A Thousand Days in Venice (3 page)

Five hours have passed since I left the hotel. I call my friends who are still waiting there, and I vow to meet them and my baggage directly at the airport. The last flight to Naples is at seven-twenty. The Grand Canal is improbably empty, free of the usual tangle of skiffs and gondolas and
sandoli
, permitting the
tassista
to race his water taxi, lurching it, slamming it down brutally onto the water. Peter Sellers and I stand outside in the wind and ride into a lowering, dark red sun. I pull a silver flask from my purse and a tiny, thin glass from a velvet pouch. I pour out cognac and we sip together. Again, he looks as if he's going to kiss me, and this time he does—temples, eyelids, before he finds my mouth. We're not too old.

We exchange numbers and business cards and addresses, having no more powerful amulets. He asks if he might join us later in the week wherever we might be. It isn't a good idea, I tell him. As best I know it, I give him our itinerary so we might be able to say good morning or good evening once in a while. He asks when I'll be returning home, and I tell him.

Eighteen days later, and only two after I'd set down again in the United States, Fernando arrives in Saint Louis, his first-ever journey to America. Trembling, pale as ashes, he walks through the gate. He'd missed his connection at JFK, racing not fast enough over a space wider than the Lido, the island off Venice where he lives. The flight had been by far the longest period he'd suffered without a cigarette since he was ten years old. He takes the flowers I hold out to him, and we go home together as though we always had, always would.

Coat and hat and gloves and muffler still in place, he moves softly through the house as though trying to recognize something. Startled that the Sub-Zero is a refrigerator, he opens one of its door expecting to find a clothes closet. “Ma è grandissimo,” he marvels.

“Are you hungry?” I ask him, beginning to rattle about in the kitchen. He eyes a small basket of tagliatelle I'd rolled and cut that afternoon.

“Do you have fresh pasta also in America?” he asks, as though that fact would be akin to finding a pyramid in Kentucky.

I start the bath for him, as I would for my child or an old lover, pour in sandlewood oil, light candles, place towels and soaps and shampoo on a table nearby. I set down a tiny glass of Tio Pepe. After an alarmingly long passage of time, he saunters into the living room, splendid, wet hair slicked back flat. He wears a vintage dark green woolen robe, one of whose pockets is torn and bulging with a package of cigarettes. Burgundy argyle socks are hiked up over his thin knees, his feet tucked into big, suede slippers. I tell him he looks like Rudolf Valentino. He likes this. I've set our places on the low table in front of the living-room fire. I hand him a glass of red wine, and we sit on cushions. He likes this, too. And so I have supper with the stranger.

There is a white oval dish of braised leeks tossed in crème fraîche, spritzed with vodka, bubbling, golden under a crust of Emmenthaler and Parmesan. I don't know how to say “leek” in Italian, and so I have to get up to find my dictionary. “Ah,
porri
,” he says. “I don't like
porri
.” I quickly rifle the pages again, pretending to have made an error.

“No, they're not
porri;
these are
scalogni
,” I lie to the stranger.

“I've never tasted them,” he says, taking a bite. As it turns out, the stranger very much likes leeks, as long as they are called shallots.
Then there are the tagliatelle, thin yellow ribbons in a roasted walnut sauce. We are comfortable, uncomfortable. We smile more than we talk. I try to tell him a little about my work, that I'm a journalist, that I write mostly about food and wine. I tell him I'm a chef. He nods indulgently but appears to find my credentials less than compelling. He seems content with silence. I've made a dessert, one I haven't made in years, a funny-looking cake made from bread dough, purple plums, and brown sugar. The thick black juices of the fruit, mingled with the caramelized sugar, give up a fine treacly steam, and we put the cake between us, eating it from the battered old pan I baked it in. He spoons up the last of the plummy syrup, and we drink the heel of the red wine. He gets up and comes over to my side of the table. He sits next to me, looks at me full face, then gently turns my face a bit to the right, holding my chin in his hand.
“Si, questa è la mia faccia,”
he tells me in a whisper. “Yes, this is my face. And I desire now to go with you to your bed.” He pronounces these words slowly, clearly, as though he's practiced them.

When he sleeps it's with his cheek against my shoulder, an arm anchoring my waist. I lay awake, stroking his hair. There's a Venetian in my bed, I say almost audibly. I press my mouth to the top of his head and remember again that brusquely delivered assignment I'd received so many years before from my editor: “Spend two weeks in Venice and come back with three feature pieces. We'll send a
photographer up from Rome,” she'd said, without any good-bye. Why didn't we find each other on that first trip? Probably because my editor never told me to come back with a Venetian. Here he sleeps, though, a stranger with long, skinny legs. But now I must sleep, too. Sleep, I tell myself. But I don't sleep. How can I sleep? I remember the sort of ranging aloofness I'd always suffered about Venice. I'd always found a way to put her off. Once I traveled nearly to the edges of her watery skirts, jaunting over the autostrada from Bergamo to Verona to Padova when, only twenty miles away, I turned my little white Fiat abruptly south toward Bologna. Yet, after the old jaundice about her had been cured during my first Venetian hours, I'd always dug deeply for reasons to return, begging for writing assignments that might take me anywhere close by, trolling the travel sections for the right, cheap ticket.

I moved to Saint Louis, Missouri, last spring from California, staying in a rented room for two months while house renovations were completed and a little café was launched. By June life had shape: the café, a weekly restaurant review for the
Riverfront Times
, the carving out of a day-by-day route through my new city. Still, wanderlust came flirting. Restless by the first days of November, I'd set off with my friends Silvia and Harold, heading back into Venice's honeyed arms. I never thought I'd be heading for
these
honeyed arms, I think as I press closer to the Venetian.

