The Politics of Washing (10 page)

In this period of transition and, I suspect, inevitable usurpation, of the saint’s feast day by the forces of devilish (American) Misrule, the children of Venice are enjoying a brief season of double glut. On 31 October, they pour into the streets in ghoulish masks, black capes and witches’ hats and descend on the shopkeepers, calling out: ‘Dolcetto o scherzetto!’ (‘Sweet or trick!’). Then, a mere ten days later, they set out again, singing San Martino’s song, hands out for another handout. Some shopkeepers refuse to give anything for Hallowe’en, telling them to come back the following week for San Martino, but the majority are indulgent of both festivals and vast quantities of sweets are consumed.

This is not simply a swallowing up of the old ways by the new. Hallowe’en is most likely a considerably more ancient jamboree than the saint’s day, which might be seen as another of the beatified shop windows in which early Christianity advertised its pious credentials. Either way, they both overlap with end of harvest rituals, marking the transition from summer to winter.

Does the gradual demise of the festival of San Martino matter all that much? Perhaps not: the passing of any pleasure or happy memory has its melancholy edge, but traditions are mutating or perishing or appearing all the time and all over the world. The Venetian anxiety about the loss of San Martino has more to do with that peculiarly Venetian problem of feeling that the indigenous life of the city is so very fragile that every blow, however slight, may be terminal.

In the meantime, my friend Ginevra is altogether more pragmatic:

‘Well,’ she says, as we watch our kids go rampaging off in full witchy and ghostly regalia on 31 October, ‘it’s no surprise Hallowe’en is winning. It’s just much more fun being bad.’

T
HE PARENTS OF
the children of 3E wander into the classroom. We take off our coats, prop up our dripping umbrellas and, still faintly exuding the damp of the Venetian November evening outside, we sit down in the circle of chairs laid out for us.

Several of the teachers are already seated at an L-shaped arrangement of tables placed at the front of the class. This layout suggests either that we are gathered here as an audience for a panel of experts or else that we are the shuffling-in accused, but despite the hierarchical furniture arrangements, the atmosphere is relaxed and people are chatting amiably. As is so often the case in Italy, no one appears to regard themselves as inferior to anyone else, but the conventions are being observed.

Professor Gasparini arrives – last and to a certain effect – as befits his station as teacher of Italian and unofficial head of year. He is a diminutive man, but all muscle, and he has a serious handshake. I like a strong handshake. I practise a strong handshake. But Gasparini’s handshake is mythic. It is a handshake you must survive in order to continue the Quest. Whenever we meet, I spend ten minutes afterwards straightening out my crushed fingers.

Every inch of Gasparini expresses determination, direction and, above all, Opinion. He sits at the central point of the High Table, the other, female, teachers flanking him like a Prada-clad Praetorian Guard. We wait in silence.

First, Gasparini presses the fingertips of both hands together like a doctor in a 1950s film (he lacks only the crisp white coat and the stethoscope). He breathes in deeply, looks severely at us through
his black-framed glasses (something of the Clark Kent here); he sighs heavily; he goes in.

‘To tell you the truth: it’s no good.’

And so it unfolds: our children, Gasparini regrets to have to inform us, are a bunch of bright, badly behaved ne’er-do-wells. They fail to do their homework and are simply not sufficiently respectful of their teachers.

‘Yes,’ chips in the maths teacher, Professoressa Zapputti, ‘and do you know what they’ve started doing in my lessons?’ She pauses theatrically; she scans her audience. ‘They imitate me! They repeat everything I say! It’s just no good.’

She frowns and everybody – parents and teachers – nod gravely.

It strikes me that in Britain, the day a teacher speaks publicly in this way, is Judgement Day: that terrible moment when she has finally given up. The failed pedagogue who, after years of struggle, can take no more, has cracked under the pressure and will now, wiping the tears from her eye, slink from the room and into early retirement, a broken woman.

