The Way the World Works

by Baker, Nicholson

  Next door to the Tramontin brothers’ squero is a gondola shop run by Daniele Bonaldo. A twenty-four-year-old American anthropology student named Thomas Price recently built a life-size gondola there with the help of a Watson Fellowship. Bonaldo is childless and says he’s tired of building boats, so he agreed to teach the art to Price. On the tenth of May I went to a party at Bonaldo’s place to celebrate “The Launching of the First American Gondola.” Price’s boat looked authentic—black, with a dark-red hull and a small, tasteful, delicately rendered American flag, breeze-ruffled, carved into one of the decorative elements by an itinerant artisan. Price has built sailboats and rowboats in Maine, but he was attracted to the gondola, he told me, because there are many unusual things about it. Not only is it asymmetrical and rowed in a standing position—but also its components are bent into shape by brushing them with water over a fire of marsh reeds (a blowtorch will also work and is handier in the winter), and they are assembled without paper plans, by cutting the pieces in accordance with a wooden template, the cantier. The prosecco that Price poured on the prow to christen the boat mixed with the sun-warmed and not-completely-cured black lacquer to produce an inspiring Saturday-morning smell. Price told me that he would like his gondola to be rowed on the canals of Venice, but it may be that a couple of entrepreneurs in Maine buy it for a novelty riverboat service there: it’s Bonaldo’s boat to sell.

  Before I left the party I talked to Price’s sister, Anne. She was living in Mestre, making a living playing North Carolina fiddle music on the steps of Venetian churches, which is forbidden without a busker’s license. I asked her if she had ever ridden in a gondola. One time she was walking across a bridge, she said, and a young, handsome gondolier with long blond hair offered her a free ride. She said okay. They went down a sludgy canal by a conservatory, where she could hear pianos and clarinets, and then out onto the Grand Canal. The whole time the gondolier was saying how sorry he was that she had no one to be kissing while she was riding the gondola. I asked her if the two of them had hit it off. “We hit it off,” she said, “but I maintained my distance. I see him from time to time. It’s like a musical skill to be able to row a gondola. When I see gondoliers just standing all day on bridges, saying Gondola, gondola, waiting, it’s like they’re begging. It’s so similar to me when I play violin on the street, waiting for somebody to stop and listen.” Her gondolier’s name was Eros.

  Eros the Oarboy is as familiar today as he was in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where Giovanni the gondolier is “devoted to his ladies, as he had been devoted to cargoes of ladies in the past.” At night there is, I have noticed, a considerable amount of giggly public gondolier-kissing in the city by groups of foreign women carrying bottles of wine. My wife made up a song: Come into my gondola, I’m going to fondle ya. Once, in the middle of the Grand Canal at ten o’clock in the evening, we passed a gondola that was sitting motionless on the water with two women and two stripe-shirted men in close converse within; one of the men greeted our rower and called out (my wife translated for me), “How do you say ‘double bed’ in Spanish?”

  All this is as it should be. My minor complaint is just that there is no privacy available to the passengers of these boats—privacy not to go hog wild, necessarily, but simply to talk without constraint. You are compelled to take the waters in a convertible. The felze (wooden winter cabin) and tendalin (canvas summer hood) were renounced forty or fifty years ago—too time-consuming to set up, and unnecessary, it was thought, for the demands of tourism. Unless these traditional enclosures are revived, the conventional tender moment on the water will be forever inhibited by the steady oar-plying and tour-guiding going on abaft. You tentatively take the spousal hand, and then hear, from behind, “This is Goethe house. Goethe lived in this house.” All potential romance has been realigned in favor of the presiding gondolier himself. Male passengers are adjuncts, balding lumps of flesh with wallets.

  The one real love story I know between a gondolier and a straniéra is the one between Bruno Palmarin, the profusely mustached hereditary gondolier who rowed at our wedding, and Susan Nickerson, an American mosaicist. Susie grew up in Long Island, the daughter of two judges. She came to Venice in 1972 after art school to study mosaic-making. Late in December, on her birthday, she went alone to Torcello. The sacristan unlocked the church for her; she was the only person there. Then she got a boat back to Venice and went to an antique store where she knew some people. She told them it was her birthday, and they bought a bottle of spumanti to celebrate. Just then Bruno Palmarin came by—a big, polite man carrying two baby rabbits in a cage. (They were a Christmas present for his niece and nephew.) Bruno looked a little like the bust of the Emperor Constantine, Susie thought: the same large, spiritual eyes. Later she found out he was a gondolier.

