A Thousand Days in Venice (9 page)

“Good night, old man. Good night, little girl.” So long ago. Not so long ago. What am I doing here without them? Why didn't all this happen fifteen or twenty years ago? Now I wash my face, change my shoes, trade my black linen shirt for a billowy white voile one. I put pearls in my ears. It is eventide in Venice and the sweet stranger loves pearls, so I add a necklace of them. Opium.

The forever barman at the Monaco is Paolo, dear Paolo, who had stuffed newspaper into my wet boots eight months before, when I'd missed my first rendezvous with Fernando. He herds us out onto the terrace into the luster of a slow-ripening evening. He brings us cold wine and says,
“Guardate
. Look,” pointing with his chin at the mezzotint, the Canaletto, live before us in the rosy leavings of the sun. His everyday tableau delights him, surprises him. Paolo can never be old in my eyes.

Across the canal sits a low-slung building, the maritime customs
house of the republic's later days. The promontory is raised up above the lagoon on a million wooden pilings, and at the summit of the building's stone tower twin Atlases bear up a great golden sphere, a perch for Fortuna, goddess of all fates. She is beautiful. A timid wind tries to dance with her now. And slim shards of light become her.
“L'ultima luce
. Last light,” we say to each other like a prayer. “Promise me we'll always be together at last light,” Fernando says, needing no promise at all.

If I could give Venice to you for a single hour, it would be this hour, and it would be in this chair that I would sit you, knowing Paolo would be close by, clucking about over your comfort, knowing that the night that comes to thieve that lush
last light
would also make off with your heartaches. That's how it would be.

“Let's walk as far as Sant'Elena,” he says. We cut through the piazza and head toward the Ponte della Paglia, past the Ponte dei Sospiri, onto the Riva degli Schiavoni, past the Danieli and another bridge, past a bronzed Vittorio Emmanuele on horseback, and another bridge in front of the Arsenale.

“How many more bridges?” I want to know.

“Only three. Then a boat from Sant'Elena to the Lido, a kilometer on foot to the apartment and we're there,” he says. Nothing about this life is for the fainthearted.

After two days, Fernando goes off to the bank. I am kithless, my language is sparse and often contorted, and my groundings are only two: a kind of philosophic composure, that sense of “portable sanctuary,” and my sweet stranger. I am free to begin coloring in that
crisp, new, just unrolled space
that appears to be my life.

Our joint plan is to confront a fundamental restoration of the apartment after the wedding. We will resurface walls and ceilings, hang new windows, completely reconstruct the bathroom and the kitchen, find furniture we love. For now, a swift ambient transformation with hard scrubbing and lots of fabric. Fernando tells me to rely on Dorina, his
donna delle pulizie
, cleaning woman.
Cleaning woman? What did she clean?

Dorina arrives at eight-thirty on my first morning alone. Large, and long unbathed, she is a sixty-something woman who changes from her striped pinafore into another striped pinafore, which she carries in a wrinkled red shopping bag along with a pair of stacked-heel shoes, whose backs have been carved away. She moves about with a bucket of murky water, room to room with the same bucket of murky water and the same vile sponge. I ask Fernando if we might be able to find someone with more energy, but he refuses, saying Dorina has been with him for too many years. I like this loyalty to Dorina. The trick is only to keep her away from her bucket,
to find something else for her to do, shopping, mending, ironing, dusting. I can finish the baptismal cleaning before she is due to return. I have thirteen days, and it's not exactly the
earth
I'm going to scrub. I can finish it in four, perhaps five. I think back to my evening chant in Saint Louis,
Weed, scrub, and dig clear down to China
.

Fernando helps by demonstrating the floor-polishing machine. More a prototype for an upright motor scooter, it seems to me. Though its weight is light, I can't control its speed, and it has its way with me, jolting me about until I ask if a helmet is required to operate it. He doesn't think I'm funny. That neither he nor Dorina has ever had occasion to use it does not diminish the machine's status for him. “This represents the ultimate in Italian technology,” says the churlish stranger. After it bucks him across the living room, we silently tuck the thing away, and I have never seen it since. Surely he sent Dorina home with it one day.

