A Thousand Days in Venice Read online

  “How do you feel about Venice?,” he wants to know. “This is not your first visit here,” he says, as though flipping through some internal dossier that tracks all my European movement.

  “No, no, this is not my first time. I began coming in the spring of ’89, about four years ago,” I tell him brightly.

  “1989? You’ve been coming to Venice for four years?” he asks. He holds up four fingers as though my pronounciation of quattro was muddled.

  “Yes,” I say. “Why is that so strange?”

  “It’s only that I never saw you until December. Last December. December 11, 1992,” he says, as though eyeing the dossier more closely.

  “What?” I ask, a little stunned, rummaging back to last winter, computing the dates when I’d last been there. Yes, I’d arrived in Venice on December 2 and then flown up to Milan on the evening of the eleventh. Still, he’s surely mistaken me for another woman, and I’m about to tell him that, but he’s already lunging into his story.

  “You were walking in Piazza San Marco; it was just after five in the afternoon. You were wearing a long white coat, very long, down to your ankles, and your hair was tied up, just as it is now. You were looking in the window at Missiaglia, and you were with a man. He wasn’t Venetian, or at least I’d never seen him before. Who was he?” he asks stiffly.

  Before I can push out half a syllable, he is asking, “Was he your lover?”

  I know he doesn’t want me to answer, and so I don’t. He’s talking faster now, and I’m losing words and phrases. I ask him to look at me and, please, to speak more slowly. He accommodates. “I saw you only in profile, and I kept walking toward you. I stopped a few feet from you, and I just stood still, taking you in. I stood there until you and the man walked off the piazza toward the quay.” He illustrates his words with broad movements of his hands, his fingers. His eyes hold mine urgently.

  “I began to follow you, but I stopped because I had no idea what I’d do if I came face to face with you. I mean what would I say to you? How could I find a way to talk to you? And so I let you go. That’s what I do, you know, I just let things go. I looked for you the next day and the next, but I knew you were gone. If only I’d see you walking alone somewhere, I could stop you, pretending I mistook you for someone else. No, I would tell you I thought your coat was beautiful. But anyway, I never found you again, so I held you in my mind. For all these months I tried to imagine who you were, where you were from. I wanted to hear the sound of your voice. I was very jealous of the man with you,” he says slowly. “And then, as I was sitting there at Vino Vino the other day and you angled your body so that your profile was just visible underneath all that hair, I realized it was you. The woman in the white coat. And so you see, I’ve been waiting for you. Somehow I’ve been loving you, loving you since that afternoon in the piazza.”

  Still I have said not a word.

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you on the bridge just now, about destiny and true love. I fell in love with you, not at first sight, because I saw only a part of your face. With me it was love at half sight. It was enough. And if you think I’m mad, I don’t care.”

  “Is it okay if I speak?” I ask him very quietly and without a notion of what I want to tell him. His eyes are now deep blue bolts, holding me much too tightly. I look down, and when I look up again his eyes have softened. I hear myself saying, “It’s a very sweet gift, this telling of your story. But that you saw me and remembered me and then that you saw me again a year later is not so mysterious an event. Venice is a very small city, and it is not improbable to see the same people again and again. I don’t think our meeting is some sort of thundering stroke of destiny. Anyway how can you be in love with a profile? I’m not only a profile; I’m thighs and elbows and brain. I’m a woman. I think all of this is only coincidence, a very touching coincidence,” I say to the blueberry eyes, neatly patting his arcadian testimony into smooth shape as I might a heft of bread dough.

  “Non è una coincidenza. This is not coincidence. I’m in love with you, and I’m sorry if this fact makes you uncomfortable.”

  “It’s not discomfort I feel. It’s only that I don’t understand it. Yet.” I say this, wanting to pull him close, wanting to push him away.

  “Don’t go today. Stay a little longer. Stay with me,” he says.

