by Paul Theroux
I decided to climb the unsupported staircase. Before I could reconsider this plan, I was 40 feet up in the air. I hugged the wall as I went, sidestepping pieces of fallen ceiling, and tiptoed, imagining that silence would make me lighter. On the top level of the building, the floor had collapsed in sections 10 feet wide. The wind blew hard through empty windows. It was a monumentally stupid place to go alone. But here was a pope’s-eye view.
I tiptoed back downstairs, thinking that I would row east, to the former insane asylum. Now it was a five-star hotel. I’d find the concierge, ask if I could camp on the lawn, spend the evening at the hotel bar.
But I’d been enchanted by the stillness. Leaving the island’s protected canal was like entering the jet stream sideways. The wind and the current had picked up, and I got snapped around a full circle and a half—like a skateboard trick. When I tried to flee back to St. George, I was hauled 200 feet to the Fusina Canal, the last dredged channel before the mainland. I began to row as I’d done with shirtless Gigi 20 years before, imagining that spirits were punishing me for taking the corroded door handles from the island. Door handles that saints and popes had grasped. I wanted to throw them overboard but couldn’t take a hand off the oar.
I gave six hard pushes, came alongside a navigational piling, and grabbed—almost hugged—it. I’d been blown a quarter mile and could see the long bridge to the mainland. I turned on my cell phone for the first time in days. Crouching to get out of the wind, I called Gino. He didn’t answer. And what was I going to ask him? When he was 12, he’d brandished a disastrous report card and told his mother, “The undersigned is done with this.” She’d told him, “Go work.” He’d lied about his age, got a construction job, saved enough money to buy a gondola, and became the fifth in a line of Macropodios to take up the profession. He never married or had children. He never joined the gondoliers’ union. He never needed anyone’s help. I lay in the boat, and an hour later called again.
He said, “Good idea tying yourself to the piling.”
“Yeah. But, Gino, how much longer is this wind going to last?”
“Who can say? It’s the wind. It’ll last till it’s over. And now you see it’s no joke out there in the lagoon. I told you you should have got a motor. Aren’t you glad you didn’t go in a gondola?”
“Yes.”
“Well, anyway, I’m going to move my car right now. Which is good luck for you, as it’s in the parking lot on Little Trunk.” In the distance, I could see this island, which was devoted entirely to parking facilities.
“If you can meet me there, come meet me,” Gino said.
“I’ll try. The wind seems favorable.”
Before I could change my mind, I started out, and as the whitecaps of broadsiding waves sloshed in, rowed not so much with my muscles as with my bones. A wave hit so hard I thought my arm might break. The car ferries and big ships and heavy commercial traffic that frequent a shipping lane grew closer. I was in serious danger here. If I lost control, I’d get swept away to the impassable margin between water and land which Venetians call the Dead Lagoon, or drift into the path of a tanker. Yet I managed to cross the Canal of Giudecca—clogged with intersecting wakes and metal hulls, which I’d failed to cross 20 years before—aimed for an empty slip at a vaporetto depot, barely dodged a car ferry, and banged into the dock. I tied up and lay down. I was on the floor of a maritime bus station.
“And now?” Gino asked, when we found each other. “What are you going to do? Don’t you have a plan? This lagoon is very treacherous.”
Getting to Little Trunk had taken all my strength and ability. I needed Gino to help me. He was 80 and hadn’t picked up an oar in 14 years. Whenever I asked him if he missed rowing, he said, “I’ve done my part.”
He looked at the sandolo. “You made it here by yourself. Nobody towed you?”
“No.”
“But you can’t stay here.”
I pointed to a methane plant on Braid Island, 500 feet from where we stood. “I could make it to that. Or try and go under the bridge and camp on Second”—a trashy-looking island that I’d regarded with pity every time I’d crossed by road or rail into Venice. “Mostly, I’d rather sleep on a clean island, where there aren’t any rats, and I don’t think Second is a very clean island.”
“No. It’s not so clean.”
We both started laughing. He put a hand on my shoulder. “The north lagoon is calmer. And, if you make it through the night up there, then row to Venice in the morning. Find a rowing club along the edge of the city, and ask them to keep your boat so you can meet me for lunch. I’ll be in St. Mark’s Square at noon.”
I steered for one of the mainland bridge’s arches and slipped in. There were gray-white stalactites hanging from the ceiling, and gallery upon gallery of arched darkness. A sloppy concrete seam joined the newer automobile section to the old train trestle. The cold, damp air smelled ratty. I rowed out fast, and as I emerged by the squalid Second, littered with plastic detritus in medicinal shades of green and pink, I saw another island, about a mile away, its rolling, sunlit meadows rising, miragelike, from the water.
