The Politics of Washing (22 page)

Every summer, the long Lido beach is divided up into sections called zones. Each one is managed separately as a sort of family holiday camp, with bars, showers, toilet blocks, table tennis, games for small children and, of course, the
capanne
. But before describing the different zones in more detail, I must first confess my shoddy, freeloading credentials.

When I arrive in Venice, I cannot for the life of me understand
why the locals cough up such exorbitant sums of money every summer for a beach hut. The cheapest zones boast
capanne
at the knockdown rental of 5,000 euros for the three-month season, while the classiest will provide you with the same wooden hut (though acres more distant from your neighbours, and with superior furnishings) for a mere 15,000 euros. For those to whom 5,000 euros for a beach hut represents a serious budgetary challenge, the solution is clear: you go in on a
capanna
with every single relation, friend, passer-by you can collar on the street. So that, as is always the way, the housing of the poor is chronically overcrowded: the ‘cheaper’ zones are heaving with people, and on hot weekends are not unlike the Favelas of São Paolo.

Surely, I thought when I first arrived in Venice, the sea belongs to Everyman, and anyway I couldn’t see the attraction of decamping from your narrow street and apartment block to another narrow street (sand not stone), along with most of the same neighbours (albeit arranged horizontally rather than vertically and wearing many fewer clothes). So I bought myself a beach umbrella and went walkabout, sometimes setting up camp on the no-man’s-land of the
spiaggia libera
, or Free Beach, where students, immigrants and creepy lone men hang out, sometimes visiting friends in one or other of the different zones.

One of the advantages of being a foreigner anywhere can be a sort of social fluidity – it is often less easy to put foreigners into boxes. As a result, perhaps, I have friends in
all
the zones. I have spent long, hot afternoons between the rows of oiled, baking and oozing matrons and their tumbling grandchildren, in the jolly populous and popular zones; I have enjoyed the busy, but less cramped, family atmosphere of the bourgeois middle-range zones and I have (secretly) relished the silken sand and open spaces of the top-of-the-range zone, despite deciding early on that I could not afford to be seen in a bikini among that many beautiful, hungry people.

Yes, I was that ignominious creature, a hutless beach-goer, a permanent outsider. And yet, now some time into my Venetian life, I have to admit to a Sea Change. Not into something Rich and Strange, but into something Poor and Aspirational. There are days when I find
myself wishing that I too had a
capanna
. Not just any
capanna
, but a
capanna
in the Top Zone. That I could be a part of all that shiny, exclusive beach stuff. That I, too, could have a cane lounger with fat cream cushions and a view of the Adriatic uncluttered by a heaving mass of bodies. Because, you must believe me, the extraordinary thing is that when you are in the Top Zone, even the sea looks different – more, somehow, Caribbean – and the furnishings are indubitably softer.

Which is why I can see that it’s time for me to move on: time to accept that class distinctions are alive and well in Paradise and that one cannot slough off one’s roots, that we all have a place on the Lido, and that mine is not in the zones. I must abjure my beach umbrella, turn my back on the
capanne
, and retreat to the distant reaches of the Lido, where there is not even a beach; where the avant-garde set have hauled driftwood and debris from the Adriatic and used it to build wonderful platforms and fragile, curlicued structures on the white stones of the breakwater; where some inspired wag has created palm trees from salt-bleached tree trunks, hung with the flotsam of Fanta bottles, and set up an alternative biennale of beach art, made from anything they could reclaim from the sea, for discriminating passers-by. Here, in the long summer evenings, the people lie about in hammocks, in a
bohemian
and creative kind of way, drinking prosecco and gazing out to sea, thinking about Art and Utopia.

M
Y FATHER AND
I used to get up early and, with J. G. Links’s famous guide
Venice for Pleasure
in hand, go off to explore the city. I remember the still, clear mornings of those childhood holidays in Venice, and my father, who loved the amiable, rambling J. G. like a brother, reading aloud to me all the way, barely drawing breath to look up at the buildings and views to which the book was leading us. What
mattered
most, after all, were not the stones of the city, but the smell of the early morning air, the sunshine and the companionship of a father and daughter, walking together before breakfast.