  “If there’s to be something, anything at all between us, my going today won’t change it. We can write to each other, talk. I’ll be coming back in the spring, and we can make plans.” There seems a forced syncopation to my words before I hear them falling away into near paralysis. Still as a frieze, we sit there on the edges of the campo’s Saturday fracas. A long time passes through our silence before we shuffle to our feet. Not waiting for a check, he leaves lire on the table under the glass dish of his untasted strawberry gelato, rivulets of which drip onto the paper money.

  My face is burning, and I feel startled, flush up against an emotion I can’t name, one eerily like terror but not unlike joy. Could there have been some gist to my old Venetian forebodings? Have the pre-sentiments spun out into the form of this man? Is this the rendezvous? I am drawn to the stranger. I am suspicious of the stranger. Even as I am drawn to Venice, so am I suspicious of her. Are he and Venice the same thing? Could he be my Corsican prince masquerading as a bank manager? Why can’t Destiny announce itself, be a twelve-headed ass, wear purple trousers, a name tag, even? All I know is that I don’t fall in love, neither at first sight nor at half-sight, neither easily nor over time. My heart is rusty from the old pinions that hold it shut. That’s what I believe about myself.

  We stroll through Campo Manin to San Luca, just making small talk. I stop in mid-stride. He stops, too, and he wraps me up in his arms. He holds me. I hold him.

  When we exit from the Bacino Orseolo into San Marco, la Marangona is ringing five bells. It’s him, I think. He’s the twelve-headed ass in the purple trousers! He’s Destiny and the bells only recognize me when I’m with him. No, that’s rot. Menopausal gibberish.

  Five hours have passed since I left the hotel. I call my friends who are still waiting there, and I vow to meet them and my baggage directly at the airport. The last flight to Naples is at seven-twenty. The Grand Canal is improbably empty, free of the usual tangle of skiffs and gondolas and sandoli, permitting the tassista to race his water taxi, lurching it, slamming it down brutally onto the water. Peter Sellers and I stand outside in the wind and ride into a lowering, dark red sun. I pull a silver flask from my purse and a tiny, thin glass from a velvet pouch. I pour out cognac and we sip together. Again, he looks as if he’s going to kiss me, and this time he does—temples, eyelids, before he finds my mouth. We’re not too old.

  We exchange numbers and business cards and addresses, having no more powerful amulets. He asks if he might join us later in the week wherever we might be. It isn’t a good idea, I tell him. As best I know it, I give him our itinerary so we might be able to say good morning or good evening once in a while. He asks when I’ll be returning home, and I tell him.

  2

  There’s a Venetian in My Bed

  Eighteen days later, and only two after I’d set down again in the United States, Fernando arrives in Saint Louis, his first-ever journey to America. Trembling, pale as ashes, he walks through the gate. He’d missed his connection at JFK, racing not fast enough over a space wider than the Lido, the island off Venice where he lives. The flight had been by far the longest period he’d suffered without a cigarette since he was ten years old. He takes the flowers I hold out to him, and we go home together as though we always had, always would.

  Coat and hat and gloves and muffler still in place, he moves softly through the house as though trying to recognize something. Startled that the Sub-Zero is a refrigerator, he opens one of its door expecting to find a clothes closet. “Ma è grandissimo,” he marvels.

  “Are you hungry?” I ask him, beginning to rattle about in the kitchen. He eyes a small basket of tagliatelle I’d rolled and cut that a
fternoon.

  “Do you have fresh pasta also in America?” he asks, as though that fact would be akin to finding a pyramid in Kentucky.

  I start the bath for him, as I would for my child or an old lover, pour in sandlewood oil, light candles, place towels and soaps and shampoo on a table nearby. I set down a tiny glass of Tio Pepe. After an alarmingly long passage of time, he saunters into the living room, splendid, wet hair slicked back flat. He wears a vintage dark green woolen robe, one of whose pockets is torn and bulging with a package of cigarettes. Burgundy argyle socks are hiked up over his thin knees, his feet tucked into big, suede slippers. I tell him he looks like Rudolf Valentino. He likes this. I’ve set our places on the low table in front of the living-room fire. I hand him a glass of red wine, and we sit on cushions. He likes this, too. And so I have supper with the stranger.

