The Politics of Washing (16 page)

This does not make of her anything less (or more) than a beggar, so why is it that I am able to give money to the red-eyed addict in a London underpass and not to this tiny, gnarled, knowing grandmother, on her knees in the street?

When I see a homeless drunk on the streets of London, I recoil from his visible degradation, but I am also compelled to empathize with him. My sense of social responsibility is not fuelled by religious belief, but by a conviction that here is another being with whom I share my humanity. I think that I have a notion of how he has arrived at this tragic point and I pity him accordingly, from the bottom of my selective heart. He and I belong to the same social structure; I am safe in it, he has drifted to its hopeless nether regions; there, but for the grace of God, go I. Bad luck, bad genes or bad governance have forced him into
this place and I recognize these forces and believe that there is a way out for him … possibly … maybe …

Unlike the drunk, the gypsy beggar does not consider herself as having drifted off the social map; on the contrary, she has a distinct place in it. Her job is begging and she commutes into Venice to beg. This does not make her a fake or a thief. She is part of a social structure in which begging for alms has its place; it is an ancient culture in which the moral appeal of beggars to the wealthy is based on religious obligation and the hope of buying a place in heaven:

In begging for ‘good, good, good’, the picture-postcard image of the Virgin propped against her knees, the old woman on the bridge is telling us that the support of the poor is both a religious imperative and a social duty. What I must face up to is this: the fact that she is begging within a social structure does not make her situation any less desperate, nor does it mean that I should care for her any less.

And so, confused and uneasy, I resort to the child’s eye imagery of the gypsy beggar as a witch. I do this because I can place her nowhere except in storyland – a generic, mythical figure. People like her don’t have a place in my conscious, practical life, because I come from a society which is overwhelmed by the cult of the individual.

What motivates me to give away my money is the recognition of another individual and our common humanity. I am not moved by religious duty or belief, or by any kind of investment in a social hierarchy that makes some people into beggars for alms. I am motivated by guilt, by pity, by fear, by cod psychology. The waters are muddy. But when it comes to this muttering medieval mendicant on the bridge, a refugee from unknown lands to the east, I have no such difficulty and I sail past her daily, as though she were, indeed, a ghost in a parallel universe.

If the fishermen on the Giudecca, or that aged farmer on the lagoon island, provide me with a comforting cliché of the old ways, a pleasant nostalgia for the ‘authentic’, the gypsy beggar does not. One morning,
as we hurry over the bridge to school, always late, always bounding two steps at a time, she is there as usual: Virgin at her knee, babushka headscarf, sardine can.

‘Look at her!’ Freddie shouts indignantly. ‘I won’t give money to her!’

And what can I say to him? ‘Oh reason not the need! Would you, my boy, choose to spend your whole life on your knees?’

Because all that this secular, materialistic six-year-old sees is a beggar talking loudly on her mobile phone.

T
HERE ARE HIDDEN
gardens all over Venice. In January, when the city is at its stoniest, I might be walking down a narrow, grey
calle
and find myself suddenly engulfed in a cloud of rich perfume. Behind high walls, a gaunt witch hazel is in bloom – the little white flowers seeming to have been stuck along the naked branches and fiercely exuding summer into the cold, dead air.

In April, wisteria plays a similar trick, clambering over the walls and pouring down the other side to brush the heads of passers-by with purple blooms and thick, sweet scent.

The land birds of Venice nest in these gardens too. Sometimes I hear the trill of a blackbird and look up to see the little yellow-eyed creature perched on the top of a wall. And there are the plaguing mosquitoes too, lurking among the trees. Out at the back of the island of the Giudecca, on the edge of the South Lagoon, there are a number of grand, private gardens. Trees and climbing plants loll over brick and drift the tips of their leaves in the still water. You can see this only from a boat and, even then, you can only guess at the luxuriance of fig trees and roses, jasmine and willow tangling in there.

Of course, having a garden in Venice is a privilege. Often enough, people have bits of outside space attached to their houses – backyards, strips along the side of a building – but whether you can persuade any plant life to take root in these shady pockets is another matter. One
afternoon, while we are waiting for our children to come out of school, Federico tells me about his ‘garden’, a small dank yard that never sees the sun.

‘I was woken up at dawn last week. I heard this loud shouting coming from the back of my house. I was half asleep, but I went out on to the terrace to see what was happening and I found this drunken tramp lunging around down there. So I said, “Hey! What are you doing?” Well, he climbed back over the wall, cursing and swearing, and disappeared.

‘Then, this morning, I heard the noise again and I found the same man crashing around out there and he looked up at me and yelled:

‘“Oy! You! Signore with the shit courtyard!”’

Federico looks at me, laughing.

‘You see what I mean? It really is a dump, even he knew that. Even in that state!’

