A Thousand Days in Venice (25 page)

“I feel the same way,” I tell him, remembering when I, too, was so much older.

We decide to go to New York to meet up with the children, to visit friends. On the day before our departure, we walk in the Rialto and Fernando says, “Let's stop in and tell Gambara to put the apartment on the market. Maybe we have to approach the change from another direction.” We sign up the apartment and go home to finish packing.

Packing and unpacking, it's all we do. We are a touring company. My secret to serene travel is to wear everything I can't afford to lose, and because it's February, this task is easy. I am layering a tweed vest over two thin cashmere sweaters over a silk shirt, a long wide suede skirt over slim leather pants when Gambara rings to say he will be coming by at eleven with a potential buyer, a Milanese named Giancarlo Maietto who wants a beach house for his retired father. At eleven we'll be somewhere over the Tyrrhenian Sea I tell him, and he says to leave the keys with the troll and to call him the next day from New York.

But we don't call him on the next day, or on the day after that. On our third day in New York we are tucked in at Le Quercy behind plates of duck confit and potatoes that are dark gold from a fast, hot dalliance with a pint of duck fat. A bottle of Vieux Cahors is close at hand. Fernando says he feels guilty for not calling and wants to call right then, even though it's seven-thirty in the morning in Venice. I am wholly absorbed in duck thighs and wine and, through
eyes half-closed, I wave him on to the telephone. My face and hands are glossy with duck fat when he returns to the table to say, “Gian-carlo Maietto bought the apartment.” I exchange my clean plate with his, still full of confit, and I continue to eat. “What are you doing? How can you eat when we don't have a place to live?” he whines.

“I'm living in the moment,” I tell him. “I may not have a place to live, but right now I do have this duck, and before you put it up for sale I'm going to eat it. And anyway it was you who said perhaps change must come from another direction—and so it did. It's all going to be fine,” says Pollyanna through lips ornamented in two purply points, a sensualist's mustache earned from deep drinking the Cahors. The return of Mr. Quicksilver. Will he always resist more than two palmy days in a row?

By the end of our first week in New York, the offer, the counteroffer, and the countered counteroffer have been proposed and accepted. Maietto will pay only a sliver less than our pitilessly high asking price. Because he knew we were not yet hard-pressed to sell the house, Gambara told Fernando to shoot for the stars, and he did. Back in Venice we meet with Gambara who tells us Maietto wants possession in sixty days, but we ask for a ninety and Maietto agrees. On the fifteenth of June we will leave. To go where, we must yet divine. We tell ourselves we must be diligent, keep looking. If we come up empty, we'll put our things in storage and rent a furnished
place in Venice until we come up flush. That's what we say, but Fernando has the sighs, the angsts, and on the morning he's due back at the bank he asks if I'll take the early boat with him and walk with him to work.

We walk right past the bank as though he forgot it was there, and when we meet one of the tellers outside he throws him the keys to the safe and says,
“Arrivo subito
. I'm coming right away.”

We walk out of San Bartolomeo, past the post office and over the Ponte dell'Olio, and he's not saying a word. The Princess is beautiful this morning, peeking from behind her March veils. When I ask him if he doesn't think so, too, he doesn't hear me. We stop in at Zanon for an espresso and then rush over the Ponte San Giovanni Crisostomo, as though this was the way to the bank rather than away from it. We're almost running now, along the Calle Dolfin and over another bridge into Campo Santi Apostoli, full of children screaming their way to school, and then into Campo Santa Sofia and onto Strada Nuova. He says nothing until we come up to the
vicolo
that leads out to the Ca' d'Oro landing stage. And then all he says is, “Let's go back.” We ride but we don't debark at the next stop, which is the bank, so I think we're going home. Instead we get off at Santa Maria del Giglio, and he says, “Let's go into the Gritti for coffee,” as though it's our habit to take a ten-thousand-lira espresso in Venice's most plush hotel.

He doesn't sit with me at the little table in the bar but plunks
down a fresh package of cigarettes and his lighter and asks the waiter to bring a cognac. “Only one, sir?” asks the barman.

“Yes. Only one,” he says, still standing. To me he says softly, “Smoke these, drink this, and wait for me right here.” He has perhaps forgotten I don't smoke and that I like my cognac after dinner rather than at nine-thirty in the morning! He's gone in a flash. But where? Has he gone to call Gambara and kill off the sale? Could he even do that if he'd wanted to?

Half an hour, perhaps thirty-five minutes pass, and he reappears. He is dazed and looks as though he's been crying.
“Ho fatto
. I did it. I walked over to Via XXII Marzo to the main office and climbed the stairs up to the director's office, and I walked in and I sat down and I told him I was leaving,” he says, tracing his every move to assure himself he'd really made each one of them. Always in control of his
bella figura
, now he is unselfconscious in this Lilliputian space among the barmen and the concierge, three men drinking beer and a woman puffing on a very large cigar. He proceeds with his story. “And do you know what Signor d'Angelantonio said to me? He said, ‘Do you want to write your letter here, now, or bring it to me tomorrow? As you wish.'
‘As you wish,'
was all he had to say to me after twenty-six years. Well, I did as I wished,” he says. He tells me he sat down in front of a manual Olivetti and pecked out his salvo, that he tore it from the rollers and folded it in three and asked for an
envelope, which he addressed to d'Angelantonio, who still stood a yard away behind a desk.