  When Bruno finished work for the day, he would hitch his gondola like a horse not far from Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo (Bruno’s father was Peggy Guggenheim’s gondolier for a time), in the little canal where Susie shared a mosaic studio with a Russian woman. He would peek in the little window that was in the door and greet her; she would scoop away the wet cement from her work-in-progress (she was using pieces of old mirror-glass a lot then) and come out with him. In time Susie learned to row herself, and they rowed a lot—to the Rialto to shop, to entertain dinner guests, to carry Susie’s heavy mosaics to her show. They, together with an American man and Bruno’s brother Ambrogio (who was a gondolier until elbow problems forced him to become a businessman), competed in the first Vogalonga in 1975—the Vogalonga being a noncompetitive marathon open to any kind of international oar-powered craft. “She should be home washing the dishes!” some people called from the shore (in Italian). Others called out, “Viva la donna!”

  They got married in Venice’s City Hall in 1978; their first child, Giacomo, learned the basics of rowing when he was two, by holding a broom and standing in a wooden cradle that Bruno had built for him. Giacomo is now eighteen; he is not sure whether he wants to be a trumpet player, or a gondolier, or both. Last year he won the youth-division Regata Storica and every other race he entered. I asked him if he had any rowing tips. “You have to make the boat always go forwards and not go back,” he said. “The oar has to come in strong to come out sweetly and then go back fast.” Bruno is not a regatta-racer himself, but Giacomo admires his father’s virtuosity. “Everybody can go fast, if you train,” he said, “but not everybody can go fast in the canals.”

  Bruno has the ferri, the prow and stern ornaments, of various relatives mounted on the walls and ceilings of their house. He recently spent three winters renovating an ornately filigreed felze made around the turn of the century, the sort of thing that Henry James or William Dean Howells would have cruised around in. (“I don’t know where, on the lagoon, my gondolier took me,” James wrote; “we floated aimlessly and with slow rare strokes.”) Bruno has a collection of old gondola components he keeps in a low-ceilinged storage room near where he grew up, in the Dorsoduro. (His family moved to the Giudecca in 1960, after canal water began flooding into Bruno’s room.) On the wall are portraits of gondolier relatives, old paintings of regatta champions, and a photograph of Susie and him leaving City Hall on their wedding day. The radio is always softly playing. “I like old things, anyway,” he said as he uncovered more and more of his collection of cloth-shrouded gondoliana. He owns two gondolas—the one that he rowed for our wedding (which seemed plenty fancy to us at the time), and a budget-busting wedding sloop that he commissioned Tramontin to make for him in 1990. Its stern-piece is an elegant twist of steel curving around a fernlike decorative whorl incised with the Palmarin coat of arms and the initials “PB.” (“Handmade by a friend of mine,” Bruno said.) The chairs are the ones his uncle used on his wedding gondola, re-gilded; Susie made the embroidered pillows and found the putti-and-flower pattern that the wood-carver chipped into the top panels. On the prow there is a small gold man holding a bottle of wine that Bruno had cast from a statue on an old clock he owns—the figu
re serves, as Bruno sees it, as the hostly Bacchus, saluting all passenger-guests and wishing them a good journey in his boat. Bruno hesitates to say how much it all cost: “Thirty thousand dollars would not be enough,” he says. The boat’s name is Aurelia Stephanie, after his daughter.

  I walked with Bruno one morning to pick up the sealed results of a heart test from the Ospedale Civile. He tore open the white envelope on the front steps of the building, in front of a fifteenth-century trompe l’oeil stone facade, but the results were numerical and abbreviated and impossible to interpret. Not long ago he experienced what he calls “an episode of fast heartbeating” during an argument over the phone with Giacomo. He hasn’t felt any flutters while he is rowing, though. Inactivity is his enemy. “The more I work hard, the better I feel. If I fatigue, if I feel nice and tired, I feel much better.” One of the difficult things about his job is the waiting—standing in the heat in front of the Doge’s Palace. Passersby ask him the same questions hundreds of times a day, and have their pictures taken next to him as if he’s a monument. The sunlight reflects off the walls of the palace and off the water; it is like standing in a toaster.

