NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (34 page)

They all laughed at me, so bored and frustrated were they on a chilly night with no cars. There were more of them farther on, standing on the street, lurking in the driveways, in black slacks and blue suits. Some were Africans, a few might have been Germans or Slovenians, Bosnian refugees, recently liberated Albanians. Apart from me, they were the only pedestrians, and yet they were not walking, but rather actively standing, posturing, hallooing, waiting to be picked up by cars that went by. And after a while a few cars did go by, very slowly, the drivers appraising the women.

Fellini would have loved it: the bourgeois neighborhood, the expensive cars, the windy nights, the whores scattered among the villas, the shrieks and catcalls.

Seven or eight young boys went down the street and began teasing them, but the prostitutes stood their ground, jeering at the boys, questioning their virility.

“You’ve got nothing down there, boy!”

In the Via Gambalunga, also on a “nice” street (dentists’ offices, villas, apartment houses), there was the “Club Riche Monde—Cabaret” and in small print
No one under 21 Admitted
and
Porno Show.
This also seemed Fellini-esque—degradation in a respectable neighborhood. As a younger man, ravenous for experience, I would have gone in. But it was after midnight, and I knew what was inside: expensive drinks and exhibitionism, and the kind of shakedown that makes you ashamed of how predictable the libido is. That, and the feeling of unease I got in the presence of public sex, like the irritation I felt when I saw comic books and porno mags all jumbled together on the newsstand. I went back to my hotel and read a book. Nowadays I did not want to put myself in the hands of pimps.

Another Fellini episode occurred the next day in Rimini. I was walking along one of the main streets and a bus lurched to a halt, and the passengers began banging on the windows. The driver had barricaded them in by locking the exit door, and a crowd gathered around the bus to watch the passengers arguing and struggling to get out. The police were summoned,
and so were the ticket collectors from a nearby bus stop. There was fury inside the bus.

Ten African girls were gesticulating and howling in Italian. Then the doors opened and some old women got out. The African girls were still yelling at the driver. The police questioned them. “Where’s your ticket?” “Don’t touch me!” “We’re all together!”

An Italian dwarf in a silk suit, smoking reflectively, stood near me to watch.

“What’s up?”

“Tickets,” he said.

The crowd grew around the bus, and now the African girls were screaming. They were Somalis or Sudanese or Eritreans, from the old Italian colonies and mission stations. It was hard to tell where they came from because they were so thoroughly urbanized, each one in an expensive wig and tight pants and heavy makeup—purple lips, glittering mascara. It was a showdown, and it went on for about twenty minutes, but at the end the girls were triumphant, and they screamed abuse at the spectators and waved their bus tickets and swore at the driver. The police shrugged. The bus drove off.

Not all encounters between Africans and Italians are so jolly. The Violence Observatory, a Rome-based organization that monitors such incidents, reported that an average of at least one attack a day on foreigners was recorded in 1993, and the figures were higher in 1994. These were stabbings, shootings, beatings. All it took to provoke such an attack was a single episode—say a carload of Moroccans running down an Italian girl (as happened the same month at the Tyrrhenian resort of Torvavianca)—and local people began assaulting any darkish foreigner they encountered. A few months after I saw this odd encounter in Rimini a fire destroyed a barracks housing hundreds of farmworkers in Villa Literno near Naples. The victims were mostly Africans, who are now Italy’s tomato-pickers.

A satirist like Fellini, merciless and impartial, would have had something to say. And I began to think once again that the great justification for traveling the shore of the Mediterranean, if such a justification was necessary, was that the foreground—these sudden strange encounters—was much more interesting than the Roman amphitheaters and the ruins.

• • •

From Rimini I took a branch line train inland to Ferrara, via Cérvia and Lido di Savio, detouring around the enormous low-lying delta of the Po. The train stopped everywhere, picking up old people and noisy schoolchildren in this tucked-away part of Italy, all farming communities, crammed with fig trees and vineyards and fields tangled with artichokes.

I stopped in Ferrara and took a taxi to the nearby village—so it seemed from the map; it was called Dodici Morelli, it was just a crossroads, some houses, a thicket of hedges, a small church.

“There is not much here,” the taxi driver said.

“My grandfather was born here,” I said. “My mother’s father.”

“Bravo,” the man said. “He did the right thing—went to America!”

“He used to write poetry,” I said.

