A Thousand Days in Venice (8 page)

In a breezy drive about the island he points out landmarks, personal and cultural. I try to remember how long it's been since I really slept and I compute fifty-one hours. “Please can we go home now?” I ask from my trance. He turns off the Gran Viale Santa Maria Elisabetta, the broad avenue that follows along the seaside of the island, onto a quiet street behind the Film Festival theaters and the very worn chic of the Casino, and then into a narrow
vicolo
, alleyway, framed in old plane trees whose leaves reach across to each other in a cooling arcade. A great iron gate opens onto a drab courtyard lined in skinny, one-Italian-car garages. Above them rise three levels of windows, most all of which are sheathed in
persiane
, corrugated metal privacy curtains. Exactly as he promised it, home is inside a postwar concrete bunker. There is no one there except a very small woman of indeterminate age who darts about the car in a kind of tarantella.

“Ecco Leda
. Here is Leda, our sympathetic gatekeeper,” he says.
“Pazza completa
. Completely crazy.” She is gazing upward, beseeching. Is she emotional because of our arrival? In fact she offers no
greeting, neither uttered, shrugged, nor nodded. “
Ciao
, Leda,” he says, without looking at her or introducing us. Leda gargles out something about not leaving the car in front of the entryway too long.

I try, “
Buona sera, Leda. Io sono Marlena
. Good evening, Leda. I'm Marlena.”

“Sei americana?”
she asks. “Are you American?”

“Si, sono americana,”
I tell her.

“Mi sembra più francese
. You seem more French to me,” she says, as if she means Martian. We unload, she continues the tarantella. Much as I try, I can't resist furtive peeks at her. She is a Faustian troll with black-olive eyes hooded like a hawk's. Over the next three years I will never once hear her laugh, though I will hear her grizzly shrieks and see her fists extended to the heavens more times than I wish to remember. I will learn too that she wears teeth only to mass. But here, now, I romanticize her. All she needs is some tenderness and a warm bitter-chocolate tart, I think.

As we shove and pull my bags along the corridor to the elevator, a few people are in arrival or departure.
Buon giorno. Buona sera
. The dialogue is stingy. We might be hauling cadavers in burlap bags for all they care. On the last trips out to the car, I notice more than one person cantilevered out of as many just-unsheathed windows.
L'americana è arrivata
. The American has arrived. Holding
out for a scene from
Cinema Paradiso
, I wait for at least one black-stockinged, kerchiefed old woman to come forth and press me to a generous bosom scented in rosewater and sage. But there is no one.

Elevators are announcements, and, as much as do entry halls, they tell the house's story. This one, its atmospheric composition oxygen-free after fifty years of carting smoking human cargo, is three feet square, paved in linoleum, and painted a shiny aquamarine. Its cables screech and creek under the weight of more than one of us. I read that it is approved to transport three hundred kilos. We send the bags up alone, a few at a time, while we race up three flights to meet them at the apartment door. We do this six times. Fernando can no longer avoid opening the door. He braves it with,
“Ecco la casuccia
. Behold the little house.”

At first I can't see a thing except the outlines of cartons and cardboard boxes, which seem to be stacked everywhere. Universal Flood aromas lie thick in the air. With the flicking on of an overhead bulb Fernando illuminates the space, and then I know it's a gag. I hope it's a gag. He has taken me to an abandoned space, some third-floor storage room just for laughs, and so that's what I begin to do. I just laugh and giggle,
“Che bellezza
. How lovely,” cupping my face in my hands and shaking my head. Perhaps this is where the black-stockinged old lady comes forth to press me to her bosom and lead
me to my real house. I recognize my handwriting on one of the boxes, and it becomes clear that
this
is my real house. Scoured of all vanities, it is the lair of an ascetic, the mean hut of an acolyte. Savonarola could have lived here, all of it bespeaking reverence for a medieval patina, undisturbed by the passing of time or someone's rifling about with a dust cloth. I have come to live in the shuttered-up gloom of Bleak House. I begin to understand the real meaning of Venetian blinds.

