The Politics of Washing (6 page)

The opening of this shop is a triumph for ‘authentic’ Venice, though it is doubtful that any tourists will ever take a picture of the haberdasher’s granddaughter’s window display. The clothes she is selling are the preferred uniform of a certain section of ‘indigenous’ Venetian society. It seems likely that her new business will thrive, since the
calli
and
fondamente
nearby teem with people sporting exactly this style of dress. Just metres off one of the main tourist drags, the Real Venice has fought back and, for now at least, it has won.

Meanwhile, like a large and unlikely decoy duck, I will continue to row up and down the Grand Canal and be, extravagantly, photographed.

I
T IS
A
warm autumn afternoon, and we are sitting in the sun outside a bar, by a canal. Roland has brought his new skateboard; he is already very good and goes on it to school every day. He has, rather brilliantly, mastered the technique of reading a book at the same time: his eyes are fixed intently on the page as, with minute knee and ankle bends and fluid hip movements, he weaves a sinuous path among the oncoming pedestrians.

Today, as Alberto and I sit drinking hot chocolate, Roland is practising flips and swerves on the wide
fondamenta
outside the café. Then, suddenly, the board slips from between his feet and shoots, like a pea popping from its pod, towards the canal. Roland, who is lithe and quick, is after it in a moment, but the board is faster than he is and it tips over the edge, elegantly, like an acrobat executing a back flip. Roland vaults down from the
fondamenta
into a small, wooden boat moored there, but he lands just a second too late, in time only to see the skateboard slide silently to the muddy bottom of the canal.

Roland, however, is not silent; he has fallen badly and is crying with the pain. Alberto pulls the sobbing child on to his shoulders and we head for the hospital.

Venice’s hospital – L’Ospedale Civico di Santi Giovanni e Paolo – is the most eccentrically beautiful building I know. The top of the
marble façade is like a lopsided crown of delicately descending
scallops
, beneath which are grand but curiously squashed trompe l’oeuil columns, and lions set in bizarre perspectives, all of which gives the impression of many things going on, but mostly out of sight, just around the corner.

The great entrance courtyard is a sea of ancient and perilously undulating pavement, punctuated by stone pillars. For centuries, people have been coming here for the same continuous purpose. But putting history and aesthetics aside, it strikes me how very difficult it must be for the halt and the lame to navigate a safe passage across this space: it would be hard to imagine anything much further from the ideal image of a modern hospital.

Now, with Roland hanging on to Alberto’s back in grimly stoical silence, we follow a surreal route of impersonal hospital corridors that morph unexpectedly into renaissance courtyards or arcades and then back again into hospital corridors, until we eventually arrive in casualty. We present ourselves at the reception desk and finally take our place on plastic chairs, along with all the other minor medical flotsam and jetsam cast up by this particular Venetian afternoon. We settle down to wait.

After an hour, I revise my opinion of the Ospedale Civico. Casualty, whether it is housed in a stupendous renaissance building in the middle of the Venetian Lagoon or in a jerry-built cottage hospital in the Midlands, is the same the world over: a place of infinite general boredom, punctuated by the odd high-octane drama, set off either by mental imbalance, pain or frustration. It is the
Divine Comedy
rewritten for the twenty-first century: the circles of Hell and Heaven have merged, for the most part, into a single zone: medical purgatory, with its rows of chairs and endlessly waiting people. Death and Mercy make their incursions, of course, but casualty is, at its heart, the no man’s land of a world that prefers to ignore the existence of both.

When eventually Roland’s ankle is x-rayed, it is found to be broken. We wait for another long time to have it plastered up. When we emerge from the hospital, it is 8 p.m. and dark. There is an
ambulance
boat that does the rounds of the city every few hours, dropping
people near to their homes, but we have just missed the last one and the next will not leave until after midnight. We decide, just this once, to take a water taxi, and approach one waiting near to the hospital entrance.

‘Calle del Vin,’ says Alberto, to the handsome, tanned young man in pressed white jeans, a leather jacket and designer stubble standing at the wheel. ‘How much?’

‘A hundred and twenty.’

We are speechless. We could walk there in ten minutes. If we could walk.

‘But it takes five minutes to get there by boat! And our son has broken his ankle.’

