The City of Falling Angels (9 page)
Read The City of Falling Angels Online
Authors: John Berendt
Tags: #History, #Social History, #Europe, #Italy
I could not let that remark pass without comment.
“But what about the industrial smokestacks belching smoke just across the lagoon in Marghera and Mestre?”
“What about them?” said Peter, his smile broadening in anticipation of scoring a point. “The prevailing winds blow inland,” he said, “just as they do in all port cities. So the pollution you see coming out of those smokestacks on the mainland blows away from us, not toward us.”
IT MADE SENSE TO ME that people who lived in Venice would talk a lot about Venice, the business of Venice being, after all, Venice itself. But I doubted that many Venetians were as vociferous on the subject as the Lauritzens were. Peter held forth in a manner more in the nature of oratory than conversation—informed, didactic, fiery, confrontational—his discourse punctuated by the occasional “whilst” or “shedule.” Rose, speaking in verbal italics, evoked a Venice of wild extremes—horrific and blissful, ghastly and exquisite, hideous and enchanting. Whether they realized it or not, both Lauritzens presented themselves as beleaguered, like the city itself—but gamely, almost proudly beleaguered, in love with Venice despite its shortcomings. In their eagerness to explain Venice to me, they occasionally overlapped each other, both speaking at the same time without seeming to notice. At such moments, I found myself looking from one to the other, my head nodding and swiveling, as I tried to avoid making the social gaffe of listening to one and ignoring the other.
Peter, for example, was saying, “Venice is not for everybody. To live in Venice, you must, first of all, like living on an island, and you must like living near water. . . .” And Rose, at the same time, was saying, “It’s exactly like an Irish village where everybody knows everybody else. . . .” Oblivious, Peter went right on, “And to live in Venice, you must be able to do without much greenery, and you must not mind walking a great deal.” I heard this over Rose’s, “You’re always running into people you know, because the only way to get around in Venice, whether you’re a countess or a shopkeeper, is to walk or take the vaporetto. You can’t move about unseen in a private car, and in that respect Venice is terribly democratic.”
Keeping up with the Lauritzens at these moments was like listening to stereo with each of the speakers playing a different tune. In one ear, I heard Peter say, “Now, those are very unusual circumstances, and a lot of people who say they love Venice eventually discover they do not.” With the other ear, if I understood correctly, I heard Rose saying, “. . . When I’ve come back from having gone out shopping, Peter doesn’t ask me what I bought. He asks who I saw.”
“The key word is ‘claustrophobic,’” said Peter. “I listen for it. Because whenever I hear ‘claustrophobic’ mentioned in connection with Venice, I know that the person who said it would never be happy living here.”
“Funnily enough, I
like
it that Venice is a village,” said Rose simultaneously.
like
it that Venice is a village,” said Rose simultaneously.
The Lauritzens displayed the fervor of converts. Venice had been their chosen home. They had not simply been born in it and stayed. Their spirited defense of the city was, it seemed to me, partly a defense of their decision to live there, in self-imposed exile.
Peter had been born in Oak Park, Illinois. His arrival in Venice had been by way of the Lawrenceville School, Princeton, and a Fulbright Scholarship to Florence, where he studied the Provençal language in the poetry of Dante. His father had wanted him to become a baseball player and enter the business world, but Peter never moved back to the United States. Instead he became an acolyte of the Anglican priest who presided over the American Church in Florence, and when the priest was reassigned to Venice to establish an English church there, Peter came with him, met Rose, fell in love, and married her.
By the time he arrived in Venice, Peter bore little resemblance to the boy from Oak Park, Illinois. He had re-created himself, and he was disarmingly candid about it. “My father never understood why anybody would pick up and move to Italy. Italy of all places. He enjoyed visiting us here, but he could never take my living in Italy seriously. To him it seemed like a nice joke. When our son, Frederick, was born, my father offered to pay for his college tuition, but only on the condition that he go to an American college. He was afraid we were going to make Frederick into an Englishman. He got this notion, no doubt, because of the way I speak and because I married an English girl. However, I’m pleased to say that every bit of Frederick’s education, to date, has been in Venice—he’s a Venetian, not an Englishman. He’ll soon go off to college—but to Oxford, not to America. And as for my living in Italy, it was the best decision I’ve ever made. I luxuriate in this world I’ve invented for myself.”