I dream of having a garden in Venice, but only under certain circumstances. Maria Grazia has a large garden – full of mature trees and with a big, undulating lawn where generations of her children, grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren, play. It seems like an unimaginable luxury in this city of narrow streets and stone public spaces, but when I tell her how jealous I am, she smiles wryly.

‘I call it the amphitheatre,’ she says and gestures at the surrounding buildings. That’s when I notice the tens of windows overlooking the garden from every side. Nothing that you do or say here could possibly go unobserved.

The courtyard garden of my neighbour Signora Zambon has distinct shades of the prison yard: the walls are so high and the surrounding buildings so beetling that for most of the day three-quarters of this brick cube is cast in shadow. There is a meagre patch of grass in the middle, which struggles to survive against all the odds. Grass can usually be counted on to tell you what a place is really like, underneath it all: the grass of Venice is rough and dry; it is, of course, dune grass, sea grass.

Signora Zambon spends much of her time in this garden. She is a dry, thin little woman, always dressed in a cardigan and pearls, even
when she’s getting her hands dirty with the big sacks of soil, the plants and pots that are delivered at regular intervals and stacked up in the communal entrance hall, before being hulked out back.

She has planted jasmine in the sunny part of the courtyard and it appears to be flourishing, but it is, for the most part, difficult to see where all that money and time has gone. Well, I think, most gardens tend to be like that, and anyway Zambon is not to be downcast: Zambon has a dream. She confesses it to me one day, as we pass on the staircase.

‘I go to bed at night with the David Austin rose catalogue. There is nothing like it in Italy. I would like to fill my garden with English roses.’

I think of English roses in their English places: the white snowstorms of Kiftsgate; the heavy, odorous velvets staggering over village walls; smatterings of Dog Rose, tunnels of pink petals among the cobnuts, arcading hidden lanes.

‘I can only grow roses in the pots on my
terrazza
,’ she shakes her head mournfully; it is the nearest she can ever get to her dream, but still she won’t relinquish David Austin. Even Signora Zambon smiles at this.

I begin to think about people who, despite where they actually are, dream of being somewhere and something else altogether. In the Signora’s case, she may in fact be in the right place, but a few hundred years too late. The palazzo in which we both live was once famed for its beautiful garden. This dank, overhung courtyard is all that remains. I wish that for the shy, wary Zambon the clocks of Tom’s Midnight Garden could chime thirteen and she might find herself strolling through the scented gardens of the Marcellani, in the cool night air.

I
T IS A
dull February morning and a huge crowd has packed into Piazza San Marco and the Piazzetta, the space between the Doge’s Palace and the waterfront looking out over the Basin of San Marco.

I am standing with my four children on the edge of this great crush.

‘OK,’ I say, ‘link hands!’ and we start to wriggle our way through, finally coming to a halt beneath the bell tower of San Marco, the campanile.

Strung over our heads and stretching from campanile to palace there is a thick wire. Dangling from its highest point, at the top of the campanile, are six massive, three-dimensional, white letters:

A-N-G-E-L-O.

When the great bronze men on the clock tower step forward and hammer out the twelve strokes of midday on the side of the bell, the so-called Angel of the Carnival will, we are told, fly down this zip wire and land effortlessly on the balcony or
loggia
of the Doge’s palace – a fleet spirit, an Ariel, to inaugurate the Venetian Season of Misrule.

Every year, a celebrity of some kind or other performs what sounds like a not inconsiderable feat; this year, the Angel is a rapper, of whom I have never heard.

Now, the hammers are striking the bell and everyone is craning for a first glimpse of the Angel. Silence settles over the Piazza. Then,
creakingly, the zip wire begins to move and the giant letters joggle slightly, then start to slip, rather jerkily and very slowly, downwards.

Now at last we can see the Angel. He is straddling the O, hands gripped tight around the wire from which it is suspended, his legs dangling in space. He is a large man, in a sparkly, white suit; even at this distance, he is visibly ill at ease.

The crowd cheers and the Angel cautiously raises one arm in salute. He and his letters continue to move clumsily, falteringly, down the wire, like an ancient ski lift in operation for the last time.

This is not the circus spectacular I had envisaged: the slick, horizontal swoop from campanile to
loggia
, and I am not the only one among the crowd to register surprise, albeit for a different reason. The people around me greet the Angel’s appearance with amazement:

‘Ma! E nero!’ – ‘But – he’s black!’

This is the conspicuous official face of the opening of Carnival. Specially laid-on
vaporetti
with names like
Arlecchino
and
Colombina
can be seen steaming purposefully up the Grand Canal towards San Marco, where more and more tourists are being unloaded into the already heaving Piazza. Here, dramatically masked and enrobed individuals are striking mannequins’ poses for the photographers – they are faceless and nameless celebrities for one day. From this point, thousands of visitors will soon set off around the city in search of Carnival happenings, both real and imagined.