Next morning I splash vinegar-water everywhere and swab the floors with a new, green, string-headed mop. A splattering of pungent brown liquid from a tin labeled Marmi Splendenti, Resplendent Marbles, and I polish the floors by skating over them, my feet ensconced in the soft, felt envelopes Fernando wears as slippers. Under long, smooth glissades, the marbles give up a sheen. My thigh muscles burn. Though they are not truly resplendent, the floors' rusty-veined anthracite is beautiful to me, and I am eager to proceed.
For Fernando it's not quite so. Each phase of the work causes him to grieve, before he shrugs into a temperate enthusiasm. We excavate the site, sifting things with anthropological sympathy, kneeling over moldering lockers and reproduction sea chests. In one I find a fifty-four piece audiocassette kit, its plastic coverings intact and labeled
Memoria e Metodo
, Memory and Method. It promises to “order one's mind.”

“Accidenti,”
he says. “Damn, I've searched everywhere for these.” Each evening we relieve the apartment of another layer of its past, and Fernando's eyes are like those of a dying bird; his journeys to the trash dump are funereal. He is the one spurring on this interim cleanup, yet he is anguished by it. He desires progress without change.

I begin to establish survival rituals. As soon as Fernando leaves in the morning, I bathe and dress and, avoiding the elevator, run down the stairs, past the troll, out the gate, and to the left—fourteen yards to the yeast-perfumed, sugar-dusted threshold of Maggion. A tiny and glorious
pasticceria
whose resident pastry cook looks as a gingerbread man would look if he were a cherub. Inside it, I am near to a fever of joy.
This pastry shop is next door to my house
, I think. I take two apricot
cornetti
, crisp, burnished croissant-like beauties, and eat one on the way to the bar to drink cappuccino (fifty yards), the second on the way to investigate the
panificio
, the bakery (perhaps seventy
yards, perhaps less), where I buy two hundred grams, not quite half a pound, of biscotti
al vino
, crisp cookies made with white wine and olive oil, fennel seeds, and orange peel. I tell myself these will be my lunch. In fact, they are to eat while I walk by the water, along a strip of sea-beaten sand that is the private beach of the Excelsior Hotel. Though Fernando assures me I can walk through its lobby, out its grand glass backdoors, and down to the sea without intervention, I prefer to swing my legs over the low stone wall of a terrace that looks to the water, edge my way down the embankment and onto the wet brown fringes of the Adriatic Sea. I am nearer yet to the fever.
The sea is across the street from my house
, I think. In summer and winter, in the rain, wrapped in furs, in a towel, once in a while in despair, I will walk this stretch of the Adriatic each day for three years of my life.

Back up the stairs to work, then back down the stairs two or three times more during the morning for espresso, for deep drafts of unmusty air, for one, maybe two, tiny strawberry tarts from the gingerbread cherub. Exits and reentries are recorded by the troll and her posse, each of whom is uniformed in a flower-printed smock.
Buon giorno
is all we say. I have lost hope for the welcoming black-stockinged lady, and I am less certain about the potency of tenderness and bitter chocolate. There is a stereo in the apartment but the only cassettes, besides
Memoria e Metodo
, are, of course, Elvis
and Roy, and so I sing. I sing for the sheer joy of another beginning. How many houses have I made? I wonder. How many more will I make? Some people say that when your house is finished, it's time to die. My house is not finished.

By the third day, the scrubbing is nearly complete, and I'm ready to begin shopping. Fernando wants us to choose everything together, and so, when his workday ends, I'm there at the bank, and we go off to Jesurum for heavy ocher-colored sheets, a bedspread, a duvet, all dripping with eight inches of embroidered borders. We take masses of thick white towels and bath sheets adorned with milk chocolate-colored lace, a more intense ocher for an embossed damask tablecloth and napkins big as dish towels. These things are more expensive than a baby grand but, at last, there will be vanities in the stranger's lair.