The space is astonishingly small, and I think immediately that this is good, that a tiny bleak house will be easier to reform than a large one. Fernando hugs me from behind. I go about lifting the wretched
persiane
, letting in air and sunlight. The kitchen is a cell with a Playskool stove. In the bedroom there is a bizzare oriental carpet covering one wall, a collection of very old ski medals hang from rusty claw-shaped hooks and, like ashen specters, tatters of curtains float over a windowed door that opens to a cramped terrace piled in paint cans. The bed is a double mattress on the floor, a massive and ornate burled-wood headboard leans against the wall behind it. There is perilous walking in the bathroom, what with missing and broken tiles and the great girth of an ancient washing machine dead center between the sink and the bidet. I notice the washer's hose empties out into the bathtub. There are three other tiny rooms whose stories are too terrible to tell. There is no evidence
of preparation for his bride's arrival, and he is neither fey nor apologetic when he tells me, “A little at a time, we will make things suit us.”

Over and over again he had talked with candor about where and how he lived, that the
where
and
how
were passive symptoms of his life, that the apartment was the space in which he slept, watched television, took a shower. If I am reeling from first-sight shock, it's the fault of my own glossing over. This is neither more nor less than an honest homecoming. It's good that Fernando knows it is for him I have come to Italy, not for his house. Houses are easier to find than are sweet strangers, I think. I think again, this time to a man I knew in California. Jeffrey was an obstetrician, successful, madly in love with Sarah, an artist, starving, who was madly in love with him. After years of fencing, he set Sarah aside for an ophthalmologist, extremely successful, whom he married almost immediately. His rationale was unembarrassed by sentiment. With the doctor, he said, he would have a better house. That is, Jeffrey married a house. This thought soothes me. All this aside, I miss my French canopied bed. I want to drink a good wine out of a beautiful glass. I want a candle and a bath. I want to sleep. As we set about clearing a space on the bed, he says once again what he'd said way back in Saint Louis. “You see, there are
un pò di cosette da fare qui
, a few little things to do here.”

A sickle moon shows in through the tiny, high-set window in the bedroom. I focus on it, trying to quiet myself for sleep. I'm still on the airplane or maybe in the car, on the ferryboat. I have moved through each leg of the day's odyssey at descending speeds. It's as though, at some point during the journey from there to here, a lapse of sorts has occurred, a short death, during which one era passed the keys onto the next. Rather than being delivered to the
edges
of a new life, I am already inside it, through the looking glass and center stage. Sensations are untethered. I can't sleep. How could I sleep? Now it's me lying here in the Venetian's bed. Fernando sleeps. His breath is warm, constant on my face. Searching for rhythms? Here is a rhythm I think. Very softly I begin to sing. “I can't stop loving you.” A lullabye. If it's so that dreams dreamed just before waking are true, what are dreams dreamed just before sleeping? I fall into half-dreams. Half-true?

The scents of coffee and a newly shaven stranger awaken me. He is standing over the bed with a tray on which sit a tiny battered coffeepot, steaming, and cups, spoons, and sugar in a sack. The house terrifies me in the morning light, but he is luminous. We decide to work for two hours, that whatever order we can wrest from the rubble by then will be enough for the first day. By eleven we are racing down the stairs. He wants to ride out to Torcello, where we can talk and rest and be alone, he says. “Why Torcello?” I ask.

“Non lo so esattamente
. I don't know exactly. Perhaps because that crumble of earth is even older than Venice.” He wants us to begin at the beginning. “Today's my birthday, our birthday, isn't it?” he wants to know.