Mornings, we take to sitting by the kitchen fire, facing each other in the rusty velvet wingback chairs, each with a dual-language dictionary in hand, a full, steaming coffee press, a tiny pitcher of cream, and a plate of buttered scones on the table in front of us. So settled, we speak of our lives.

“I keep trying to remember important things to tell you. You know, about my childhood, about when I was young. I think I am the prototype for Everyman. In the films I would be cast as the man who didn't get the girl.” He is neither sad nor apologetic for his self-image.

One morning he wants to know, “Can you remember your dreams?”

“You mean my night dreams?”

“No. Your daydreams. What you thought you wanted? Who you thought you'd be?” he says.

“Of course I can. I've lived many of them. I wanted to have babies. That was my first big one. After they were born, most of my dreams were about them. And when they grew older, I began to dream a little differently. But I really have lived out so many of my dreams. I'm living them now. I remember the ones that went up in smoke. I remember all of them, and I've always got new ones rolling around. And you?”

“No. Not so much. And until now, always less. I grew up thinking that dreaming was a lot like sinning. The discourses of my childhood from priests and teachers, from my father, they were about logic, reason, morality, honor. I wanted to fly airplanes and play the saxophone. I went away to school when I was twelve, and, believe me, living among Jesuits does little to encourage dreaming. When I went home, which wasn't very often, things were somber there as well. Youth and, especially, adolescence were offensive stages through which almost everyone tried to rush me.”

He is speaking very quickly, and I keep having to ask him to slow down, to explain this word, that word. I'm still back with the Jesuits and the saxophone while he's already onto
la mia adolescenza è stata veramente triste e dura
.

He thinks volume is the solution to my blurred comprehension, and so now he inhales like an aging tenor and his voice swells into thunder. “My father's wish was that I would be quickly
sistemato
, situated, find a job, find a safe path and stay dutifully on it. Early on I learned to want what he wanted. And with time I accumulated layers and layers of barely transparent bandaging over my eyes, over my dreams.”

“Wait,” I plead, flipping pages, trying to find
cerotti
, bandages. “What happened to your eyes? Why were they in bandages?” I want to know.

“Non letteralmente
. Not literally,” he roars. He is impatient. I am a dolt who, after twelve hours of living with an Italian, cannot yet follow the drift of his galloping imagery. He adds a third dimension to bring home his story. He's on his feet. Pulling his socks up over wrinkled knees, arranging his robe, now he is wrapping a kitchen towel around his eyes, peeking out over its edge. The stranger has combined speed and volume with histrionics. Surely that will do it. He continues. “And with yet more time, the weight of the bandages, their encumbrance, became hardly noticeable. Sometimes I would squint and look out under the gauze to see if I could still catch a glimpse of the old dreams in real light. Sometimes I could see them. Mostly it would be more comfortable to just go back under the bandages. That is, until now,” he says quietly, the show finished.

Maybe he's the man who didn't get the girl unless the girl was Tess of the d'Urbervilles or Anna Karenina. Or, perhaps, Edith Piaf, I think. He's so deeply sad, I think again. And he always wants to talk about “time.”

When I ask him why he came racing so quickly across the sea, he tells me he was tired of waiting.

“Tired of waiting? You arrived here two days after I came home,” I remind him.

“No. I mean tired of
waiting
. I understand now about using up my time. Life is this
conto
, account,” said the banker in him. “It's an unknown
quantity of days from which one is permitted to withdraw only one precious one of them at a time. No deposits accepted.” This allegory presents glittering opportunity for more of the stranger's stage work. “I've used so many of mine to sleep. One by one, I've mostly waited for them to pass. It's common enough for one to simply find a safe place to wait it all out. Every time I would begin to examine things, to think about what I felt, what I wanted, nothing touched, nothing mattered more than anything else. I've been lazy. Life rolled itself out and I shambled along
sempre due passi indietro
, always two steps behind.
Fatalità
, fate. Easy. No risks. Everything is someone else's fault or merit. And so now, no more waiting,” he says as though he's talking to someone far away off in the wings.

When it's my turn, I begin to tell him of some milestone or another—when we moved from New York to California, stories about my brief, terrible stint at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, about traveling on my stomach to the remotest parts of France and Italy to find one perfect food or wine. Everything sounds like a case history, and after a short roster of recitals I know that none of it matters in the now, that everything I'd done and been until this minute was preamble. Even in these first days together, it is very clear that this feeling of mine for the stranger has trumped all the other adventures in my life. It has shuffled everything and everyone else I thought I was moving toward or away from. Loving
Fernando is like a single, sharp shake of the stones that lets me read all the patterns that once baffled and sometimes tortured me. I don't pretend to understand these feelings, but I'm willing to let the inexplicable sit sacred. It seems I had my own set of heirloom bandages. Astonishing what a man bearing tenderness can do to open a heart.

He comes to the café with me each morning, helps with the second bake, chopping rosemary and dumping flour into the Hobart. He loves pulling the focaccia out of the oven on the wooden peel, learning to shake the hot, flat bread deftly onto the cooling racks. We always pat out a small one just for us, set it to bake in the place where the oven's hottest so it comes out brown as hazelnuts. We tear at it impatiently, eating it still steaming, burning our fingers. He says he loves my skin when it smells of rosemary and new bread.

Afternoons we stop in at the newspaper office if I have a column to drop off or something to work out with my editor. We walk in Forest Park. We have supper at the café or go to Balaban's or Café Zoe and then downtown to the jazz clubs. He doesn't understand much about geography, and it's three days before he can be convinced that Saint Louis is in Missouri. He says now he understands why the travel agent in Venice was exasperated when he tried to book a ticket for Saint Louis, Montana. Still, he suggests we go to the Grand Canyon for a day, to New Orleans for lunch.