The Politics of Washing (23 page)

D
URING THE LONG
, hot summer months of July and August, when we are away from Venice with its dense, mudflat heat and increasingly vengeful mosquitoes, the friend of a friend comes to stay in our flat. She is from Milan, where she works for a charity dedicated to the defence of indigenous peoples around the world. She is coming to Venice for the film festival on the Lido, to attend the launch of a film about the Guarani people of South America – displaced, exploited and abused by the interests of power and commerce and whose particular response to this chain of endless disaster is suicide.

Photographs of these people have none of the colourful, primitive drama of the newspaper images of naked men in rainforest
clearings
, painted red and shooting arrows at aeroplanes. Pictures of the Guarani show dry-eyed boys slumping at noon in the shadow of the sugar cane; men, in shorts and battered trainers, standing in listless groups around a beat-out truck, next to a vast hangar-like building, the sugar cane stretching away in every direction. Defiance and incomprehension have long ago flattened into exhaustion and
knowledge
. These photographs are neither pretty nor exotic; they exude only a dull despair.

And now, the woman from the charity in Milan has brought a group of Guarani people to Venice, for the public showing of a film
that is to reveal their plight to the world.

This is by no means the first time that the politics of human rights has set to work on the Lido. Some years before, Rupert Everett,
striding
(one imagines) across the strip of sand between his hotel and the Adriatic Sea, a towel slung around his hips, his grand profile, his louche, confident film star’s lope, was challenged by some Italian guardian of the beach and told he must pay for the privilege of swimming there. Everett, who, for all his transatlantic glamour, is an Englishman, must have felt a rush of outrage when denied his right to a free dip and, accordingly, kicked up a fine rumpus. The
continental
notion that the sea must be paid for came head to head with the insular conviction that the sea, chill and brutal, is a democratic right, an individual necessity and the way out – to everywhere. So it was that Everett – Byronic, enraged – stymied in his attempt to swim his own private Bosporus, found himself facing out the signora with the deck chair concession.

I think of all those unflinching, officious faces I have encountered in Italy – in banks, at post offices, police stations, ticket booths – and I am in no doubt that were it not for the fact that Everett is famous and the deck chair lady was not, Everett would not have had the remotest hope of getting his own way.

Meanwhile, when it comes to their own lands, the Guarani have much, much less leverage than the deck chair signora and infinitely more at stake. I am not in their heads; I do not know who they are, nor where they come from. I cannot presume to understand how it felt to these people to leave their home, to fly in an aeroplane for the first time, far away from South America, to step down from that plane in Northern Italy, to rattle in a bus across a long, straight causeway, to a stone city lying low in salt water. I can only guess how they saw Calle del Vin, or how Calle del Vin saw them: the tall, wall-eyed greengrocer on the corner, stacking up empty vegetable crates; the dapper Sicilian who sells cheese and expensive wines; the haberdasher’s granddaughter and her cap-sleeved, gold-sloganed tee-shirts, must all have witnessed the arrival of those five small, dark Guarani, shepherded up the
calle
by the woman from the Milan office. The rustling
hectares of sugar cane were real only in the mind’s eye of the Guarani; it was the grey stone canyons of an aged city that rose up around them now.

I picture them coming to a standstill outside the great wooden door of number 3460. I imagine the woman from Milan jiggling the key in the unfamiliar lock and the scrape of the door as it opens. They enter the dark hall and begin to climb the stairs. When they reach the first landing, they hesitate.

From this point on, I have some concrete information because my neighbour, the saturnine Signor Zambon, tells me, a while afterwards, what happened next.

‘I found this group of – of –
Mexicans
– ’ he hesitates, puzzled, ‘– and I said: “who are you?” And they said they were staying in your house. Well, I wasn’t sure – but they did seem to know you.’

Whereas Rupert Everett was at least temporarily blocked by the signora with the deck chair concession, the Guarani and their
chaperone
did succeed in running the gauntlet of Zambon. I see Zambon, with his narrow frame and hunched shoulders; his white, lined,
troubled
face and suspicious eyes, emerging from his apartment with its ponderous wooden furniture and acres of small lace and bric-a-brac. Arturo Zambon – Venetian hotelier and misanthrope. And I see the short, muscular Guarani, with their straight black hair and wary eyes, and I wonder how any of these people could begin to recognize the human being in the other.