Another day we buy a wonderful ivory lace coverlet in a
bottega
near Campo San Barnaba. Our treasure in hand, we walk a few yards round the corner to a sailing barge, a floating vegetable market, which, in one reincarnation or another, has rocked up along the Fondamenta Gherardini every day for seven or eight hundred years. We buy a kilo of peaches. Lace and peaches, the stranger's hand to hold. This is good. And it's this scene I think of as I crumple and fasten the lace to the overhead light fixture in the bedroom, stretching its edges taught and tying them to the posts of the headboard.
Now we have a
baldacchino
, a canopied bed. Now we have a boudoir.

A vase of cobalt blue glass I find under the kitchen sink is gorgeous with branches of forsythia from the flower lady on the
imbarcadero
, boat landing. Once an extravagant ashtray, a large square dish of the same blue now holds artichokes nodding on thick long stems and lemons still attached to their leaves and twigs. Reine Claude plums, the color of new grass, are heaped in a basket carried from Madeira to New York to California to Missouri and, most recently, home here to Italy. Books line squeaky-clean glass shelves where once lived wounded model airplanes and tons of old pink newspapers, the
Gazzetta dello Sport
. I stand twenty or so photos in silver frames on the freshly beeswaxed and chammied lid of what seems to be a wonderful pine chest, a
cassapanca
he calls it. He says his father carted it down from Merano, the city that lies on the border with Austria, where the family once lived, where Fernando was born.

I will die with an unreformed and carnal love for fabric. Fabric matters more to me than furniture. Heirlooms and antiques aside, I'd rather drape and festoon some sorry, wounded relic than open the door to the Ethan Allen man. Shamelessly I head for the Lido market, which sets up on Wednesdays down by the canals. I buy a bolt of beige damask, lengths of which, unhemmed, warm up a black leather sofa. With a bolt of raw creamy silk I sort of gift-package the
mismatched chairs, fashioning pouches for each one, tying them at their bases with silk cording. The glass and metal dining-room table is draped in a white linen bedspread, the ends of which are twisted into fat knots around its legs. A collection of Georgian candlesticks, rubbed, gleaming, I set like jewels in a row down its middle.

I find perfect poses for nearly every one of those old pillows I wouldn't leave behind in Saint Louis. All the surgery-efficient light-bulbs are replaced with
bugie
—literally, “lies”—low-wattage night lights and vanilla- and cinnamon-scented candles. Sunlight by day, candlelight in the evening: electricity can seem redundant. I am blithe while the stranger pouts.

Fernando is, in fact, livid when I show him the just-washed walls in the bedroom. He says walls in Venice can only be washed in autumn, when the air is relatively dry, or the dreaded black
muffa
, mold, will creep and crawl. Lord, as if it would matter, I think. We take turns on the ladder with my hair dryer.

He mourns the dead plants I set out on the terrace with the paint cans.
“Non sono morte, sono solo un po' addormentate
. They are not dead; they're just sleeping.”

“You should know what
that's
like,” I mutter sotto voce, carrying the plants back into the bedroom, trimming their crunchy leaves down to their sapless stalks. I begin finding how convenient it is to speak a language not understood by one's beloved. I stamp my feet
hard through the apartment, flinging a wake of crushed leaves behind me and wondering why there always hovers, just an inch or two above love, some small itch for revenge.

A white rool rug from Sardinia conceals the ruins in the bathroom, and the red plastic-edged mirror over the sink is displaced by a smoked, beveled one fitted inside a baroque cornice from Gianni Cavalier in Campo Santo Stefano. He convinces us to buy two gold-leafed lily sconces to hang on either side of the mirror, even though there are no outlets for them. “Attach them to the wall and put candles in them,” he tells us, and that's what we do. Relieved of its melancholy, the space is soft, inviting. We tell each other it feels more like a country house or a cottage than an apartment. I begin calling it “the dacha,” and Fernando loves this. Now it seems a good place to be, to eat and drink and talk, to think, to rest, to make love. Fernando walks the space three, four times every day, surveying, touching, half-smiling in a still-tentative approval.