Monday,
July 31, 2006
Venice:
Everybody's Town, Except the Venetians
The ANNOTICO
Report
It is quite
interesting that Americans and Europeans seem to claim Venice as their own, and that Venetians should
get out of the way and not obstruct their amusement. It is as if the Venetians
should not even be permitted to remain, only as if to add "color" to
a theme park.
It is more of the
Ugly American and Arrogant European attitude. One example:
John Berendt gives a piquant account of the rivalry between two
American millionaires to control the Save Venice philanthropic association.
One, a puffed up cosmetic surgeon, had the habit of saying, "Venice would be better
off without Venetians." The other, heir to the Piggly
Wiggly grocery chain fortune, convinced himself he actually belonged to the
European aristocracy that he had spent his life sucking up to. A
perplexed Venetian of some standing commented, "Why must they come to Venice to save it? It's
nice, of course, the money they give. But it doesn't have anything to do with
generosity. It means they want to look important. ...Venice will save itself. Go and save Paris."
It is quite a
long piece, and only for the patient. It includes the viewpoints of John
Ruskin, Thomas Mann, Henry James, Graham Greene, Mary McCarthy, John Berendt, and Harold Brodkey.
Swan's
Commentary's
by Peter Byrne
July
31, 2006
"What is it
about Americans and Venice?"
I ask myself. Then I burrow deeper into the mountain of books about Venice and realize that
not only Americans are infatuated with the island city. Everyone else is just
as taken with the place, even the Italians, though their village chauvinism
being what it is -- bred in the bone -- they view Venice from a different angle. They are
surely impressed by the strange ingenuity of the city, but they look on it with
a colder eye. That leaves the Venetians, the ones still alive and kicking.
Their views appear not to interest anyone much. Yet it's hard to believe they
don't have opinions and maybe even lives of their own.
It
seems the rest of the world, all those Venice
lovers, would simply like the surviving Venetians to get out of the way or
recede into history and its annals with a bit more snap. Consensus among
visitors is well established on the subject and runs from the sweatiest
day-tripper or package tour denizen right through to academic historians and
belle-arti buffs. Venice belongs to them, not to the people who
actually live there. Of course the locals have their place as background.
Movies need extras. But the Venice
script, the story line, is a mind game played on the
back of a city reduced to myth.
Just
now anti-Americanism sets the fashion note in Western Europe, so it behooves us
to join the crowd and look at how Americans have twisted Venice into their very
own personal thing. One could, though, build at least as strong a case against
British, French, or German claimants, not to go farther afield,
who prefer their dream of the blessed isle to its humble waterlogged citizens.
John
Ruskin laid the impregnable groundwork of Venice
viewing. He not only thought that the actual inhabitants were guilty of lese
majesty by their existence; he didn't like their forebears either. To Ruskin's
mind, you had to go back before the 15th century to find anyone worthy to live
in Venice. The
primitive, age-of-faith city had been corrupted by mercantile rationalism about
then. Ruskin thundered all this out in library-shaking prose that still echoes
over the lagoon.
The
narrator of Proust's Remembrance
of Things Past actually ended his
enjoyment of Venice
when he finally managed to visit it for the first time. It had taken him a
couple of thousand pages of mooning over the proposed trip before packing his
bag and setting out. Venice
in print and paint was his real love. He treasured his preconception of the
place, his idea of it. Up against the solid stone and artifacts of the island
city, he lost his footing. And if he couldn't cope with the geographical place,
what chance did its inhabitants have of making him aware of them?
Thomas
Mann's Death in Venice put German culture's stamp of doom on the city. Both
the protagonist Gustave Von Aschenbach
and Tadzio, the object of his obsession, are, with
all due respect for their fine manners, only up-market tourists. Their sessions
of peek-a-boo haven't anything to do with the city's life. A few menials from
the local labor pool do appear to trim their hair or wait at table, and the
bodies piling up from the plague are presumably native Venetians. No mean feat
was Mann's, and one still thinks twice about whistling a happy tune while
strolling along the canals. Though Paris, London, and -- for heaven's sake,
Chicago -- lost more lives to cholera in the 19th century, Venice remains
forever the plague-ridden city where beauty goes hand in hand with hideous
death.
