The Politics of Washing (4 page)

Every couple of months, Giovanni, who is on a mission, marches into the bakery, puffing emphatically on his cigar.

‘Give me thirty rolls!’ he says to the baker, an elderly, bullish-looking man, behind the counter.

Thirty rolls take up several large paper bags; slowly, the baker turns to the floury bread bins and fills the bags up, one by one. Then, he lays them on the glass counter. It is at this point that Giovanni suddenly raises both hands in dramatized horror, puffs extra hard on his cigar, and exclaims:

‘Ah! But wait a minute! I have just seen that disgraceful picture of the fascist dictator displayed on your wall! I cannot possibly buy bread from you, ever again!’ and stamps off the premises.

It is surprising that after a mere two months the cussed baker, a sharp-eyed Venetian who surely misses nothing, seems to have forgotten Giovanni’s face and goes through the whole business of bagging up the rolls again. I understand why Giovanni continues this ritual, but what is in it for the fascist baker? A pleasure in the theatre, perhaps, or the dogged hope that this time he might just flog the goods to the troublesome lefty?

It seems to me that these apparently personal differences of opinion are markers of wider historical realities. Where Alberto sometimes appears to me unremittingly cynical about other people’s motivations, I seem to him stupidly naïve in my perennial assumption of good intentions or, at the very worse,
unconsciously
bad behaviour. We are, in our small ways, re-enacting the larger, older dramas that have gone to create certain national characteristics and which, in turn – and over decades or centuries – have mulched down into individual character traits.

The Italian peninsula, where Alberto was born and bred, has seen almost two millennia of continuous political turbulence: repeated invasions by foreign powers and the fragmentation, until just over 150 years ago, into small, often warring political entities. This has created a culture that can appear to my English eyes chronically suspicious, always glancing over its shoulder in anticipation of the knife in the back. Machiavelli was, of course, a Florentine.

I, on the other hand, am the product of a country that has not been successfully invaded in a thousand years, during which time it spread itself around the entire globe, ruling and exploiting with a calm and leisurely conviction of its own righteousness. Now, the British Empire has gone, but the reach and power of the English language continues to go from strength to strength. We have a way to go yet before we feel entirely sidelined.

Is it any wonder, then, that Alberto goes for the dry-cleaning lady’s jugular, while I blush with embarrassment at the brouhaha and observe, a little patronizingly, the Grand Opera of it all?

T
HE PULLEY LINE
extends from a hook on our building, across a courtyard, to another hook on the opposite palazzo. In order to peg out the clothes I have to lean from our fourth floor window. The ledge is at the level of my hips; this places the central point of gravity rather lower in my body than feels secure and means that hanging out the washing, that most mindless of operations, is accompanied by a nasty fluttering in the stomach, a vicious tingling in the fingertips and a distinct sense that the distribution of weight could shift at any moment so that I will topple headlong down into the bleak little walled garden of my neighbour, Signora Zambon. Even if I succeed in keeping my balance there is still the risk that plastic pegs, knickers and socks might slip from my hands and parachute down on to the head of the signora who has already informed me leadenly:

‘The garden is mine,’ as if convinced that it is only a matter of time before I storm her balding square of grass with my barbarian brood and lay claim to it.

In the early days, as I tremulously hang out clothes, then release the line a little at a time to make space for the next towel or tee-shirt, I am suddenly aware of being watched. Glancing to the right, I half jump out of my skin at the sight of an old woman, smoking intently – almost, I feel, malevolently – and staring beadily out of her window. I duck back inside as though caught in some guilty act.

A little later, I look across to another building, about 50 metres away. Clearly visible through his open window, a handsome young man in shorts lounges on his bed in the hot afternoon sun, as oblivious to me as I was to the smoking crone.

This crone, in fact, later turns out to be an invention of my own, a scrap of pure paranoia. After several months, I realize that the window where she appeared belongs, in fact, to the kitchen of our neighbour Pio and that the smoker was his by no means aged companion Alessia, a lively psychoanalyst.

