My Venice and Other Essays (9780802194039)

by Donna Leon

  Though it embarrassed me to ask, considering the delicacy of my feelings, I could not stop myself from inquiring about Blitz’s sex life. None. The training is so strong that even the scent of a bitch in heat cannot override a command from his handler. The only possibility of a romantic life open to dogs like Blitz is to be selected as part of the Department of Defense’s breeding program, a new policy, begun perhaps to answer the increasing demand for dogs skilled at the task of sniffing out bombs. At present, most of the military’s dogs are bought from vendors in the United States and Europe, but bought on approval and kept for ten days, during which time both their general health and their natural inclination to hunt are assessed.

  The men who work with these dogs find their lives enmeshed with those of the animals. This was particularly evident when they discussed the “personalities”—careful to apologize for the use of the word—of the dogs. Layca, it turns out, is weird, and her handler never knows if she is going to bite or snarl or lunge at a person. Rocky, by general agreement, is the most laid-back and peaceful. In fact, during their discussion of Rocky, I had the suspicion that the dreaded word “passive” was but a hairsbreadth from the tongues of the handlers. Blitz, I was pleased to note, was generally conceded to be the handsomest of the lot.

  We passed on to the subject of emotions, and the soldiers heaped scorn on the official stance that these animals have no emotions. They spoke of love and dislike and jealousy and, as evidence of this, mentioned one dog who, for a period of time, had to share a handler with another dog. Whenever the handler came to take the second dog out for work or exercise, the first one made every attempt to stick his paw out of his cage and hit the other dog and displayed a great deal of aggression toward this other dog whenever it went by in the company of the handler. Further, during this time of joint belonging, he would often hold up one paw and feign injury in order to gather attention to himself. Jealousy? Hell, that’s what I’d call it, regardless of what the animal theorists say. And listening to the way the handlers talked about their dogs there was no question that love existed.

  All theory dropped from my mind the day we all went out to play. Before I could get near the dogs, I had to worm my way into the protection suit. This suit, which is made of thick burlap and weighs about twenty pounds, is not a garment designed for the making of a fashion statement: its purpose is to protect the wearer from the attack of dogs, from those two thousand pounds of pressure as well as from the repeated, fast biting, which the handlers refer to as “typewriting.”

  I stood in the field, the snowcapped Dolomites behind me, and Blitz came out at the end of his handler’s leash. For what seemed an inordinately long time, Blitz and I got to know each other at last. I stood in the suit, arms outstretched, and Blitz sat on the ground, looked at my throat, and barked. I noticed that the tooth cut down in the root canal had done nothing at all to reduce the number of his teeth: there appeared to be ninety-two of them, and they all, from that angle, appeared to be the size of sardines. As I watched him bark, saw his saliva splash out onto my feet, and counted those teeth, my memory fled to the time, twenty years before, when I was being evacuated from Iran during the revolution and a young revolutionary guardsman climbed onto our bus and stuck a Kalashnikov in my face. It had been that long since I’d been the prey of such raw, animal fear.

  After my time in the suit, after Blitz and I had gotten to know each other a bit better, I watched him in the company of his handler. And in those minutes, while the soldier caressed his head and accepted licks on his neck from that long tongue and gave him a drink of water from the same bottle, I realized that Blitz, even Blitz of the many teeth, has in him that wondrous canine quality that creates the bond between man and beast. The words came to me unasked. “Hello doggie-woggie.”

  My First Time

  Eating Sheep’s Eyeball

  Only I didn’t eat it, so you can keep on reading. It happened in 1979, in Iran, toward the end of the country’s revolution, which would drive us all out. My companion, William, and I were invited to the home of Iranian friends for a special dinner. Martial law had been declared, and it was evident to everyone—except, of course, the U.S. government—that we would all be leaving Iran soon, and so our friends wanted to show their affection and regard for us by offering us a special meal.

