My Venice and Other Essays (9780802194039)

by Donna Leon

  Each month, magazines and newspapers here publish sondaggi and provide the results of various surveys that attempt to study the sociological, psychological, and emotional lives of Italian men. Fewer of them, it seems, are getting married, and fewer of those do so in church. More of them are coloring their hair, more divorcing or separating from their wives, fewer of them having more than one child. And yet, and yet, in the midst of all of this information, this explosion of facts and factoids, the Italian man goes tranquilly about his business, that of being no more than a man. And by virtue of that fact, he is still viewed as having a particular position in society. One glance at who runs government, business, and the universities shows that his position is unchallenged, for the country is still firmly in male hands; it is unlikely that this will soon change, though many people, men and women both, would like to see it happen. Certainly many women have risen to positions of considerable authority—the previous two presidents of the Chamber of Deputies were women—and la donna manager is a force increasingly felt in business and industry. But Italy remains a man’s place.

  This male hegemony, however, differs greatly from that observed in other countries, perhaps because it is tempered by the affection and regard that Italian men feel toward women as much as by the fact that legal institutions provide women with complete equality to that of men. One has but to consider a place as squalid as Saudi Arabia, where women are denied the most basic human as well as legal freedoms, to appreciate the way in which women can and do assert their independence here.

  In any consideration of the position of women in this country, there is also to be considered that intangible quality present in Italy with overwhelming force: the joy Italian men take in the company of women. Most interchanges between a man and a woman here, whether they take place between a woman and her lover or between a woman and the man who sells her cheese and prosciutto, are charged by some mutual recognition of, at however wild and improbable a distance, sexual possibility. This might at first sound like the ravings of frustration, the wild imaginings of a sex-starved spinster, but any woman who has lived here or traveled here has surely often been aware of the sexual charge that fills the air at the most seemingly innocuous exchange with an Italian man.

  Some people might find this offensive, an invasive familiarity on the part of a stranger, but to many Italian men it is no more than the tribute due to a woman, no more flirtatious or suggestive than the admiring glance given to a painting or a field of poppies. Women exist to give pleasure to men, the sexes exist to give joy to each other, and so with the pecorino comes a compliment, with the stracchino a smile that lights the heart and speaks of what might have been.

  The criticism has often been launched against Italian men that they are as superficial as schoolboys, that they remain adolescents all their lives. The question here, perhaps, is not so much whether this is true of Italian men so much as whether it might not be true of all men. At any rate, if it is true of Italians, this superficiality can be seen as an integral part of their enormous charm and, because it is never far away in Italy, yet another result of their central attachment to the family. If the family is the only meaningful bond, then all others are free to be nothing more than superficial. The great secret of the Italian lies in the fact that human contact that is superficial and transitory is not necessarily unimportant or trivial because of that.

  For a woman to spend an evening with an Italian man, whether he is a friend or a lover, a colleague or a husband, is for her repeatedly to be made aware of the difference that exists between the sexes. It can result from nothing more than that old-fashioned gesture of pulling out her chair as she sits at the table or a flower bought from a passing Gypsy and presented with a smile, or it can just as easily result from a heated argument about politics or music in which her opinion is given just consideration and his ideas perhaps adjusted because of her. Whatever the cause, she will find herself enveloped in the warmth that comes of being with a person who likes her, who finds the simple gift of her company a source of pleasure, and who makes no attempt to disguise that pleasure. Some might think of him as the new Italian man, but those who have the tremendous good fortune to live in this blessed country recognize him as the Italian man who has always been and who will, with God’s grace, endure.

  Instincts

  You think maybe there’s a place where they go, all those wasted hours we’ve spent on useless discussion and conversation? You think it’s possible that there’s some sort of cosmic repository where they all cluster together, exhausted by having worked so hard and uselessly, those hours we’ve spent talking about religion or politics or any of those social issues upon which, by now, everyone has an entrenched position? I’m sure all of us have taken the pledge, especially on the mornings after particularly belligerent dinner parties, never again—never—to talk about abortion or the pope or astrology. But we do, don’t we? All of us, I’m sure, have a few red-flag topics that can always lure us into futile argument and leave us with pounding hearts and filled with astonishment at how stupid other people can be.

  Over the course of the years, I’ve taken the pledge never to talk about religion, at least not with a person who has one, to avoid discussion of abortion at all costs, and never to allow myself to remain in a room where pedophilia is being discussed.

  But they sneak up on us, these topics, come stealing into the living rooms of friends, even get invited out to dinner. A few weeks ago, as I was busy eating the first frittella of the carnival season, I allowed my attention to be diverted for a moment by the explosion of cream, raisins, pastry dough, and sugar. Almost before I knew what was going on, pedophilia had slipped into the room, pulled up a chair, and was reaching for one of the pastries. Or so it seemed. We’d been talking, three of us, about the general tendency of the Italian legal system to accept the insanity plea, though with a special, Italianate twist: the plea of momentary insanity, that a person can, for the time it takes to do something—murder his parents, burn down a theater full of people, rape and strangle a girl—be in some sort of other state and hence not fully responsible for that behavior.