Windows are bringing out the worst in me. In Venice, it is clear, you could become obsessively conscious of the scrutiny of your
neighbours. Either that, or develop a brazen insouciance to the gaze of other people.

The most uncomfortable overlooking of all is that of the blank window. A permanently shuttered window presents no problems: a blind, honorary wall. Windows that revealed brief moments of other people’s lives are also acceptable. But there is one particular window that I can see from my sitting room that I do not like at all. It is enshrouded in a net curtain and never lit from within. This unnerves me. If anyone should happen to be looking out from behind that curtain they would see me clearly; I, on the other hand, would see nothing of them.

Glimpsed fragments of other people’s lives can, though, be as comforting as a sentimental film. When I see the elegant lady across the
rio
opening the windows of her airy flat, or the family who live below her busily compressed into their few rooms – making a bed, playing the guitar, sitting in front of the computer – all seems right with the world. Surely, with so much visible, bustling, prosperous normality all around, there can be no real suffering, no tangible pain? Even the old woman I see from my dining room, who, every morning, draws her dingy net curtains and shakes out her bedding, a single light bulb
suspended
from the ceiling behind her, has her daily rituals and her place in my imaginative comfort zone.

But, after all, no amount of flinging open of windows or shaking out of dust is a guarantee of anything. The mystery of an apartment at the level below us is solved after months. The window is hung with a rickety Venetian blind like a lopsided mouth packed with collapsing teeth; the place appears deserted. Then, one day, as I am, yet again, hanging out the washing, I see a sick and aged man emerging on to the minute terrace like an ancient tortoise coming out from long hibernation; each step is impossibly slow so that he seems on the point of fossilizing into immobility. With one slippered foot, inch by inch, he nudges forward a plastic laundry basket. Once he and his washing have reached the outside, he begins the slow unfolding of his spine as he bends, then reaches, then takes hold of a single sock. Now, vertebra by vertebra he straightens up and moves his trembling hand towards
the line upon which he intends to peg the sock. That sock could be travelling light years across the distance from basket to washing line.

I stand a pace back from the window, into the shadow. The man could not possibly see me; I am looking down on the bald crown of his head. Though I hide myself partly out of respect, and feel sorry for the extreme effort cost him by his minuscule task, I am, none the less, spying on him with unrestrained curiosity, gawping at this other life.

Meanwhile, no one else escapes scrutiny or comment. Antonio, who lives on our landing and is a big, ebullient lion of a man and a fertile source of gossip, tells me that the saturnine Signora Zambon is ragingly jealous of her equally brooding spouse.

‘She’s always at him,’ Antonio tells me. ‘She’s convinced he’s got hundreds of lovers. You should hear her when she gets going.’

I’m not convinced: it seems improbable to me that her husband, who has a misanthropic reluctance even to greet a neighbour on the stairs, should be engaged in extra-marital gallivanting, but Antonio is adamant. Their teenage children, he tells me, have perfectly gauged their mother’s Achilles heel and can often be heard taunting the
green-eyed
signora for her fits of violent jealousy.

How much can one hope to conceal here, where we all live piled up, hugger-mugger? When my friend Filippo plans an illicit triste, he arranges to meet his beloved in a bar in a distant and isolated part of the city. As they walk into the anonymous place on an anonymous street, Filippo hears a voice from behind the bar:

‘Ciao! Filippo!’ It is the girl who works in the bar next door to his bookshop, where he goes for coffee and brioche every morning.

‘What are you doing here?’ he says.

‘Oh, this is my sister’s brother-in-law’s wife’s place and I fill in for her on a Thursday afternoon sometimes.’

The fact is they could pin anything on you in Venice and, certainly, one ends up seeing the ancient Venetian predilection for masks as neither quaint nor sinister but merely desperate, and about as ineffectual as the act of a small child who covers both eyes with her hands and is convinced that no one can see her.

A further variation on the theme of the privacy problem is the
vexed question of what you do or do not hang out to dry. I, personally, draw the line at underwear and find myself prudishly protective of my own and my daughter’s nightwear – this, while carelessly pegging out rows of boys’ pyjamas. It occurs to me that the far from cronish, but undeniably beady-eyed, psychoanalyst who nearly scared me to death with her smoking and watching was, in fact, professionally intrigued by the psychodynamics of my laundry.