  There is a white oval dish of braised leeks tossed in crème fraîche, spritzed with vodka, bubbling, golden under a crust of Emmenthaler and Parmesan. I don’t know how to say “leek” in Italian, and so I have to get up to find my dictionary. “Ah, porri,” he says. “I don’t like porri.” I quickly rifle the pages again, pretending to have made an error.

  “No, they’re not porri; these are scalogni,” I lie to the stranger.

  “I’ve never tasted them,” he says, taking a bite. As it turns out, the stranger very much likes leeks, as long as they are called shallots. Then there are the tagliatelle, thin yellow ribbons in a roasted walnut sauce. We are comfortable, uncomfortable. We smile more than we talk. I try to tell him a little about my work, that I’m a journalist, that I write mostly about food and wine. I tell him I’m a chef. He nods indulgently but appears to find my credentials less than compelling. He seems content with silence. I’ve made a dessert, one I haven’t made in years, a funny-looking cake made from bread dough, purple plums, and brown sugar. The thick black juices of the fruit, mingled with the caramelized sugar, give up a fine treacly steam, and we put the cake between us, eating it from the battered old pan I baked it in. He spoons up the last of the plummy syrup, and we drink the heel of the red wine. He gets up and comes over to my side of the table. He sits next to me, looks at me full face, then gently turns my face a bit to the right, holding my chin in his hand. “Si, questa è la mia faccia,” he tells me in a whisper. “Yes, this is my face. And I desire now to go with you to your bed.” He pronounces these words slowly, clearly, as though he’s practiced them.

  When he sleeps it’s with his cheek against my shoulder, an arm anchoring my waist. I lay awake, stroking his hair. There’s a Venetian in my bed, I say almost audibly. I press my mouth to the top of his head and remember again that brusquely delivered assignment I’d received so many years before from my editor: “Spend two weeks in Venice and come back with three feature pieces. We’ll send a photographer up from Rome,” she’d said, without any good-bye. Why didn’t we find each other on that first trip? Probably because my editor never told me to come back with a Venetian. Here he sleeps, though, a stranger with long, skinny legs. But now I must sleep, too. Sleep, I tell myself. But I don’t sleep. How can I sleep? I remember the sort of ranging aloofness I’d always suffered about Venice. I’d always found a way to put her off. Once I traveled nearly to the edges of her watery skirts, jaunting over the autostrada from Bergamo to Verona to Padova when, only twenty miles away, I turned my little white Fiat abruptly south toward Bologna. Yet, after the old jaundice about her had been cured during my first Venetian hours, I’d always dug deeply for reasons to return, begging for writing assignments that might take me anywhere close by, trolling the travel sections for the right, cheap ticket.

  I moved to Saint Louis, Missouri, last spring from California, staying in a rented room for two months while house renovations were completed and a little café was launched. By June life had shape: the café, a weekly restaurant review for the Riverfront Times, the carving out of a day-by-day route through my new city. Still, wanderlust came flirting. Restless by the first days of November, I’d set off with my friends Silvia and Harold, heading back into Venice’s honeyed arms. I never thought I’d be heading for these honeyed arms, I think as I press closer to the Venetian.

  Mornings, we take to sitting by the kitchen fire, facing each other in the rusty velvet wingback chairs, each with a dual-language dictionary in hand, a full, steaming coffee press, a tiny pitcher of cream, and a plate of buttered scones on the table in front of us. So settled, we speak of our lives.

  “I keep trying to remember important things to tell you. You know, about my childhood, about when I was young. I think I am the prototype for Everyman. In the films I would be cast as the man who didn’t get the girl.” He is neither sad nor apologetic for his self-image.

  One morning he wants to know, “Can you remember your dreams?”

  “You mean my night dreams?”

  “No. Your daydreams. What you thought you wanted? Who you thought you’d be?” he says.

  “Of course I can. I’ve lived many of them. I wanted to have babies. That was my first big one. After they were born, most of my dreams were about them. And when they grew older, I began to dream a little differently. But I really have lived out so many of my dreams. I’m living them now. I remember the ones that went up in smoke. I remember all of them, and I’ve always got new ones rolling around. And you?”

