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Dennis E. Bolen
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In a city of tourists there is need for pickpocket patrols. Lost child finders. Dogshit scoopers. I have passed one embassy, the Portuguese. They had the doors wide open on a weekday evening and seemed welcoming to one and all, canap's and Codorniu laid out on a long table in the grand front entrance. No guns in sight. *** But if you do get killed in this town it likely will have nothing to do with bullet-work. I lunched today with a couple of American women, one of whom has lived here since 1969. She mentioned that even without earthquakes (they sometimes have `em), and the obvious perils of falling into the sewageflavoured canals, the masonry on most of the buildings is so old it routinely falls off into the narrow alley-streets, occasionally killing somebody. When it happens I am sure the desperado-African street vendors will be gone only minutes before they are back hocking one-size-fits-all hard-hats from crates floated in on barges and moored illegally under the Accademia Bridge. I remarked that the place does look like one large construction site everything needs frequent maintenance just to stay together, many buildings are behind semi-permanent-looking scaffolding and netting. The building-material barges buzz in and around town all day and when I come home on my favorite boat, the 62 non-stop from Zatterre (near the centre of town) straight to goodold Giardini (on the extreme eastern end, a rare non-touristy area) in a fine twelve-minute sea cruise across the mouth of the Grand Canal, the work boats issue from the canals like monster ants and cut across our bows in strength like some kind of daily re-enactment of the Dunkirque evacuation. *** Because I am distracted, numb, and walk the streets much like a zombie, neither thinking or doing other than simply to traverse, one place to another with no particular purpose in mind, I struggled inordinately long with the change situation. Pocket change. Money. When it finally hit me (and one of my lunch companions let me in on the full story) it emerged as the perfect one-off to illustrate how Italy differs from the sane world. Here's the deal: Though there are prices on consumer goods just like anywhere else, there often exists no reliable means by way of Italian currency to actually pay these amounts with exactitude. It happens mostly with groceries; you might end up with a tab of 32,030 lira. The generally-used bills come in denominations one thousand, two thousand, five, ten, fifty and one hundred thousand (Woe betide you if you try to pay a bill of less than eighty grand with a 100K note! They hate making change, it's like a spontaneous national antagonism. I have had grocery clerks glare at me, growl, turn away in disgust, mutter under their breath, go to the next customer, not give me a bag (sacco) to carry my groceries away even after I paid for it. There is a heavy-ish woman-clerk in my neighborhood whose expression corrupts like rotted lettuce whenever she sees me come in the store... and the coins run fifty, one hundred, two hundred and five hundred lira (This last looks damn close to the two-tone Canadian toonie so look out, I once got one in change from some smart-aleck Kitsilano salesclerk. The damn thing is only worth about thirty-three cents.). Smaller denominations haven't been issued for years. So the 30 lira remanet is a point of contention you can have a fun argument about. Some clerks will try to con you into giving them fifty or a hundred and then let you walk away gypped. Other times I have gambled on getting peppered with Carabinieri sub-machine-gun rounds by shrugging my shoulders and walking away. And yet, I have had my overpayment sneered at and snubbed, it all depends upon the prevailing grocery clerk mood that day. I once deeply pissed off a checkout clerk by throwing up my hands in frustration (mimicking theirs), standing with my stuff on her counter and not taking it away until she gave me a free sacco. The crabby black-clad little old ladies behind threatened a shrieking tattoo (everybody yells in this country). I won, but I'm not sure if I'm a wanted man with an artist's rendering on a poster on a wall of the local Carabinieri hideout. *** Speaking of insanity one need only point to the average restaurant in Venice. Extreme average food, larcenous prices. Two woman friends and me (One of them, who has lived here thirty years, admitted it was a mistake because eating out on Sunday in Venice is always risky.), shared a middling bottle of the local Chardonnay; one had a small plate of pasta; two of us had a tiny portion of fish (Rombo: it looked like a kind of skate or overgrown sole, had to be cleaned like one. I ended up with about five forksfull.). We finished with coffee. Cost: $125.00 CDN. Rough reckoning has the fish to my mind costing just slightly below the price of gold. *** There's dire doom coming down for this Mecca if something isn't done about the sinking of the place. You can see it in the waterlines of all the better palaces. There will only be technological solutions, because nature is having its way with this place, a city build on no fewer than one hundred fifty separate tiny mud flats by people unable to come to a consensus (There's perfectly good dry land about three klicks from here where you could have built a fine harbour, had gardens, streets and not fought the stench of sewer-gas whenever you walk to the corner store.). Anyway, over the years the flooding problem has threatened churches and art treasures, interrupted commerce, carried away small dogs, and caused a run on gumboots, especially the littleold-lady size.
