Venice 1 | Venice 2 | Venice 3
Bcourt
Dennis E. Bolen
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Venice 1 | Venice 2 | Venice 3 Bcourt |
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Let me tell you what three score and ten dollars Canadian will get you in Venice, if you know where to eat and drink: A full meal (insalada, pizza or pasta, cafe), all the vino rosso di casa you can drink (available by glass, quarter-litre, half or full litre, the latter usually about a six dollar item, tops), untold amounts of whiskey (scotch or Irish, not rye, that's too imported), or even better, brandy, or even better, cognac, or even cheaper (and more to the drunken point) grappa - a drink that cannot be excused, cut, mixed, attenuated in any way, or even pretended about to even a hard-core cornmash drinker, it is excruciating - but all this for about the equivalent of twenty-five bucks. * * * Everywhere there are dramatic hats. It isn't the weather, even when it warms up, gets dry, you still see the western boilary jobs, the bowlers, straw boaters (the quirky types the gondoliers wear, not the one Southern politicians made well-known), fedoras of all stripe, a curious Swiss-looking alpine gob - straight out of a muesli ad (Though I guess it is best not to forget that some of the Alps are in Italy.) - even cowboy hats. That's for the men. Women, particularly the James Bond movie-type starlets, favour the lush Russian fur hat. If she's real rich (or her boyfriend/husband/lover is) it'll be a sable. On a Canuck at the hockey game it looks like ultra-hoser gear. On these Countesses it will rend solemn stand-to fashion respect from even the drunkest stroller. * * * Having come so far to see change, it is a grinding sadness to me to see graffiti. Gang-like markings of the average four hundred-year-old residence of this artist, that sea captain, Marco Polo, Lord Byron, these idiots don't care, they're going to tag no matter what. What do these kids know from gangs? Curse MTV anyway! It's like the Crips and the Bloods decided Los Angeles wasn't big enough. Here they are, hassling the gondoliers, whipping their 9's out when the pizza-man presents the bill. A longtime resident hushed me when I mentioned this all, saying "There is such unemployment..." * * * SUVs? Hah, not a thing of the past, not even a memory. A non issue. Nobody worth knowing has a car. Few people have a boat (they're all in love, like me, with their favourite vaporetti route). People don't even boast that much about their shoes, which are the most important transportation implements in the Venetian transportation system. * * * The countess showed me around her palazzo; the light, the air, the art, the beauty, the impossible gleam from the floors. She seemed ageless. "Darlink," she hissed, "let us go to lunch." The Countess (who the more I looked at her the more I was thoroughly uncertain as to how old she was) ordered for us in a perfect local bistro with a private back room. We spoke of everything possible. She said: "When I was finished school in Poland I attended art college in London. Then I lived in Holland. For za past two decades I have been a resident here, though there is no art market." She had shown me her large boulder-sculptures, rocks cleanly cleaved by diamond-cutting professionals and with precise form-fitting mirrors installed within them. "Do you know what zay are"? she asked. "No," I said, spotting a tortured face grimacing out from one of them. "It doesn't matter." As we lunched her words and sentences began quickly to lull me with their melody. It was as if she spoke with a kind of subliminal rhythm of calculated sounds as much as a recognizable foreign tongue. I tried to determine what a Polish-English-Dutch-Italian hybrid of an accent might sound like. Though I tried to convince myself otherwise, as she spoke, I could not help thinking her cadence and inflections were so like a strong wind down from the Carpathians. "Darlink," she leaned close, "you must learn za language. It is thee door to za secret to za solution." She leaned closer. "I vill instruct you." * * * So I decided to take Italian lessons. Three hours per day, five days per week, a four-week course. They guaranteed I would either be speaking Italian by the end of it or I would have run out of there with my hair on fire. Darn good thing, I don't want to be stuck studying some goddawful language for the rest of my conscious life in this place. * * * Our man Todd needs a girlfriend. If he is realistically going to be here for six months, and wants to hold his head even moderately high when he gets home and recounts his half-year in romantic Venice to the folks back home, he had better. So far, though, no dice. As far as I can see, this is not for lack of skill, market or trying. Todd is a fine guy, quick of wit, deep but light, solidly humorous, not bad looking, tall, and at that age of early-mid thirties women of all ages and types seem to find innately attractive. And he's a smooth enough operator for an art-history egghead. The other day we were in a room - I was working the ex-pat couples, trolling for dinner invites - when I spied my man Todd jawing to a hyper-tall big-hairs sweetie I hadn't even noticed before. I worked my way to him to see what the action was, he had had her attention for no more than one hundred and eighty seconds, and he was writing her phone number on his hand as I arrived. Phew! Reminds me of me in my heyday. Reminded me that I was so glad my heyday was hell-and-gone, because he did not look like he was having particular fun and I think I knew instantly why. If you are a nice man, you will not necessarily admire the accepted, necessary methods of relationship acquisition these days. Taking of numbers, calling, verbal ballet, rules observance, calculation, assessment, risk, dispassionate decision-making. We rue that it has not changed, due to either time or place. Good god you'd think that in one of the original romantic spots in the world that the rules might be void or at least suspended in favour of the idea that we've all had so much experience just to get here, let's put aside conventions and just conjoin