We settle ourselves on the prow of the vaporetto facing into the
wind. It's neither possible nor necessary to speak out there; we squeeze hands. He kisses my eyelids, and, with flapping seagulls for escort, we glide under a Tiepolo sky through abiding lagoons, past abandoned thimblesful of sand, islets that once were market gardens and sheepfolds. We lurch up against the dock at Canale Borgognoni. Torcello is the ancient mother of Venice, in her lonely yellow leaf. Primitive echoes drift. Here there is a whispering up of secrets:
Take my hand and grow young with me; don't rush, don't sleep; be a beginner; light the candles; keep the fire; dare to love someone; tell yourself the truth; stay inside the rapture
.

It is past two and, with roaring appetite, we take a table under the trees at Ponte del Diavolo, the Devil's Bridge, to eat wood-roasted lamb, arugula dressed with the lamb's own charry juices, and heft after heft of good bread. We eat soft mountain cheeses scribbled with chestnut honey. We sit for a long time until only we are there to keep company with the old waiter—the same one who I remember had served me
risotto coi bruscandoli
, risotto with hop shoots, when I first came to Torcello years before. He still wears a salmon-colored silk cravat and a middle part in his pomaded hair. I like this. Amid so many changes, I feel sympathy in these unbroken facts. Beatifically, the waiter folds napkins as we, also beatifically, dawdle over black cherries, plucked one by one, from a bowl of icy water.

Raised up upon direct order from God to the bishop of Altinum Torcello's Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta is a bedizened shrine to a Byzantine king. Inside its great cavern, the air feels charged, haunted, holy. A great elongated and shadowy Virgin of Byzantium holding Christ looks out, pitiless, from the conch of the apse. A country church with no parish. I ask a monk in brown robes about the hours when mass is said. He brushes past me and floats beyond a tapestry-draped door, my Italian too rustic to earn his response, perhaps. Outside, I run my hand across the marble throne smoothed by a million hands before mine, since the time when Attila sat there, orchestrating doom among the wind-whipped weeds. I want to sleep out there in that meadow, to rest in its prickly grasses and memories. I want to sleep where the first Venetians slept, sixth-century fugitive fishermen and shepherds in search of peace and freedom. From here, the apartment and its medieval patina seem a small business.

To return to the Lido to rest and change seems a waste of time, we say, and so we debark from the boat at San Marco. Since I have packed my purse like an overnight bag, the ladies' room at the Monaco will be my dressing room. More than once have its aqua and peachy chintz comforts provided me succor. As I sit before the mirror, I somehow think of New York, of 488 Madison Avenue and Herman Associates, how I trundled into the city from upstate four days each week to write ad copy and “learn the business.” The
Hermans would love that I've come across the sea to marry the stranger. They would take credit for having long ago stirred my sense of adventure. After all, it was they who sent me off to present an ad campaign to the government of Haiti just weeks after Baby Doc fled.

I remember the two men wearing greasy jeans and wide smiles who accompanied me across an airstrip to a graffitied van and drove, wordless and pell-mell, through what were the most sorrowful scenes of human desperation and the most heart-stopping vistas of natural beauty I have ever seen. Later that first evening, I lay in my hotel bed under a canopy of patched mosquito netting, breathing in the thick, sweet air, listening to the drums. Just as in the movies. Except where is that man from Interpol, the one with the silver hair and a white dinner jacket, who should be slipping into my room just about now, enlisting me as accomplice in a night's treachery?

I saw no other American or European woman the week I was in Haiti, the other New York agencies having dispatched fresh-faced boys upholstered in dark blue. An officer of the police force was also a member of the tourism committee. Kind enough to rest his automatic weapon on the table, he sat next to me. My hand brushed the leather strap of it each time I picked up a piece of paper. I began my pitch nervously but gained strength, momentum even, and returned to New York with the account.

Sitting here now, in front of this mirror, I remember racing from the Madison Avenue office most evenings after work to sit for a few moments in front of another mirror, one in the ladies' room at Bendel's. A dose of civility before boarding the five-fifty-seven up-line to Poughkeepsie, collecting the children, cooking, supping, homework, baths, the extended tucking-in ceremonies. “Mom, I know exactly who I want to be for Halloween,” Erich would say every night, beginning in July.