The Politics of Washing (11 page)

On the elegant marble benches in the hall of our building, where we rest our shopping bags or stop to pick up a parcel left there by the postman, the pall bearer of 1630 had slumped for a few minutes’ rest
before grunting to his companions that they must once again shoulder up the sorry corpse they had somehow managed to manouevre down the stairs and take it on its way to disposal. Stinking, buboed bodies had piled up in the
calle
where I now drop a carrier bag of rubbish in the mornings, in time for the arrival of the 8.30 a.m. refuse boat.

In those terrible days of 1630, the skin of your warm child
suppurated
in front of your eyes, rotting before she was even dead. Pain and disfigurement, decay and loss were smeared on the walls of these narrow streets, as though some monstrous and vengeful hand had dropped a titan’s boulder in the stillness of the Lagoon and a tidal wave of devastation had ringed out from it.

And, of course, over years, over generations, the circles widened and thinned until the memory of all that horror was no longer concrete, but became the echo of memories. What was, in 1630, an unbearable grief had transformed, by 1655, to buried sadness; by 1700 it had worn down to bitterness, which modified, slowly, across the ensuing decades, into a certain grumpiness of character. This in turn transmuted over
subsequent
generations into a marked stubbornness which was the merest shadow of the resignation arising from past grief. This, in a great, great, great grandson of a plague survivor, had become a certain dourness of look or abruptness of manner. All of these might be qualities, reactions, behaviours that had their roots in that original, terrible cataclysm.

How much of what any of us are has drifted down in this way from the past, like sticks caught up in black-matted flotsam, then dislodged again, back into the current? Running down the stairs from their apartments, to get to school or work, the inhabitants of Venice do not think of the stumbling, sweating seventeenth-century pall bearers, hulking a sad cargo down these same steps, between these same walls. But the city is still their place, as it was their ancestors’, and in
celebration
of that, as much as anything else, they continue to file up the steps of the Salute, with candles in their hands.

Here on this dank November afternoon I am witness to a
crumpling
up of time. By walking in the footsteps of their forebears, by joining the flow with them and continuing to give thanks for delivery from something that terribly mattered, the Venetians are keeping in
their lives ampler realities than that of the lone individual wading through the short, muddied span of one life.

Virginia Woolf describes how, when reading Chaucer, ‘we are floated up to him insensibly on the current of our ancestors’ lives’. Moving through the ancient streets of Venice, adapting their contemporary life to the spaces and rituals of past generations, modern Venetians are floated up to their ancestors on the currents of art, habit and endeavour.

In the Salute, named for health and ill health, the lottery of mortality and the hope of eternal redemption are enshrined in a divinely inspiring space. Standing among ordinary Venetians, in an
extraordinary
building, on an ordinary winter’s day, giving ritual thanks for a temporary deliverance from sickness and death is, perhaps, as close to stepping out of linear time as I will ever get.

Only by participating in the past – its griefs and rhythms – by looking death and suffering in the face and every so often
acknowledging
it as ours, do we have a hope in hell of survival. Do we have a hope of remembering that, in other parts of our planet, now, in this minute, whole cities are in the stranglehold of illness, of hunger; are being besieged by crazed armies; are living a present that is, thank God, for now, our past and holiday memory.

S
NOW AND HIGH
water come together on the same Saturday in December – one dropping silently from the sky, the other gurgling up from the drains. I have a parcel to fetch from the post office at the Rialto, and at 9 o’clock I set off. The Accademia bridge is deserted as I drag my trolley behind me, up the snow-muffled steps. A bitter wind blows along the Grand Canal from the Adriatic.

Once on the other side of the bridge, I meet an American friend, steadfastly crunching across Campo Santo Stefano in wellies and a sheepskin hat with ear flaps, determined to open her gallery on time. A little further on, I come to one of the lowest points of the city and find the
calle
flooded with rank-smelling, icy water surging around my ankles. I gather the skirts of my overcoat in both hands and wade, very gingerly, on.

After the bitter, monochrome of the streets, the sorting office spills yellow light and warmth out of the door. It is full of postmen in sweaters and a holiday mood, who have been reprieved from their long morning trudge from door to door by the extreme weather conditions. These are just about the only Venetians I encounter during the whole morning. Who, after all, in their right mind, would set foot outside the house in such weather? The entire round trip (an easy forty-minute walk, under normal conditions) takes me two hours of wading, half
slipping and half freezing.

At the
vaporetto
stop, temporary walkways have been laid out for the high water. Some Japanese tourists are edging along them, looking for the right boat stop, and for all the world as if they might be blown away at any moment by the vicious north wind. They are giggling
nervously
and, being seriously under-dressed, are blue in the face. I can only think that they are utterly perplexed: what kind of a way is this to conduct one’s life, in a wealthy country, in the twenty-first century?

At the boat stop, I hear someone calling my name. It is Katerina and her niece, two stalwart Moldavian cleaners for whom I suppose this is a picnic in comparison with their own eastern winter. They are pink-cheeked and good-humoured; their black hair is obscured by brightly printed shawls, and each looks as though she might have stepped out of another, larger version of herself, in a stack of Russian dolls.

