The Politics of Washing (7 page)

‘Now,’ Stefania murmers, looking Lily deep in the eyes. ‘Do you feel better?’

‘No,’ says Lily.

At the end of the school day, Stefania comes out of the door with the children, leans up against the wall and lights a cigarette, which she proceeds to smoke, with long, slow drags. I imagine the effect this would have outside our village school in England and smile. But Stefania’s lungs are demanding in other ways too and these amuse me less.

Behind the elementary school there is a wonderful park, with huge plane trees and grassy knolls: a kind of paradise for these Venetian kids who are so bound in by stone walls and mostly live in small, gardenless flats. But Stefania rarely takes the class outside at break time. She is allergic to the trees, she tells us, so the seventeen lively nine-year-olds, who have sat through two hours of lessons already, simply have to stay inside. At first, they are allowed to play in the hallway, but they are judged to be too unruly and end up in the classroom for five hours at a stretch.

Stefania’s refusal to give these children exercise is entirely
sanctioned
by the system. Many of the teachers do not take the children
out – it’s too far to go all the way down those stairs for such a short break; it’s too wet, too hot, too windy, too dusty; the children will catch cold; the children have been too naughty. There’s always some excuse. So the kids continue to gaze, like Alice, out at the
unobtainable
garden and the teachers continue to complain vociferously to the parents that their children are wild, uncontainable and incorrigibly fidgety.

Venetian children get used to the physical constraints, both necessary and unnecessary, of their city and culture. In our first months here, I am acutely aware of the impact my family of non-Venetians has on the world around them. Four children brought up in the English countryside are altogether louder and more numerous than the average Venetian family of one or two children. Lily, Michael, Roland and Freddie have grown up without having to think about the people downstairs or upstairs; they are used to having space and to filling it, with their gestures and their voices and their belongings. Every morning, we tumble out of our building and into Calle del Vin and it is as if the circus has arrived in town.

But it’s not only the numbers and the volume that makes us so very conspicuous, it’s our style: the hastily brushed hair, the unbuttoned and brightly coloured coats, the continuing argument or the loud pleas for a snack from the cake shop. The twins, who are in the middle of a knitting craze, sit at the back of the
vaporetto
and knit their way up and down the Grand Canal, like a couple of old ladies and I, who love nothing more than being an invisible observer, must submit to being a beacon of foreignness as I roll across town with my gaggle of kids.

When Venetian children come out of school, they head with their parents, grandparents or au pairs for the
campo
. These public spaces are the playgrounds of Venice. Adults stand in clusters chatting and their children race around them until darkness begins to fall and then, because this is Italy, everyone goes in for dinner at the same time.

Often, standing in the
campo
, I think of that Breughel painting of children playing in a sixteenth-century Flemish square – scuffling,
tumbling, pretending, competing – dozens of kids exuberantly occupying their public space. And here they are still: kicking and throwing balls, chalking pictures on the flagstones, hopscotching, giggling,
skipping
, eating ice creams, scootering and skateboarding.

After school, I am chatting with some of the other mothers as our children roar about in the
campo
, letting off steam after the long school day, when a sweet-faced elderly American woman engages me in conversation. She is in Venice for two reasons. Not many years ago, when they were staying in the city, her husband died suddenly and unexpectedly, and now she has returned to this place of loss and her last happiness. But besides that, she is also here to continue, alone, the sociological and architectural studies they carried out together for years:

‘Our conviction was that we needed to develop in America a consciousness of the public space as a valuable and creative facility. A place where you are on foot, not insulated in your car; where you can stop and talk, play, eat and drink, look around you, be together with other people, some of whom you know, some of whom are strangers.’

There is something touchingly solitary about her as she gestures around this very communal space, heaving with people of all ages.

‘This,’ she smiles warmly, ‘is good.’

But, of course, the street life of Venice isn’t all roses and the same battles continue to be waged between the old and the young.