I have learned these tempests of his are not tempests at all but only the last quick darts of lightning that come after long, seething reflection. Fernando's passages are nearly always silent and nearly always private. I understand this, and still he staggers me. I reach for the untouched cognac and try to begin lining things up in my mind. I think the story goes something like this. I come to Venice and meet a stranger who works in a bank and lives on the beach. The stranger falls in love with me and comes to Saint Louis to ask me to marry him, to ask me to leave my house and my work and come to live happily ever after with him on the fringes of a little island in the Adriatic Sea. I, too, fall in love and I say
I will
, and so I do. The stranger who is now my husband decides he no longer wishes to live on the fringes of a little island in the Adriatic Sea nor work in a bank, and so now neither he nor I have a house or work and we are beginning at the beginning. Incredibly, I am at ease with all of this. It's only the whiplash way in which he moves that stings. What happened to patience? Then again there has been not one prudent act in this story.

I drink a ten o'clock cognac, and I cry and laugh. It's the old terror-and-joy two-punch, once again. Anyway, what does it matter that we are doing everything backward and sideways? In ten minutes
I'll have found my wind. Still I ask him, “Why today and why without our having talked about it?”

“Sono fatto cosi.
This is the way I am,” he says. A clean self-acquittal, unambiguous, selfish I think. Fernando is Venetian, a son of the Princess. And on both their faces folly and courage look the same, bleeding into this morning's muslin light.

Back at the apartment, which in eighty-one days will belong to this man called Maietto, we take our portfolio and a pot of tea to the bed that will probably always be ours. We tally up our resources for the hundredth time, but nothing changes. The severance payment from the bank, the proceeds from the house, what's left of our savings, a few other assets, and, before the tea is cold, our financial meeting is finished and we lie there feeling, in a way, excited but more than anything else,
little
. Not “little” as in “diminished” or “fragile” but as in “new.” We begin sifting through possibilities that might permit our economic independence. We have illusions of neither ease nor grandeur ahead. We are, indeed, going off to launch a lemonade stand, but we both know I'll drape it in old damask and pour the lemonade into thin, crystal goblets.

We're running out of time. Ruthlesslessly, we narrow our geography to a patch of southern Tuscany. Sunday morning rain falls in
leaden sheets, the windshield wipers beat a dirge. We head toward Chianciano, Sarteano, Cetona, then up a mountain road where we've never been. We wind up and up to the crest full of pine and oak woods. It's beautiful. “Where are we going?” Fernando asks and I tell him the map promises the tiny village of San Casciano dei Bagni.

“Roman baths. Thermal waters to cure problems of the eye. Medieval towers. Population, 200.” I read the facts in a fake, cheery voice. The descent is less sinuous until it becomes more so, until the last, brusque veer to the left and then—just as it's been for one or the other or both of us at other moments in this life of ours together—nothing is the same. The road ends and we stop the car.

Straight ahead, up a hill, we see the village towers, looming out of the mist. It seems a place conjured. Miniature, heaped-up stone houses, red Tuscan roofs polished by the rain, clouds wrapping it, concealing it, before the wind blows it clean and we see it's real. Leaving the car below, we walk up the slope to the village. A man with a single wide, sharp tooth and a navy beret sits in the hush of the piazza's only bar, still as furniture. We tiptoe up to him and begin a gentle interrogation.

He tells us two families own most everything in and around the town. These are the ancestors of warring factions, medieval enemies of the blood, and we can be certain neither one of them will sell even an olive tree. He says they survive by minimally remodeling one
property at a time and then renting it long-term to artists, writers, actors, and anyone else prepared to pay a high price for Tuscan solitude.

He seems to know everything. He is the sacristan of San Leonardo, on his way, now, to lead a funeral march from the church down to the cemetary.
“Infarto
. Heart attack,” he tell us. “Valerio was standing right where you're standing only yesterday, and after we took our morning
grappina
together he went home and he died,
poveraccio
, poor man. Only eighty-six he was.” He says we can walk along with the mourners if we'd like, that it might be a good way to get to know people, but we decline.

In parting, he urges us to chat with the matriarch of one of the dominant families. There's work being done on one of her properties,
un podere
, a farmhouse, on the road to Celle sul Rigo, a few yards outside the village. “She's eighty-nine and ferocious,” he warns. When we knock on her door, she shrieks down from the third floor that she wants nothing to do with any witnesses of Jehovah. We tell her we're only Venetians looking for a house. All blue hair and cheekbones, she is hesitant, but we lure her into parting with the truth that there is reconstruction in progress on one of her farmhouses. Yes, we can see it, but not today. No, it is not for sale. She has yet to decide on the rent, and do we know how many people from Rome have been waiting for how many years to rent a house in this area? We say that all we know is that this a beautiful village,
that we'd like to live here. Come back next week, she says. We hike up the road to the house, circling it again and again, searching for reasons not to fight for it. We can't find one.

Made of crudely cut stone, taller than it is wide, it's a sober place whose spare garden spills out and down to a meadow and a sheep-fold and then down further onto the lane that twists back up to the village. We stand at the edge of the garden under a vault of still-weeping Tuscan sky. There is no epiphany, no great jubilation. We do not see stars at noon in the rain. But softly entranced we are, as if kissed by a witch with half her powers. We look to the village and the chain of yellow and green valleys pleated and tucked around and beyond it, to the Cassia, the ancient road to Rome. It is a humble estate, and, perhaps, a good place for us to be.

There's a second-story window that has been left open just a crack, so I step from the little porch up onto some crude scaffolding, raise the window higher and catapult myself into a bathroom, onto a floor of brutally ugly, just-laid, puce-colored tile. The stranger follows me inside and, wandering through it, we tell each other it feels like home.