Almost everyone I meet on the street today is a foreigner. Whether visitor or immigrant, we would reveal our true alien colours to any Venetian through the mere fact of being out at all. It is at times like this that I know with conviction that my fragile sense of belonging here is an illusion to which I cling, but which cannot outlast my time in the city. Despite not having lived in London for sixteen years, I can still be a Londoner. When I step out of Paddington Station, I am part of the real life in those streets and even if I don’t know exactly how to buy a ticket for the bus any more, I am still at home, albeit a dithery old-timer. In Venice – a village under siege from foreigners – you can win temporary acceptance by living daily life here, but when you leave, you are, once again, forever a tourist.

Which is why, even as a resident, I face the reality and the risk of being an alien every single time I leave my house. On a good day, I do not have to think about it. On a good day, I scuttle along my little rat run of friendly faces: the parents at the school gate and the teachers; the sweet-faced woman from Sant’Erasmo on the market stall; the loquacious cake shop owner with her wonderful pastries; the helpful man in the health store; the kindly, melancholy ice cream lady; the laddishly jolly tennis coach, the music teachers, the neighbours and
friends – and I feel happy, welcomed and accepted. But on other days, if I should happen to diverge from this circuit of known faces who, far more importantly, know
me
, I might well be stung – both financially and socially – by any number of hostile locals.

If I go into the wrong bar and ask, in my foreign accent, for a coffee, I may automatically pay twice what the man next to me is paying with his singsong of a Venetian accent. Not only do I pay twice the money, but I pay also for being a stranger, with the off-hand, unsmiling manner of the waitress, the palpable contempt of the shopkeeper. I find myself, pathetically, wanting to plead with them, waving my credentials in their faces:

‘But my kids are at school here, you know! I live just down the street, all year round! Treat me kindly – please … Allow me to belong …’

Although there is never an excuse for rudeness, here, in this
beleaguered
little community, there are numerous reasons for it. So I have to admit that if these people continue to look at me with disdain, they are, from a certain point of view, justified in doing so. After all, what am I in this city other than an undercover tourist? A parasitic sucker of the Venetian blood; playing, in their home, at belonging?

But you could, of course, turn all of that around. Venice, though now a village, was, and should be again, a city. Cities are ample places – where change is the continuum; where new blood breeds new life. And all sorts of different foreigners come to cities: the welcome and unwelcome, the temporary, the permanent. The trouble is that when, as here, a siege is on, nothing really comes in or goes out.

I never wanted to be an undercover tourist. Quite the opposite, but I cannot fully belong here because Venice does not allow it. The city closes itself up, turns its back on the world which, with careless sentimentality, ruthlessly exploits its charms. Like the victim of violence, Venice can no longer distinguish between those who will cherish and commit to it, and those who want only to exploit.

‘Do you
know
?’ I hear an American guide drawl at an incredulous tourist group, waving her hand magisterially along the length of the Giudecca. ‘Those aren’t hotels over there. They are
real
houses where
real
people live! And they have shops which only
six
people can get into at a time!’

It’s time for the cut-price airlines, the cruise ships, the hotel chains, the tour operators to lay off the relentless onslaught. To leave this damaged city in peace for a while so that it can rebuild confidence, relearn to appreciate diversity and change, safe from the brutal
monoflux
of tourism. Where is the political vision that will encourage small businesses and artisans to return to the ancient workshops? That will provide affordable housing in Venice, for the people who are born, live and die here? Where are the politicians who see that the human race cannot go on in this way – consuming everything in sight – and that this unique city offers a visionary blueprint for small-scale living, close community, sustainability?

‘No, Venice is finished,’ says Gianfranco. He is the committed director of a municipal project of rare imagination and creativity – a rush of optimistic fresh air into the community. ‘Ten years ago, my building was full of residents. Now, my family is the only one living here and all the other apartments are holiday flats. When we come out on to the landing, there are different people there every day. Usually, they don’t even say good morning.’

‘I lived in San Stae until six years ago,’ Monica tells me. ‘My family had been there for generations, but then the landlord realized that the short-term tourist lets were going to make him much, much more money, so he chucked us out.’

‘No,’ says the friendly woman I am chatting to on the
vaporetto
, as we head out for the beach at the Lido, on a Saturday morning, with our children. “We don’t live here any more. Since we had our children, we can’t afford to stay. We’ve got a house in Mestre now. But you know, I never stop wanting to come home.’

We can all imagine a Venice submerged by the waters of the Lagoon. This may yet happen, but what about fostering in the meantime a shorter-term vision of the city’s future, which, linked as it is to the sustainable and the local, might offer a model of change, not apocalypse.