But, in one respect, I may be wrong. Perhaps Zambon, whose budget hotel is cleaned by Filipinas, who have not seen their children since the year before last, is someone the Guarani know very well. Perhaps the Guarani – small, dark, useful, cheap, dispensable – are equally familiar to Zambon.

The world is run by Zambons; the world is fuelled by Guarani. Is there thanks, after all, to be given for the stolid signora, with a deck chair concession, who dared to challenge the Hollywood star and suggest that he, too, should pay for the sea?

E
VERY TIME
I run into another friend in the street and invite them to my party, I put away the nagging thought that this number of people, and growing, cannot possibly fit into our flat. I try to book a venue – but it’s too late – everywhere is taken. So, in the end, there is nothing for it but to borrow a couple of trestle tables from my neighbour, cover them with bright cloths, and have the party in the street.

People start arriving while it is still light. They approach from two directions, at either end of the long
rio terà
, calling out greetings as they draw near with ineffable, Venetian theatricality.

Across the street from our building there is a secondary school housed in an ex-convent. The high, red brick wall is patterned with centuries’ worth of opened and closed windows, now all blind, and the bricked-in half smiles of interrupted arches and truncated doorways. As my friends gather, darkness comes. The
rio terà
is like an
open-ended
room; its ceiling is the hot night sky, spun with stars, smeared over with the Milky Way. Eighty or more people have filled this city room and the warm buzz of their voices carries upwards to the canopy sky, across the canals and the
fondamentas
and the rooftops and out into the black, unlit reaches of the Lagoon, where the grass
barene
, or mudflats, emerge from the water and then fall back again, under the rising tides.

Intoxicated with the pleasure of friends and the heat and food and wine, I have forgotten our bilious neighbour, but at eleven o’clock he sticks his head out of the fourth floor window opposite, like a bearded bad fairy who has not been invited to the party, and starts to bellow furiously down at us:

‘Go back to your own houses! You’ve been making that racket for hours! I’ll call the
carabinieri
if you don’t clear off back to where you come from!’

The zenophobic undertones are unmistakable, but although he knows that we, the annoying neighbours, are not Venetians, he has not bargained for our Venetian guests.

‘You grumpy old bastard!’ Federico hurls at him, grinning with
pleasure at this unexpected sport, ‘this is our city too!’

‘Yes,’ Marco wades in gleefully. ‘Get stuffed, you fool!’

The black-bearded Fairy Malvolio comes back hard and for several minutes the row ricochets back and forth off the ancient stones. But there is not, after all, that much to say once a certain amount of abuse has been hurled by both sides and it is, in fact, the children who have the last word.

Nobody knows how it starts – as far as anyone ever understands not a word is exchanged between them – but as Malvolio’s abuse continues to come thick and fast, they begin gathering up the chairs we have brought out into the street. There are about twenty of them, ranging from three-year-old Nicola and Ariele, to Tito who is five, and Costantino and Francesco, to ten-year-old Nico manful on his zimmer frame, and Freddie and Carlo and Gio, Sofia and Esther, Lily and Roland and the big boys, Luca and Michael and Eric.

Silently, they arrange the chairs in a row in the middle of the
rio terà,
directly below Malvolio’s window. Then, silently, they all sit down, put their hands on their knees and tip their heads upwards, staring straight at the ranting neighbour. He stops short and returns their stare, astonished.

‘And you … and you …’ he attempts to start up again, but that solemn, implacable joint gaze seems to have struck him dumb and he merely looks back at them for some minutes more. In the end, he draws his head inside and our children sit on, silently united in outstaring him and his ridiculous rage.

This is a small battle won: the living Venice has pitted itself against the dying Venice. The Venice of the future, determinedly outstaring the past.

