quarter where we are staying at Hotel des Deux Mondes because we see her at every turn. She is at Café de Flore in the morning, feeding bits of a jambon beurre to her fluff of a puppy on a leash, and she smiles and nods but never more than that. At five she is already sitting outdoors at Les Deux Magots with a glass of red wine, a little dish of
picholine
olives, the electric heaters tucked into the awnings warming her. We
sit outside, too, sipping at Ricard, welcoming the evening. It seems everything she wants us to understand is contained in those gestures of smiling and nodding and as though she needs to know nothing more about us than she does already. We like having her nearby, and she seems to like having us nearby, and therein is benevolence.

Our days are undesigned. We walk until we see something we'd like to see more closely, and then we walk again until we want to sit or go back to bed or go early to lunch at Toutone so we can go late to lunch at Bofinger or to lunch not at all, so we can go at eight to Balzar for oysters and then to Le Petit Zinc for mussels at midnight. We crisscross the sprawl of Paris again and again, as though she were a tiny parish. When we run into our French woman at Museé d'Orsay, it seems strange enough, but when we find ourselves side by side with her in the Egyptian exhibition at the Louvre, I begin to think our meetings spookish. When she is already drinking tea at Ladurée in the Rue Royale as we come in for ours, I can't decide who is following whom. Is she a Parisian keeper of the newly wedded, assigned to us for the honeymoon? Is that why she was there in the piazza when we waltzed on our wedding day? I wish one of us would say something about this chapter of accidents and flukes, but none of us does. When a day passes without seeing her, I begin to miss her. “How can you miss someone you don't know?” Fernando asks. When two or three days more pass without seeing her I know we've lost her forever, or
that perhaps she was simply some druidess figment, fond of middle-aged brides and waltzes and tiny green olives.