The Politics of Washing (21 page)

The terracotta floor is intact but the plaster ceiling hangs in a dry swag, like a crumbling stage curtain, and I can see straight up to the floor above. A soft drizzle of plaster powders my hair as I walk, as though I have set off an imperceptible tremor just by being there. I wonder how safe this place is, but I am too curious to go back.

The hospital is built around a central courtyard. Most of the wooden doors have been barricaded shut, but when I peer through cracks, I see that the rooms are ruined shells. There is a wide flight of splintered wooden stairs leading up to the first floor. This, I do not risk. The sawing of crickets intensifies the silence. The air is alive with mosquitoes and I am constantly brushing them away from my face and arms. Now, I feel like the prince who has cut his way through the enchanted forest to Sleeping Beauty’s castle. But this time it is deserted; I have come too late.

Back at the landing stage, the others are packing up the picnic.

‘Let’s go for a swim,’ says Giampaolo, and I am content to leave this melancholy place and join the cheerful banality of a day at the beach.

The beach he has in mind is, however, not just any beach: it is uniquely Venetian, which is to say that, most of the time, it is knee deep in water and therefore invisible. Its whereabouts are known only to locals, and it is only accessible by private boat. On summer days, people from the city go there in their droves. You know you have arrived because the spot is marked by many small vessels, like a flock of seabirds, wings folded, bobbing peacefully together on the water.

And the owners of these boats have, in their turn, become long-legged waders. Though the elderly or indolent may stay put, reading the paper or sunbathing in the bows, most people get out and do the usual beach things – playing ball, having water fights, chatting to friends – and all of it calf-deep in water.

Every so often, at a certain point in the tide’s ebb and flow, a sandbank emerges from the shallows and this is instantly colonized by beach umbrellas, tables and chairs. Within minutes, whole families are to be seen perched on a narrow ridge of sand, eating lunch or playing
cards. It is the unlikely and surreal opposite of an oasis in the desert. And the inhabitants of Venice who, it seems to me, do have something amphibian about them, whether they are browsing in a flooded bookshop or playing catch, up to their knees in salt water, are, after all, still hanging on in here and relishing their strange home for all they are worth.

F
OR CENTURIES PEOPLE
have come to Venice looking for another, new version of themselves, a reinvention of their prosaic daily self through the extravagant theatricality of the city. What these visitors choose to wear exposes and enhances their fantasies.

On the whole, Venetians adopt uniformly monochrome,
understated
and practical clothes. What distinguishes the rich from the rest is not necessarily style (why would one wear anything other than sensible shoes and trousers in a place where you simply have to walk everywhere?), so much as label and quality of garment. Nothing differentiates a visitor from a local more than a pair of high heels.

During the first week of the Biennale, the international art show that takes place in Venice every two years, I notice that some of those who have come for the event are struggling with certain
contradictions
between what they are and where they are. One bright June morning, as I am walking down the long, wide Fondamenta della Misericordia, I see three men coming out of one of the exhibition spaces, a little way ahead of me. The exhibit is about buildings and I get the impression that they are all architects, albeit of quite different provenance.

Two of them might be brothers or, at the very least, brothers in arms. They are tall, meaty men; they have thin, reddish hair and
reddish skin; they both wear immaculately pressed pink and white checked, short-sleeved cotton shirts, with what look like air vents set into the sleeves near the shoulder. Their cream-coloured slacks have many zipped pockets and their plain brown brogues are polished to a military shine. Their gait is slow and somehow manages to be looselimbed and rather stiff at the same time. They remind me of my Uncle Brian, a big, gentle sheep farmer from the Western District of Victoria in Australia. I am sure that they, too, are Australian.

The third man, their companion, is altogether a different animal. He is small and slight, with a fine mane of wavy black hair swept back artistically from his high forehead. He wears a fashionably cut black suit, a black shirt and a black tie, and the total effect is elegantly insouciant. He walks alongside his large, pink companions, gesturing showily, but nervously, as he talks. I cannot hear what he is saying, but imagine that he is an Italian architect guiding his antipodean colleagues around the Biennale. Curious to know if I have read the cultural signs accurately, I quicken my pace and come up close enough behind them to eavesdrop their conversation.

Yes, the big men, as I guessed, are Australian. They are talking slowly and appreciatively about the exhibition they have just seen. I was also right about the nerves of the little man in black, which are certainly highly wrought – he speaks fast and emphatically, as though dancing on verbal hot coals. But I was wrong in supposing him Italian. It is true that this is the impression he wishes to give: the gorgeous maestro’s hair-do, the unstyled yet stylish suit. Nature has helped him in this too – he is wiry and olive complexioned – but his accent is unambiguously Australian.