Skinny little Roland on his crutches looks like something out of Dickens, shivering forlornly in the chill night. The taxi driver shrugs.

‘All right then. A hundred.’

We are over a barrel. After much haggling, we get it down to eighty euros. It is, metre for metre, without doubt the most expensive trip we have ever made. The Venetian taxi driver, pouting all the way to the bank, has taken his pound of the foreigner’s flesh.

I
T IS A
drear autumn day soon after our arrival and I am hurrying across a small, grey
campo
in the rain. An old woman is leaning against the stone portal of a building, a carrier bag of shopping slumped at her feet. She is tightly wrapped in a wool coat; her legs are so terribly thin that her thick beige nylon tights sag at her ankles; she has the gaunt fragility of extreme age, but her voice is strong when she calls out to me.

‘Signora, excuse me, but could I ask you to take my bag up the stairs and leave it outside my door?’

In twenty brief seconds I run up the short flight to the first floor and leave the shopping propped against the wall.

‘Thank you, Signora, thank you so much.’

Very, very slowly, she turns and begins to mount the first step, grasping the stair rail with both hands. Her face is strained with the effort, but she pauses to smile back at me over her shoulder.

‘I can get up if I hold on like this, but I can’t manage the bag at the same time. Thank you again. Some days I have to wait for half an hour for somebody to go by.’

Measured against modern ideas of convenience, Venice can be wildly impractical and often uncomfortable. If you have no access to a private boat or are hampered physically in any way (age, disability, luggage, babies), or simply do not have a lift in your building, the logistics of daily life can range from the tricky to the nightmarish. But there is another side to this: physical restrictions that might at first seem limiting, even to the able-bodied, enforce a speed and rhythm of living that is on an entirely human scale. The 4x4 that I park outside the supermarket is a sagging blue shopping trolley; the ‘supermarket’, as often as not, is the greengrocer’s stall on the corner of the street, the sweet-smelling cubby hole of a bakery, the butcher or the fishmonger. The £200 bumper shop at the out-of-town Megastore, complete with desert wastes of car park, clattery, disobedient metal trolleys, bulging excrescences of plastic bags, aisle after neon aisle of hammering choice, choice, choice, has shrunk to five minutes on the way home: a brief, friendly transaction with someone you see every day and the purchasing of ingredients for one meal – or perhaps two.

During my first months in the city I unfailingly buy too much food and end up hauling splitting bag-loads of groceries up the four flights of stairs to our apartment. Finally, though, I get it and begin to purchase just enough and no more. That is when I stop even noticing the shopping. It becomes an organic, practically invisible part of the walk back from school. Everything is scaled down: individual serves individual; bread and fruit and vegetables are mostly sold in paper bags and a plastic carrier doubles as tomorrow’s rubbish container. The physical constraints imposed by the city mean that daily life unfolds in a sustainable, human dimension. I am beginning to understand that in Venice, you can, quite simply, go no further than it is possible to
walk (with a little help from the plodding
vaporetti
) and you can never transport more than you can carry.

This is why IKEA in Padua represents a kind of consumer nemesis for inhabitants of Venice. Back on the mainland, I revert immediately to being a citizen of the modern world of hyper mobility. Once the car has been parked and I am inside that great corrugated-iron box of a selling machine, ambling obediently along the yellow brick road of tape, through the forests of sofas and shelves, chairs and tables,
lampshades
and glasses and cushion covers, all memory of the necessary minimalism of life in Venice magically disappears.

This is why, some hours later, I find myself back at Piazzale Roma with a vast and weighty flat pack balanced on my trolley, which I must now get home by heaving it up and down bridges and manouvring it around corners, with the strain on my lower back proving quite possibly terminal.

Or I may find that it is raining and that the several enormous brown paper bags, full of candles and nests of Tupperware that I had not known I wanted, are fast turning to papier-mâche. The once bright plastic drops out of the sodden bottom into a muddy puddle and I am still half an hour’s walk from home. The shining, the new, the practically free, suddenly feels less alluring; may even start to look like folly.

