A Thousand Days in Venice (6 page)

I call my children. I call my attorney. Fernando calls me. I call Fernando. Was it all going to be this simple? I pull off my good black dress and pull on jeans and boots, remembering I had to place an order with the meat purveyor before ten. I ring up Mr. Wasserman without thinking first what I'd cook for that evening's menu. I hear myself telling him I'll need baby lamb shanks, fifty of them. I'd never yet cooked baby lamb shanks at the café. Used to my orders for game and veal, Mr. Wasserman misses half a beat, then assures me they”ll be delivered before three. “How will you cook them?” he wants to know.

“I'll braise them in a saffron tomato broth, lay them over French lentils and add a stripe of black olive paste,” my chef's voice announces without consulting me.

“Write me in for two at seven-thirty, will you?” he says. After a look at the ice-encrusted car, I walk the mile or so to the café, though I'd never once walked to work before. Of course I'd never been romantic about old smoke from an Italian cigarette left behind in my bedroom, either. And those baby lamb shanks. Tramping through high snow that is falling still in earnest, my old white Mother Russia coat trailing, making a soft, scraping noise behind me. I wonder when I will begin, if I will begin at all, to feel sad about all these endings I was sealing. Would there be some late lapse
of courage? Is it, indeed, courage that was shaping my way? Is it bravado? Did I fancy myself some aging armchair swashbuckler setting off, at last, to adventure? No. My friend Misha says I am
la grande cocotte
with flour on my hands. Or ink stains. No, I'd never been an “armchair” anything. And let's go back to why I must anticipate anguish or muddy what was feeling immensely clear. There is nothing I want more than to be with Fernando. Anyway, June seems far off, safely, sadly far away.

As I near the corner of Pershing and DeBalivier I remember there is to be a meeting with my partners before lunch. A father and son, the elder is a rancorous old magistrate, the younger, a gentle-hearted philosopher who is restaurateuring to please his magisterial old papa. That it is papa's choice to never be pleased has yet to impress the son. It's a brief, cool discourse between us, an almost luscious divorce, and we agree that June 15, the day after our last programmed event and one year, to the day, from when I'd moved into my house, would be my last. I call Fernando. He says to book my ticket even though it is only December 19. It is not yet noon, and I've sold my house and drawn up a graceful exit from a piece of my business. All that's left to do now is the slow braising of fifty baby lamb shanks.

Before Fernando returned to Venice, we had scribbled a time line of sorts, establishing priorities and settling on definitive dates by which everything would be accomplished. It was he who thought it best to sell the house immediately rather than rent it for a while, to wait and see. Sell the car, too, he had said. And the few pieces of good artwork, the furnishings. I should come to Italy with only those things that were absolutely
indispensabili
. I balked until I remembered the talk I'd already had with myself about “house, fancy car, etc.” Still, I thought him callous, talking as he did about the house as though it were only a pretty container in which I would wait until it was time to go, a nicely decorated launchpad. But, also, I remembered another talk I'd had with myself after knowing Fernando only a few days. He needed to lead.

I already knew how to lead. For better and for worse, I had always been more than ready to carve away at life whenever the fates
left me a little room. But he had been a sleepy observer of his life, watching its events and embracing them in a kind of passive obedience. He said that telephoning me that afternoon when we first saw each other in Venice and, more, chasing me back to America were among the first acts of sheer will he'd ever dared to undertake. Fragile, I think. There is a new gossamer-thin self-awareness about him, and Fernando needs desperately to be in charge. So be it. As much as I know how to lead I know how to follow, when I trust someone. But I know, too, that the following sometimes chafes.

“Let's just begin at the beginning,” said he who'd lived his most of his life in two apartments on an island less than a mile wide and seven miles long, said he who'd gone to work in a bank at age twenty-three when what he really wanted was to fly airplanes and play the saxophone. Yet, unsolicited, his father had secured a post for him and then laid out a new suit and shirt and tie on his bed, new shoes on the floor below it, and told Fernando they'd be waiting for him at the bank at eight the next morning. He went. And he goes there still. It was curious, his telling me to be a beginner when so many things in his life would remain exactly as they were. Or would they?

And so I had to decide what would go over the sea and what would stay, and the most puzzling things made the short list. A small oval table, black, marble-topped with ornate carved legs; nearly a
hundred crystal wineglasses (going to the kingdom of hand-blown glass!); too many books, too few photos, fewer clothes than I thought I would take (the waitresses in the café were presented with a life's worth of Loehmann's and Syms's final markdowns); an old Ralph Lauren quilt; a set of antique sterling flatware (packed and shipped separately for reasons of security and which never arrived in Venice); and pillows, dozens of small, less small, tasseled, corded, ruffled, chintz, silk, tapestry, velvet pillows, like so many pieces of so many places where I'd lived. Small evidences of past lives, I thought. Proof of my well-decorated nests. Were they, perhaps, to cushion my landing?

Much of the rest, I divvied up into small legacies. Sophie was transforming a spare bedroom into an office; hence, she got the French desk. I knew my friend Luly wanted the baker's rack, and so we stuffed it into the backseat of her car one evening. There were many such scenes. And rather than being sad at parting with so much, I found my new and relative minimalism exhilarating. I felt as though I'd weeded, scrubbed, dug in the earth clear down to China.