  I was just about to laugh at this patent nonsense when one of the people at the table said, “But it really is like that for pedophiles. They’re overcome by an irresistible urge.”

  In a manner I thought quite decorous, I set the remainder of my suddenly tasteless pastry down on the plate and said, “We might as well stop talking now and go home.”

  There followed general consternation until I explained that, as far as I was concerned, once the term “irresistible urge” came into the room, the rest of us might as well get up and leave, as we were never going to agree on anything.

  I meant it and did want to leave because those of us who don’t believe in irresistible urges should save time spent talking to those who do. And learn, perhaps, to knit. At least then we’d have a scarf or sweater to show for our expended energy rather than the vague guilt that comes of having, once again, been tricked into tossing away hours of our life and, sometimes, friendships.

  We’ve all heard it a thousand times: “He was overcome by an irresistible impulse.” “He [it’s always he, isn’t it?] didn’t know what he was doing.” “He couldn’t stop himself.” The most common manifestation of this argument is the hypothetical situation in which a man, involved in some sort of light sexual activity with a woman, hears her tell him, “No.” That is, he wants to continue the scene and she does not. That’s when the irresistible urge marches into the argument, for what’s a boy to do, huh? Even if she says “No” he’s arrived at such a point, you know, that he just can’t stop himself. Irresistible, right?

  Whenever this tired old example gets pulled out of the rag bag of sloppy argumentation, I always ask what his response would be if the woman, instead of saying “No,” instead said, “I’ve got AIDS.” Would the urge remain irresistible?

  Another interesting element of this be
lief is the object of desire. It would seem that, at least from what I’ve heard over the decades, the irresistible urges of men invariably lead toward damage or pain of some sort, generally for some other person: rape, murder, assault. The irresistible urges of women, on the other hand, are usually edible: chocolate, ice cream, or a second dessert. Big-time sinners might change their hair color or buy a Gucci bag. But usually there’s no trail of blood and grief behind them.

  In the end, then, there are only questions. Why does society permit only men the luxury of violent irresistible impulses? Why don’t women have them or, if they have them, why do they seem so easily able to resist them? And, as ever, there’s the original question: where do the hours we spend talking about these things go?

  Oh Beautiful Little Foot

  I must confess that, like many women, I simply don’t get pornography. That is, the idea of it is in no way stimulating to me, neither sexually nor intellectually. This is no doubt as much a result of my having been raised in the America of the 1950s as it is of any high-minded principle on my part. After all, can you imagine Mamie Eisenhower looking at dirty pictures? I’ve never seen a pornographic film, aside from Terminator, that is, and I’ve never looked at the photos in any of the famous magazines, nor have I read the articles. I can’t honestly say that I disapprove of pornography; my ignorance precludes the right to have an opinion.

  Once, however, I did have to read some, this in conjunction with research I was doing for another project, and I ended up reading, of all unlikely things, Chinese pornography of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Well, you’d think we’re all the same, wouldn’t you, believe that the same things serve as sexual stimulators for all of us, that there’s a sort of across-culture set of erotic parts or actions? Nope.

  From what I read in and about Chinese pornography, the prime erotic object for Chinese men (and whoever writes about the erotic objects of women?) was—you guessed it—that tiny little foot, that mutilated, stinking, bound appendage, ideal size three inches, and don’t think about marriage without it, dear. It was done to little girls, usually by their mothers or aunts, when they were three: the toes were bent under, bound below the sole of the foot with specially made cotton bandages, which were removed only to be changed, perhaps to have the pus or blood washed out, then immediately replaced with others. To conceive of the resulting pain requires no explanation and less imagination. It lasted for the rest of her life.

  The effusions of the men who regarded these rotting little buds, which became the epicenter of erotic fetishism, are not far from the veiled excesses of The Romance of the Rose, though they lack the delicacy of that poem. Just listen. “Every time I see a girl suffering the pain of foot-binding, I think of the future when the lotuses will be placed on my shoulders or held in my palms and my desire overflows and becomes uncontrollable.” We all know what that means, don’t we, girls? Or this little jewel: “Oh little foot! You Europeans cannot understand how exquisite, how sweet, how exicting it is! The contact of the genital organs with the little foot produces in the male an indescribable degree of voluptuous feeling, and women skilled in love know that to arouse the ardor of their lovers a better method of all Chinese aphrodisiacs is to take the penis between their feet.” Your stomach able to take one more? Okay, then this: “The smaller the woman’s foot, the more wondrous become the folds of her vagina.”

  More committed feminists than I have argued that pornography is degrading to women because its ultimate aim is the de­gradation of women, based as it so often is upon their physical suffering. Reading all this Chinese crap one sees that these texts are meditations upon the helplessness of women, a helplessness that renders them completely at the disposal of male desire. The Chinese are said to be a subtle people, and here they certainly are, for they have eliminated the ugly clanking of chains and handcuffs, all those knots and ropes. There’s no need to chain her to the bed, after all, if she can’t walk.