A
LVISE IS IN
his mid-sixties. He has the head of Father Christmas: a round, genial face, pink cheeks, kindly eyes, a bald pate and a bushy white beard. But he has the forearms of a rower – strong, muscular
– and a wide-handed grip on the oar.

One afternoon, we are rowing across the Giudecca Canal in a sandolo, one of the traditional boats of the Lagoon, flat-bottomed and unadorned, a sort of small, frumpy gondola. The oars are balanced in the focole, the elegant, wooden rowlocks that look like highly polished stands of driftwood or pieces of abstract sculpture. I am rowing at the front,
prua
, and this makes of me mere muscle power; Alvise, on the other hand, is rowing
poppa
, or steersman, so he stands at the raised back of the boat, expertly twisting the long, heavy oar in the water and keeping us on a straight course.

This is a challenge: the Giudecca Canal is a notoriously choppy waterway; never still because of the constant traffic of large boats – car ferries to the Lido, vaporetti, delivery boats, tour boats and the gargantuan cruise ships that bulldoze through the city twice a day. Sometimes, at the end of a calle leading to the canal, one of these passing monsters blocks out the sky, like a genetically reconstructed dinosaur that has escaped from Jurassic Park and is wreaking havoc in the world of human beings.

‘Ha,’ says Alvise angrily as we try to stabilize our little craft in the wash of one of these juggernauts. ‘They might get around to doing something about those things when one ploughs into Piazza San Marco. Until that happens, there’s just too much money to be made. The ecosystem of the Lagoon, the foundations of the city, can go to hell if there’s money to be had.’

I am doing all I can to stay upright when the wash from a speeding taxi hits the side of the sandolo and I plump ingloriously down on my bottom.

Eventually, we get across and enter a canal that cuts through the island of the Giudecca. Our oars slice the still water with a lovely ease and we slip out the other side of the island, into the South Lagoon. Ahead, stretching into the distance, are little islands, some
abandoned
, some inhabited. Cormorants stand on the big wooden posts or bricole that mark the channels of the Lagoon. The lone birds raise their black wings and sit motionless, like small vampires, poised, cape aloft, at the foot of a bed. Sometimes, a small, busy coot pops
up through the glassy surface of the water, as though diving upwards from an underwater world.

As the oars move gently and rhythmically in and out of the water, I notice an irritating, distant buzzing sound. The noise increases until we see a motorboat bearing down on us, skimming along the aquatic highway between the bricole. There is a young man at the wheel. Our sandolo starts pitching heavily and Alvise gestures furiously at the boat to slow down; the young man skids by, grinning and shouting.

‘Perh!’ Alvise snorts. ‘They’ll destroy Venice with their motorboats. They’re no better than the cruise ships.’

As the sandolo stabilizes again and the noise dies away, Alvise says to me, ‘Put down your oar for a moment and look over there.’

The summer afternoon has a bright, lemony clarity. In the distance, the city is laid out, a miniature archipelago, its towers and domes afloat on the sea. In this pristine light, the strung out peaks of the Dolomites seem preternaturally close. ‘Once, you would have often seen the Dolomites like that. Nowadays, the pollution tends to obscure them. You know,’ Alvise says, leaning on his oar, looking out across the water, ‘the Lagoon has been like this for a thousand years and it could stay like this for another thousand – if we want it to.’

We talk about Venice’s chances of survival, not as a mere monument, but as a living city. He takes the oar and stirs it gently in the water so that the boat begins to turn again, very slowly. ‘Shall I tell you something?’ he says, smiling. ‘The numbers of people speaking Venetian dialect is growing now and do you know why? All the immigrants who come from Eastern Europe to work in Marghera and Mestre are learning it, because that’s how everyone communicates in those factories. Tell that to the Lega Nord,’ he laughs, ‘it’s the foreigners who are putting new life into our dialect!’

We are now moving along the back of the Giudecca with its invisible gardens, its convents, monasteries, churches and boatyards; the cranes and winches and broken-down boats awaiting repair – the old Venetian mix of industry and melting, melancholic beauty.

‘There are so few Venetians left now,’ I say, ‘I know it sounds silly, but sometimes I feel guilty just being a foreigner here.’

Alvise shakes his head.