My New Yorker woman friend who is elegant, cutting and savage in everything she does put it acutely when her friend suggested a system of seagates such as they have in various land-reclaimed areas of Holland. "Hah. That only works because it's run by a bunch of up-the-ass Germanic-type Dutchmen. The first time you needed it done around here Luigi would miss the moment to throw the switch because his mama might not have cleaned his underwear properly. I mean, do you really think a country that produced the Fiat would be able to design, build and, most improbably, run a complicated tidal-control system that required any kind of reliability?" Though I laughed and poured more wine (which you can always do, not just to punctuate conversation, but because in this country their hearty red is cheap, good and plentiful), in discussions (and I hear lots of them) like this I'm trying to be a nice person, even though I haven't lost my mind completely. I made some gesture before the topic died to try to salvage the conversation from it's racist depths, something like: "But hey, look at the Ferrari...." but I don't think either of my friends heard. Well, let me add my own up-to-the-minute-experience as shading and depth to this admittedly nasty observation. I have been using ATMs for twenty years, as I am sure most people over the age of thirty have. Never in all those years has one ripped me off. There's a first time for everything. Today I tried to pull 100, 000 Lira out of a machine and it only gave me fifty. This is a ripoff of approximately $35.00 CDN the last time I heard the exchange rate. I stood dumbly at the machine, sticking my fingers in the little slot where the money was supposed to keep coming out. I looked at the receipt. Sure enough, I had been highway robbed by a robot. The branch it was attached to was deserted, in any case my Italiano is no-where near sufficient to tear the appropriate strip off any bank official I might find to tear a strip off of. I took the piece of paper, wrote the address of the branch on it, will research and write the kind of letter I'll need to get something going, and hope for the best. But it has dawned heavily upon me that this may likely not ever be resolved. Mistakes are endemic in this country and they go unresolved if committed by authorities and individuals alike. That's why there is a Mafia. You can't get even by just going through channels. In this town you can only get to the grocery store by going through channels. (Sorry!) *** If this town is not entirely Italian (and it isn't, it's Venetian, an identifiably distinct nationality maintained through a thousand years of independence and only taken into the Italian fold in 1865), it is secondarily American. I have yet to unearth a fellow Canuck and I've only met a couple of furtive Brits (one of them married to an American). Otherwise, there are fellowship-endowed scholars from Williams (Baltimore?), Brown (Maryland?) and even junior colleges across the States you never heard of; there are casually super-rich New Yorkers who talk about the good year they had last and the money markets they are in and the SUVs they drive and the horse farms they keep in Connecticut and how they hate being married; inheritees from who-knows-what potentate families; trying-to-be-anonymous movie/rock/art/opera/writing stars who just want to have a long vacation or residence and not sign autographs; free-agent academics making a criminal living (US $120,000. per year plus, tax free!) doing art/architecture/history tours of the town for their rich countrymen; aging and aged debutantes who saw Venice in 1960, grabbed a marriable Italian and never left the place; fugitives who don't want to talk about it; earnest young women who earned enough money at The Gap to afford a year in Europe and just want to learn about art and not be hit on; and imperious Italians with US connections via family or investment who speak some Inglese and would oversee these pretenders from elsewhere who would dare to pronounce on the art and culture of their own sacred milieu. They are a nasty crew. Ferociously bright, they are the type who pick up enough Italian in a weekend to give even the vilest hotel desk clerk whatfor when overcharged on a bill (you have to check addition closely), and above all they know their art - all of it: mediaeval, renaissance, baroque, impressionist, pre-Raf, modern, and all the ones in between - and they suffer no charlatans. I have been attending a favourite