The
Olympian novelist Henry James best sums up the American case. He deftly
interlaced the threads that had been spun for centuries. Sunny though its ruins
might be, Venice
was a Republic raped by foreign autocrats and ruined beyond repair. It
continued to decay, but so slowly that James could hold the city up as
unchanging and permanent while the rest of the 19th century metamorphosed in a
wild fandango around it. He called it a fantasyland. "It remains strangely
the Venice of
dreams, more than of any appreciable reality." But, beware, the heat
generated by all that unclothed art in one place not far from where the Romans
had frolicked, and the city's admixture of unfamiliar courting and marital
customs, made for -- the dependable Anglo-Saxon dirty mind aiding -- a hot-bed
of sensuality.
James'
experience of Venice, when not visiting art
galleries and seeing the sights, was colored by his stays with the very rich
Curtis family in their Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal. The patrician life of these Americans so
bemused him that he began to wonder if the plebeians he spied from the Curtis's
balcony might not lose their picturesque charm if properly fed and clothed.
When
James chose Venice
as a setting for his fiction, he knew better than to give Venetians anything
but walk-on roles. They were an unknown quantity to him. The Aspern Papers (1888) had originally been set in Florence. He moved it to Venice in order to show his villain's
inability to see real beauty even in the one place it could hardly be ignored.
The story concerns a callous American literary man forcing entry into the life
of a helpless old woman, vaguely American, bearing a French,
not an Italian name, for his selfish ends. The saintly heroine of The Wings of the Dove (1902) is an American whom heartless, mercenary
people are out to fleece. They aren't Venetians either. But James seemed to
think that Venice
with all that unreality, decrepitude and licentiousness was a great setting for
tales of fraud and deceit.
To
spell all this out, James wrote a long essay in 1882 and set down impressively
what we might call the ultra sensitive American's view. He said that Venice "of all the
cities of the world is the easiest to visit without going there." In other
words, just as Proust's alter ego would find, we know everything that matters
about Venice
from the tons of books and piles of pictures, without ever venturing over the
water to touch down there. But this "visit" accomplished without
actually setting foot in the city had nothing to do with the Venetians on the
ground, going about their grotty lives in fairyland.
They no more inhabit those books or pictures than today's five-star hotels.
James
goes so far in his essay as to cast the city in an erotic posture:
The
creature varies like a nervous woman, whom you know only when you know all the
aspects of her beauty.... The place seems to personify itself, to become human
and sentient and conscious of your affection. You desire to embrace it, to
caress it, to possess it; and finally a soft sense of possession grows up and
your visit becomes a perpetual love affair.
But we
mustn't jump to conclusions. Those unfamiliar with James's biography might take
the steamy language to mean he kept a mistress hidden away on a lesser canal,
found a soul mate in the Venice brothel that would delight Graham Greene years
later or had consummated a sex-tourist's passion in the bottom of a gondola --
that he had, after all, got close to the people of Venice. Not this Henry James
who, in the language of his day, was "one of nature's bachelors." His
sexuality went entirely into his novels. Academic snoopers haven't been able to
tag him with any sexual intimacies, female or male. Some researchers have noted
a senile twitch of homoeroticism, but they used a very thick magnifying glass.
It was nothing that actually got him out of his armchair. The eroticising of Venice
was only another way of keeping the city in his head, a dream, without
inhabitants.
If Mary
McCarthy wasn't a disciple of James, she followed him in writing with feeling
about Venice.
Her Venice Observed (1956) could almost be the next chapter in the story
he told. James said he hardly spoke to Italians in Italy "save washerwomen and
waiters." McCarthy, farther removed from Victorian snobbery, tells us
about her renting agent and her landlady. But they are mere shadows in a book
that consists mainly of remarks on remote history and a sharply written
personal perusal of the great Venetian paintings. It engages with what's real,
but the reality McCarthy observes isn't so much Venice as the art that's been created there.
