My Venice and Other Essays (9780802194039)

by Donna Leon

  Just then, the woman from Germany entered the church. She stood at the back, transfixed by the sight of a woman dressed entirely in black, a cat dangling from one hand, walking down from the main altar of the Church of the Miracoli, muttering to herself in Italian. Heaven alone knows what strange ideas she has taken home about the bizarre rites practiced by papists.

  Tell Me You Forgive Me,

  Professor Grzimek

  One of the most embarrassing aspects of advancing years is the increasing difficulty of ignoring one’s own hypocrisies. In a way, hypocrisy can be seen as the defining quality of modern life: politicians apologize for things their governments did a century ago; news agencies apologize for having run stories that had no relation to truth; our friends give elaborate justifications for their bad behavior. And thus a person is well armed to detect it in her own behavior.

  For years, I’ve read a broad spectrum of magazines about animals, have contributed to various animal protection agencies, have even worked myself up to a state of high moral indignation when learning of those terribly selfish peasants in India (or Nepal, or Nigeria; it doesn’t matter much where they are, so long as they are far away) who refuse to allow animals to destroy their land, who fight back when the protection of elephants (or tigers, or hooded owls, or horned toads, or just about any animal you can mention) is declared by a governmental agency to be a greater good than their own economic survival. I’ve seen the photos of the dead beasts, slaughtered by the unfeeling humans, and my loyalty has always been on the side of the animals.

  Until the ghiro. A ghiro is a darling little gray animal, a relative of the squirrel, only smaller and far more adorable. He hops lightly from branch to branch, picking up nuts here and there, is quite thoroughly irresistible and no doubt huggable. He is so cute that he has charmed his way into Italian idiom, for one who sleeps deeply and well is said to “dormire come un ghiro.” He attended the Mad Hatter’s tea party as the dormouse. He is also, alas, a rodent. This means he chews and gnaws away at wood and cannot be stopped from entering into any house or attic whenever he pleases. And there she nests, and there she raises her young.

  I discovered them nesting on the beams of my mountain house when I opened it this week. Below them, like soiled snow, lay small piles of chewed wood, remnants of my sixteenth-­century beams. There was also urine and excrement but that can be cleaned away. Ghiri themselves are far more difficult to displace.

  I called Mirto, my friend the mason, and he came over and had a look.

  “You’ve got to get rid of them, Mirto.”

  “But they’re a protected species,” he explained, just like the badgers for whom I do battle all summer long.

  The words were out before I could stop them: “Nothing’s protected in my house.”

  So Mirto is coming this weekend and bringing along a four-meter ladder to climb up and destroy the nest. Then he is going to close up any hole through which they might be slipping, even one as small as the diameter of a quarter, with a mixture of fast-setting cement and smashed glass, for this is the only thing that will prevent their gnawing their way back in again.

  And if that doesn’t work and they come back? The options are the same ones offered to those ignorant, ecologically insensitive peasants in far-off lands: violence or the continued destruction of my property. The words are out before I can stop them: nothing’s protected in my house.

  Moles

  A few days ago I went out into the field beyond my mountain house to rake some grass I’d cut the day before. As I approached, rake in hand, I saw something move in the grass just ahead of me. Traumatized by seven years of hearing my neighbors talk of vipers, I froze, eyes fixed on the spot. It moved slightly, the grass bubbling up forward, then backward, in an erratic pattern I didn’t think could be a viper.

  Carefully placing one booted foot in front of me, then the other, I moved closer to it, then closer still, until finally the grass parted momentarily and I saw the soft gray fur of what I knew had to be a mole. For the first few minutes, I saw only its back and its tiny frond of a tail as its head darted about under the cut grass and fallen leaves in search of something to eat.

  Suddenly, off beyond it, I saw the grass move in the same pattern, then another moving bubble, and then another, until I stood transfixed by the wonder of it: four dear little moles, busily working no more than a meter from me. Slowly, I lowered the rake to the ground and moved closer, trying to recall everything I’d ever heard about moles. I’d read somewhere that they were virtually blind and could detect human approach only by the vibrations set off by heavy footfalls. And at every turn, for the past seven years, from those same people who had warned me about the vipers, I’d heard that they were to be killed instantly, cut in half with a shovel or battered to death with whatever was to hand, for they were the worst sort of garden pests.

  I bent lower and still they remained unaware of me. They were about the size of a mouse, their fur gray velvet, with feet that looked rather like they’d been borrowed from miniature ducks, webbed for better digging. They appeared to have no eyes and just the littlest slits for ears and their long snouts ended in a point. Busily, they tunneled about through the cut grass, doing whatever it is that moles do at eight thirty on a Sunday morning.

  I backed slowly away and went to the house to get my camera, for I have longed for years to see both mole and badger and thought it would be nice to have a photo of a local one. I returned to the same spot with gossamer tread and they were still about their moley business. Snap and snap, and then back to the house to drive my eighty-two-year-old neighbor to Mass, which is what I do at eight thirty on a Sunday morning.