haunt of the Venetian ex-pat, the lectures at the Circolo Italo-Britannico, an English-speakers' social club wherein casually visiting professors get to put in their fifty minutes of pap and then claim the trip as a business expense and put the presentation on their CV to impress non-traveled innocents who don't know that it is nothing more than an art-history burlesque, meant largely for belly-laugh inside-joke entertainment, a picking-round for the ultra-critics in the crowd, a postmortem hilarity-topic for excessive drinks in the cafe afterward. There is cruelty. I've seen dog fights with more gnashing, tearing grace. This last, the lacerating criticism extant in the very air in the Veneto, despite the spraying blood, is good for my soul. Always characterized the black-hearted ogre-critic by many who put in time with me in the creative writing classes of the 1970's and 1980's, and who read me in The Sun, the Straight, The Vancouver Review, the whatever-you-found-me-in (I can't remember anymore, okay?), it sure is good to find people willing to call a spade blacker than even me. They have had some presentations at the Circolo they absolutely hated, and various members are not shy about telling anyone why and wherefore, hilariously, drunkenly, dead-eyed and unappologetically. I guess that's what coming to art-central gets you. Laughs and danger. *** Speaking of justice, guess who got busted on the Vaporetto the other day. The Todd-ster. Yup, he's convicted, down the river (or Canale), marked, sent up, shut down, roped and tied, ranked and guzzled by that noble corps of lawperson, the ACTV (Venice Transit Authority) biglietto-brigade. They apparently cased him during a little-used sailing on the not-so-busy Canale di Canereggio and got him between stops when there was no escape. As noted earlier in these pages, Todd's plan in such an event was to plead a kind of gringo ignorance and cheerfully pay the fare and/or the fine (if they were real jerks). Well, twenty-six thousand lira later he was given the bum's rush off that boat and more or less encouraged never the float his American ass on the Venetian transit system again. According to old Veneto-hands at the Circolo, once you get busted, your M.O. travels among the inspectors, your likeness gets known the level of legend, and they can tell by the desperate look in our eyes and the way you prance aboard trying to act Venetian that you are not one of the real people. Once you're marked, you might as well get used to walking (It's not so bad, the whole place is no bigger than the West End and downtown.) or get your own rowboat. Even at that, the gondoliers would probably have you taken out by way of the lupo (sawed-off shotgun) during some anonymous midnight rather than have you clog up the waterways in what is already the marine equivalent of O'Hare airport on the average Xmas eve. If my man Todd doesn't watch out I'll have to relay the terrible news to the registrar or somebody at the University of Cincinnati or somewhere that our friend Todd is confined naked in some freezing putrid Venetian cellar. Until then he's a free man, but marked. *** Hey if you think my violent imagery is a little much just delve into the history of Venice. The biggest, prettiest place here, the Piazzetta in front of the Doge's Palace (one of the best art galleries in Europe) and tail end of perhaps the grandest piazza in the world (Napoleon termed it the greatest drawing room in Europe) San Marco, essentially the centre of town, was the location of some of the most gruesome, depraved, downright not-nice acts of human desecration written into history. Anybody who offended anybody in a position of power was as usual the first in line of beheadings, hangings, drawing-and-quarterings, burnings, pilloryings (followed by execution), detongue-ings, delimbings, blindings, floggings (for first offenders), tearings apart by wild dogs, tramplings by horses, shootings (with arrows), beatings and public ridicule. The worst thing to do was to be against the state and strive for individuality to the point of self-aggrandisation. There are no statues of individuals in this city of art (mostly painting, not much sculpture) before the eighteenth century (with only a couple of exceptions that have to do with terrific wealth and patronage). © Dennis E. Bolen 1/2001 ««« Venice In Winter 1 || Venice In Winter 3 »»» |
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Culture Court | copyright 2001 | Lawrence Russell