  We had been to their house before, they to ours, so we were familiar with Parveen’s cooking and thought she’d make one of her specialties: stuffed grape leaves, fried patties of egg and spinach, grilled lamb. When we arrived at their home—early, because we had to eat and get back home before the curfew began at dusk—we noticed that her mother was in the kitchen at the back of the house, surely a good sign, for the Hanumm, or lady, was known in the entire neighborhood as a good cook. Not only was Parveen’s father there, but so were her married sister and her husband; the more family members dined with us, the greater the respect being shown.

  We sat at the low table, feeling very transgressive at this mixing of men and women at the same table in a traditional household. There were pistachios, almonds, and raisins on the table, a bowl of yogurt and cucumber. We drank tea and made polite remarks, all of us avoiding the sound of machine-gun fire that occasionally filtered over the walls of the house.

  After ten minutes or so, Parveen excused herself and went across the courtyard and into the kitchen, only to return quickly with a platter of rice the size of an inner tube, from the center of which rose a steaming mound of meat. She placed it in the middle of the table and started to heap rice and meat on each of our plates. When all of us were served, she reached her spoon into the remaining meat and drew out, in quick succession, two marble-shaped and -sized objects and dropped them first on William’s plate and then on mine.

  Agonizingly aware of what had just been done, I kept up a relentless monologue on the use of the past perfect tense, while William, equally sensitive to what lay ahead of us, listened breathlessly, as though a full understanding of the past perfect tense were the only desire he had ever known in life.

  Everyone began to eat, I perhaps more slowly than the others. Rice had never been drier; each of the raisins cooked to rich plumpness in the rice caught in my throat. I drank a few glasses of tea, the edge of my fork occasionally brushing the offending ball from one side of my plate to the other. Occasionally, I looked down at my plate, admiring the delicacy that awaited me, making it obvious to everyone that I was saving it for last.

  William, whose courage had never failed him, or us, during months of martial law, proved again his heroism and ate his down in a single gulp, leaving only mine on my plate, occasionally glancing back at me.

  The meal drew toward its close. I knew there was rosewater-flavored rice pudding to follow. I looked down at my plate, and what was on it looked back at me. I recalled the advice given to Victorian virgins on their wedding night: close your eyes and think of England.

  A hand grenade or something making the sort of boom one would imagine a hand grenade would make went off in the next street, and Parveen’s father’s knee knocked against the table, tipping the water pitcher to one side. Hands reached to save it, a glass of tea fell onto the carpet, someone upset the bowl of yogurt. By the time everything was set again to rights, my plate was empty and I was smiling in delight at having been given such a sign of respect that had turned out to be so very, very delicious.

  The rice pudding followed, but then it was time for us to leave if we wanted to get home before curfew. Hasty handshakes all around. Parveen’s husband walked us all the way to the corner of our own street, more handshakes and bows.

  As William put the key into the door to our house, he asked, “Where is it?”

  “In my handkerchief, in my pocket, and I am now a vegetarian.”

  ON MEN

  Bosoms

  The musical highlight of my 1997 opera season was a performance of Handel’s Ariodante in Amsterdam, presented in concert form
, which means they just stand there and sing: no costumes, no scenery, no awkward gestures, and no collapsing backdrops. Mark Minkowski conducted one of the most thrilling performances of a Handel opera I’ve ever heard, and Anne Sofie von Otter confirmed my long-held opinion that she is among the best singers performing today. Ariodante is one of the roles Handel wrote for a castrato, and because—alas—there are no castrati singing today, the part is sung by a woman, usually a mezzo-soprano, as in this case. But Ariodante’s a guy. Even though the man who originally sang the role wasn’t an entire guy, eighteenth-century audiences were familiar with the convention, and so they pretended all of him was there. Two hundred years later, though the singers have female body parts, we go along with our version of the convention and still pretend that Ariodante’s a guy.