McCarthy
might speak of "Venetian concreteness and visualizing power" or tell
us that in contrast to the Tuscan school "Venetian painting from beginning
to end is a riot of dress goods." But does this get Venetians on to the
stage or does it merely bring Venice down out of James's head and display before
us, not Venetians, but a Venetian art gallery? When McCarthy talks of the
"eternal Venetians" that Veronese painted, it's only a mellifluous
way of short changing the residents of Venice
in the nineteen fifties.
In his
day James decried the tourist "hordes" and "a herd of fellow
gazers." He pontificated: "There is nothing new to be said about Venice." McCarthy
goes along with him and then one step farther: "And there is no use
pretending that the tourist Venice is not the
real Venice....
The tourist Venice is Venice."
At this
point in the Venice
phantasmagoria as recorded by our more delicate sensibilities, I want to say
whoa, what's this place you're talking about? Could we, please, begin afresh?
The island city of Venice is a blob of land with
tails on each side sitting in a lagoon system, hard by the Adriatic coast of Italy. An
hour's brisk walk will get you from one end to the other and it takes half that
time to go from top to bottom.
The
city belongs administratively to the Veneto.
This region, one of the most prosperous in Italy, holds it
own economically even in the glum present of zero national growth. It's the
home of a fervent Catholicism that can surprise Italian visitors from more
secular regions. Politically it harbors just now a European embarrassment in
the shape of the Northern League, a foul-mouthed swarm of small-minded
provincials. (Their spokesman, an ex-Minister, recently called the French
National soccer team, "N.....s, Islamists and Communists." Previously
he sported a t-shirt emblazoned with a disputed Danish caricature of Mohammed.)
The League's aim is to separate the Veneto
from poorer regions of Italy.
Think Minnesota opting out of the USA because it doesn't want federal tax money
going to Louisiana and Alabama. Italians possessed of any civic
sense that extends beyond their own backyard wince when the Leaguers spout
their simple-minded venom against immigrants, the poor,!
the capital in Rome,
and anyone who isn't one of their own, if possible a blood relative. But small,
grotesque parties have weight in the Italian political system that relies on
heteroclite coalitions in order to function at all.
The
city of Venice doesn't share the Veneto's prosperity, which is based on widespread and intense
small industry in medium sized cities. Venice's
own industrial area, Marghera, within sight and
polluting distance on the mainland, has been in crisis for decades. The city's port facility that always furnished jobs and revenue has
also declined steadily and may well dwindle to nothing.
Venice, everyone knows, is
sinking and subject to ever increasing flooding from Adriatic high tides. A
mega project called Moses, meant to save the city by constructing sea gates, has been the source of controversy for years. Opponents say it would be preferable to raise the city by pumping
water beneath it and that the gates will destroy the delicate balance of the
lagoon. There are as many experts against the project as for it, and an
odor of pork presided at its conception. But work on Moses has actually begun.
At present the official position seems to be, We've
started the goddamn thing and can't stop now.
Faster
than Venice's
economic decline, and tied to it, is the city's loss of population. It fell
from 110,000 in 1950 to 75,000 in 1992 and now stands at 62,000. Italy has one of the lowest birthrates in Europe
and that of Venice
is lower still. Young people leave in search of work and more ample housing. Venice is no place to
start a family and the population gets older every year. Wealthy seekers of
second-homes and scarcity have inflated house prices and driven up the cost of
living. The cramped nature of the city rules out large stores offering discount
shopping and the need to bring everything in by water increases costs.
The
island economy depends on tourism and the service industries, but these hardly
solve its problems. Europeans now tend to spend a few days in Venice
but take their vacations in places like Mauritius
or the Caribbean. Many Italians often only
show up for a day's excursion. There's not much money in school trips.
Hoteliers lament the passing of the well-heeled sojourner of yore who would
hang himself with his necktie rather than gobble a slice of pizza in the open
air. The so-called mass tourist satisfies his curiosity about the city without cars
by a quick look-around, and he doesn't come back.