As for Rose, living in Venice came naturally. She was a member of the British aristocracy. For centuries her family had lived in great manor houses and passed along such titles as Baron of Ashford, Lord Bury, and the Earl of Albemarle among the males. Her ancestral line did have its quirky elements: Rose’s great-great-aunt, Alice Keppel, was the publicly acknowledged mistress of Edward VII. Mrs. Keppel’s daughter, Violet Trefusis—“Aunt Violet” to Rose—had become famous as the eccentric and irrepressible lover of Vita Sackville-West. When Rose was a teenager, she visited her aging, expatriated Aunt Violet in Florence. Violet advised her in matters of style and society, contributing significantly to Rose’s worldliness and dramatic poise. Although Rose was entitled to be addressed as “Lady Rose,” her family background seemed a matter of indifference to her. She had settled in Venice in part to get away from it. And because she had lived for most of her childhood at Mount Stewart, a family estate in Northern Ireland, she often replied to questions about her origins by saying simply, “I’m bog Irish.”
Rose had been coming to Venice since the age of sixteen, usually in the company of her mother, who bought an old gondolier’s cottage as a retreat for summer vacations. Ezra Pound lived next door in an identical cottage, which he had shared with his mistress, Olga Rudge, since the 1920s.
“Pound had just been released from St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane,” Rose recalled, “and by the time I saw him in the early 1960s, he was old and hermitlike. He had taken his famous vow of silence.
“We’d see the two of them, Olga and Ezra, quietly strolling in the neighborhood and having coffee at one of the cafés along the Zattere. She was diminutive and very beautiful. He was tall and dignified and always elegantly dressed: a broad-brimmed felt hat, a wool coat, tweed jacket, a flowing tie. His face was craggy, and his eyes were immensely sad. When people stopped to greet them, he would stand patiently, in silence, while Olga made pleasantries. We never saw him speak in public, but at home we could hear him reading his poetry aloud in a strong, rhythmic voice. My mother was a fan of Pound’s, so she rang the doorbell and asked if she might have an audience with him. Olga very politely told her to go away: It was no use, he wouldn’t talk to anyone. We finally realized we’d been hearing recordings of Pound reading his poems. He’d been sitting on the other side of our common wall, listening quietly, just as we had. Pound died ages ago, but Olga lives on. She’s over a hundred now.”
The Lauritzens’ circle of friends included both Venetians and expatriates, among them the art collector Peggy Guggenheim. Peter frequently accompanied Peggy on late-afternoon rides in her gondola, which was the last private gondola in Venice. “She knew every foot of every back canal,” he said. “She would sit in her little chair with her Lhasa apsos lounging underneath and her gondolier standing behind her on the stern deck, rowing. She’d give him directions with hand signals, as if she were driving a car, without so much as saying a word or looking back at him. Peggy was notoriously stingy. She hired the city’s corpse collector as her gondolier, because he was available at a better price. She didn’t seem to mind that he serenaded her with funeral dirges and that he was very often drunk.
“I went to see Peggy during her final illness,” Peter went on. “She was rereading Henry James. She told me she had given instructions that she was to be buried with her dogs in the garden of her palazzo on the Grand Canal. She made me promise to see that her wishes were carried out, and I did. In fact, by the time she died, fourteen of her dogs were already in the garden waiting for her. Peggy was still alive when the last of them was laid to rest. During the burial ceremony, while the butler was poking around in the dirt with a spade looking for an empty spot, he unearthed a Lhasa apso skull that rolled to a stop at Peggy’s feet. Peggy was sobbing into her handkerchief and didn’t notice.”
In his study, Peter showed me the 1922 edition of the works of Henry James that Peggy had bequeathed to him. Each volume was signed with the first of her three married names: “Peggy Vail.”
Peggy Guggenheim was never accepted by members of Venetian society, who professed to be appalled by her sexual promiscuity. But the Lauritzens had been taken up by Venetians and frequently attended Venetian parties. On the evening I first met them, Peter picked up an engraved invitation from his desk, studied it for a moment, and then glanced up at Rose with a look that seemed to ask, “Should I?” Rose nodded her assent. Twelve Venetian families were giving a formal Carnival costume ball in two weeks. The Lauritzens had been invited to come and to bring a guest of their own. When Peter extended the invitation to me, I readily accepted. “You’ll see what I mean when I say Venice is really just a small village,” said Rose.
