A Thousand Days in Venice (2 page)

I open my eyes and look out the window to see we have pulled into Tiburtina. Two young, pink-faced German women are hoisting their great packs up into the overhead space, thrusting their ample selves down onto the seat opposite me
.

“Yes,” I finally answer, in English, to a space somewhere between them
.

“For the first time,” I say
.

They are serious, shy, dutifully reading the Lorenzetti guide to Venice and drinking mineral water in the hot, airless train car as it lunges and bumps over the flat Roman countryside and up into the Umbrian hills. I close my eyes again, trying to find my place in the fable of life in the Via Giulia where I'd taken roof-top rooms in the ochered-rose palazzo that sits across from the Hungarian Art Academy. I'd decided I would go each Friday to eat a bowlful of tripe at Da Felice in the Testaccio. I would shop every morning in
Campo dei Fiori. I'd open a twenty-seat
taverna
in the Ghetto, one big table where the shopkeeps and artisans would come to eat the good food I'd cook for them. I'd take a Corsican prince as my lover. His skin would smell of neroli blossoms, and he'd be poor as I would be, and we'd walk along the Tiber, going softly into our dotage. As I begin putting together the exquisite pieces of the prince's face, the trespasser's small voice asks, “Why are you going to Venice? Do you have friends there?”

“No. No friends,” I tell her. “I guess I'm going because I've never been there, because I think I should,” I say, more to myself than to her. I have hopelessly lost the prince's face for the moment, and so I parry: “And why are you going to Venice?”

“For romance,” says the inquisitive one very simply
.

My plainer truth is that I am going to Venice because I'm being sent there, to gather notes for a series of articles. Twenty-five hundred words on the
bacari,
traditional Venetian wine bars; twenty-five hundred more on the question of the city's gradual sinking into the lagoon; and an upscale dining review. I would rather have stayed in Rome. I want to go back to my narrow green wooden bed in the strange little room tucked up in the fourth-floor eaves of the Hotel Adriano. I want to sleep there, to be awakened by powdery sunlight sifting in through the chinks in the shutters. I like the way my heart beats in Rome, how I can walk faster and see better. I like that I feel at home wandering through her ancient ecstasy of secrets and lies. I like that she's taught me I am only a scintilla, a barely perceptible and transient gleam.
And I like that at lunch, with fried artichokes on my breath, I think of supper. And at supper I remember peaches that wait in a bowl of cool water near my bed. I've nearly retrieved the pieces of the prince's face as the train lurches over the Ponte della Libertà. I open my eyes to see the lagoon
.

B
ACK THEN
I
COULD
never have imagined how sweetly this ravishing old Princess was to gather me up into her tribe, how she would dazzle and dance the way only she can, exploding a morning with gold-shot light, soaking an evening in the bluish mists of a trance. I smile at Paolo, a tribal smile, a soundless eloquence. He stays near, keeping my teapot full.

It's after eleven-thirty before the storm rests. I pull on boots all hardened into the shape of the newsprint stuffing. Damp hat over still-damp hair, still-damp coat, I gather myself for the walk back to the hotel. Something prickles, shivers forward in my consciousness. I try to remember if I'd told the stranger where we were staying. What's happening to me? Me, the unflappable.
Even as I am drawn to Venice, so am I suspicious of her
.

It seems I
did
tell him the name of our hotel, because I find a sheaf of pink paper messages under my door. He'd called every half hour from seven until midnight, the last message letting me know he would be waiting in the lobby at noon the next day, exactly the hour we were to leave for the airport.

Morning brings the first sun we've seen in Venice during that stay. I heave open my window to a day limpid and soft, as if in apology for all that weeping the night before. I pull on black velvet leggings and a turtleneck and go down to meet Peter Sellers, to look him in the eyes and to find out why a man I'd hardly met could be so disturbing to me. I don't know how I'm going to find out very much though, because he seems to speak no English and the only clear discourse I can carry on in Italian is about food. I'm a bit early, so I walk outside to feel the air and find I'm just in time to see him climbing over the
Ponte delle Maravegie
, trench coat, cigarette, newspaper, umbrella. I see him before he sees me. And I like what I see, feel.

“Stai scappando?
Are you escaping?” he asks.

“No. I was coming to meet you,” I say, mostly with my hands.

I had told my friends to wait, that I'd be half an hour, an hour at most. We would still have plenty of time to take a water taxi to the Marco Polo airport and check in for our three o'clock flight to Naples. I look at him. I really look at the stranger for the first time. All I see is the blue of his eyes. They are colored like the sky and the water are colored today and like the tiny, purply-blue berries called
mirtilli
, I think. He is at once shy and familiar, and we walk without destination. We stop for a moment on the Ponte dell'Accademia. He keeps dropping his newspaper and, as he bends to retrieve it, he thrusts the point of his umbrella into the crowds that pass behind us.
Then, holding the newspaper under one arm and the umbrella under the other, its evil point still a thwart to the strollers, he slaps at his breast pockets, his trouser pockets, in search of a match. He finds the match and then begins the same search for another cigarette to replace the one that just dropped from his lips into the canal. He really is Peter Sellers.

He asks if I've ever thought much about destiny and if I believe there is such a thing as
vero amore
, real love. He looks away from me out over the water and speaks in a throaty sort of stammer for what seems like a long time and more to himself than to me. I understand few of the words except his final phrase,
una volta nella vita
, once in a lifetime. He looks at me as though he wants to kiss me, and I think I'd like to kiss him, too, but I know the umbrella and the newspaper will go into the water and, besides, we're too old to be playing love scenes. Aren't we too old? I'd probably want to kiss him even if he didn't have blueberry eyes. I'd probably want to kiss him even if he looked like Ted Koppel. It's only this place, the view from this bridge, this air, this light. I wonder if I'd want to kiss him if I'd met him in Naples. We take a gelato at Paolin in Campo Santo Stefano, sitting down at a front-row table in the sun.