*****
I ought
to declare my interest before launching into another invidious comparison
between the highflying literary daydreamers of Venice and the wide-awake Venetians on the
ground busy worrying about unemployment and finding a place for their children
to set up house. Venice
was my home for several years. More than once I took that brisk walk across
town in a rainstorm to get to work. The waterbuses can't operate when the water
gets too churned up or rises so high they can't dock or pass under the bridges.
I often paused on one of those bridges -- there are some four hundred -- and
looked down at the Grand Canal, wondering
about its lethal concentration of dioxin, PCBs, and DDT. In less contemplative
moments I argued about whose garbage had been set out in the wrong place. As
often as not the garbage man and his barge didn't turn up on schedule and
swollen plastic bags would obstruct the idyllic view for the day, postponing
all poetry.
My
friend Carlo, who lived nearby, played peacemaker in these neighborhood
territorial disputes. Even against everybody's common enemy, acqua alta
or high water, he avoided wild curses. The rest of us would get wound up and
let ourselves go against this Venetian scourge. Chewing out an act of God
offended no one. True, Carlo made his home on a dry upper floor, but he was a
calming presence all the same.
Far
from Venice
now, whenever I pick up another book about the city, I wish for someone like
Carlo to appear in its pages. It never happens. My last hope was John Berendt's non-fiction portrait of contemporary Venice. The City of Falling Angels
(2005) promised to leave the ageless myths alone and dish up the
quotidian dirt. The canny American author's previous book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
(1994), had managed to put Savannah,
Georgia, on the
tourist map and increased downtown real estate prices fourfold.
I was
encouraged by Berendt's assurance that his interest
was "not Venice per se but people who live in
Venice."
Nevertheless, it was soon apparent that Carlo wouldn't stand a chance.
"People" for Berendt were rich and worldly,
if possible genuine aristocrats or at least plausible phonies. What used to be
called socialites were welcome. He aimed to get behind
expatriate Venice,
but ended up sitting around collecting high-end tittle-tattle from the city's
shop-worn upper crust. In their provincial boredom they'd been waiting for
someone just like Berendt -- an outsized ear on top
of a cash register.
Italians
weren't amused by Berendt's retailing of recent Venice scandals. Not that
they felt besmirched. Quite to the contrary, they saw misdeeds in Venice as small beer
compared to what they read every morning in their national newspapers. This
Signor B. was a naive beginner at scandal mongering. He made heavy going of the
criminal arson that destroyed the La Fenice opera
house in 1996. But the building has been rebuilt and opened again in 2003. The
magnificent Petruzzelli Theater in Bari was burnt out by felons in 1991 and city
officialdom is still at loggerheads about whose brother-in-law will get the
contract to refurbish it.
As for Berendt's revelations of hanky-panky in the struggle for
Ezra Pound's personal papers -- a spare scandal he held in reserve to treat us
to when tension over the opera house fell -- they could at most cause an
eyebrow to rise at a tea party for Italian librarians. Italy has
bigger fish to fry just now. It won the World Cup soccer competition this year
while trying to bury a national soccer scandal that makes the Chicago Black Sox
throwing of the 1919 World Series look like a locker room prank. Referees were
suborned and matches fixed in a far-reaching and long-standing conspiracy that
constituted, not isolated crimes, but a whole thriving criminal system. One of
the world's most famous soccer leagues will find it hard ever to regain
credibility.
Berendt gives a piquant account
of the rivalry between two American millionaires to control the Save Venice
philanthropic association. One, a puffed up cosmetic surgeon, had the habit of
saying, "Venice
would be better off without Venetians." The other, heir to the Piggly Wiggly grocery chain fortune, convinced himself he actually
belonged to the European aristocracy that he had spent his life sucking up to.
A perplexed Venetian of some standing commented, "Why must they come to Venice to save it? It's
nice, of course, the money they give. But it doesn't have anything to do with
generosity. It means they want to look important. ...Venice will save itself. Go and save Paris."