Now, thirty-five years later, actually living in the city, I spend my days walking past those monuments and curiosities to school meetings and work appointments; to have coffee with a friend; to get to the farmers’ market and the doctor’s surgery. Art and culture really do not figure in my domestic routine, unless you count the school concerts and the fancy pastries. Which is why, after almost a year, I begin to feel vaguely guilty about the sheer quantity of art I have
not
looked at since I became a resident of Venice.

One hot June afternoon, I decide to do something about this and go to look at a painting by one of my favourite Renaissance painters, Lorenzo Lotto, whose physically solid and psychologically subtle portraits of traders and scholars feel to me so vividly Venetian. It is to be found in a nearby church.

As I set out through the city, everything seems unusually still; it is the heat that I hear, not the familiar soft bustle of footsteps and voices. When I arrive in Campo Santa Margherita I understand why: Italy is playing Slovakia in the Football World Cup. The four or five bars in the area have rigged up flat-screen televisions on the pavement and each screen is surrounded by a crowd of people, seated and standing, all watching the game intently.

As I pass through a bottleneck between two of these groups, Italy scores a goal. A great roar of elation bursts from the crowd as though a curling wave has risen magically up from the stones of the
campo
and is carrying us all forward for a brief, glorious moment of shared joy. Even I, alone, accidentally present and with no interest in football, find myself grinning broadly, swept up in the emotion that surrounds me. Then the referee decides against allowing the goal and the
spectators
yell and gesture passionately at the screens – arms outstretched, hands splayed, as though flinging the referee’s decision back in his face.

I leave the football behind me and walk on to the church which sits on the other side of the
campo
. It is a big old place, like an outbuilding on an aristocratic estate, where the family has dumped its unwanted furniture and works of art over generations. The sun, streaming in through high windows, is thick with dust motes and illuminates
unlikely tangles of brass work, ramshackle chairs and tables, and blackened oil paintings lost in magnificently pompous gilt frames. It is handsome, shabby, familiar and neglected.

As I step in from the baking outside world, the church feels cool and quiet. There is hardly anybody around. Close up to the altar, a stocky elderly woman sits in a pew; she is rocking heavily back and forth, her feet pacing out a strangely nimble repeating pattern, first on the lower wooden bar of the pew in front and then back on the floor. She mutters noisily to herself as she moves – whether in prayer, or in some disturbed, obsessive mantra of her own, I cannot tell.

On the other side of the aisle, some way behind the swaying woman, there sits a skinny old man in a black suit. He is writing intently in a notebook balanced on his knee. After a while, he gets up and goes to the lectern, where the Bible is spread open on golden eagle’s wings. Perhaps he too is mad, I think, and is on the point of declaiming from the scriptures, at the top of his voice, to the almost empty church. But he says nothing and it occurs to me that it is I, not the old man or the rocking woman, who is off course: one of the banal godless, capable of suspecting that the devout or the contemplative might be touched not by faith but by insanity.

I amble around the church, looking idly for the Lotto. It is nowhere to be seen and I eventually realize that it is hidden behind scaffolding and sheets, in a side chapel. It is, not unusually for this land of endless restoration work,
in restauro
and hidden from sight. I don’t much care and wander on, aimlessly.

Two workmen, in plaster-splattered overalls, stride quickly past me up the central aisle talking as though they are in the street, so that their chat is unnaturally amplified in the still, contained space of the church. They disappear through the sacristy door.

Next, a young man rushes in through a side entrance.

‘One all!’ he calls out excitedly to the rocking woman.

‘Ha!’ she says, continuing to rock.

Then another explosive roar comes up from the
campo
, distant now, but ferocious in its passion. The young man, who is painfully thin, his pale face inflamed with acne, turns abruptly back towards
the open door and casts an anguished look out to the
campo
, where the action is, hopelessly torn between his duties in the church and his burning desire to be back in the hot, sunlit world of the football match.

This is when the priest rounds the corner, walking swiftly and neatly in his black cassock, a shiny leather briefcase slotted under one arm, his white hair cut close around his face. He takes one look at the boy and understands the situation.