Is this Professoressa Zapputti? Oh no. Zapputti is a short, square, ageing and glamorous blonde, with a flirtatious smile and robust upper arms. Michael quakes at the mere mention of her. Zapputti by name, I obscurely, onomatopoeically think, is ZAPPUTTI! by nature: a kind of mathematical Superwoman to Gasparini’s Literary Superman. The cultural assumptions behind her words are, once again, the complete opposite of those one would find in Britain. It is a logic untarnished by guilt or by any undue sense of personal responsibility; it is utterly unclouded by the possibility that she herself might be at fault. To Zapputti and, it seems, to all the other people assembled here, the situation is clear: the children of 3E are not behaving acceptably and that is their fault. The mood is one of solidarity: nobody is blaming anybody else. These kids are forces of nature and we, their civilized elders and betters, must work together to tame them.

Now, one of the fathers speaks up.

‘Professore Gasparini,’ he begins pleasantly, ‘I am a little confused. Clearly the children have made a mistake, but when you say that only
two out of eighteen did their geography homework last week, I wonder if, perhaps, there was some kind of misunderstanding – a problem of communication. On the part of the kids, obviously.’

Yes, yes, Gasparini nods sagely, they must have failed to understand. The father sits back in his chair, apparently satisfied. The matter does not appear to me to have advanced at all. I must have missed something.

So far, so united. Then, a mother raises her hand to speak; she is small, plump and has a lot of bouncy brown hair.

‘And French?’ she asks emphatically.

There is a palpable change in the atmosphere: a drawing in of breath, a collective pursing of the lips. The French teacher, Professoressa Maestri, is not present, but far from this restraining anyone from discussing her, it seems to give them licence. The Professoressa has been absent so much, the plump mother goes on, that the children are learning no French at all. What is to be done about this?

While she delivers this indignant speech, the teachers nod and smile sympathetically. Then Gasparini speaks:

‘Well, Signora, obviously as her colleagues, we are not in a position to discuss the situation. You would need to speak with the headmaster.’

He smiles benignly and is clearly in agreement with everything the woman has been saying. This is no closing of ranks, no serious refusal to comment on the matter. Quite the reverse. I think of poor Maestri – a pretty, hectically over-made-up woman who, it is said, is struggling with a long journey to work from the mainland, a young child and her obvious inability to teach high-spirited thirteen-year-olds. But the plump mother has not finished yet.

‘And you, Signora,’ she continues, turning now to a teaching
assistant
sitting on the outer flank of the High Table. ‘From your more detached position – would you say the children are under control in the French lessons?’

The elderly, impeccably coiffed assistant smirks in this unexpected limelight.

‘Quite honestly, no,’ she says happily and, judging by the general
nodding and smiling, it seems that everyone is satisfied with this reply.

The absent Maestri, with her wide, nervous blue eyes, her harum scarum mascara and too-red lipstick, is unaware, for now, of the knife twisting in her back, and I see that respect and professional solidarity go only so far here. The weak are shown no mercy.

Now, the meeting is ending. People are standing up and beginning to leave and one of the mothers approaches Zapputti.

‘Professoressa,’ I hear her say deferentially. ‘I know my Giovanni was one of those behaving rudely and I would like to apologize for his behaviour.’

Zapputti accepts the apology graciously, regally even. A particular vision of the world remains intact: children are to be duly respectful to adults. We, their parents and teachers, must ensure that they conform to our rules and expectations and that they grow up acknowledging the authority of their elders and betters.

Here, in this dreary Venetian school room, with nothing on the yellowing walls except one large, lopsided map of the world; where the work is often difficult and dry and unimaginative, there is still this consensus between parents, teachers and children. The kids muck around; the teachers complain; the parents rant and apologize. It is a ramshackle business, as human relations and human solutions
generally
are, but everyone is playing the same game by the same rules. In that sense, at least, it works.