Cleary
the epic battle fought between Dr. Botox and Piggly-Wiggly over whose name would appear above the other
on Save Venice stationery didn't interest Italians. They had their teeth in the
story of Bernardo Provenzano, the Mafia super boss,
aged seventy-three. The police had been looking for him since 1963, during
which time he managed to father two sons and lead a pretty full life, never
relinquishing the reins of his empire. He'd been living around the corner from
his family residence in Corleone, Sicily,
and regularly sent his dirty laundry home for his wife to look after. The
police would still be "not finding" him if a rival Mafia family
hadn't dropped Provenzano in their lap. Conspiracy
theories are not wanting since the boss of bosses was arrested on April 11, the
very day that Silvio Berlusconi fell from power in Rome.
No, I
wasn't going to find out about someone like Carlo by reading a book by the
patron saint of Savannah
property developers. Humbler Venetians appear in it in roles like the suspects
that turn out to be innocent in a detective thriller. They merely give the
private-eye space to get his breath back before uncovering the evil top banana.
But what would a story about Enron, Jeffrey K. Skilling
and Kenneth L. Lay tell me about the life of a Bronx subway rider or a driver
on an L.A.
freeway? If I wanted to know about Carlo, I'd have to go and see him. Which I decided to do.
*****
I went
straight to the Locanda Sant'Anna
in Castello. During my time in Venice I'd often settled visiting friends
there. It was near my home in the fag-end of Venice where the island finishes
and you only have to climb over a bridge to find yourself on San Pietro,
another island altogether. In all logic it should have been a quiet corner, as
it was far from Venice's
main lines of communications. You got off the waterbus and had to walk half a
mile to where I'd lived.
But in
the tourist capital of the world remoteness is never more than relative. I used
to sit at my kitchen table looking out on the footpath for San Pietro Bridge.
Even on a vile January morning I'd see an early-rising visitor walking past.
His expression would say he was no run-of-the-mill tourist, but a lone wolf
traveler, shrewd enough to come to Venice
in the middle of winter when he could have it all to himself. He glowed with
the thought that he'd also now discovered the city's back door. I'd wish him
well under my breath, turn up my gas heater and go back to reading the morning Gazzetttino. But the next time I looked up at the frosty
brickwork opposite my window another lone wolf would come loping along with a
neat pack on his back and the same self-satisfied look on his face.
I knew
where to find Carlo after breakfast. He was an honorary official of an
old-folks club. They had a pleasant room complete with a tiny garden and a bar
that served snacks. Sure enough he was installed at a table there and the
discussion in course made me feel I'd not been away for some years. Carlo's
principal duty was to plan the club's annual summer outing on the lagoon.
That's what he was discussing now with a couple of hard-bitten cronies. The
outing on a rented ferry had little to do with sight seeing. The participants
had all been born within spitting distance of the lagoon. It was a social
occasion and more particularly a chance to sit down to a very special meal.
Some
social clubs decorate their walls with pennants and trophies of sporting
contests. There are photographs of winning teams. Carlo's club had group
pictures of well-fed faces from past summer excursions. The two friends
opposite Carlo considered last year's choice of a trattoria
on one of the minor lagoon islands as a serious mistake. Carlo defended it like
a politician his policy when his honor and future were at stake. The opposition
was two pronged - good cop, bad cop. The mild fellow praised the antipasti but
bit his lip over the main course of vitello alle acciughe. His partner came
down hard on the whole meal. He had all sorts of historical comparisons at his
fingertips. There was an unsurpassed risotto nero con le seppie in '98
and even the '03 meal, though overpriced, managed to finish with a glorious
dolce allo zabaione.
Carlo
took me for a walk. This was established practice for the male retirees of Venice. Alone or in pairs
they would set out every morning on something like an obligatory circular tour.
There were set stops at half a dozen bars. Each pause would involve a glass of
white wine and a few minutes of gossip. The aim was to complete the circuit and
be home just after midday as lunch was being put on the table. You would
actually meet old timers half trotting not to miss a stop before the knell of
noon.
I
wouldn't say that our reunion was a disappointment, but I was struck by how
Carlo touched pretty much on the same subjects he talked to me about before.
There was his and his wife Laura's health; his pride in his grandson; the
career in a municipal office of his daughter, an only child. I noted the usual
absence of Carlo's son-in-law from our conversation though I'd met the harmless
fellow and knew he existed. I steered the talk back to Carlo's earlier years.