  I’d like to believe that most people today, regardless of sex, would find all of this pretty horrible, so what I found as unsettling as the actual Chinese texts was the manner in which the custom was written about by Western scholars well into this century. In 1976, The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe could state that “The Chinese regarded the bound foot as the most erotic and desired portion of the entire female anatomy.” Note that neat use of the generic “Chinese.” I’m curious to meet the Chinese woman who found the bound foot erotic. The book also referred to the “discomfort to which the growing girl developed a good deal of immunity.” “Discomfort,” for chrissake? And how would he know, anyway? Did he get his feet bound? Another scholar opined that footbinding would “discourage women’s interest in dancing, fencing, and other popular physical exercises.” Yeah, for instance, standing upright, walking, and running. One lamented the fact that foot-binding put an end to the “great old art of Chinese dancing.” Must one point out that it also put an end to the even older art of Chinese walking?

  I leave it to you to decide which is more horrible. Is it worse to do it to young girls or to dismiss as unimportant the fact that it was done, basing your judgment on the assumption that what happens to women doesn’t matter anyway? In the end, there’s probably very little difference.

  Given the choice between the two, I think I’d rather go see Deep Throat.

  It’s a Dick Thing

  It was during a class I was teaching to young American students that I first heard of the incident in which more than twenty people had been sent plummeting to their deaths in a cable car in the Italian Alps. While one of the students explained that the cause of the incident was thought to be recklessly low flying on the part of a U.S. Marine pilot and others wondered what the cause could have been, a young woman student said, in a voice as tired as the ages, “It’s a dick thing.” I was surprised by the vulgarity of her language, but I have not, in all I’ve heard and read about the incident, found it more accurately or correctly explained. It’s a dick thing: young men, high on testosterone and the sense of power that no doubt comes of flying around in their death-dealing capsules at supersonic speeds, had apparently disregarded all rules of safety or sense and competed to prove to one another how low they could fly. Unfortunately, much as the pilots and navigators might have enjoyed their all-male ritual, a score of people had to pay with their lives for all the fun.

  Twenty years ago, when I worked in Iran, all of my tennis pals were men, and most of those were former Vietnam combat pilots. I still remember the day, sitting around between sets, talking, drinking iced tea, and trading stories, I heard them begin to reminisce about how much they missed combat flying, how wonderful and exciting it had been to sweep in low in the early morning, machine guns blazing, and drop napalm on the sleeping villages, then wheel back and cut down the fleeing villagers. One of them claimed it was better than sex, better than anything in his life, before or since. All of them missed it because it had been so much fun. These, mind you, were the same guys who softened their serves when they played with me, who were always willing to cover more than their half of the court when they played as my doubles partners, and for whom I had developed a real affection. But from that day on I could never see them as the same men.

  For some years, I’ve been teaching on the periphery of the U.S. military, and my students have often told me similar tales, about what great fun it is to sweep out of the skies and terrify the stupid civilians standing on the beaches, about the wonderful sense of power that comes from knowing you carry the power of life and death over the people below you. Thus, when the military issued its first denials and spoke of bad maps or confused instructions, I knew that the cover-up had begun. In the end, the evidence was too obvious, and we found out what it was: just good old boys horsing around, driving too fast and having themselves a good old time. It’s a dick thing.

  Then, the Indians go and blow up their bomb, and CNN shows us the masses in the streets, cheering and yelling and happy
as clams that India now has this great new bomb, Shiva the destroyer in their own backyards. Many of the people ­interviewed—all men, I might add—raved on about how proud and powerful it made them feel, how India had finally become a nuclear power, worthy of respect. It’s a dick thing.

  A not dissimilar phenomenon is the American male’s love affair with his gun. Bodybuilding, religion, and guns are the three subjects I forbid my students to mention to me because they are the three subjects that most immediately launch them into flights of irrationality. Their ignorance, both general and historical, causes them to misinterpret the U.S. Constitution and insist that this document gives them the right to keep a gun at home, indeed, to keep as many of them as they please. To attempt to reason with them is to court madness; to listen to them is to enter into it.

  It all seems very simple to me. If this little portable penis is the only power a man is ever going to have in this life, then using it will be fun, and he will never allow it to be taken from him. You see, it’s not a deadly weapon they see when they pick up the gun, or fly the plane, or blow up half of Rajasthan: it’s power. It’s a dick thing.

  A Trivial Erotic Game = Okay, So I’m a Puritan

  Question: How many weeks a year do Panorama and Espresso have tits and ass on the cover?

  Answer: Fifty-three.

  After thirty years in Italy I’ve probably developed the visual equivalent of numbness to the covers of these two news magazines. Week after week, there they are on the newsstands: tits on one, ass on the other, or both on both, all in apparent proportion to the lack of news that particular week. Every so often, the images makes something akin to sense, as when they publish an article about venereal disease or pornography, but it is far more representative an example that the article concerning the excessive use of medical exams will carry the cover photo of—you got it—the things that get photographed in a mammogram. I suppose people don’t buy magazines with lungs on the cover. Kidneys?