A Thousand Days in Venice (26 page)

All the floating pieces drop into place. The apartment is really sold. Fernando has really retired from the bank. The blue-haired
matriarch agreed to a two-year lease, and we really are going to live in a tiny Tuscan village. Though we are free to move in during the first days of May, we decide to pack leisurely and depart Venice on June 15. With our long dramas quieted, we want simply
to be
in Venice and then to part with her peacefully.

We perform a ceremony of the dead for the alarm clock, but still Fernando wakes each morning precisely half an hour before sunrise. His groans of disbelief wake me, and soon we're both on our feet. I pull an Aereonautica Militare sweatshirt over one of Victoria's oldest Secrets, slip into Wellies. Fernando wears Ray-Bans even in the dark, and we stumble across the road to watch the sea and the sky light up. In our folkloric costumes we are Maggion's first customers, and we take our paper tray of warm apricot
cornetti
and the old Bialetti coffee maker, steaming and sputtering, back to bed. Sometimes we doze a bit, but usually we dress and head down to the boats.

Fernando carries a small yellow portfolio everywhere, filled with articles on olive farming and his designs for the bread oven that he'll build from the ruins of an outdoor fireplace in the garden in Tuscany. He has planted in little plastic pots twelve eight-inch-high olive trees that he plans to transplant down the western slope of the garden. He's calculating that his first harvest will happen, if all goes reasonably well, in twenty-five years and will yield a cup and a third of oil. He packs one box or carton or suitcase each day with the hand-wringing glee of a boy off to summer camp.

“I'm so exciting,” he says fifty times a day in his weird English. I look at him sometimes and wonder how he'll fare out there on dry land behind the lemonade stand rather than in a palazzo sitting above the lagoon, behind a marble-topped desk.

“You know, we're likely going to be poor, at least for a while,” I tell him.

“We're already poor,” he reminds me. “Like any under-capitalized business, like any under-capitalized life, we'll have to be patient. Big way. Small way. Hard. Not so hard. If we can't make one thing work, we'll make another thing work.”

On our last Saturday morning he says, “Show me a part of Venice you think I've never seen.” So we ride the vaporetto to the Zattere. Even though we've already had two breakfasts, I pull him into Nico and order three hazelnut gelatos drowned in espresso. “Three, why three?” he wants to know. I just take the extra cup and the extra little wooden spoon and tell him to follow me. We walk the few yards to the Squero San Trovaso, the oldest workshop in all the city, where gondolas are still built and repaired. I introduce my husband to Federico Tramontin, a third-generation gondola builder, who is sanding the prow of a new boat with two hands, his arms stretched out taut. He tells Fernando he's using jeweler's sandpaper, fine enough to smooth gold. He knows I already know this. I hand him his gelato and Fernando and I sit on a plank off to the side, each one of us stirring and sipping at the luscious potion. We say a word or two about
the weather and then another word or two about what a pleasure it's been to have spent this time together. I'm still in the lead as I draw Fernando up to a tiny storefront travel agency, in whose grimy window there is posted a hand-wrought sign, an old invitation from Yeats.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

I translate the words for Fernando and tell him that when I came upon this sign during my first few weeks in Venice, I had thought the poem was for him, that
he
was the lost child; now, though, I sometimes think it's
me
who is a bit lost. But which one of us is not? Which one of us does not long to be hand in hand with a faery who knows more than we do about this sad world? That's marriage, taking turns being the lost child, being the faery.

The shops are just opening when we come, on another morning, to walk in the Strada Nuova. Everything echoes here. A man whistles while he sweeps outside his shop, where he sells rubber boots and fishing gear, and a man across the way is polishing smooth-skinned violet eggplants and laying them in a wooden box and he whistles the same song. They are a coincidental duet. Water purling up against the
fondamenta
, the embankment; bells, foghorns, feet
shuffling up a bridge, down a bridge. Everything resonates. Sometimes I think Venice has no present, that she is made all of memories, the old ones and those
aldilà
, beyond. New memories, old memories are the same in Venice. Here there are only encores of a diaphanous
pas de deux. Veni etiam
, come back again. A Latin invitation from which, some say, Venice was named. Even the name is a reflection. Which image is the real image? The one reflected? The one reflecting? I touch Fernando's face as I look at it, mirrored, shimmering in the canal.