  I didn’t get back until almost ten, and the first thing I did, of course, was go and check on the moles. Three were gone, but one of them was trapped outside, unable to find the entrance to their tunnel. He bumped into lilacs, stumbled over pansies, and ran about, quite hopelessly lost and, in the growing sunlight, increasingly blind. Thinking that this was the moment, I went for my shovel, this time making no attempt to walk lightly. He was trapped on the surface, this same villainous creature who had systematically, for six years, eaten my tulip bulbs.

  I grabbed up the shovel, came back, and quickly found him, trapped among the towering stalks of the lilies of the valley. I held the shovel over him, then brought it down and scooped him up. I carried him back to the entrance to the tunnel but he must not have been a particularly intelligent mole, for he turned away from it and started back toward the lilacs. I picked him up again, this velvet miracle, and this time all but dumped him headfirst into the tunnel. The last I saw of him were his little pink webbed feet disappearing into the earth.

  Battle Report

  One of the results of American dominion on the planet is the invasion of other languages by English words. As part of this process, Italian has adopted “escalation,” and, though it is pronounced in the Italian way, the meaning remains that of the English, as does the violence lurking in the syllables.

  I dedicated a great deal of the summer to un escalation with the dormice who have laid siege to my house in the mountains. I won the opening campaign of the war, a clever flanking movement, which drove them from the beams of the study and effectively removed them from the central field of battle. A few days after this I was sitting under the portico attached to the house, gloating over the ease of my victory, when I happened to glance up to the beams upon which this roof rests. And there my gaze was met by four round little black eyes, the size of grape pips, looking curiously back. “Sam and Louise,” I muttered, their names springing to my lips. That was a tactical error, for once they had individual names they ceased to be merely “the enemy.”

  Quite content to study the opposition, we looked at one another for ten minutes or so, until my eye moved to what, until then, I’d assumed to be a swallows’ nest. Why was Sam’s tail draped around it? I got up, went across to my neighbo
r’s, and borrowed her ladder. I set it against the wall and climbed to the top, muttering dark threats, rather like one of those falsely fierce sergeants in Dickens. I was going to toss them out, hurl them to the ground, grind their little faces into the dust.

  But when I reached the top Sam (or Louise) was crouched in the nest, paws drawn up to his (or her) chest, confronting me, whiskers a-quiver with terror, body a-tremble as this blustering monster approached. I stood at the top of the ladder for a moment, eyes no more than six inches from those of my enemy. I would guess I’m seven hundred times bigger than a dormouse.

  “I’m going to break your little neck.”

  He trembled.

  “I’m going to grab you and hurl you to the earth and jump on you, crushing you to a pulp.”

  He blinked.

  “I will be merciless in your destruction.”

  His nose twitched.

  Our eyes remained locked for long moments, and then I climbed down the ladder so as best to plan the next move. During the next week, I accumulated a number of satanic devices. There were two ecological traps, guaranteed to capture but not injure, both of which the dormice ignored. There was the ultrasound machine, guaranteed to drive them either mad or away, but which I cannot use because my neighbor’s cat doesn’t like it. Following a recipe in a wildlife magazine, I prepared a sauce of olive oil and peperoncini and squirted it with a water pistol on the beams where I’d seen them; Louise, I suspect, dabs it behind her ears. And then a man driving past told me that it’s effective to suspend a plastic cat’s head in front of where you think their nests are. These I carved out of Styrofoam myself, carefully painting them to look like cats’ faces, even using dental floss for whiskers, then I climbed up and attached them by short pieces of thread to the four corners of the roof.

  Two nights after this, we had a fierce windstorm, branches breaking and things going boom in the night. The next morning, when I went out on the patio with coffee, I saw four hairless pink creatures, little bigger than cashew nuts, lying dead on the pavement beneath the place where I’d last seen Sam and Louise. There was no sign of the nest, which the wind must have carried off into the fields beyond the house. I got a trowel and put them in a matchbox, then buried them under the lilac near the stairs.

  I’ve given back the traps, decided to use the peperoncini in pasta, and when I get the ladder back I’m going to take down the cats.

  Blitz

  It was love at first sight. It had happened to me before but never like this, with a stunning immediacy that knocked me right off my feet. Unfortunately, as I have two of them—feet, that is—and he has four, there was little chance that this love story had much of a future. But I’ve always been an optimistic sort of girl, so I entrusted my heart to Cupid’s care and hoped that something might come of it.

  After our first meeting, I found myself thinking about Blitz a great deal, wondering what my parents might have said, decades ago, had I brought Blitz home to meet them. He wasn’t very tall, little more than two feet, but then I’m a mere five-foot-three so that hardly seemed a problem. Luckily, my parents had always been open-minded, so the fact that he was black wouldn’t have mattered in the least. There was, however, the difference in our educations, something my parents had always warned me could lead to serious problems between a couple. I’d spent all those years at university, while Blitz had had only three months of formal education.

  But then there was the distinct advantage that he had a secure job, enjoyed perfect health, and was, well, he was gorgeous.