It was unwalled, and at the point of my ferro’s spear was a floating dock and a red sandolo with two men standing beside it. I saw them see me as I approached. I waved, taking one hand off the oar. Spooked, the men untied and rowed off in a needlessly wide arc. I pulled up and took their place. Then I heard low voices. Tucked away in a slot of water behind the dock were two more men, dressed in black, in a red-and-black speedboat. One had silver teeth and a nose ring. Both had buzzcuts.
I said, “Ciao.”
Silence. I turned away. The strong smell of pot followed me.
I looked at my map. I was on the island of High Field—a natural location for drug dealers. The rowers in the red sandolo had probably left with such haste because they’d seen my boat’s colors and feared exposure by a rival rowing society. Hoping to appear Venetian, I lay low.
Then I heard a motor. A stocky teenage girl was hunched at the tiller of a purple-and-white speedboat, prow out of the water and bearing aloft its name (in purple script): BABY FRAGOLA. She came in fast, blasting techno, holding the collar of a huge Presa Canario war dog. A clean-cut boy in a white speedboat followed. They tied up and went ashore into a grove of trees. Ten minutes later, they returned and both climbed into Baby Fragola. Behind them came a man with spiked hair, arms banded in tribal tattoos. The buzzcuts jumped to their feet. Slurred words drifted my way.
Spike: “I threw him off a bridge near St. Mark’s.”
Buzzcut No. 1: “I smoked it.”
Spike: “Then I took my clothes off.”
A small wooden rat powered by a big American outboard arrived. A middle-aged man in a white T-shirt and khakis looked suspiciously at the island’s inhabitants before coming ashore, followed by a salt-and-pepper Shih Tzu.
Spike asked for the time, and a buzzcut responded, “Five to eight.” Dinner. They started up their engine and jetted off toward Venice. I jumped onto the dock and walked up through the trees. In the middle of a large, open meadow, the mirage I’d seen from afar, I found the man and his dog.
I asked, “Is this a safe place to camp? With the drugs and all?”
He said, “The smokers are harmless. But this is a place where people come to fight.” He took a boxer’s stance. “Looking for fights.”
Aside from Piazza San Marco, all of Venice’s squares are called fields (campi). They used to be covered in grass, and served as arenas for boxing. In 1574, Henri III, before being seen off by a ceremonial artillery salvo from St. George in the Seaweed, watched a staged brawl that he described as “too small to be a real war and too cruel to be a game.”
“You’re a foreigner?”
“Yes.”
“If fighters come, just say you’re not from here. They’ll probably decide to leave you alone. Now let me show you where the good fruit is.”
He led me down a slope to a tree bearing cherry-size plums, plucked one
, and said, “No pesticides—delicious.”
I ate one and immediately grabbed another.
“Don’t gorge yourself. Eat too many and you’ll get the shits.” He squatted to mime this.
After he left, I had High Field to myself. It was ringed by trees, the high, open namesake meadow like a monk’s tonsured scalp in the center. I discovered a handful of stone houses—an abandoned village—in a thick copse of trees.
At the top of the meadow, some benches had been set up under an open-sided shelter. The bleachers for battles. Nearby was a fire pit big enough to cook an ox. On a piece of planking were two competing graffiti:
Respect this sacred place.
Eat my penis you with your canoes of shit.
I lit a fire, simmered tomatoes and beans in a pan, undressed, and bathed with water that I’d brought in a huge rubber bag that doubled as ballast. A large, bright green grasshopper watched me from the graffitied plank. Then I put on pajamas, grabbed the pan and a spork, and looked out at the domes and bell towers of the city. Kekquakeà: a pajama-clad foreigner with a pot of beans and a pet grasshopper. He had found himself in the heart of Venice, alone.
By nine the next morning, I was back on the water, rowing toward lunch with Gino. The tide was out and the secca so extreme that I could submerge only half a blade. But a sandolo is designed to go anywhere. I quickly made it to the Canal of New Foundations, Venice’s West Side Highway. I jay-rowed across six lanes of heavy traffic, threading like a skateboarder between a cab and a bus, and claimed a lane right up against a stone embankment. I got rocked hard, without interruption. Buses passed. Taxis. Runabouts. Rats ranging in comparative size from pickup to semi. Endless mopedlike skiffs. Vaporetti filled with tourists came one after the other, backing up at the floating docks and jamming me into pockets of churning foam, stone and metal on all sides. I began to tread water with the oar, hovering in place, something I’d seen gondoliers do but didn’t know I could do. On my right was a city canal called the Stream of Beggars. A taxi cut me off and I rocked through its wake into the stillness.