  We stopped at the Rialto at a small clothing store; I stood outside guarding a wicker basket that Bruno had found in a pile of trash by a canal while Bruno went inside and bought two pairs of black gondolier’s pants. Then he told me another story about his grandfather Ambrogio. “In the winter, there was very little to support the family, but he was a grand man,” he said. Ambrogio had a big red handkerchief, in which he put three cabbages. “Then he bought three necks of turkey—only the necks. He pinned the necks of turkey outside the handkerchief, and the cabbages were inside. Passing by San Vio like that—he wanted everybody to think he had three turkeys inside.”

  Bruno’s childhood was not prosperous, either. He is self-educated; he left school after fifth grade and got a job carrying boxes of tripe across town on his shoulder. Later he worked for an old gondolier, cleaning out his boat and doing substitute work. Eventually he inherited his father and grandfather’s gondolier’s license. The licenses are valuable nowadays, like cab medallions. Recently someone introduced a measure that would prohibit the transfer of a license to one’s offspring. “Someone would make me not be able to give it to my son, eventually?” Bruno asks, incredulously. “No, no, ridiculous.” It was voted down. On the other hand, Bruno half hopes that he is the last Palmarin gondolier—that Giacomo will choose a different profession. “Not that I don’t like this job, but I think sometimes it is restricted, if you know what I mean, limited.”

  He thinks of owning a place in the mountains, far from boats, and raising land creatures—horses, pigs, chickens. Venice can seem paved-over and confining. English and French he learned by spending winters abroad when he was in his twenties. “It didn’t mean when I went to Paris I did the grand life, or to London. But—ah!—I breathe more. The life here was to be a gondolier, to get fiancé with some nice young Venetian and then eventually get married, and then, that is life.” When he met Susie it was different. “Modestly, I had some opportunities here,” he said. “But she was not suffocating. A Venetian woman would be suffocating, you see. And so something grew in between us. She very often says to me, ‘You should have married a Venetian woman, cooking well, and so on.’ But she doesn’t know how much happy she made me, anyway.”

  If Giacomo does decide in time to be a gondolier, he can expect to make a comfortable, if seasonal, living. Tariffs have risen steadily, and each gondolier is a member of a cooperative that pools income and pays a percentage of health insurance and pension expenses. “The gondola is alive because of money,” Bruno reminded me. “I am no angel myself.” But Bruno is troubled by how narrowly income-obsessed some of his colleagues are now. They are relinquishing their traditional roles as ambassadors and civic proxies. “There used to be a gondolier who was called Zar delle Russie, ‘Russian Czar,’ because he was a very pompous guy,” Bruno told me. “When somebody came to Venice, he used to go to Piazza San Marco and say, ‘The gondoliers welcome you, sir.’ And shake the hand. It was a bit of pathos, if you like. But it was done in an elegant way. Now gondoliers, what are they? We have no identity anymore. We have no past. We have put everything in money.”

  Relations with City Hall are not good these days, either. When some kooks recently hijacked a ferryboat and occupied Saint Mark’s with the help of a cardboard tank, a famous Italian television commentator announced that he would be spending the next day in the square. The gondoliers, through their official representatives, lodged a protest with the city, saying that the TV equipment would interfere with their business and they wanted due compensation. Bruno thinks that was a mistake. “Our image is more important than immediate money, you see. The image pays in the long term.” Formerly gondoliers rowed political dignitaries and racing champions during annual celebrations like the Regata Storica or the Sensa (the day in which the mayor of Venice celebrates the city’s marriage to the sea by tossing a ring into the water out by the Lido, while a man with a microphone adds booming color commentary); now the four-oared boats of honor are manned by volunteer members of the city’s rowing clubs. “It is true that the city spares money by giving these services to the rowing clubs,” Bruno says. “But I was one of those on the table who said, ‘No, no, no, we must do that. Who if not the gondoliers? We should do that for free. One day a year, we should pay our people, in order to take a place there.”