Before leaving, I signed the Lauritzens’ guest book, and as I did, a question that had occurred to me earlier in the evening came to mind again.
“By the way,” I said to Rose, “how did the Comune ever find out you had renovated the apartment downstairs?”
Rose smiled conspiratorially. “Someone informed on us, apparently. We don’t know who. It might have been a neighbor.”
“Ah,” I said, “so if Venice is a village, it’s a village . . . with an edge?”
“Oh, absolutely,” she said with a broad smile. “It definitely has an edge.”
{4}
SLEEPWALKING
QUITE APART FROM THE TWICE-DAILY TIDAL RISE AND FALL of the Misericordia Canal, life outside my window had a special rhythm of its own. Typically the day began in the predawn stillness when a fruit-and-vegetable dealer stepped into his boat, moored opposite my window, gently started his motor, and chugged slowly and quietly down the canal—the equivalent, for a motorboat, of tiptoeing. Then everything fell silent again, except for the lapping of water against the stones.
At about eight o’clock, life along the canal officially awoke, as shopkeepers on the other side started opening their doors and rolling up their metal gates. Giorgio set his tables and chairs out in front of the trattoria. The butcher took delivery of meat from a passing barge.
Pedestrians began moving across my field of vision like actors crossing a stage: a laborer shambling unhurriedly, a man in a business suit walking at a more purposeful pace. Customers stopped in at the trattoria for coffee and a glance at the morning’s
Gazzettino.
Next door, at the local Communists’ storefront headquarters, with posters bearing the hammer-and-sickle insignia on the walls, there were generally one or two people sitting at a desk, talking on the phone or reading a newspaper. The small shop next to that one had been the workshop of Renato Bona, one of the last Venetian craftsmen who specialized in making oars and oar posts for gondolas. Bona’s genius as a sculptor—particularly his mastery of the curving, twisting oar posts—had made him a demigod among gondoliers. Since his death two years earlier, his shop had become something of a shrine, commemorated by a plaque next to the door. The Misericordia Canal was not on any of the usual gondola routes, but every so often a gondola would glide by in silent tribute to Bona. One gondola, however, had its regular mooring spot in front of the house. It was a wedding gondola, so it had elaborate carving and ornamentation, but it was still black like all the others. At some point during the day, the gondolier would ready it for a wedding by putting gold-and-white slipcovers over the chairs and cushions.
Gazzettino.
Next door, at the local Communists’ storefront headquarters, with posters bearing the hammer-and-sickle insignia on the walls, there were generally one or two people sitting at a desk, talking on the phone or reading a newspaper. The small shop next to that one had been the workshop of Renato Bona, one of the last Venetian craftsmen who specialized in making oars and oar posts for gondolas. Bona’s genius as a sculptor—particularly his mastery of the curving, twisting oar posts—had made him a demigod among gondoliers. Since his death two years earlier, his shop had become something of a shrine, commemorated by a plaque next to the door. The Misericordia Canal was not on any of the usual gondola routes, but every so often a gondola would glide by in silent tribute to Bona. One gondola, however, had its regular mooring spot in front of the house. It was a wedding gondola, so it had elaborate carving and ornamentation, but it was still black like all the others. At some point during the day, the gondolier would ready it for a wedding by putting gold-and-white slipcovers over the chairs and cushions.
At one o’clock, the rolling of metal gates sounded again as the shops closed for midday. Only the trattoria stayed open, serving local seafood specialties to a predominantly neighborhood clientele. The pace of life slowed until late afternoon, when the shops reopened and people walked at a quickened step: students released from class, housewives hurriedly shopping for dinner.
As darkness fell, the metal gates rolled down again, and the lights of the trattoria came up at stage center. People moved now at a leisurely stroll, and convivial voices floated in the nighttime air. Toward midnight, the sounds of boats and backwash died down. The voices drifted away. Giorgio dragged the chairs and tables back inside and turned off the lights. By that time, the fruit-and-vegetable dealer had long since tethered his boat to its mooring poles, and Pino, the owner of the white water taxi, had pulled a canvas sheet over the open part of his deck and retired to his apartment above the Communists.
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