Just outside our house, there is a
rio terà
or filled-in canal. This creates a wider than normal area in this city of narrow byways and is perfect for football and other games. According to people who have lived here all their lives, this particular
rio terà
was once full of kids careering up and down after balls, all of which culminated every so often in legendary mass football games wildly played out between the youths of the neighbouring parishes.

When we first move in, the
rio terà
is taken up with building works and, except for a few people passing through, it is deserted. But the arrival of four new kids on the block and, at the same time, the end of the works means that it soon begins to fill up again. Every day, after school, a band of boys that includes Freddie and Roland play football
there. Huddles of girls and younger children play less rumbustious games happily around the edges.

But no authentic Venetian street scene would be complete without its grumpy old men and women. So, perfectly on cue, the elderly couple on the top floor of the building opposite begin to grumble and complain.

‘You can’t play out there between 1 o’clock and 4 o’clock,’ they snap at the children. ‘You can only play in the street between 4 and 6.’

This injunction is cordially ignored, but the children, it is clear, are becoming the focus of intense resentment.

‘You’ve broken my front door with your football,’ the old woman tells the boys bitterly. Given that the door is a great, weighty wooden thing studded with metal and designed hundreds of years ago to resist much more threatening foes than a plastic football bought for a euro at the newsagents, I remain sceptical, but understand that the real problem is not structural.

Then, one day, the old woman’s husband comes out and says menacingly to the careening footballers, ‘We’re watching you! We know where you live!’

Which strikes us as not especially brilliant, given that we live in the house opposite. Anyway, despite repeated threats to call the
carabinieri
, the
carabinieri
never come.

This is par for the course. Visitors to Venice are mostly blithely unaware of the seething, muttering Venetians on the
vaporetti
who are cursing them audibly for cluttering up their streets and their boats and for having the gall to be there at all.

Though I dislike the rudeness, I do understand: the Venetians are drowning in tourism. What, on the other hand, I cannot comprehend is the venom they direct towards the children of the city, who are, after all, their own kind and the only hope that Venice has of one day becoming again a place for the people who live here and not a mere temporary staging post for millions of tourists.

Often, older Venetians speak lovingly and sadly of the days when the city was properly, fully inhabited. Another of our neighbours, a kindly, elegant man in his seventies, recalls how, when he was a
small boy, the children had long-jumping contests off the well in the nearby
campo
: a kind of impromptu, Venetian juvenile Olympics. He remembers perilous swimming races across the Giudecca Canal and the kids dive-bombing off the bridges, when the summer heat became unbearable.

My friend Roberta, who is in her forties, tells me how she and her friends would race home from school on boats, leaping along the canal from craft to craft, with a weather eye for the owners, who would sometimes catch them and give them a furious rocketing.

The city is painfully aware of the loss of a younger generation. Years before, on a visit to Venice, we were walking along a wide
fondamenta
with all four of our then very small children strung out like ducklings behind. A tiny, bent and ancient woman stopped to watch as we went by.

‘Signora!’ she said, her eyes shining in her frail, wrinkled face. ‘Are they all yours?! It’s like a fairy tale!’

She seemed to be returning to a folk memory, to a time when families were very big indeed – a time, in fact, when a family of four children would have been on the small side. Now, in these melancholy days of a chronically falling national birthrate, it felt to her like a miracle.

And yet and yet … the living children, the children of now, are, when they actually begin to play in the actual street, just too much trouble. It’s a predictable enough story – how youthful energy, youthful noise, can be exhausting and somehow cruel to the old: a heartless flouting of age and its unjust ills. All the same, it has a pathetic irony in this fatally depopulated city that is so desperately in need of youthful, resident blood.

One afternoon, when I am letting myself into our house, while the kids of the neighbourhood play noisily around me, the young man who looks after the small hotel opposite approaches me nervously.

‘Signora,’ he is visibly embarrassed, but clearly there is something he has to say. ‘Couldn’t the children play a little further up there?’ He points miserably towards the end of the
rio terà
. ‘You see, they might disturb the tourists.’