Anyway, there is no doubt that when I first arrived in September, tens of pairs of neighbourly eyes lifted washing-line-wards to clock the arrival of a large family in the long-empty Borolini apartment. And who can help but be sneakingly admiring of whoever it is who hangs out absolutely every last scrap of bra or stringy knicker on the washing line that stretches clean across the
calle
leading to the much used swimming pool and sports centre?

Now, I am putting out the washing on a soft, sunny autumn day. The unoiled pulley squeaks peevishly as I yank it along between each pegging. Our first-floor neighbour Francesco is down below in his corner of the Zambon garden (it is, it turns out, not exclusively the signora’s property). He is a big, good-natured man in a washed-out blue fisherman’s smock. This morning, he caught some small silver fish in the Lagoon and now, meticulously, he is cleaning his catch. I wish that my washing line wouldn’t shriek so much; I want to go quietly about my business as Francesco is going about his and with at least the illusion of solitude. But, of course, at the third or fourth screech of wire rope on metal pulley, he looks up and waves, and I – pleased after all to have a genial neighbour – smile back.

The matter of washing line rights is a mystery to me. How far along one’s line is it acceptable to peg the clothes? The logical answer is that since the line is mine, I should be able to peg my underwear right across to the wall of the opposite palazzo. But there are other factors to take into consideration. By doing this, I rig my laundry out over the terrace of the signora opposite. Am I therefore breaking an unwritten rule of limits, of borders, of air space Venetian style?

I decide to play safe; to heave up the flag to a horizontal half mast and, while not able to spare the signora the sight of my washing, I am at least not subjecting her to the greater indignity of taking her morning coffee, in the sunshine, with someone else’s boxer shorts
flapping
directly overhead.

The business of space and of separation has grim shades in the Ghetto of Venice. Until the end of the Venetian Republic in 1797, it was forbidden for Jews to live outside the Ghetto, so they were forced to build not outwards but upwards, to accommodate their growing families. As a consequence, running along the side of this island within an island there is a canal where washing lines are extended palazzo to palazzo, far higher over the water than in the rest of the city.

On these distant, high-strung wires, lanky trousers and diaphanous shirts swell and flap in the wind with a particular, far-away beauty, like balloons escaping into the blue. In the sometimes comically public world of this city, it seems that the public washing of one’s linen can achieve a kind of poetry if only because a section of the population, with ample reason to reach, metaphorically speaking, for masks or to acknowledge paranoia with pragmatism, were forced to go skywards and had to hang out their washing accordingly.

W
ITHIN
WEEKS
of my arrival in the Calle del Vin, the landscape of the street has changed. First, the kindly, harassed, grey-haired woman who runs the stationery shop at the end of the street announces that she is closing down her business in order to move closer to her
grandchildren
, on the mainland.

A month later, the crowded little shop, which is always cheerfully packed with schoolchildren stocking up on the inordinate quantities of stationery devoured by the Italian school system, is empty.

It is not long before a young Chinese man is to be seen at a lone desk, in the otherwise bare premises. A few Perspex photo frames have
been placed in the window along with a sign explaining that he will frame photographs on order. His wife, with a baby on her hip, appears occasionally.

Soon after that, an antiquated haberdasher’s shop halfway up the
calle
announces its intention to close with a small, handwritten card in the window. The place smells of old fabric and old cardboard and behind the counter there sits a quiet, smiling, plainly dressed girl whom I imagine to be the proprietor’s granddaughter. The dozens of little wooden drawers full of buttons and pins and threads must have been stocked years before her birth.

Both of these events inspire in me a feeling of anxiety – panic even – a sense that no sooner have I arrived in Venice than the last, precious scraps of real Venetian-ness are disappearing before my very eyes. Thank God, I think, that the second haberdasher’s shop, at the other end of the
calle
, is still there. But even this cannot last and before another month has passed, brown paper has been taped all over the insides of those windows too, and one more fragile, indigenous light has been snuffed out.