These days, Carnival is not a Venetian festival; it is a recent revival of the old tradition, designed to squeeze yet more money from the insatiable tourists and is, as far as I can see, universally disliked by the inhabitants of the city. It goes on for days and has no real centre or purpose, but is a sprawling, random spread of events, among which tourists wander aimlessly in ridiculous masks.

For Venetians, Carnival is a another example of their perennial, nightmarish problem: somebody has organized an enormous party in your backyard but it’s not your party and you don’t know any of the guests. All you want to do is get on with your daily life in peace, but all around you there are millions of strangers doing just the opposite.

Not surprisingly, there is a mass exodus of residents from the city
during these joyless festivities.

Still, as ever, real Venice clings on valiantly like a tenacious little limpet. On this first day of the Carnival and at the same time as the big, tacky public show, there is another, smaller and genuinely Venetian event taking place, nearby and on the water. The various rowing clubs of the city have gathered in the Basin of San Marco and are taking their own Carnival procession back
down
the Grand Canal, against the rising tide of tourists converging on the Piazza.

Earlier this morning, Jane and I decorated her lovely wooden boat, the prawn-tailed
sanpierota
, with strings of cotton flags and balloons. We have filled it with six children and two adults, all of whom are dressed up in hastily cut and stuck masks and headdresses. Jane is at the back, steering in a large Mad Hatter’s top hat, and I am rowing
prua
(at the front), in a black nylon Batman cloak I found in the dressing-up box, and a gold mask that covers my whole face so that I am having a certain amount of difficulty in breathing even before I begin rowing a heavy boatload of people up the Grand Canal. We are a motley and cheerful crew as we join the string of thirty Venetian rowing boats of various sizes and shapes bobbing about in the little waves of the
bacino
.

The only close encounter between these two Carnival events takes place as the boat club rowers pass under the Accademia Bridge. Here, hundreds of tourists lean on the wooden rail and photograph us for all they are worth. What perhaps they cannot fully understand is that, moving under the famous bridge, processing between the venerable and fantastical palaces of the Grand Canal, is a small, waterborne village fete.

One boat, a
topo
is packed with people in crepe paper octopus hats, the multi-coloured tendrils falling over their shoulders. In another, a band of merrily un-PC cannibals are dancing to Bob Marley, blacked-up like minstrels, with woollen dreadlocks and crepe paper grass skirts over purple nylon tracksuits. A large
batelo
is crewed by six hefty men in blond wigs and Ugly Sister finery. They manage to row the whole length of the Grand Canal without smiling once.

On another boat, a wooden frame has been erected and then
lavishly draped with plastic vines and plastic oranges and lemons. Under this lopsided Bacchic pergola four fat, bearded men in aprons are busily frying fish in a cauldron, precariously balanced on a single gas ring. As the Carnival flotilla goes by, the four cooks use long slatted spoons to dredge up the fish from the spitting oil. They drop it into cones of white paper, which they fold shut and then lob across the water into our outstretched hands.

‘Vino?’ they shout and we lean over the edge of our boat towards them, holding out our plastic cups, precariously, across the water. From unlabelled bottles they lustily slug red wine in our direction – half of it reaches the cups, half slops into the Grand Canal.

Because there are so few bridges over the Canal and so few points of public access to the water’s edge, this procession has few witnesses. The atmosphere down here at water level is friendly, informal, local and light-hearted – not much different, really, from any Sunday afternoon fancy-dress parade in any other village in Europe.

E
ARLY MORNING IS
the only time of day in Venice when you can be certain that the ratio of tourists to residents will be weighted in the residents’ favour. It is, for me, the most magical time in any city; there is a sleep-tousled, unguarded, good-naturedness in the early morning streets that you find at no other hour of the day. In Venice this is more starkly the case than anywhere else simply because as the morning advances, the balance of tourists and residents undergoes a violent destabilizing swing, to the point where the life you observe on the streets after, say, 10 a.m., is in no way guaranteed ‘authentic’ and is much more likely to consist of the few limited transactions in the repertoire of tourism: food, souvenirs, sightseeing, food again, and so on.

Every morning, I walk with my children across the wide
campo
that runs along one side of the church of the Frari. In the convoluted Venetian world of narrow alleyways, this space allows a fine opening of perspectives and reveals the great brick church silhouetted against
the wider sky. Perhaps it is precisely because of this sense of an open space – an arena inviting display – that a curious phenomenon is to be observed here during the midwinter weeks of Carnival.

In the early morning, the campo is full of people hurrying diagonally across it and disappearing, one way, into the network of
calli
leading towards the Accademia bridge, and the other, over a bridge that leads to the station and Piazzale Roma. There are sharply suited businessmen and businesswomen with briefcases and mobiles; there are parents and children heading for the various schools in the neighbourhood, and students on their way to the university at Cà Foscari. The green-suited street cleaners are brushing rhythmically over the pavements with their old-fashioned brooms, bunches of long twigs bound with string to a knobbly wooden handle.