But here again I heard what I'd been told before. Carlo had worked all his life
as an electrician in a boat-outfitting establishment on San Pietro Canal.
Seagoing ships had gone into dry dock there to be done over. The fact that the
company was adjacent to and in some sense a successor of the Venice Arsenal
that had produced sea craft by a kind of assembly line process in the Middle Ages meant nothing to Carlo. On the other hand he was
very interested in how his retirement pension differed from that of vari! ous
other people he named.
As we
walked Carlo pointed out things that came back to me as having been pointed out
by him before. There was the Tuscan's house. This interloper had come to Venice a half-century ago from Tuscany, but had never managed to be
considered a Venetian. There was the clump of houses where the Dalmatian
Italians had been settled when Yugoslavia
took over their coastal region after WWII. There was crazy Luigi with the game
leg who had lived on the floor above me -- I'd forgotten his face but would
remember his dragging step over my head forever. Why Carlo thought him crazy I
never learned, and Luigi always seemed quite normal to me and admirably
discreet for a Venetian. It probably went back to some misstep of a
half-century before, like getting his shoe caught in a boat's propeller.
As noon
approached Carlo got nervous about being home on time. We'd kept to the white
wine routine at each stop, but it hadn't dulled his appetite. At the last bar,
he re-introduced me to an old man I'm sure I met a decade before. His
distinction was having been a British prisoner in North
Africa during WWII. I remember our first meeting had proceeded in
the same way and in the same words. Shaking hands with the ex-captive of His
Majesty George VI, I spoke to him in English. He grinned but didn't understand
a word, and I had to ask him about Field Marshal Rommel's strategy in Italian,
in which he replied, preferring to talk about the curious things the Brits had
given him to eat in the desert.
Maybe
it was when Carlo went home to lunch and Laura that the problem became clear to
me. I walked along the Riva degli Schiavoni,
past Vivaldi's Church, with the Ducal
Palace ahead of me and
wonderfully built-over San Giorgio Island out in the water to my left. I had to
sympathize with Ruskin, James, and McCarthy. It was very hard not to ignore the
people trudging along beside me and hoist myself up on mental stilts to be
alone with all that splendor.
*****
My Venice trip was over. I
caught a launch for Marco
Polo Airport.
It wasn't my first project that didn't work out in the hard glare of other
people's lives. Of course it had been good to see Carlo and Laura and to learn
they were still thriving in their quiet way. But I had to drop the last part of
my plan. That had been to bring together ordinary Venetians and the
mythologists of the city. In the kindest possible way I'd intended to expose
Carlo to a sample of the Venice
myth. I'd help him through the airier parts. The point was to get him wrestling
with the dream. I was sure some sort of synthesis was possible and eager to see
him embrace it. My friend's enlightenment would please me no end. In fact it
would in a sense be mine as well. This would be an
experiment in presenting one world to another -- Mr. Ordinary, the man on the
canal, would meet Dr. Hyper Aesthesia.
I felt
I was fortunate in having found a book in Italian to do the job. In the early
1990's a group promoting Venice
had commissioned a book on the city by the American novelist Harold Brodkey. According to their practice the Consorzio Venezia Nuova had first published the book, a novel, in Italian
translation. I now had a copy of Amicizie
Profane (1992) in my brief case
beside the 1994 original Profane
Friendship. But I'd had second thoughts about lumbering Carlo with
one of these two slabs. I'd checked out his bookshelf, and found, well, lighter
stuff, and not much of that. So I'd decided to begin with something less
demanding. After Brodkey died a little book of his
musings on Venice
appeared, My Venice
(1998). I thought I'd feel out Carlo with a fairly straightforward Brodkey thought from this slim volume. Radical, yes, but
not metaphysical or quite so whimsical as a fugitive
balloon. It was this:
How I
wish for the causeway and the railway to be dismantled, and for Venice to be cut off from the mainland and the lagoon
restored to a swamp, for the city's filled-in and paved canals to be returned
to water, for Venice
to be unpedestrian, isolated, impractical, wholly
itself and unlike the rest of the world.