I feel for the man in the black suit, so visibly ill-at-ease that his almost perfect European cover is being blown by these two big, pink, colonial appendages with whom he is obliged to walk. It occurs to me that, in an ironic little back flip of history, he might in fact be of Italian descent. It is more than possible that some generations earlier, his forebears, exhausted by poverty and lack of hope in their village in Calabria or Campania or Sicily, boarded the big ship to the other side of the world, in search of the good life. It is more than possible,
too, that the family made its way back from the brink of desperation, through hard work and a new-found optimism, and began to flourish, so that, perhaps half a century later, here he is, one of their
descendants
, back again: a successful Sydney architect, visiting the Venetian Biennale in an Armani suit.

The bluff country architects with whom he is travelling come, most probably, from less ravaged, more prosperous beginnings. I imagine that those ambling, big-boned men, with their bright blue eyes and fair skin, are, like me, the descendants of burly Scotsmen, who set off for the Australian Gold Fields, and set up shop as grocers or wheelwrights or railway contractors: determined and hardy people, with an eye to a profit, made on the back of an unflinching Protestant work ethic.

Somewhere along the line, lots of things have got muddled together. Now, what counts is cool, is image, not mere hard graft. And the seeds of this highly prized glamour are to be found not in the Highlands, but in the bone-dry olive groves of the South.

Later the same day, I am on the
vaporetto
. It is packed to the bulwarks: the seats inside are full of tourists, gazing quietly out of the windows with rapt expressions as the palaces of the Grand Canal slip by. Because they got on the boat at the beginning of its run, at Piazzale Roma, they have taken up all the seats. The people who are standing stuffed along the aisles are in a less blissful state of mind and are mostly Venetians. Some are muttering dark imprecations against the tourists who have colonized the seating. The tourists remain happily unaware of the bile emanating from their fellow passengers. There is a stench of sweat and the oppression of too many bodies.

Lurching through the water, under the weight of its cargo of placid tourists and irritable Venetians, the
vaporetto
veers lumberingly towards the landing stage at Rialto Mercato. Strangely, surreally, for this busy time of year, there is only one person waiting on the platform: a young man, of simply gargantuan dimensions. He is as wide as three people. He has that smooth, babyish look of the obese, however old they are. He could only be American – and this not only because of his size. He stands there with his little round glasses, his hands hanging loose by his sides, his sneakered toes turned out,
in his enormous tee-shirt, his enormous jeans, and observes, with the smallest and sweetest of smiles, the approaching vessel that is so inordinately, burstingly full of people. And I cannot say whether it is a smile of resignation, of denial or of despair.

I am getting off soon and have already begun the slow shove towards the front. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve got stuck and the
vaporetto
has chugged on to the next stop before I can squeeze myself out of the boat. That happened in the days before I learnt how you do it: first, repeatedly call out a loud and insistent: ‘Permesso!’ (‘Excuse me!’) and then, resorting to unashamed elbowing, force the wall of bodies to part and let you through.

As I step off the boat there is, ahead of me, a young and strikingly handsome couple. They are both slim and tall and ineffably
glamorous
. The man, who is a few steps in front, has on a beautiful pale linen suit which he wears over a subtly coloured shirt, open at the collar. His silky blond hair falls in a perfect lock over his tanned forehead; he strolls with both hands in his pockets and is, every inch of him, careless, East Coast American aristocracy. As I slow down behind him, he turns back languidly to his wife to ask her, ‘Are you OK?’

She is patently not OK.

The woman is dark, where he is blond. Her hair is sleekly bobbed, her lips impeccable scarlet; her little, cream silk shift dress is a mere accompaniment to her physical loveliness. She comes along the
gangplank
on the most disappearing of strappy, high heeled sandals, but what is striking about her is not this predictable beauty, her magazine style, nor that of her husband; what is striking is the massive baby in her ballet dancer’s arms. There it is: a great cube of infancy, in stripy dungarees, with wisps of mousy hair and a face smeared with
chocolate
ice cream. There it is with its fat hands and its bulging fists, its one sock on and one sock off, its impossible weight and its unworkable wriggliness. By the look of it, it was born about a year ago. By the look of her, this is absolutely the first time ever, coming en famille to the Venice Biennale, that she has had to pick the thing up and deal with it.

W
HAT CHARMS ME
when I first arrive in Venice is the illusion of classlessness. The absence of cars, the absolute necessity of using your feet to get from one place to another, has a wonderfully levelling effect because, on the street, you are mixing with people from every walk of life. The only private transport other than a baby buggy that exists here is the boat, but by no means everybody owns one and a mooring close to home can be very difficult to find. Those people who have both a boat and parking for it come from every section of society, because getting hold of a mooring is not a question of mere money but also one of contacts and address, perseverance and, on occasion, guile.