A
DRIANA IS WEARING
a hairband to which are attached a pair of green Shrek ears. This does nothing to reduce her impact. On Adriana, even Shrek’s ears assume a look of authority and of the unavoidable. She is one of Freddie’s teachers, and Freddie, himself the beau ideal of stubbornness, has met in Adriana his match and nemesis.

‘There’s a group of foreign mothers,’ she tells me, ‘which meets a few times over the winter and everyone brings something – a recipe or a song, perhaps – from their own culture and they make a lovely book and bring it into schools and dress up in their national costumes and talk about their countries with the children.’

Adriana is a force of nature and hard to resist.

‘Yes,’ I say, entering into her enthusiasm, ‘and there are so many foreign parents at this school that you must have a real goldmine to draw on – ’

But I see, in the minute flicker of Adriana’s face muscles, that I am missing the point. The charming Irish glass designer, the clever Parisian translator, the chic German costumier, the Polish archeologist and the Russian painter who gather outside the school to wait for their children are not the kind of foreign mothers the Foreign Mothers’ Group is after. The sort of foreign mothers required are the really foreign kind, not educated, bilingual European women, but recently arrived immigrants from hotter, poorer, farther away places. It occurs to me that I, fresh from an English village, reasonably fluent in Italian and working for Radio Four, might not entirely meet Adriana’s
criteria
. Still, I understand, that as the newest foreign mother in town, she needs me to meet her quota. Obediently, I go along.

The meeting is to take place in yet another lowering palazzo turned primary school. The outside of the building is made of great blocks of rough stone and is windowless at ground floor level; the doors are heavily studded and have many enormous keyholes.

I step up on to the stone threshold and press the bell – the nose of a bronze lion.

‘Who is it?’ comes a disembodied voice from the door phone.

‘I’m here for the Foreign Mothers’ Group.’

The door clicks open and I go through into the deserted entrance hall.

I stand in the semi gloom for some moments, wondering where I should go. There is no one in sight. Then, somewhere deeper in the building, I hear a distant echo of voices and so I follow the sound until I come to another double door that stands slightly ajar. I peer through into the poorly lit depths of a hall. There are stacks of tables and chairs, and large objects – blackboards, perhaps – draped in sheets. I have the impression of being in an abandoned furniture depository. At one end of the room is a stage, around which are rigged heavy, dark curtains, and sitting at a table at the foot of this stage is a group of women.

‘Come in, come in,’ a smiling, pleasant-faced woman in her late forties, and with a lot of red hair, stands up; she is eager and slightly breathless. Seated on either side of her are two other middle-aged Italian women; they too appear kindly and earnest and are dressed in the loose, vaguely ethnic clothes commonly seen on middle-class British women, but not so much on their Italian peers, who tend to favour sharper profiles, less of the dangle and drape. These are the teachers and co-ordinators of the Foreign Mothers’ Group.

Also seated at the table are five very young Senegalese women, all of them slender and beautifully, vividly black, and they are laughing and talking with energy and expansive movements of their long hands. At the end of the table are two girls from Bangladesh. They are small and round and quiet. One wears a sparkly scarf, wrapped around her head. She has fat fingers and a little plump boy on her lap, who lays his cheek against hers. Last of all, there is a wiry Filipina woman, cradling a toddler who is drinking brown-coloured liquid from a bottle.

I am at least twenty-five years older than any of these girls and my circumstances could not be more different. I have infinitely more in common with the middle-aged, middle-class, white Italian school teachers than with the twenty-two-year-old Senegalese mother of three who arrived in Europe for the first time six months ago. For all that, even with my serviceable Italian, even waving the flag of an Italian spouse, even with education and experience and age, there are often,
in those first months in Venice, times when I have no idea of what is going on, or what I am required to do. I have bumbled my way around post offices, school secretaries, parents’ meetings, homework schedules, telephone calls to landlord, plumbers, electricians, and though for the most part I can see it for the comedy it is (for me, after all, this is play – I never have to enter the shadow of the immigration office), I am permanently two steps behind the action and, sometimes, on another planet altogether.