Thinking
it over now, maybe I should have chosen a more poetic and less concrete
thought. Brodkey is full of those. Carlo wouldn't
have found fault with, "The sky was deep red, maroon-vermilion, dark
crimson, and purple, flames or sunset." But could he have visualized it?
Could anyone? Laura, though, might have been disconcerted by, "City noises
here resemble the sounds of breath, the sounds of someone in bed beside you,
the sigh and shuh and creak of the mattress, the
rustle of sheets, the clicking of eyelashes..."
Be that
as it may, I stuck with Brodkey's great big
destructive wish to cut the city off. It could be that the moment wasn't quite
right. Laura and Carlo had invited me for an evening meal. The point had come,
after several memorable dishes, for the refusal of whiskey. This was a ritual,
the same as I remembered from years back. In fact it was probably the same
bottle of whiskey from years back. Because Carlo didn't touch
whiskey. He was an enthusiast for wine, local Merlot or Tocai, and downed an occasional glass of grappa. He kept
the whiskey out of pure exoticism and urbanity. I think one of his great
disappointments in me, apart from my having turned my back on Venice, was that I didn't drink whiskey
either.
I had
to repeat the bit about knocking down the causeway twice before Carlo took me
seriously. Laura had retreated somewhere when the whiskey bottle and the long
words appeared.
Then
Carlo said, "Knock down the causeway? Why?"
"Well.
It would make Brodkey feel better," I said,
lamely.
"He
takes the train when he goes to Padova?"
"He
wants Venice to
be completely on its own," I said. "No more
railway station, either."
"No?
Our mayors have fought for years to have the north-south trains
stop in Venice.
Where would they stop if there was no station?"
"Brodkey would get rid of the tracks too."
"Well,
he probably comes here on vacation by plane. But Laura and I go to the
mountains in August. You know how impossible Venice gets with the heat. I suppose we could
take the bus."
"No
causeway, no bus, no station, no train." I could see that Carlo began
wondering about me.
"Does
he know about the free shuttle bus the hyper market runs from Piazza Rome to
Mira? Laura figures that she saves a hundred euros a month by making a trip
every Saturday."
"I
don't think Brodkey does much shopping."
"Really?"
"Look,
he wants the whole lagoon to go back to swamp."
"Why?"
"Well,
that's how it used be."
"No.
No. It was never swamp. My grandfather told me he used to fish in a sandolo as a boy and didn't pick up a single weed in his
net. And, you know, when I was twelve the water was so clear we swam right over
there in the San Pietro Canal."
"Brodkey means a long time ago, like fifteen hundred
years."
Carlo
thought that over. So did I. This wasn't going to
work, but I went on anyhow.
"He
also wants those filled-in canals dug out."
The
filling in had also taken place a long time ago and it was news to Carlo.
"Like
Via Garibaldi" I explained. "That was a canal. Napoleon had it filled
in. Brodkey wants it dug out."
I'd
lost Carlo for good. Via Garibaldi was where he spent half his day, sunny side
in winter, shady side in summer. Everything was there, his church, his favorite
bar, the good pastry shop, the pharmacy. He caught the waterbus nearby.
"You
know, Carlo, I think I'll have that whiskey after all. But you must join
me."
He
apologized for not having a soda siphon like he'd seen in TV movies. We had one
glass and then another. I felt Brodkey fading out of
the evening.
"You
see Carlo, this Brodkey wanted Venice to be like no place else."
"Well,
it's not big like Milan
or scruffy like Mestre."
I let
it go at that, adding only, "He had strange ideas. He didn't even want
people to walk around here."
"No?
How would we get to the boat landing or to the doctor's office or the football
stadium?"
"I
suppose he wanted you to grow wings."
Carlo
liked that, but had had enough of whiskey and other exotica for one evening.
I
wasn't through with Brodkey though. I had hours to
pass in the airport and more on the plane, and nothing but Profane Friendship to read.
It
wasn't that bad a novel, a D.H. Lawrence kind of love story between the
author's alter ego and his mirror image. All you had to do was to filter out
everything he said about a strange place he called Venice and it became quite believable.
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