  I eagerly awaited the issue of the CD, curious to confirm my aural memory. Finally, in Musik Hug on Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich I found it and was promptly given it by a too generous friend. The label was clear enough, for there was the name—Ariodante—and there was Anne Sofie von Otter to prove it. She stood there, photographed in black and white, her left shoulder covered by a piece of body armor, that sort of engraved metalwork you see in museums when you look at the knights’ armor and marvel at how short they were. It’s got a delicate tracery of flowers and birds yet looks strong enough to protect her shoulder from a whacking blow. But under it she’s wearing a black cocktail dress cut to a low V in front, and just the least little bit of décolletage is showing.

  Décolletage? Ariodante’s got a bosom? But Ariodante’s a guy. Okay, okay, I know he’s not really a guy, ’cause he’s sung by a girl, but he’s supposed to be a guy. And guys don’t have bosoms. They have muscles.

  I studied her face. Her hair was cut like a guy’s, but her hair has been cut like a guy’s for years. When you’re six feet tall that’s probably wise. And she’s wearing lipstick, badly penciled eyebrows, and has been caught looking off to the left as if wondering when this ridiculous photo session was going to end.

  Intrigued, I began to walk along the aisles of the classical music section, casting my eyes on the covers of various CDs, and after a quarter of an hour I finally got it. Music isn’t enough anymore, or it can no longer sell itself. Nope, it’s gotta be sex and music or, in the case of some of the dreadful covers I saw that day, only sex. Intrigued by the eroticism of their covers, I selected a few CDs and listened to them. There is a cellist who appears to be making love to her instrument, no doubt because it’s the only thing she knows how to do it with. There was something called Sensual Classics II, in the brochure for which a young couple seem to be making passionate love to each other’s clothing. Aspiring young sopranos provided more décolleté. But the best was a young Asian violinist standing in a large body of water, holding what appeared to be a white violin. Remarkable. Rather in the fashion of the eyes of those suffering Christs painted on velvet, her nipples followed my gaze wherever I moved in the room.

  While the mixture of sex and popular music seems quite normal, the idea of its use as a means to sell classical music offends me. Suddenly disgusted with this tawdry cocktail, I took my CD and went home to listen to it. And spent three hours in heaven. Ariodante is heroic and passionate and Anne Sofie von Otter one of the great singers of the age. Bosom or no bosom.

  The Italian Man

  Every few decades, it seems, Italy is “discovered.” The English of the nineteenth century, Americans just after the Second World War—they discovered Italy, fell under the spell of its many charms, and wrote of it in prose from which radiated the passion and optimism that have always been the chief adornments of new love. In recent years, it has fallen to Europeans to make the discovery, and many of them find their hearts lightened by this magical place where the uniting national characteristics appear to be nothing more complex than happiness and the ability to live and love even the most simple moments of life with passion and gusto.

  Much has been said and written about the “new” Italy, the Italy that has given the world an idea of style wherein is shown the perfect harmony of elegance and simplicity. One has but to think of the graceful line created by the lapel of an Armani jacket or the stitching on a pair of Fratelli Rossetti boots to see proof of this instinctive urge toward the tasteful and well made. Even the most simple meal in a workers’ trattoria provides another example of this desire for excellence. And it is in this, I believe, that one sees how much the new Italy really is the legitimate child of the old, for Italian history, if it tells anything, tells the story of the people’s eternal love affair with beauty, with elegance, and with that elusive quality of bella figura.

  The Italian man has also been discovered—that daytime macho who will go home to help with the dishes, that seductive jeweler who takes his children to Luna Park on Sunday and shares their hooting delight in the flying dinosaur ride. What is common to both of these images is the family, that bedrock from which all Italian men spring and to which all want to return, for any consideration of the Italian man, whether new or old, must begin here.