  Blitz, to stop teasing, is a bomb dog and works at the U.S. Air Force base in Aviano, an hour north of Venice. He’s an eight-year-old Dutch shepherd and has been working in Aviano for six years. I met him when I was at the base a year and a half ago to write a story for Zeit about the opening of the new shopping mall. The site was filled with generals in their medal-dripping uniforms, cheerleaders from the high school, shopping addicts lined up six deep waiting for the doors to open, and there, sitting quietly beside his handler, was Blitz. Since I have been a dog addict all my life, I approached with the usual greeting, “Hello doggie-woggie,” never having been ashamed of making a fool of myself for a dog. The sergeant, towering above me, said, “If I were you, ma’am, I wouldn’t touch him,” and when I asked why, poker-faced, he responded, “Because Blitz’ll bite your hand off, ma’am.”

  Playing hard to get, as we all know, is a technique that seldom fails. I suppose the threat that he’ll bite your hand off is about as hard to get as a male can play. Tactics dictated that the surest way to Blitz’s heart was through his handler, and so I started to chat with him about this and that, where Blitz lived, who his parents were, where he worked, whether he had a lot of friends . . . perhaps even girlfriends. The sergeant answered my questions, the responses to which made me even more interested in Blitz, and when I blurted out I might be interested in writing an article about him, the sergeant glowed.

  Few can resist the human need to anthropomorphize the animals around us: the closer they are to us, the more we insist they be like us. Bears and elk seem fine having their completely alien animal responses, and we leave it to animal specialists to figure out what those mean, but cats and dogs and other things we invite into our homes are almost obliged to be just like us, if not in their behavior then certainly in their feelings.

  Blitz, however, and the other dogs he works with—Rocky, Layca, Carlo, Arny, and Allan—aren’t dogs in the way people usually think of dogs, as friends and companions who live with us, amuse us, comfort us, and love us. They are work dogs, highly trained animals who can sniff out drugs or the chemical components of bombs at stunning distances, and so the anthropomorphism becomes a bit more complicated, for these dogs give their human companions rewards different from what people are accustomed to getting from their dogs; in certain situations, the dogs will save human lives by bringing even the most dangerous attacker to ground. Most family dogs are sloppy things that lie around all day and are perfectly happy to love everyone in the family or, for that fact, just about anyone who comes through the door or who pats them on the head in the supermarket. Bomb dogs love their handlers, though to speak of “love” is to engage in more anthropomorphism. They obey their handlers, respond eagerly to their commands, and give every sign of excitement to be in their presence. If there is love, my guess is that it is on the part of the handlers, for they speak of the dogs with the highest regard and bask in any praise that is given them.

  The kennel at the air base at Aviano is set a bit back from the main highway that runs from Pordenone to Aviano. It’s an enormous prefabricated building with pens for at least thirty dogs, though today there are only six dogs in residence. Their job is to seek out either drugs or bombs as well as to guard and attack. From what I learned from the soldiers, I’d say that all a dog needs for this job is a good nose and good training. In fact, civilian airport security is increasingly turning to the use of Labradors, border collies, even the beagle, all called by military handlers, in tones of great condescension, “passive” dogs. The military, instead, wants dual-purpose dogs: those who can sniff as well as attack.

  Behind the building is a large fenced-in field where the dogs are trained and exercised. This seems to be the only place where the dogs are allowed to run free; otherwise they are in their kennel or working, which means they are on a short lead at their handler’s side, either guarding the gate to the base or patrolling the base and its perimeter.

  This lack of exercise is only apparent: the dogs’ veterinarian, Dr. Mark Smith, said that these dogs get a lot more exercise than the average family dog and that an eight-hour shift is nothing for them. Further, their health and weight are regulated, and they’re given a thorough physical exam every six months. A few months ago, Blitz broke off the tip of a tooth, necessitating a root canal that was done by one of the military dentists. No crown, though. I asked. It seems that the pressure ex
erted by the biting jaw of a dog this size, 2,500 pounds per square inch, is so strong that it would snap off even the best-made crown. So there’s a hole in Blitz’s smile. When they are too old to continue to work, the air force has a policy that allows some of them to be adopted by a trained handler. But if disease prevents them from working and the disease is considered terminal they are euthanized.

  This is precisely what happened to Roy, a German shepherd, this past summer. Dr. Smith diagnosed bone cancer and the air force, which is the owner of the dog, decided that he should be put down. The men who described Roy’s death, all large men in the prime of life, spoke of it with evident raw feeling. Sergeant Howard, the kennel master, decided that, after a lifetime of loyal service, Roy deserved a military funeral, and that’s what he got, complete with a twenty-one-gun salute from the honor guard.

  Talk of death led me to ask Dr. Smith what happens to the pets of military members who die while their owners are stationed in Aviano. He explained that there is an Italian contractor who disposes of the bodies of pets for a fee: $30 for a cat or hamster, $80 for a Great Dane. There is a flat fee of $180 for any cremation; the ashes are returned to the owner. These sums led me to suspect that many Italian landlords must discover, after their American tenants are transferred to some new military post, lots of suspicious small bones in the backyard.

  The corpse contractor had taken Roy away before the funeral took place, and so the guns fired into the empty blue sky over an equally empty coffin. This deceit had no sooner been revealed to me than the speaker put his hand over his mouth and said, “I didn’t mean to let the cat out of the bag,” a metaphor that, however inappropriate, seemed perfect.