Sometimes, rich foreigners come to Venice and use water taxis as they would an SUV at home, but they miss the point and cut a clumsy and ridiculous figure in this city whose own rich and important are regularly to be seen walking from one place to another, just like
everybody
else.

The grace of Venice lies in its fluidity. Except for the days when you’ve got a washing machine to remove from the fourth floor, this world of footsteps is easy and pleasurable to navigate. It can also allow for friendly and unexpected contact across barriers of class and money. In this, as in much else, Venice is a happy anachronism in the Western world and has some resemblance, perhaps, to
eighteenth
-century London, where the elegant, aristocratic town houses of Soho crowded in, side by side, with coffee houses and inns, shops and brothels; or ancient cities, like Pompeii, where a modern visitor is surprised to find that the entrance to the most luxurious of patrician villas is an unassuming door stuck between an oil merchant’s and a barber’s shop.

But all this convivial mixing comes to an abrupt end every year, on 1 June. This is the day the beach huts or
capanne
open on the Lido, Venice’s very own beach island. This is the day that the mass migration of the city’s population from street to strand begins to gather
momentum
, reaching its pitch in July.

The Venetian year is marked out by certain traditional events, most of which are linked to religion: the feast of the Redentore and the pilgrimage to the Salute, San Martino and the brief, delicious appearance of
fritelle
, the little carnival fritters, in the cake shops in February. But one of the main events in the city’s calendar is unashamedly secular: it is the
capanna
season.

We devotees of the Lido in winter are in a definite minority. The long spit of sand is not the most beautiful beach in the world. On a grey afternoon in January, with the icy Bora blowing in from the northeast, the empty hotels, the boarded-up bars and mess of half-finished developments along the edge of the sea, it is nothing short of Soviet. But for all that, on a winter Sunday, the short ferry ride across the Lagoon, a brisk stride beside the Adriatic, and lunch in a trattoria, is the Venetian version of a walk in the country and a pub lunch. As the dank city begins to close in during those empty weeks after Christmas, there is relief in the wider skies, and those of us in need of it return home across the Lagoon on Sunday evenings, our heads cleared out by the wind and the space and ready for another week in the stone labyrinth.

But between June and September any hope of a brisk stride on the beach is mere fantasy. The Lido is colonized by thousands of painted huts, springing up, so it seems, overnight, like so many polka dots on a bikini. These huts are about the size of a garden shed, with a little roofed porch section on the front where one can sit outside, perhaps at a table or on a deck chair. Inside, there is a wooden bench that runs around the walls, some hooks for your clothes, and a curtain that can be pulled across to make a private changing room. And that is all.

The
capanne
are arranged in neat rows. The front row is, of course, the most desirable and the most expensive, having an unblocked sea view. Temporary plastic walkways are laid out between the huts, in a grid, so that one can visit friends or relatives or go to the bar or toilet block barefoot, without touching the scorching sand. It is hard to believe that the windswept reaches of the winter beach are the same place when you are walking around these little impromptu, gridded metropolises that owe more to Mondrian than de Chirico.

On opening day, the city’s population arrives, hauling and lugging their kit for a summer on the beach. They stow away swimming costumes, towels, ointments and sprays and sandals and sarongs in their little wooden houses.

So far, so united, but that’s the last glimpse anyone has of the Republic of the
Calli
. Each day, throughout the summer,
vaporetti
disgorge thousands of citizens at the Lido. Once off the boat, everyone makes their way up the central street, the Gran Viale, towards the beach, which lies on the other, Adriatic, side of the island. The Gran Viale is not, it must be said, very grand; it is a street of average length, lined with bars and ice cream shops, beachwear purveyors and
pizzerias
. There are a few cars and lots of bicycles; tables and chairs are set out on the pavement under pergolas of wisteria, roses and jasmine. It is a busy little promenade, full of holiday promise and people of all ages, strolling, licking ice creams, gossiping. I like it; it reminds me of a musical hall song we used to sing as children, already antiquated in the 1960s:

‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside, oh I do like to be beside the sea!’ But, for all its holiday atmosphere, the Gran Viale is the place where the sheep are sorted out from the goats – the rich from the poor, the aristocrat from the plebeian, from the bourgeois. The Gran Viale, that short strip of street, so anonymous, so comfortably unclassy, so much in the festive mode, is like a passage along which one must travel from the fantasy world of La Serenissima, in order to be born, brutally, into a tougher, more real world of insuperable class distinctions. As Venice surges, in sunhats and Ray Bans, towards the sea, along this most provincial of promenades, she ceases to be the City of Dreams and becomes Every Town. Why? Well, it’s all in the zone.