  One of the qualities that most characterizes Italian men is the absolute certainty about their own self-worth, which emanates from them to form a ring of emotional health protecting them from the buffeting of life or loss, and it is from the family that this confidence springs. Just look at Italian children, study them as they play in the parks or in the narrow streets of their cities. See the perfection of their clothing, the quality of the shoes they’ll outgrow next week. And then look around and, near them, hovering above or beside, ever protective and ever adoring, is a female relative—a sister, an aunt, a mother, a grandmother—and in her eyes is the same glow that fills them at the moment the host is raised above their heads during the Mass. For there he is, un figlio maschio, and in him is manifest the glory of the culture, the hopes and future of the family, the virility of the father, and the femininity of the mother. It’s all there, in this adored child who, from the time of his birth, knows that he is the center of the universe of everyone around him, that his every waking moment, his every word or gesture, is the source of life’s greatest joy to the people near him. In non-Latin countries, this sort of unquestioning adulation is viewed with tremendous suspicion, and blamed as the source of inescapable complexes, the snake in the garden of life, the sure cause of future psychic ills. Here in Italy, however, it is no more than the way a particular sort of love is manifest, and its result, as has been the case since the wolf suckled those two infant boys, is the creation of a man who will pass through his entire life without ever entertaining doubts about either his worth or his virility.

  There are, of course, countless clichés about the Italian man, chief among them those age-old classics, the Latin lover and the cigar-chomping mafioso, but now there is a new one, the cashmere-suited businessman with a Gucci briefcase in one hand and telefonino in the other. Like all clichés, these find their sources in life, for certainly men like this do exist, but they are rare, and most Italians see them as figures of fun, much in the way they make jokes about the eternal stupidity of the carabinieri always seen in twos, one to write and one to read. The true Italian man, if such a figure exists, is far more interesting than any of these, and he is the product of that unquestioning and unexamined love that binds the family together.

  History has had its unkind way with Italy, as armies have come and gone, invaders have swept up and down the peninsula, and for centuries various forms of government have shown themselves to be, to varying degrees, both corrupt and incompetent. Given this, it makes sense that the only social unit that Italians trust is the family. It is the family, then, that must be preserved, and it is to this faith—for it is the real faith of the Italians—they owe allegiance. This grasped, the Italian man becomes more easy to understand. His wife, the mother of his children, is always worthy of respect, though fidelity need not be one of the ways in which respect is manifest. Work is important, success vital, for this will allow hi
m better to protect his children against the perpetual uncertainty of the future. And pleasure, which that same uncertain future might take from him at one moment or the other, pleasure is to be sought in all its varied and glorious ways: good food, good wine, good sex, the soft caress of a silk scarf, the joy that comes from the possession of that which is well made and of high quality.

  One of the most astonishing things about these men, at least for the non-Latin, is the total absence of guilt with which they take these pleasures. Women are to be loved, money spent, life lived—and they consume these pleasures with the same simple greed with which they ate the ice cream given them by those adoring aunts and sisters. Pleasure is, after all, theirs by right of birth and so who to fault them?

  Just as Italian men are not given to entertaining doubts about their virility, it does not occur to them to call into question the suitability, indeed the desirability, of their bodies. Like animals and small children, they are perfectly at home in their bodies and perfectly at ease with their erotic potential. They are not to be seen streaming into the gym to work off that paunch, running on a treadmill to get rid of those extra five kilos, nor is one to observe them slaving away and lifting weights to develop a body that would cause Adonis to swoon with envy. If they develop a paunch, well, the tailor will take care of it. And if he cannot disguise it sufficiently well, there is always the protection that comes of describing oneself as robusto. The idea of dieting seems faintly ridiculous to them, and all of this business about “no smoking” is perverse and foreign. Since eating and smoking provide physical pleasure, there is obviously no reason to deny the body either.

  The above is not intended to suggest that they are nothing more than simpleminded hedonists, for Italian men are far finer and more complex than that. Perhaps it would help, in considering them, to remove the very concept of hedonism and see them, instead, as the only pagans left in Europe, men for whom vanity is a virtue and not a vice, men for whom pleasure is a goal and not a sin.