“How do you feel about Venice?,” he wants to know. “This is not your first visit here,” he says, as though flipping through some internal dossier that tracks all my European movement.

“No, no, this is not my first time. I began coming in the spring of '89, about four years ago,” I tell him brightly.

“1989? You've been coming to Venice for four years?” he asks. He holds up four fingers as though my pronounciation of
quattro
was muddled.

“Yes,” I say. “Why is that so strange?”

“It's only that I never saw you until December. Last December. December 11, 1992,” he says, as though eyeing the dossier more closely.

“What?” I ask, a little stunned, rummaging back to last winter, computing the dates when I'd last been there. Yes, I'd arrived in Venice on December 2 and then flown up to Milan on the evening of the eleventh. Still, he's surely mistaken me for another woman, and I'm about to tell him that, but he's already lunging into his story.

“You were walking in Piazza San Marco; it was just after five in the afternoon. You were wearing a long white coat, very long, down to your ankles, and your hair was tied up, just as it is now. You were looking in the window at Missiaglia, and you were with a man. He wasn't Venetian, or at least I'd never seen him before. Who was he?” he asks stiffly.

Before I can push out half a syllable, he is asking, “Was he your lover?”

I know he doesn't want me to answer, and so I don't. He's talking faster now, and I'm losing words and phrases. I ask him to look
at me and, please, to speak more slowly. He accommodates. “I saw you only in profile, and I kept walking toward you. I stopped a few feet from you, and I just stood still, taking you in. I stood there until you and the man walked off the piazza toward the quay.” He illustrates his words with broad movements of his hands, his fingers. His eyes hold mine urgently.

“I began to follow you, but I stopped because I had no idea what I'd do if I came face to face with you. I mean what would I say to you? How could I find a way to talk to you? And so I let you go. That's what I do, you know, I just let things go. I looked for you the next day and the next, but I knew you were gone. If only I'd see you walking alone somewhere, I could stop you, pretending I mistook you for someone else. No, I would tell you I thought your coat was beautiful. But anyway, I never found you again, so I held you in my mind. For all these months I tried to imagine who you were, where you were from. I wanted to hear the sound of your voice. I was very jealous of the man with you,” he says slowly. “And then, as I was sitting there at Vino Vino the other day and you angled your body so that your profile was just visible underneath all that hair, I realized it was you. The woman in the white coat. And so you see, I've been waiting for you. Somehow I've been loving you,
loving
you since that afternoon in the piazza.”

Still I have said not a word.

“That's what I was trying to tell you on the bridge just now, about
destiny and true love. I fell in love with you, not at first sight, because I saw only a part of your face. With me it was love at half sight. It was enough. And if you think I'm mad, I don't care.”

“Is it okay if I speak?” I ask him very quietly and without a notion of what I want to tell him. His eyes are now deep blue bolts, holding me much too tightly. I look down, and when I look up again his eyes have softened. I hear myself saying, “It's a very sweet gift, this telling of your story. But that you saw me and remembered me and then that you saw me again a year later is not so mysterious an event. Venice is a very small city, and it is not improbable to see the same people again and again. I don't think our meeting is some sort of thundering stroke of destiny. Anyway how can you be in love with a
profile?
I'm not only a
profile;
I'm thighs and elbows and brain. I'm a woman. I think all of this is only coincidence, a very touching coincidence,” I say to the blueberry eyes, neatly patting his arcadian testimony into smooth shape as I might a heft of bread dough.

“Non è una coincidenza
. This is not coincidence. I'm in love with you, and I'm sorry if this fact makes you uncomfortable.”

“It's not discomfort I feel. It's only that I don't understand it. Yet.” I say this, wanting to pull him close, wanting to push him away.

“Don't go today. Stay a little longer. Stay with me,” he says.

“If there's to be something, anything at all between us, my going
today won't change it. We can write to each other, talk. I'll be coming back in the spring, and we can make plans.” There seems a forced syncopation to my words before I hear them falling away into near paralysis. Still as a frieze, we sit there on the edges of the
campo
's Saturday fracas. A long time passes through our silence before we shuffle to our feet. Not waiting for a check, he leaves lire on the table under the glass dish of his untasted strawberry gelato, rivulets of which drip onto the paper money.

My face is burning, and I feel startled, flush up against an emotion I can't name, one eerily like terror but not unlike joy. Could there have been some gist to my old Venetian forebodings? Have the pre-sentiments spun out into the form of this man? Is this
the
rendezvous? I am drawn to the stranger. I am suspicious of the stranger.
Even as I am drawn to Venice, so am I suspicious of her
. Are he and Venice the same thing? Could he be my Corsican prince masquerading as a bank manager? Why can't Destiny announce itself, be a twelve-headed ass, wear purple trousers, a name tag, even? All I know is that I don't fall in love, neither at first sight nor at half-sight, neither easily nor over time. My heart is rusty from the old pinions that hold it shut. That's what I believe about myself.

We stroll through Campo Manin to San Luca, just making small talk. I stop in mid-stride. He stops, too, and he wraps me up in his arms. He holds me. I hold him.

When we exit from the Bacino Orseolo into San Marco, la
Marangona is ringing five bells. It's him, I think. He's the twelve-headed ass in the purple trousers! He's Destiny and the bells only recognize me when I'm with him. No, that's rot. Menopausal gibberish.