As the children and I are crossing the
campo
, in the middle of all this bustle there suddenly appears a large and imposing figure. He is dressed from head to foot in the clothes of an eighteenth-century Venetian aristocrat: a skirted, violet satin top coat and violet breeches and an elaborately embroidered apple-green waistcoat. Lace froths at his collar and wrists and his thick cream stockings are fancily gartered with yellow satin. His shoes have handsome brass buckles, two-inch heels and long, squared-tipped toes. In one extravagantly be-ringed hand, he holds a pair of cream leather gloves. He has a wispy little twizzle of a moustache, his powdered cheeks are rouged, and a giant beauty spot is pencilled on to his upper lip.

How tall he really is, I cannot say, but the general impression is of prominence and display. He holds his head high and steps deliberately, ceremoniously across the
campo
, his toes turned out, his silver-topped cane showily extended. He is acutely conscious of whatever impression he thinks he is making on the brisk dog-walkers, the schoolchildren with their rucksacks, and the waitresses having a fag outside the bar. He seems also a little lost – and this not only in time, but also in his own particular fantasy of who he is and where he is. Just peeping over the top of his coat pocket is a German guide book to Venice.

On another morning in the same week, our rush for school is hopelessly slowed by a lady in a vast powdered periwig and a geometrically
skirted dress of the seventeenth century. She rustles up the
calle
, brushing both walls with her rectangular skirts, and making it
impossible
for anybody to squeeze past her. The barrier is in fact a double one, as another lady, similarly skirted, similarly bewigged, paces regally ahead of her. Both women are very fat; their bulging, powdered bosoms, stuck all over with fake beauty spots, are bursting out of a damask corsellage and strings of pearls have been wrapped round and round their fleshy necks. The lady at the front flutters an embroidered fan and chats amiably back over her shoulder to her friend.

I wonder how these people, so consummately and elaborately dressed up, should come to be wandering the streets so very early in the morning? Have they not been to bed at all, but been pacing the city all night long in their finery? Or did they wake hours before dawn and begin the long business of primping and colouring and struggling into corsets? Did they then sally forth into the streets in their splendid bubbles of Venetianness and sail through the commuter crowds, the kids, the students, the twenty-first-century rubbish collectors, blissfully unaware that the year was not in fact 1711, but 2011?

How pleasing that, just for once, it is Venice that provides the workaday backdrop, the banal and the modern, while these petticoated and periwigged visitors, like absurd and over-blown birds of paradise, bring with them, in their overnight bags and their imaginations, some waking dream of a glorious past.

H
OLLYWOOD
HAS, ON
various occasions, cast Venice in the unlikely role of a heart-thumping, high-octane action movie location. In the West Coast depictions of this east coast city, speed boats scream up the Grand Canal in a lather of white water, and deep sea divers breathe raspingly through masks as they grapple with gold ingots among the subaqueous foundations of palaces.

The fact of the matter is, of course, that about the most difficult thing to do in Venice is move fast, let alone get away. To every holiday
we organize, we must add at least an hour just to get out of the city and join whichever means of land transport we have planned for the next leg of the journey.

Once our suitcases, bags and last-minute bits and pieces have been heaped up on the landing, we have to lug them down four flights of stairs, across the hall and into the
calle
. We then drag and heave them, over uneven pavements, to the
vaporetto
stop where we pile everything into the boat.

This particular section of the journey is a source of squirming embarrassment to me. The mountains of non-Venetian luggage inevitably set off a xenophobic riff from someone in the
vaporetto
. Nothing about us – our language, our clothes, our plastic bags stuffed full of stuff – say anything except Pesky Foreigner, although the more acute observer has, more than once, been visibly intrigued by these tourists who have a large Italian board game sticking out of a box, or a pair of skis, or a bunch of flowers. I tend, pathetically, to speak Italian with the children on these miserable trips and to flaunt my season ticket.

At Piazzale Roma, we must drag and heave everything off again and then, on the pavement, with all our worldly goods spread around us, we wait for the arrival of the green van, which Alberto has gone ahead to fetch from its semi-retirement on a quiet, suburban street in Mestre.

Crime is not a major problem in Venice. Not being able to make a swift getaway from the scene of the crime is a serious deterrent to criminals. When the heist must be followed by a longish walk, a very slow boat ride and a bus journey, the chances of (literally) getting away with it are considerably lowered.

The most successful criminal in Venice will be of the melting-away type, skilled at operating in a crowd; it is rare to go unobserved in this city, even when you think you are alone. This is why there is one particular crime that does flourish here, and within six weeks of my arrival I have fallen victim to it.