  “No. Not so much. And until now, always less. I grew up thinking that dreaming was a lot like sinning. The discourses of my childhood from priests and teachers, from my father, they were about logic, reason, morality, honor. I wanted to fly airplanes and play the saxophone. I went away to school when I was twelve, and, believe me, living among Jesuits does little to encourage dreaming. When I went home, which wasn’t very often, things were somber there as well. Youth and, especially, adolescence were offensive stages through which almost everyone tried to rush me.”

  He is speaking very quickly, and I keep having to ask him to slow down, to explain this word, that word. I’m still back with the Jesuits and the saxophone while he’s already onto la mia adolescenza è stata veramente triste e dura.

  He thinks volume is the solution to my blurred comprehension, and so now he inhales like an aging tenor and his voice swells into thunder. “My father’s wish was that I would be quickly sistemato, situated, find a job, find a safe path and stay dutifully on it. Early on I learned to want what he wanted. And with time I accumulated layers and layers of barely transparent bandaging over my eyes, over my dreams.”

  “Wait,” I plead, flipping pages, trying to find cerotti, bandages. “What happened to your eyes? Why were they in bandages?” I want to know.

  “Non letteralmente. Not literally,” he roars. He is impatient. I am a dolt who, after twelve hours of living with an Italian, cannot yet follow the drift of his galloping imagery. He adds a third dimension to bring home his story. He’s on his feet. Pulling his socks up over wrinkled knees, arranging his robe, now he is wrapping a kitchen towel around his eyes, peeking out over its edge. The stranger has combined speed and volume with histrionics. Surely that will do it. He continues. “And with yet more time, the weight of the bandages, their encumbrance, became hardly noticeable. Sometimes I would squint and look out under the gauze to see if I could still catch a glimpse of the old dreams in real light. Sometimes I could see them. Mostly it would be more comfortable to just go back under the bandages. That is, until now,” he says quietly, the show finished.

  Maybe he’s the man who didn’t get the girl unless the girl was Tess of the d’Urbervilles or Anna Karenina. Or, perhaps, Edith Piaf, I think. He’s so deeply sad, I think again. And he always wants to talk about “time.”

  When I ask him why he came racing so quickly across the sea, he tells me he was tired of waiting.

  “Tired of waiting? You arrived here two days after I came home,” I remind him.

  “No. I mean tired of waiting. I understand now about using up my time. Life is this conto, account,” said the banker in him. “It’s an unknown quan
tity of days from which one is permitted to withdraw only one precious one of them at a time. No deposits accepted.” This allegory presents glittering opportunity for more of the stranger’s stage work. “I’ve used so many of mine to sleep. One by one, I’ve mostly waited for them to pass. It’s common enough for one to simply find a safe place to wait it all out. Every time I would begin to examine things, to think about what I felt, what I wanted, nothing touched, nothing mattered more than anything else. I’ve been lazy. Life rolled itself out and I shambled along sempre due passi indietro, always two steps behind. Fatalità, fate. Easy. No risks. Everything is someone else’s fault or merit. And so now, no more waiting,” he says as though he’s talking to someone far away off in the wings.

  When it’s my turn, I begin to tell him of some milestone or another—when we moved from New York to California, stories about my brief, terrible stint at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, about traveling on my stomach to the remotest parts of France and Italy to find one perfect food or wine. Everything sounds like a case history, and after a short roster of recitals I know that none of it matters in the now, that everything I’d done and been until this minute was preamble. Even in these first days together, it is very clear that this feeling of mine for the stranger has trumped all the other adventures in my life. It has shuffled everything and everyone else I thought I was moving toward or away from. Loving Fernando is like a single, sharp shake of the stones that lets me read all the patterns that once baffled and sometimes tortured me. I don’t pretend to understand these feelings, but I’m willing to let the inexplicable sit sacred. It seems I had my own set of heirloom bandages. Astonishing what a man bearing tenderness can do to open a heart.