‘Vai!’ he says sharply, ‘Go!’ and the young man, unfrozen by this reprieve, this benediction, sprints out of the church and races across the
campo
, to join the crowd.

I
DON’T KNOW
if there are more tourists here in this hottest month, but there are certainly many fewer Venetians, so the sense in the city of being overrun is at its height. That and the effort of dragging one’s overheated body through the sometimes insufferable heat.

There is one man I notice walking about the area in these dog days. At first he seems, like all the other tourists, to be following a set itinerary, walking along the
fondamenta
, dressed in shorts and trainers, with a small rucksack slung over his shoulder, a camera around his neck, his face tanned. But then I notice him a second and a third time in the course of several days, repeating, it seems, the same itinerary over and over again. This is when I realize that his tan is not of the smooth, holiday variety, the seasonal badge of well-heeled leisure, but is darker, deeper, rougher. His trainers are scuffed and spreading from long, hard use, and I see that as he walks along the
fondamenta
he is not gazing around, star struck by the fairytale city, but has the closed-off, inward look of a survivor.

Although he neither smiles nor appears to relate in any obvious way to Venice, the old lag, masquerading as day tripper, spends his wandering hours enacting, in his very person, as consummate and tragic a piece of satire as you could hope to find anywhere on the streets of this city that has become a slave to tourism.

In the winter of 2010, a sixty-one-year-old tramp was set on fire. His name was Marino Scarpa and he described himself as a Venetian DOC – that increasingly rare creature. For some years and despite attempts to persuade him to do otherwise, he slept rough in an out-of-the-way courtyard. During the winter, his home was a hut of cardboard boxes.

One night, a group of teenagers gathered in the courtyard and started to hurl abuse at him. They were, he later said, between fifteen and seventeen years old and themselves DOC Venetians. They took cigarette lighters out of their pockets and began trying to set fire to Scarpa’s cardboard boxes. Finally, the flames took and he also found that the arm of his coat was alight. Terrified, he managed to put the flame out and to run away.

Like the clown-tourist, wandering the
fondamentas
of the city, it seems to me that this ugly desecration has shades of the morality play – the final, ghastly chapter in the Venetian fairy tale in which the young natives ritually, barbarically slay the goose that lays their golden egg.

I
T TAKES THE
best part of a morning for my father-in-law,
il nonno
, to set up his home movies. Two dusty cardboard boxes must be humped up from the storeroom in the basement of the building. He lifts an antiquated projector out of a nest of yellowing newspapers; the cords are stiffly uncoiled; the screen unfurled; and the projector is set on a little tower of magazines. The generous, old-fashioned reels of celluloid are dusted down and then clicked into place on the projector.

Now he is ready and the family is summoned. The adults are ranged along the sofa in a straight line, knees just touching; children sit on the floor. It is a temporarily ordered version of family life. The blinds on the big windows are lowered mechanically, clacking down, slat
against slat, until we are in a pitch darkness that only gradually
calibrates
to dusk. The projector refuses to start. Nonno adjusts it again. Somebody, bored with waiting, fretful about the lunch, nips out to the kitchen and is called back urgently. Then comes the quick-flickering of black strokes on a white void; nonsense hieroglyphs; fossilized insect skeletons which flower suddenly into intense, staccato images of a lost present.

A young woman walks briskly across our frame of view. She is dark-haired, her curving black eyebrows are expressive against her white skin. Her skirt is just above the knee, low enough to tell us that she is a respectable Italian wife and mother, high enough to confirm that the year is 1966 or thereabouts. She is the younger self of the stout old lady who sits, a little slumped, beside me on the sofa, her bronchitic lungs labouring even in repose. The young woman glances out from her sunny alpine day forty years ago and then turns away, without
recognition
or foreboding, because where she is, is now, and what she is looking around for is not the future, but her two small sons.

Meanwhile, Nonno, the proud projectionist, informs us that these are the Alps, and the shot pans crawlingly across immemorial white peaks.

‘But where’s Daddy?’ one of the children asks from the floor.