T
HE PEOPLE THRONGING
good-naturedly through the streets are almost all locals. Any tourists are incidental to this most Venetian of holidays and, just for a change, barely intrude. A pontoon bridge has been set up across the Grand Canal and thousands of people are moving slowly over it, all day long, passing from San Marco to Dorsoduro in the annual pilgrimage to the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute, where they will give thanks to God for the end of the plague that devastated the city in 1630.

In good Venetian style, the shocked gratitude of the survivors was expressed architecturally, in the construction of Longhena’s church with its great snail coils of masonry and ballooning domes. This is our destination on a chill, grey November afternoon nearly 400 years later.

As I shuffle forward with the crowd, I look over the edge of the bridge and see below a slight, white egret, with brilliant green feet, standing on one of the bridge’s supports. The bird is utterly still; the crowd clatters overhead. We come off the votive bridge and pack into a narrow
calle
. Moving on, under an archway, there is a dense press of bodies and the air is cold, damp and steaming. Even in this dark tunnel between buildings, the tall man next to me goes on smoking. We emerge into the paved space in front of the church that widens out before us like a river delta into which the streams of people are pouring. This area gives on to the Grand Canal and is lined with stalls selling candles to the pilgrims. The candles are heaped up
extravagantly
– some are a metre high and two handspans round. I buy four of a more modest size with patchy little transfers of the Madonna stuck on the wax, one for each of my children. Against the odds and a certain amount of vociferous public opinion, Freddie and Roland try to fence with their candles as we carry on, at the crowd’s shuffling pace, up the broad steps of the church.

Inside, the Basilica is like a vast, fat bud opening from its circular centre into the petals of chapels. To the right as we enter, the crowd is gathered ten deep around an iron grid on legs. It is the size and shape of a large table and dozens of candles have been wedged into the many holes; they make gross stalagmites of dripping wax and spindly,
dwindling
outcrops. The whole glowing white mass veers to one side and seems to be on the brink of collapse. Two girls in efficient brown
overalls
and heavy duty gloves are quickly removing half-burnt candles, snuffing them out and piling them on one side. Then, they take the fresh candles held out to them by the people pressing up to the barrier, light them, and stick them into whatever space they can find in the crude candelabra.

The Festival of the Salute is part of real life in this city, an integral element in the cycle of every year. Unlike the hollow and showy
Carnival – reinvented for the tourists and universally detested by Venetians – this is not an exotic spectacle. Well-polished and
pragmatic
locals in their uniformly dull-coloured padded jackets, sensible shoes, hats, gloves and scarves have a plain, provincial look which is almost comically counter-balanced by their lavish Basilica with its stone angels and saints, its extravagant spirals and domes. There is a dogged normality in the way these people gossip in clusters, while the great space of the church around them fills with perfumed drifts of incense, and at the High Altar the priestly celebrants follow their ritual course, beneath the gaze of the Black Madonna, the gold-encrusted, twelfth-century Byzantine icon turned, somehow, wallpaper.

As we edge forward to hand over our candles, I see how this ritual has, in certain ways, barely changed over centuries. Here are the same keen-faced, beady-eyed, wiry-framed Venetians; the handsomely cassocked priests and their antique chants; the whine and thud of dialect. But then, of course, it is also dramatically different: no more rankly stinking bodies or breath; strong white teeth, smooth hands and bright blond hair are everywhere. The vigorous and smart fifty-and sixty-year-olds milling around here would once have been the aged, the toothless and the bent. Now, nobody is hump-backed, no one limps or lisps as a result of polio, bad hips or cleft lips. And the dialect spoken is mostly diluted by the pretty melodies of modern Italian to mere accent, proverb and fragments of the original Venetian.

But despite these obvious differences, this short, local pilgrimage of thanks is not an empty re-enactment of a long dead history, wiped in all but name from the communal memory. Nearly four hundred years ago, in these Venetian streets, these houses, these squares, every second person you knew was dead or horribly dying. The person next to you. Your intimate, busy, handsome, prosperous city had been transformed, overnight, into a hell hole, a charnel house, a place where malign and unstoppable forces were battling for the souls of your children, your friends – for your very own soul.