My waiting days were full. The café in the morning, writing in the afternoon, back to the café for final prep. I fitted in meetings,
way out on the godforsaken edges of the city, with the Italian consulate, which comprised a battered old wooden desk, an older Smith Corona portable, and an older yet
palermitana
—a woman from Palermo—the wife of the insurance agent in whose office the consulate was situated.
La signora
was aubergine-haired, thick at her middle, and had spindly legs. Her fingernails were painted bright red, and she sucked at cigarettes in a hungry, hollow-cheeked way. She somehow pulled the smoke up into her nose and into her mouth at the same time, then tilted her head back and sent the last wisps of it curling upward, all the while holding the smoldering thing between those red-tipped fingers and up close to her cheek. She whispered a lot. It was as though her husband—two yards away and seated at a huge formica desk—shouldn't be privy to our discourse. She pecked away on the Smith Corona, preserving my life's story on sheaves of official paper provided by the Italian government.

My personal data, my motive for moving to Italy, testimonies of my free and unmarried state and my upright citizenship, the size of the bankroll with which I would enter my new country, premarital documents to satisfy the state, premarital documents to satisfy the church—all were transcribed. It was a work that might have been accomplished in less than forty efficient minutes, but the lady from Palermo saw fit to extend the task over four full-morning congresses. The signora wanted to talk. She wanted to be sure, she whispered
through her smoke, I knew what I was doing. “What do you know about Italian men?” she challenged, from under her dark-shadowed, half-closed eyes. I only smiled. Miffed at my silence, she typed faster and stamped the papers viciously, repeatedly, with the great inked seal of the Italian state. She tried again. “They're all
mammoni
, mama's boys. That's why I married an American. Americans are less
furbi
, less cunning,” she whispered. “All they want is a big-screen television, to play golf on Saturday, go off to Rotary Club on Wednesday, and to watch, once in a while, when you're dressing. They never complain about food as long as it's meat and it's hot and it's served before six o'clock. Have you ever cooked for an Italian man?,” she whispered more loudly.

As her inquiries became more intimate, she typed and stamped more furiously. She told me to leave my money in an American bank, to put my furniture in storage. I'd be back within a year, she said. She saved for last her story of the Illinois blonde who divorced her handsome politician husband to marry a Roman who already had a wife whom he kept in Salerno and, as it turned out, a Dutch boyfriend to whom he made monthly visits in Amsterdam. I paid her arbitrary and exaggerated fees, took my thick, perfectly executed portfolio, accepted her airy Marlboro-scented kisses, and drove away, wondering about this compulsion some women seemed to have about saving me from the stranger.

The evenings I spent almost always alone, in a soft sort of idleness. Before leaving the café, I'd pack up some small choice thing for my supper and be home by eight. I'd pull Fernando's same old woolen undershirt, still unwashed, over my nightgown, light a fire in one room or another, and pour a glass of wine. Looking for that same good sensation of having
weeded, scrubbed, and dug clear down to China
, which I'd earned from sorting through my material cache, now I wanted to look at things more spiritual than silver teapots and armoires. I wanted to be ready for this marriage.

I challenged ghosts, looking backward into long-ago shadows lit with old, strangely palpable tableaux. I could see my grandmother's sweet, teary eyes and the two of us kneeling by her bed to say the rosary. I always finished before she finished because I skipped every third bead. She knew, but she never scolded me. I learned about mystery from her. Or maybe it was that mystery was as natural and easy for both of us as it was to weep or weed the scrawny patch of hollyhocks and zinnias against the shed out back. It was easy to walk down to Rosy's or to the coffee lady's, up the three steep steps and into Perreca's for two loaves of bread—one round crunchy loaf for supper, one round crunchy loaf for the block-and-a-half walk back home. She was contained, closed even, to most others, but together my grandmother and I would tell secrets. When I was still too young to really understand, she told me about her little boy.

He was five, I think, or perhaps younger, and each morning she would awaken him before the rest of the family, sending him to race across the narrow street in front of the house to the railroad tracks to gather coal for the old iron stove. Together, then, they would make a fire, set the coffee brewing and the bread toasting, before they tugged everyone else awake. One morning, as she stood at the kitchen window, watching him as she always did, a short line of B&O freight wagons came careening around the curve, way off schedule. Out of nowhere. Her screaming choked by hurtling steel, she watched the train crush her baby. Walking alone to where he lay, wrapping him in her skirts, she carried him home.

When my babies were born and, maybe even before that, I began to understand why she'd freely told me the story that she'd never been able to recount to anyone in the then half century since its happening. Of course, people knew the story, but no one had ever heard it from her. She'd lived through the most horrific of human injuries, and her telling of it was a legacy: it gave me a perspective that would serve me always, a prism through which I would examine my own injuries, to give their weight and their solution a just energy.

I had far too few days to spend with my grandmother. I used to wish I was older than all her children, older than she was, so I could take care of her. But she died alone in the early twilight of a
December afternoon. Snow fell. And the rags of my illusion about family died with her. The pain of childhood loneliness still haunts me. But life was round, sweet during those flitting moments when my grandmother was holding my hand, whenever she was close enough for me to catch the scent of her. It is still.

In those solitary evenings by my fire I found finely spun threads, a pattern, my own story. I opened up the kind of memory that feels like a wistful hankering for something lost or something that never was. I think most of us have it, this potentially destructive habit of mental record-keeping that builds, distorts, then breaks up and spreads into even the farthest flung territories of reason and consciousness. What we do is accumulate the pain, collect it like cranberry glass. We display it, stack it up into a pile. Then we stack it up into a mountain so we can climb up onto it, waiting for, demanding sympathy, salvation. “Hey, do you see this? Do you see how big my pain is?” We look across at other people's piles and measure them, shouting, “My pain is bigger than your pain.” It's all somehow like the medieval penchant for tower building. Each family demonstrated its power with the height of its own personal tower. One more layer of stone, one more layer of pain, each one a measure of power.