“Bravo.” He said it with feeling.

It was a short trip by train from Ferrara to the little station at Rovigo. On the way a Portuguese couple in my compartment quarreled with the conductor. The woman had injured her arm, she said. The conductor doubted her. He asked her to fill out a declaration. The woman did not speak Italian. I gathered that she was drunk.

“Why you write I push de doors? I no push de doors! Geeve me, you dunno!”

“In Venice you go to police.”

“Why? No! I no go! I escape from theese man!”

I stepped from that screaming into the green fields of Rovigo and caught another branch-line train, even smaller, the spur to Chioggia by way of the tiniest Italian villages I had seen so far, the farms and settlements that feed the appetites of Venice. It was a happy discovery: in the midst of all the celebrated cities, this obscure corner, reachable on a little rattling two-car train. The land was as flat as Holland, it had the look of a floodplain, and garlic and onions and lettuce sprouted from it.

At the end of this branch-line railway was the small ancient seaside town of Chioggia, the last, most southerly island in the chain of narrow barrier islands that form the eastern edge of the lagoon of Venice. The lovely city hovers in the distance like a mirage on water, dreamlike spires and domes in the mist.

• • •

Chioggia is Venice with motor traffic. As a consequence it is scruffy and noisy, not livelier but more chaotic—few tourists, lots of locals, only dogs and children in the backstreets, and only one hotel that I could see. I was not planning to stay. I had arrived early enough in the day to look around and then leave. With no splendid image to live up to, a rather ordinary town on the water, Chioggia was restful and pleasant. There were concerts and events advertised, but it was obvious that Chioggia had constantly to defend itself against the taunts of people who compared it unfavorably with Venice.

I left my bag with the ferry captain of the
Clodia
at the main quay and then walked from one end of town to the other, and across bridges and along the small canals. After lunch, I followed a nervous and exhausted bride and groom who were having their pictures taken; the family trailed behind, with gently mocking friends, and onlookers, and all the while the bride’s white gown and long train dragged through the mud of the quay.

I bought an antique postcard with a 1935 postmark in Chioggia, not for the picture—of Trieste—but the message: “You are always in my thoughts. Infinite kisses.”
(Sei sempre nei mei pensieri. Baci infiniti.)
Such tender sentiments lifted my spirits.

Workers from Chioggia commuted to the Lido on the
Clodia.
Anything but an easy trip, it was cheap but exhausting, over an hour and a half, involving ferries, buses, and in places legging it. The whole affair of transfer had the laborious efficiency of Italian travel. The ferry crossed to Pellestrina Island, where at the quay a bus was waiting to transport the ferry passengers to the north end of the Pellestrina. This island of somewhat recent, somewhat ugly houses and green meadows, and football fields, and schools, could have been almost anywhere in coastal Italy, except that the lagoon to the left and the seawall to the right were reminders that it was unusually slender and low-lying. The soil was sodden and waterlogged, with that unnatural reclaimed look that Holland has, hardly land it seems so fragile and false, more like a raft or a carpet, not terra firma but something more easily drowned.

Arriving at the village of Santa Maria del Mare, the bus rolled straight onto another ferry, the
Ammiana
, which had been waiting there at the
north end of Pellestrina. This new ferry, with the bus on board, plowed into the lagoon and took us a half mile to the south end of the Lido, another long and narrow island. The bus drove off the ferry ramp, with us on it, and after a while we arrived at the Lido water taxi station.

The Lido was residential; it is for people who want tree-lined streets, and cars, and the chance to swim. As a barrier island, on the sea, it acts as Venice’s shoreline; the word
lido
means “shore.” Several hotels of the Lido are extravagantly grand, on their own Adriatic beaches; there are also many small hotels, and the usual boardinghouses. Today a rough sea was battering the beach of the elegant Hotel des Bains, where Von Aschenbach leered at lovely little Tadzio, and contemplated the meaning of life, in
Death in Venice
, the ultimate low season narrative. Perhaps the masterpiece would have been more aptly titled
Death on the Lido
, since the Lido bears no resemblance at all to Venice.

I considered staying at the Hotel des Bains or the Excelsior, but thought better of it. Apart from the fact that rooms were too expensive, I also felt that I would be isolated from the life of the Lido, in a gilded cage. Sometime in the future, when all I had to do was read a book, and not write one, I would return and stay there. It seemed to me that the greatest Mediterranean comforts were available at those grand hotels on the Lido, but at a price, about $600 a night. On the lagoon side of the island, I found the sort of ordinary hotel that in Italy was usually clean and pleasant, and the next morning I realized I had chosen well.