  Much of the ill-feeling between the city and the gondoliers is a result of the rampancy of moto ondoso. Speed limits are posted on the Giudecca and the Grand Canal—11 kilometers per hour for vaporetti-buses, 7 for water trucks, and 5 for water taxis—but they are seldom enforced. The gondoliers want “strict repression,” by which they mean traffic cops who will stop motormen—especially water-taxi drivers—from speeding and behaving recklessly. But the motormen evidently have powerful friends. At a big moto ondoso conference in June that I went to, under the eighteenth-century painted ceiling of the Venice Atheneum, a group of tough-looking water-taxi drivers with gold jewelry stood along the wall, arms crossed, and jeered audibly throughout a slide presentation of decaying stonework and leaping dual-engine boats. “They are brutes,” says Bruno. “They are savages. They should be thrown out the window.”

  In principle, gondoliers have nothing against engines. Bruno’s gondola cooperative (the Ducale) owns ten big excursion launches, each carrying from thirty to fifty passengers; it also maintains the only reduced-wave water taxi in the city, the Eco, which has a lower-horsepower engine and a hull that does a better job of healing its transient water wound. In 1988, Bruno put his gondola in dry dock and drove a water taxi for a year. He returned to the oar, though, because, he said, “I wasn’t sweating enough.” Sweating rowers created the Venetian Republic, one recalls; the gondola is a direct link back to the glory days, when fifty-oared, ocean-roaming triremes earned or stole for the city its Renaissance fortune. The gondola’s prow, not the Evinrude’s screw, is Venice’s omnipresent postcard symbol for good reason, and it would be sad if unregulated motor traffic succeeded in sweeping the chaotic waters in front of St. Mark’s as free of black boats as the Giudecca Canal is now.

  Bruno’s idea these days is for the creation of an elite corps of rowing police. Each would patrol a section of the city, standing up, using a smaller type of boat called a s’ciopon. Such floating mounties used to exist; because their boats were smaller and nimbler than the existing police motorboats, they could keep an eye on the narrow canals, too, which are now sometimes completely blocked by scofflaws. Oar-cops would be able to feel for themselves the destabilizing effect of waves in a way that existing Polizia and Caribinieri can’t; they would know better what gondoliers contend with every day. “But if I talk like that with someone, they think I come from Mars,” Bruno told me.

  Shouldn’t it be possible to institute an ora-remi—an oar hour, or two, in the middle of the afternoon (when business slows down anyway) during which only human-powe
red vehicles would be allowed on all the canals of Venice? Several big four- or six-oared barges, like the baroque burchielli that once plied the river Brenta to and from Padua, could then peaceably proceed, stuffed with happy map-flapping tourists, from San Marco up the Grand Canal, in place of the ubiquitously groaning No. 1 vaporetto. Imagine daylit water that had calmed down enough to reflect, as it once did, the Redentore or the porphyritic palazzi disappearing around the curve of the Grand Canal. Imagine the water-taxi men chewing at their toothpicks from the sidelines. Imagine the history-sheltering silence. Gondolas would pour from their moorings to celebrate, wedding bells would swing in their leaning towers, women would kiss their husbands or their gondoliers, and everyone would weep and spend lots of money.

  (1998)

  The Charms of Wikipedia

  Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It’s fact-encirclingly huge, and it’s idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it’s free, and it’s fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, “Diogenes of Sinope,” or “turnip,” or “Crazy Eddie,” or “Bagoas,” or “quadratic formula,” or “Bristol Beaufighter,” or “squeegee,” or “Sanford B. Dole,” and you’ll have knowledge you didn’t have before. It’s like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.

  More people use Wikipedia than Amazon or eBay—in fact, it’s up there in the top-ten Alexa rankings with those moneyed funhouses MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. Why? Because it has 2.2 million articles, and because it’s very often the first hit in a Google search, and because it just feels good to find something there—even, or especially, when the article you find is maybe a little clumsily written. Any inelegance, or typo, or relic of vandalism reminds you that this gigantic encyclopedia isn’t a commercial product. There are no banners for ETrade or Classmates.com, no side sprinklings of AdSense.