“Who do you think we'll be when we're old?” I ask him.

“Well, by some standards, we
are
old so I guess we'll be as we are right now. But the truth is I'm not sure we'll have time to really get old, what with one beginning and another,” he says.

“Do you think you'll miss Venice very much?” I ask him.

“I'm not sure, but whenever we miss being here, we'll just come back to visit,” he says.

“I want to come back every year for the Festa del Redentore,” I tell him.

Palladio built the church of the Redeemer, in 1575, on the island of Guidecca, across from San Marco, in thanksgiving for the ending of yet another long siege of the plague. And each year since, the Venetians have rejoiced with their own sacred hallelujah of sails and lights and water. On the prescribed afternoon in July, every Venetian
with a boat converges in the Bacino San Marco at the mouth of the Guidecca Canal, and the festival begins. The boats are draped in flowers and flags and are so dense in the water, one can pass a glass of wine to one sitting in the boat next door. One throws a sweater to a friend, a box of matches to another. And if the boats are small enough, boards or an old door can be balanced between them, an impromtu table for
aperitivi
together.

The feast of the Redentore is a reunion, when the Venetians celebrate themselves. They are saying,
“Siamo Veneziani
. We are Venetians. Look at us. See how we've survived. Shepherds and farmers, we survived to become fishermen and sailors who built up lives where there was no land. We've survived Goths and Longobards, Tartars and Persians and Turks. Pests and emperors and popes, we've survived them, too. And, we are still here.”

Everything is ritual on the night of the Redeemer. As the sun sets, candles are lit on the prows, makeshift tables are set, and supper is served: pots full of pasta and beans tied up in linen towels and braised lagoon duck stuffed with sausages, fried sardines and sole in
saor
. Demijohns of Incrocio Manzoni and Malbec empty at an alarming pace; watermelon awaits midnight. It is the festival when one sees that figments and chimera are real; when fireworks are as normal as stars, their light another side of the moon. Everyone stays on the water until, at two or so, like a tired, victorious flotilla, the great
white sails and the small patched ones inhale the soft wet breeze and move, to the sound of mandolins, slowly, slowly up-lagoon toward the Lido to watch the Redeemer's sunrise.

“It's my festival, too,” I tell Fernando. “I'm Venetian as much as if I were born here. I'm Venetian, Fernando. I'm more Venetian than you,” I say.

We had agreed that there would be no weeping farewell to Venice, but as I pull the sticky brown tape tight across the flaps of another box, I wonder how Fernando can be leaving so cavalierly. I don't want to leave her. Usually so good at tucking and rolling the ending of one thing into the beginning of the next, I just can't seem to do that now. I remember the very first time I left Venice. That was long before my life with the stranger. So many years have passed since then. I had stayed just two weeks that first visit and, already smitten, it was sad leaving her. Of course it was raining.

The early mist is soft and warm on my face. The gilded putti I'd bought for my children from Gianni Cavalier and wrapped in a dozen folds of
La Nuova Venezia
are safe in a sack hung from my wrist. I tug the still-damnable black suitcase back over the stones and stairs. My heels, clicking more confidently than when I had first arrived, are the only sounds in the predawn of the Sottoportego de le Acque. Though it is a longer walk than it would have been to the Rialto, I want to take the boat from San Zaccaria, to be in the piazza once more. Marooned it seems, a tenantless village in a
pewter sea. It is so beautiful. I walk across the Piazzetta, past the bell tower, out between the columns of San Teodoro and the lion of San Marco. Just as I turn left toward the
pontile,
la Marangona rings six long woeful bells. I feel the sound in my chest as much as in my ears and I turn to look back a moment, wondering what it might mean when the solemn old thing rings out one's departure rather than one's arrival
.

