A Thousand Days in Venice (24 page)

“There will be no pension available for twelve years,” he says, as though I didn't know that. “It's only an idea,” he says, which I know means, “It's the thing I want to do most in the world. Today.”

We sit there on the rock without speaking. We are so tired from not speaking that we fall asleep and it's nearly noon when we wake. We spend the afternoon and evening making fifty trips back and forth from the hotel to the work site, as though we can't be certain which of the two environments is the better place to think. Sometimes
we talk, but mostly we are silent. His part of the silence tells me he's thoroughly convinced we should leave Venice. Still, I don't understand his compulsion. If I could only be sure
he
understands his compulsion. Our finding each other has affected us almost reversely. It's not as though we've come closer at all. It's that each one has jumped the river into the other one's woods. It's O. Henry. I, the wanderer, full of tears and cornmeal crumbs, have become a nestling, while he, the sleeper, has become a rolling stone. He says no. He says it's not that we've switched sides of the river, it's that we've both jumped in. And he says I'm only tired from holding up the moon for him. “Now, I feel as though the two of us are more the same one. Strains healing, edges smoothing, if you'll be patient, you'll see,” he says quietly.

“Okay,” I tell him. I say we will proceed deliberately, shaping things carefully, letting the fates rest while we open and close our own doors.

“Patience,” we promise each other.

In the last days of September, the
operai
begin moving out their tools and equipment, bequeathing us nine months of detritus and a beautiful new apartment. We shovel and sweep and scour, and soon the little place is glowing. Mattesco comes to hang the drapes, and, piece by piece, we put things in order.

Though it is not yet officially for sale, it has become like my house in Saint Louis before, a place we are waiting to leave.

We comb through weekly journals and real-estate publications that post new business offerings and after supper we lay them out, read them to each other, tear, staple, stack, file, discard, then read, again, the ones we've saved. Fernando is convinced we should find a small hotel, a country house with a dozen rooms, a place where we can live as well as work. “But can you really see us as innkeepers?” I ask him, fondling the one newspaper that deals exclusively with restaurant opportunities.

“Yes. I absolutely can. One of us speaks English, one speaks Italian, and this is already a plus. If you can transform the apartment, think what we can do together to transform any other ruin, make it comfortable, inviting, romantic, a place travelers could come home to. I know it will be hard at first because we'll have to do everything ourselves, but we'll be together,” he tells me.

I want to show him an entry I've found in the restaurant journal. I have begun to see in him some reserved but freshly piqued interest in food. He's ordering more courageously in restaurants, walking over from the bank to meet me at the Rialto some mornings so we can shop together for supper and then sitting in our little kitchen, watching what I do with the white eggplant he's chosen. He'll crane his head round my shoulder as I tip handfuls of tiny
golden mushrooms into a pan, sizzling them up in sweet butter scented with sharp, wild onions one of the market farmers had dug up along the banks of the river Brenta. Fernando says the mushrooms smell like the forest where he used to walk with his grandfather. He buys a rosemary plant and tends it like a just-born baby. Still, I fear it's too soon to open discourse on the possibility of our spending the future heaving stockpots and easing our Wusthofs across oiled carborundum stone. I move in more frugally. “It would be nice if we could offer guests the option of staying to dinner, don't you think?” I say, barely sprinkling the seed.

But the stranger doesn't hear me. Deep in road dreams, he's measuring distances on his maps. First to second knuckle is one hundred kilometers. “I'll take every Friday off so we'll have four three-day weekends every month to travel.”

“How can you do that?” I want to know.

“What are they going to do, fire me? We can reach almost any destination in the north in less than ten hours,” he tells me, hopping and skipping his bent finger across Italy like a chess piece.

We read about a small hotel for sale in Comeglians on the sun-forsaken edges of the Friuli near the Austrian border, and we go to find it. We've agreed our territory is everything north of Rome, and so we drive three thousand feet up onto the lonely stone stretches of the Carnia, where the temperature on an August Friday
at high noon registers thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. The first thing I notice are all the signs that say
legna da ardere
, wood to burn, along the rough, serpentine roads. I try to imagine February. We're lost, and we stop to ask the way at the tobacconist who is also the grocer, the cheesemaker, and the local grappa distiller and who at this moment is hacking a wedge from a great wheel of hard, whiffy Carnian cheese. Thrusting his javelin-like tool between our heads he says,
“Sempre diritto
, always straight.” One of the few interregional commonalities among Italians is how they give directions. They agree all destinations are reached by a straight line. I already miss the sea.

There are twenty bedrooms and eight bathrooms in the stone-and-wood chalet-style hotel, a small bar to one side, and, on the other, an immense fireplace, round and low, with an unsheltered hearth—a
fogolar
in the Friulano dialect. The fire is spent, but the scent of last night's woodsmoke greets us.

The signora wants to sell because, since regional and state funding for road building slid off the docket in the late seventies, there have been no workers from Tolmezzo and Udine and Pordenone who would come to sleep in her twenty beds and sit with tumblers of grappa round the
fogolar
, who would eat ten kilos of sausages and ten more of beefsteak in an evening and a whole cauldron full of polenta that the signora had made from white cornmeal and poured out, steaming, onto a thick wooden board set close by the fire. She
says she'll give me her recipe for the sauce of sheep's intestines and red wine that's delicious with polenta. Fernando asks about tourism, and she tells him that people mostly stay in and around Tolmezzo or San Daniele del Friuli, that there's nothing much to bring them into Comeglians, but that with a little patience the workers will be back.
“Vedrai
. You'll see,” she says as we wave good-bye to her from the car.