Nonno does not seem to hear the question, being intent on the ticking reel, the fractional, technical adjustments of focus and speed.

Now, we see a scattering of alpine chalets, their lattice-carved balconies and windowboxes dense with the scarlet scribble of geraniums; then, flower-specked meadows; then, again, the so-slowly-unfolding, so icily eternal, Alps, filmed from left to right, then back again, from right to left. That masterly, unflinching hand-held camera shot is all that remains of Nonno’s thirty-five-year-old Alpha male self.

‘But where’s Dad?’ The members of the front row insist.

They want to see their father become one of them. They want to see him playing as they play. They want to meet those two young brothers – their father and uncle, the two middle-aged men on the sofa – magically restored to childhood. But we, the obedient, captive audience, continue to glide with the camera across the limpid surface of a glacial
lake. We see the surrounding peaks reflected in glassy water. We know that those mountains, their infinitely mirrored selves, that lake, are still there, exactly the same as they ever were. Nonno’s films take us on a tour of the immutable and we are all, without exception, bored stiff. What we want is metamorphosis; we want history; we want the disappeared to reappear and to call us by name and live.

Then, suddenly, there he is! Did you spot him? A wee thing, a capering, puckish scrap in a knitted hat, fitting his round head like an acorn cap, skittering towards us through the high grass of spring. He is all tricked out in an embroidered Tyrolean jacket.

‘Oh, Dad, what are you wearing?!’

Miniature lederhosen, knee-length socks, mountain boots: a funny little fellow, your dad: fairy guide, lost boy, sprite; the weightsome, middle-aged man, sitting there in the gloom, transmogrified into an accomplice.

But only for a moment. He’s lost again and the fractious, repetitive scratching of the reel takes us back to Nonno’s Alps, plotted out by him in all their grandeur. Because Nonno was a successful businessman. Because Nonno was a man with a new movie camera. Because Nonno was a man whose real life was carried out on the street, in the piazza, the office and other, unofficial places, never in company with his children, or that dark-eyed girl, his wife.

How could Nonno’s films ever have been concerned with anything less than the Grandeur and Immutability of the Mountains?

On the way home, on the
vaporetto
, moving up the Grand Canal, I watch as tourists diligently record, for their own private posterity, the stones of this ancient city. They stand at the side of the boat, with a camera held about 10 centimetres from their face, and as the boat passes slowly through the water, they film the solemn or exquisite or fanciful façades of the most known sequence of buildings in the world. This is a leaden kind of déjà vu: no Proustian frisson of memory here; no brief glimpse of something from the corner of the eye that has memory springing up, scenting the air and coursing after the disappearing moment, along the winding back alleys. This déjà vu is just
what it says: you have already seen it – hundreds upon hundreds of times. There is no surprise, no teasing distance between you and what you see; there is no space left for imagination or memory or
speculation
to creep in, curl up and grow. Like Nonno’s alpine pastures, these lugubrious photographic trawls down the long line of palaces offer only one more reproduction of the thing so ineluctably reproduced.

Often visitors say about Venice: ‘It seems unreal. It’s like a stage set!’

Now that I live here I no longer feel this because I have gone backstage.

‘Throw it away!’ I want to say, tapping the tourists bossily on the shoulder, jogging their camera hand, ‘Open your eyes. See the
unforgettable
. It won’t let you down: it won’t leave you. Don’t worry, your mind will keep the pictures safe.’ And then I want to add, intrusively, bitchily: ‘Do you honestly think anyone is going to want to watch this interminable, moving postcard ever again?’

But really, I wonder if it is less simple than that. Perhaps when the DVD is slotted into the machine (dusty, rescued from the attic) in thirty years’ time, those palaces – the impassive, virginal face of Ca’ d’Oro, the muscular abrasiveness of Ca’ Pesaro – will recall to one person in that dutiful future audience the warmth of a long-lost lover’s hand, soft on the back of a soft neck. A pinhead of memory on which dances the last, ectoplasmic puff of a shining first morning, in a cheap hotel room in Venice, when you woke in your lover’s arms and saw the reflection of water, moving silver on the wall.