T
HE GREENGROCER OVER
the bridge from whom I buy my fruit and vegetables is fighting a one-man battle for Venice and the values of his Venetian culture. Giuseppe has a prime position on a busy Venetian thoroughfare. Every morning he displays his produce outside his shop:
a handsome stack of apples and pears, aubergine, cabbages, artichokes, plums and bananas and leeks. The greengrocer is a sad, decent, angry man.

‘I was a bank manager for twenty years,’ he tells me. ‘I belonged to the ultra left. Then, one day, I turned on the path, to look behind me and I saw that there was no one there. So I thought: better to spend the rest of your life selling fruit and vegetables than this.’

He smiles grimly, baring his nicotine-stained teeth.

As we talk, he glances over my shoulder every so often at the produce displayed outside his shop. Then, suddenly, he shoots past me and out on to the street.

‘NO SELF SERVICE!’ he barks harshly at a drifty blond American girl half submerged by her rucksack, who has picked up a peach and is turning it around to see whether or not it is ripe. She does not understand.

‘No self service!’

‘No?’ she says wonderingly, thinking, it seems, that this irate foreign shopkeeper is telling her that she is not allowed to buy from his gorgeously laden stall. She is clearly confused, but accepting the prohibition as though it had some obscure Alice in Wonderland logic, she drifts away again.

Giuseppe comes back into his shop.

‘I am sorry, Signora,’ he says, apologetic and shaken by his own fury. ‘These people cannot behave in this way. Would you go into someone’s house and finger their food and then just put it down and leave again?’

‘No, of course not,’ I say, because from that point of view his logic is impeccable. ‘But they simply have no idea that picking up the fruit and touching it is unacceptable. That’s what you do where they come from.’

Giuseppe will not understand; cannot understand.

When I go to Giuseppe to buy an avocado or some peaches, he will say:

‘Is it for tonight?’ and I might reply, ‘No, some time over the next few days would be fine.’

And because the fruit I want is still firm, he will sell it to me. If I
need it that day, he does not sell it to me. I do not need to finger and bruise his peaches – he knows exactly how ripe they are and will tell me. He is always right and he has a relationship with his customers based on trust and his knowledge of what he is selling. To tell them anything except the truth about what they are buying would be to shoot himself in the foot – unhappy shoppers take their custom elsewhere. These are human-scale relationships of mutual convenience that work.

When the foreigners trek past his shop in what Giuseppe sees as a sort of cultural breaking and entering – part of tourism’s systematic rape of his city – he does not, it strikes me, really see them as human. The American girl has floated in from the land of infinite supermarket aisles, where the only non-shopping human beings are the armies of shelf-stackers, who probably know nothing about the produce they are handling. She is no better equipped than Giuseppe to understand another point of view.

One might see this America of uncontrolled and self-spawning consumerism as itself a kind of victim – a poor little rich country. But for Giuseppe, keeping guard over his vegetables, American culture is only the enemy.

‘L
ILY
’, S
TEFANIA INFORMS
me, ‘is azure.’

I look at my small daughter, who is still, in these early days at school, leaning on her zimmer frame.

‘She has a special soul, she’s different from the others.’ Stefania explains, ‘I thought you would know. You’ve got all those crystals.’

She nods at my necklace and rings. I look down in surprise; I hadn’t realized they gave so much away.

‘You don’t see these azure children very often,’ she adds knowingly.

Stefania, whose family, she tells me, is Venetian from way back, looks more like a native American. She is in her early fifties and rather large, with very long, jet black hair, a wide face and a straight nose. She,
herself, is swathed in necklaces, rings and bangles and is wearing a voluminous tie-dyed kaftan top. She has an air of kindly indolence that extends to her teaching practice, which, according to Lily and Roland, entails doing not very much at all. Unless, that is, events turn to her real, alternative area of expertise.

When Lily tells her she is not feeling well, Stefania moves swiftly into action. She lays both hands on the child’s head and breathes deeply through her nose several times. Then, she lifts her right hand and draws it slowly away from Lily, extending her arm as far as she can from her body, at which point she vigorously shakes her hand, as though shaking raindrops off her fingertips. Then, she lifts her left hand and does the same thing. She appears to be pulling something out of Lily’s head and casting it away. Her eyes are closed in intense concentration and she sways slightly. This goes on for some minutes, with alternating hands. Eventually, she stops.