The first thing I saw the following day, as I walked down my side street to the lagoon, was a great flotilla of boats. Decked with pennants and banners, they were high-sterned wooden watercraft, larger and more elaborate than gondolas, with gold trim and bright paint, the lead boat with a tall crucifix instead of a mast and others carrying statues of saints, all of them manned by crews of oarsmen who were rowing them across the lagoon from Venice to the Lido. They bobbed busily in the early-morning sunshine.

I had arrived at a good time, the Feast of the Ascension (the
Festa della ’Sensa
in Venetian slang), the day of the annual ceremony of marriage with the sea,
Ceremonia dello Sposalizio del Mare.
In former times, the Doge threw his ring into the lagoon and a young fisherman dived into the water and grabbed it. These days it was a regatta, followed by a mass at the Chiesa San Nicolo al Lido (“Here the Emperor Barbarossa stayed before his meeting
with Pope Alexander III in San Marco in 1177”—but perhaps we knew that already).

The ceremony was a ritualized blessing, the pretty boats with their bunting and flags and ribbons all fluttering in the wind, drawn alongside the embankment; the muscular oarsmen still panting from the effort of the long row, their eyes lowered, standing in their splashed costumes, their caps doffed. A mass followed this, just like the sort of happy mass that followed a wedding ceremony. I associated this amount of piety and time with the sort of weddings I had preferred in my days as an altar boy: there was usually a tip afterward from the harassed father of the bride. Tips and tokens were passing to the oarsmen who were like acolytes at this ceremony. The so-called marriage of the sea “commemorated the Conquest of Dalmatia in
A.D.
1000,” my guidebook said: oars and pennants and blessings on this shore for almost a thousand years.

I took a water-bus from the Lido to Venice proper, and approaching this city in the sea, glittering in brilliant sunshine, I began to goggle, trembling a little, feeling a physical thrill and unease, in the presence of such beauty, an exaltation amounting almost to fear.

Venice is magic, the loveliest city in the world, because it has entirely displaced its islands with palaces and villas and churches. It is man-made, but a work of genius, sparkling in its own lagoon, floating on its dreamy reflection, with the shapeliest bridges and the last perfect skyline on earth: just domes and spires and tiled roofs. It is one color, the mellowest stone. There is no sign of land, no earth at all, only water traffic and canals. Everyone knows this, and yet no one is prepared for it, and so the enchantment is overwhelming. The fear you feel is the fear of being bewitched and helpless. Its visitors gape at it, speechless with admiration, hardly believing such splendor can shine forth from such slimy stones.

Language cannot do justice to Venice and nothing can detract from its beauty. It floods regularly; its marble is damaged and decayed, its paintings rot, it has stinking corners. Its canals are green, some of it looks poisonous, it is littered, it teems with rats which not even the masses of Venetian cats can cope with. The graffiti on ancient walls and on church pillars—I noted
Berlusconi is Doing Harm
and
Berlusconi is the Assassin of Democracy
—is almost incidental. People still live in Venice, children play in its backstreets, where families turn the cranks of pasta machines, men
congregate to smoke, women scorch tomatoes. In the alleys beggar women cradle their children and hold signs:
Please Help My Family
—
Ex-Yugoslavia.
Even the fact that Venice is actually sinking, and might one day be destroyed if not disappear altogether, gives it an air of fragility and drama, a passionate mortality.

The outdoor pleasures of Venice—walking, traveling on the water-buses, gloating over the architecture—are as intense as the indoor pleasures of browsing among the masterpieces of painting and sculpture. Both are hopeless too, because there is not enough time to see everything you want. To use my time, because I was just passing through, I made a project for myself. I looked for paintings in churches and galleries where the sea was specifically shown—the sea battles, the blessing of fleets, the sight of canals and gondolas in the background of religious pictures, the mythology of the sea. The best by far was in the Ducal Palace in St. Mark’s, Tiepolo’s “Venice receiving the Homage of Neptune”—the lovely woman personifying the city,
La Serenissima
, reclining while the ancient grizzled god empties a great hornlike shell of its treasure of gold coins and jewels.