It's hard to tell tears from rain as I turn toward the boat. I ride Piazzale Roma with only the railway workers for company. Certain that I am in flight from some great sadness, some ending or spurning, they offer me a collective, wordless sympathy. Less than an hour has passed, and I'm already missing Fiorella and my funny little room on the second floor of her
pensione.
She has packed
panini:
small thickly buttered breads laid with the thin, crisp veal cutlets she had fried the evening before. I eat one of the sandwiches every hour or so, making them last through the short flight from
Venice to Milan and then through two deplanings and reboardings, nearly all the way home
. . . .

It's not as though we're never coming back, Fernando assures me. When the last day arrives, we go to down to the sea and watch the sunrise and take our
cornetti
back to bed, which is a mattress on the floor now that all the furniture is on its way to Tuscany. We ride over the waters and walk as we have always done and stop in at Do Mori, then on to tea in the far corner of Harry's Bar. We talk about all the things we have to do in San Casciano. We go back home to
rest, to bathe one last time in the black-and-white marble bathroom. As we dress we say we'll have supper not in a place where we always go but at Conte Pescaor, a shack behind Campo San Zulian. We want a feast of Adriatic fish, and the Venetian boy I married thinks it's the last best seafood restaurant in Venice. On its dusty, screened verandah with its necklace of plastic lights we drink an icy Cartizze with a
frittura mixta
, a mixed fry of sea fish. We eat baked mussels and sauteed scallops and eel roasted with bay leaves. The waiter uncorks a '90 Recioto de Capitelli for us, and, because someone nearby is eating roasted razor clams, we do too, and then fried dog fish and just a taste of baked sea bass and fried red snapper. It's ten minutes before one in the morning when we say
buona notte
to the sleepy waiters. We walk slowly out into San Marco.

After midnight the boats run only at ninety-minute intervals. We have time. I sit side-saddle on the back of the pink marble lion in the Piazzetta. “We're going to change more than she will,” I tell him. “When we return, even if we return next week, nothing will feel as it feels right now. I've been here more than a thousand days.” A thousand days. A minute. A flash. Just like life I think. I hear her whisper:
Take my hand and grow young with me; don't rush; be a beginner; weave pearls in your hair; grow potatoes; light the candles; keep the fire; dare to love someone; tell yourself the truth; stay inside the rapture
. He helps me down from my saddle. It's time to go. I don't want to go. I feel as I did
when I was seven or eight on a string of August evenings spent at the carnival with Uncle Charlie. He would always place ten red tickets in my open hand and help me up onto the black horse with the silver spots. And every time the music slowed and sounded crushed and my horse stood still, I'd tear off another ticket as if I was tearing off a piece of my heart and offer it up to the collector man. I'd hold my breath, and finally we'd be off again, round and round and round.

I always used my ten tickets in a row. Up there on the black horse with the silver spots I was a brave rider, galloping hard and fast, leaping over water and through dark forests, on my way to the house with the golden windows. I knew they'd be waiting for me there. I just knew they'd be there at the door and they'd take me inside and there'd be a fire and candles and warm bread and good soup and we'd eat together and we'd laugh. They would take me upstairs to my very own bed and tuck me tightly between the soft covers; they'd kiss me a million times and sing to me till I fell asleep, all the while saying they'd always loved me, always would. But ten tickets were never enough to reach the house with the golden windows. Ten red tickets. A thousand days. “Time to go,” Uncle Charlie would say, helping me down.

“Time to go,” says Fernando. I want to cry out to her, but no
sound comes. I want to say,
I love you, tattered, wicked Princess. I love you. Moody old Byzantine mum in resewn skirts, I love you. Pearly muse rouged in cinnamon, how I love you
. My husband, who, a thousand days ago was a stranger, hears my silence. And he tells me, “She loves you, too. Always has. Always will.”

When I served this dish to the stranger in Saint Louis at our very first supper together, he told me right away that he didn't like leeks. I fibbed and called them scallions, and he left me with a dish so clean I hardly had to wash it. Later, when I sheepishly confessed I'd served him leeks, he waited months to forgive me. But now he searches out leeks in the market, buying armloads of them, so we can try to make enough of this lovely stuff to satisfy us both.