We are exploring a bit in Verona, having heard about a
locanda
with eight rooms for sale in Via XX Settembre, when, over a glass of Recioto at the Bottega del Vino, a man dressed in whisky-colored suede who'd been candidly eavesdropping on our Esperanto, introduces himself. He says he's meeting some American friends for dinner and invites us to join them. Plausible in New York, this is outrageous and invasive behavior, a stab in the elegantly woven Veronese reserve. But we consider it over another glass of wine and half an hour's preamble to our life stories before gracefully refusing and exchanging business cards. When he leaves, the barman tells us our companion is a count, a gentleman farmer, a champion horseman whose estate is up in the hills of Solferino in Lombardy. We say, “How lovely,” and go off to Al Calmiere to eat
pastissada
, smoked horsemeat braised in tomatoes and red wine. Back in Venice, the count has already left us a message.

We are invited to spend next weekend on his farm, and we accept. He has an eighteenth-century villa with a half dozen cottages
and paddocks and barns scattered over the velvet, silken lands where the Gonzaga were once lords. The count invites us again and again. He asks us to come for a weekend of riding and hunting, to cook, if we wish, that we'll go to the markets and the cheesemakers, the winemakers, that we'll collect provisions for a four-day feast. I look to Fernando, who surprises me as well as the count with a vigorous, decisive,
“Perché no?
Why not?”

The count's guests are mostly English, with a German couple and two Scotsmen. Aproned and scrubbed, Fernando and I roll out dough for tortelli and plump them big as teacup saucers with roasted pumpkin and crushed
amaretti
, crisp almond macaroons, and slivers of
mostarda
, fruit preserved in mustard oil. We set beef to marinate in an old gray crock and drown it in Amarone; we make buckwheat polenta with braised quail and risotto the way the rice farmers once made it in the fields. Each day's lunch we seal with the heel of a Franciacorta and a thick, runny wedge of Gorgonzola, drizzled with the count's wild thyme honey.

The guests ride and eat and drink. By the third day, everyone, except the Scotsmen, leave off riding for long sleeps broken only by the call to table. The whole event is luscious. When the count offers us a home and lucrative positions, we listen, but we tell him it's our own adventure we're after and not a portion of his. These few days seem to have empowered Fernando. He's talking about developing
knife skills, and asking about the difference between naturally cave-aged Gorgonzola and the sham kind that's shot full of copper wires to accelerate the formation of it's whiffy green veins. He seems invigorated.

For three, sometimes four days of each week we race over the autostrada and curl up mountain roads and careen back down them to skim past vineyards and groves of olives, alongside tobacco fields and sheepfolds and sunflowers toward the next city, the next hill-town, the next medieval village. We drive through the Tuscan hills of Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Piero della Francesca, pink sand slopes buttoned in black cypress, the red Siena earth just turned and waiting, the powdery light, a watercolor landscape of mulberries, figs, olives, and vines. If I can't look at the sea, I want to look at this. But we don't find a house in Tuscany.

We talk with every real estate agent and tourist officer we can find, every fruitseller, baker, and barman we meet. We stalk and prowl and shadow those we think might inform us. We wave down farmers from their tractors and, over the grinding of their motors, they point us to ruins in far-off fields. And just when we're tired and hungry enough to cry, we find some small
osteria
at the edge of an unlit gravel path that traverses a wheat field and are fed a great golden tangle of pasta by a lady who's been rolling it out there twice a day for half a century.

We don't find a house, but we find a handmade sign that says,
“Oggi cinghiale al buglione
. We follow the sign to a renovated stable and a farmer's wife who sits us down on wooden benches while she braises a boar's haunch with garlic and tomatoes and white wine over an olive wood fire. We eat and drink with people who have never seen Venice or Rome, who have never lived anywhere but the place where they were born. We don't find a house, but we find a mill in a chestnut grove driven by a wooden paddlewheel powered by a stream that's been roiling since the mastodons. We find grape growers who still celebrate the harvest and the crush with torchlit suppers among the vines, and olive farmers who harvest the green-purple-black almost mature fruit by hand and press it between ancient stones turned round and round by a mule. The oil is green as grass and full of tiny, stinging bubbles. It smells like roasted hazelnuts, and, when the oil is spilled out over hot wood-roasted bread and whispered with sea salt, it tastes like the only food in a perfect world.

Bruised from trekking through rains and heat and climbing crumbling stairs, we keep going, week after week, until more than a year has passed. Still, there is no small hotel, no farmhouse-to-renovate, no place to work, and no place to live. It's Christmas Eve, and we are heading back to Venice after another of our journeys when Fernando veers off the road. “How would you like to spend Christmas
in Austria?” he wants to know, reaching for one of our six hundred map books.

“We can be in Salzburg by six.” We're prepared enough; an overnight bag always waits in the trunk. What about our presents and the tortellini and the turkey with the walnut pesto stuffed under his skin waiting back in Venice? He says we'll have Christmas all week. At least I'm wearing new boots and my green velvet hat. He is telling me there is sure to be snow, and I'm saying, “Let's go,” and when we arrive at the Weisses Rossl, a string quartet is playing “Silent Night” in front of a crèche across the way. It snows.

Fernando was right, I think, as we walk back to the hotel after midnight mass. Surely these have been journeys to find the next part of our lives, but more, they have been journeys toward the center. We have been married for two years. I try to remember life without him and it's like trying to remember an old film I thought I'd seen but perhaps never did. I ask him if he's sorry we didn't find each other when we were young, and he says he would never have recognized me when he was young. And besides, he was too old when he was young, he says.