without artifice. But no. Todd told me later she was Canadian (!). An art history student form some bigtime American school, here on some kind of scholarship. I told him outright that I was surprised, she did not look that bright. We discussed the fact that the average McDonald's employee is a college graduate, the average fast-food manager likely a post-graduate candidate. I admitted that I was a smarts-snob of long-standing, have former friends who are convinced of my non-redeemable status in that regard, and he, Todd, stated that despite appearances, it was too bad she was busy next Saturday. More than a few times I have called Todd of an early evening and suggested we do something innate - pizza, booze, the searching-out of a legitimate bar in this town - invariably he will decline, stating that he intends to stick to his plan of a long walk, a typical Venice-sojourn, with no clear objective, and every expectation of the unexpected. * * * As far as I've been able to find out, Venice is the only city in the world to have daily (except some Sundays) garbage pickup, even though in it's relationship to The Plague (raped the population about a hundred times between 900-1650 AD) other cities would have cause to do the same. You can totter around your kitchen, fill up a bag of trash, and step out to the front door just before bed and plop a bag on the roadway for a pre-eight AM pickup. After a while it gets to be part of your ease, a feature of life like an endless party, catered by unseen (but often heard) toilers in the muck of other's joyful detritus. * * * I once had a girlfriend who, toward the end of the relationship, tried to strangle me. She was skillful, it occurred to me while my breath was fading that she knew what she was doing, had done it before, was generally experienced at this kind of thing. That realization, more than the hard forearm across my windpipe, made me terrified. Then when I twisted away from this grip she pummeled me with her feet, and when I tried to dress to get away from there she calculated her attacks with fists and body so that I could barely keep my footing. She seemed intent to cause as much pain and terror as possible, and appeared, shockingly - because I had not seen this in her before - to own this territory and to have made the decision that she would be my guide through it. The conflict had begun as we resumed an on-again-off-again relationship of maybe five months, and to the question she put about whether, in the intervening month since our last meeting, I had slept with anyone, I opted (for the first time and I hope not the last, despite the advice of my friends) to be honest. She was a fine girl, spirited, artistic, nearly talented. During the five or six terrific moments we had I felt like a million dollars. But the emotional confliction she carried inside her did not let her enjoy life. Nearly every aspect of it - her work, relationship, apartment, cat, family caused her obsessive feelings, from regret, sadness, to bitterness and violent anger. Though I did see her again after the beating incident, a year later, and we tried to decompress and be friends about it, we were never on firm ground. Though I was firmly disposed toward love with her - piercing eyes, manic energy, powerful sexuality - it never got off the ground. She was Italian. Raised in what I know (because she told me) was an ethnically immigrant predisposed family. Everyday when I walk the streets, ride the vaporetto, munch pizza standing up at the corner snackateria, she stares back at me. I see her scowling, pulling peevishly on a cigarette, hectoring her boyfriend as they step quick and uneasy along the strada. * * * Footfalls, silence, especially at night, like living in a cabin in the woods. Except for the occasional voice, singing on Saturday nights, and in the morning, the shuffling and scraping of the garbage men. But footfalls, their sweet music of shoe-rubber on stone, is what makes one fall in love. I never knew, living in the car culture, that I could appreciate them so. Like voices, they all have a particular note, a tone which identifies them. The stomp of sole teenagers returning home, clicking of young women rushing for the vaporetto, the nearly silent shuffle and roll of mama pulling her wheeled grocery bag home, the purposefully resonating stride of businessmen. * * * The funereal island of San Michele, more flowers in a field than I've seen since I train-traveled across Holland. Venetians know how to do cemeteries. Acres and acres of fine-cut marble, etched faces in stone, mosaic, photographic faces frozen for decades (the older ones have faded, except for the really old ones, on hundred years or more, where the paper had no acid), crypts the size and design of deluxe houses. Igor Stravinski lies here (he wrote music), Ezra Pound also (he was the 20th Century's greatest literary innovator as far as I'm concerned), though good luck finding them without a map. I didn't ask for one because it felt too ghoulish. Who cares where somebody's body is anyway. * * * And there among the spirits I thought of you-know-who. He would not have appreciated my having traveled damn near half-way around the world to walk through a graveyard. Plenty of them in Canada. * * * Venice is interesting for a lot of things, but one peculiarity in particular intrigues me: Other than when he was posted with the /German Army in Belgium during the 1914-18 war, it is the first place Adolph Hitler ever traveled to. By that time (1932) he had been "elected" Chancellor. Mussolini was his mentor. I imagine that the buildings were as beautiful, the water as compelling, the launches making their bow-waves like paint-strokes in the portrait of this place as magic as it is now. * * * When I was a kid and discovering Hemingway I told my dad what it was like to read him. "He says everything he does. He goes to a bar, he has a whiskey. His friend comes in, they have Pernod. They go in a cab to the bullfights. It goes on and on..." "That's the kind of writing I like," said Dad. © Dennis E. Bolen 1/2001 |
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Culture Court | copyright 2001 | Lawrence Russell