In this picture of the future, the houses that have been packed with short-let holiday flats fill up again with families and people who live
their real, daily lives here. The shiny, skin-deep tourist outlets flogging masks and scarves are reclaimed by butchers and bakers and grocers who sell the stuff of life – meat, bread and milk. In this Venice of the future, the deserted streets and courtyards come alive again, bubbling with a new generation of kids who, on hot days, dive-bomb from bridges into the water.

A
T A PARTY
, I meet a Venetian woman who is about to leave the city and go with her young children to live on
terraferma
. She is rather elegant, with melancholy eyes.

‘What makes me sad,’ she tells me, ‘is that they will not grow up in all this beauty.’

I have often noticed how much Venetians speak of the loveliness of their city. I suppose that the changing dimensions of the place – always charming, sometimes just plain wondrous – never stop being surprising, even after a lifetime.

So much of Venice is on a small scale: the narrow byways and cramped apartments giving a feeling of containment, of the local and familiar. Then, every so often, as one moves around the city, this intimacy undergoes a dramatic transformation. It is as though you are paddling happily in a shallow stream, take one step more, and find yourself on the brink of a vast and vertiginously plunging waterfall: all spume and glitter and cascading, silken perspective. The fishing village turned Shangri-La.

In the depths of our first winter, I take Freddie to see a doctor near Campo Santa Maria Formosa. We are unfamiliar with this part of the city and are trying to find our way through a maze of anonymous, dank-smelling
calli
with dark, water-streaked walls. The sky overhead is a flat, black strip.

As with all routes navigated for the first time and at night, it feels long and tortuous. I hesitate at every junction or bridge, not sure whether I have completely lost my way. Freddie trots along beside me,
holding my hand. Then, with no warning at all, instead of leaving one tight little
calle
and entering another, we find ourselves on the edge of space. A trick of the darkness, of street lights or perspective, shows a wide expanse of pale stone pavement sloping upwards to touch the walls of the Church of Santa Maria Formosa. No water, no grass, nobody: a stone edifice rising from a sea of stone, looming white, arctic, against the night sky. The small boy at my side lets out a sharp breath: ‘Ah!’ No words for this mysterious, sudden vision that has, in that instant, so radically altered his six-year-old’s perceptions, turning the physical world into something grand and ghostly.

What does it feel like to live in this place if you are a child and still adrift in those years when what is inside your head and what is outside are often indistinguishable? My children hang from the back of the boat as it scuds through the choppy waters of the north Lagoon to the Lido. They lay their cheeks on the cold metal bar and shout into the eruptions of froth and the wind. They watch the Christmas decorations going up along the rio and see the strings of white lights reflected in the still, chill, black water. They hopscotch down the dirty
calle
when there has been no rain for days and then, all of a sudden, there is
acqua alta
and they are knee deep in salt water. When school is cut off by this high water, they make Lego boats and play with them in the street turned river. Their world has dissolved in the space of an hour, into something unimaginably different – a waterborne playground.

When my eldest son Michael moves to the senior school in Venice, he enters the hushed halls of a seventeenth-century palace. The atmosphere is monastic: grey, calm, unadorned. It is a strangely empty place. Despite the size of the building, one teacher explains to me, the numbers of pupils are strictly limited by health and safety regulations. This, it occurs to me, is the unlikely spectacle of twenty-first-century bureaucracy coming to the rescue of the monkish, the collegiate and the classical.

Michael’s lessons take place in high-ceilinged rooms that would once have been the richly furnished and decorated apartments of an aristocratic Venetian household. Over the door frame in his classroom
there is a stucco oval relief. It is held up, like a large egg, by two crumple-bottomed cherubim; at its centre a Grecian hero, in his pony-tail helmet, sits ruminatively – more, it must be said, of a foppish
eighteenth
-century youth than a hellenic superman.

The rooms are bare except for some plastic-topped tables and metal-legged, stackable chairs, circa 1972, which are lined up in front of a blackboard scrawled all over with columns of Latin verbs. The only other contemporary addition, besides the single electric light bulb hanging down on a very long cord from the very high ceiling, is a map of Greece. Whether the cultural reference points implicit in this map, or these teetering piles of verbs or indeed the blackboard upon which they are written can actually be described as contemporary is debatable; let’s just say that they arrived in the room more recently.

In this environment, adolescent Italians are swallowing industrial quantities of Latin and Greek every day. This is the Liceo Classico – the most academic of the state-financed senior schools – in which the curriculum is still strikingly similar to that of the ancient Greeks from whom it takes its name: philosophy, literature, languages, mathematics. The only subject that has all but lapsed since classical times is athletics, which may explain the dejected and slightly flabby appearance of the Grecian youth over the door and also the trapped and dazed look one often sees on the faces of the latter-day students.

Here at the Classico the approach to learning is dry and mercilessly rigorous. Within months of his arrival, my son is tackling serious bits of Homer. Because he is struggling with his Greek I go to talk with his teacher. I mention, in the course of our discussion, how much he loves reading the Greek myths.

‘Ah, but you see,’ she explains gently and a little patronizingly, ‘the Classico isn’t about
enjoying
the myths. Michael’s work here is to learn the grammar of ancient languages.’