A couple of hundred feet of easy water and I saw a white-haired man standing on the dock of a rowing club. I held out my hand. Without hesitation, he took it and pulled me in. I told him my name.
“Tony,” he replied.
“You must be a rowing club.”
“Yes. We’re the Generals.”
On land, I started sorting through my gear and talking expansively about the previous night. “The fruit trees. The grass. The moon. The view. The friendly grasshopper. It was incredible. The best night I’ve ever spent anywhere.”
Tony said, “It used to be a garbage dump. They closed it when it caught fire.”
I took a long shower in the club’s locker room, dressed in the cowboy boots and suit jacket I’d been hauling around in a dry bag all week, and walked across town. In St. Mark’s Square, surrounded by tourists, Gino shook my hand and said, “You made it.”
Before I left Venice 20 years earlier, Gino had let me row his boat for the first time with paying passengers. Two German girls, blond, twins, looked up at me in what I imagined was awe as I rowed them down the Stream of Lead. I rowed without speaking or splashing—preserving the silence in order to amplify the moment when we’d burst into the Grand Canal.
Then I one-handed my oar, pointed over their heads, and shouted, “Ponte Rialto!”
The girls performed an ungainly swivel, which rocked the boat and made me stumble. Simultaneously, the No. 2 express vaporetto came powering through the canal’s sharpest bend, arced under the bridge, and bore down on us. We were going to be rammed. My adrenaline surged—but I had no idea how to move my 36-foot skateboard out of the way. A strong hand pushed me down into a crouch and wrested the oar from my grip.
Gino had been watching, poised to take over, noting criticisms and whispering warnings. Now I stayed low as he detailed my many mistakes.
“You let go of the oar just now for what reason?”
“To point out the sights.”
“Never let go of the oar.”
“Okay.”
“Talk about history; don’t point at it.”
“Yes.”
“And what did you think you were doing with that wall you almost ran into? Do you know how much it costs to buy a new ferro?”
Gino had kept the oar. I’d crouched, embarrassed. Then a quick glance showed that the twins were enraptured. Fifteen minutes later, their parents handed over a hundred dollars in cash for the near drowning I’d provided.
“May we please have a photograph?” they asked me in perfect English.
After delivering a halting English response, “It’s. No. Problem,” I placed a daughter under each arm and Gino took the picture. I imagine I’m still in a family album, somewhere in Germany, as a gondolier’s son.
Contributors’ Notes
Elif Batuman is the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. She is a staff writer for The New Yorker and writer in residence at Koç University in Istanbul. In 2007, she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award.
Julia Cooke is the author of The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba (2014). She is a frequent contributor to VQR and Condé Nast Traveler, and her writing has also appeared in Guernica, Departures, Metropolis, and the Village Voice, among others. She has lived in Mexico City and Havana and now calls New York City, where she teaches at the New School, home.
Janine di Giovanni has reported on war for nearly a quarter of a century, working in some of the world’s most violent places. Her trademark has always been to write about the human costs of war and to single out individuals to recount the cost of conflict and human rights abuses. She is the author of five books, and her recent TED talk “What I Saw in the War” has gotten more than 600,000 YouTube hits. She is currently Middle East editor of Newsweek, a consultant on the Syria crisis for UNHCR, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Her Vanity Fair article “Madness Visible” won the National Magazine Award and was later expanded into a book. She has also won Britain’s Foreign Correspondent of the Year, two Amnesty International awards, a Nation Institute grant, and Spear’s Memoir of the Year for her book Ghosts by Daylight. She has taught and lectured on human rights around the world, including at Sciences Po in Paris. In 2010, she was the president of the jury of the Prix Bayeux-Calvados for war correspondents. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, she lives in Paris with her son, Luca. She is currently writing a book on Syria.
A. A. Gill, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is a features writer for the Sunday Times (London). He is the author of several books, including To America with Love, AA Gill Is Away, and Here & There: Collected Travel Writing. He lives in London.
Arnon Grunberg was born in Amsterdam in 1971 and works as a novelist and reporter. His work has been translated into 27 languages.
Harrison Scott Key is the author of the memoir The World’s Largest Man, due out in 2015. His humor and nonfiction have appeared in Oxford American, Creative Nonfiction, The Pinch, Reader’s Digest, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Swink, and elsewhere, and his work has been adapted for the stage by Chicago’s Neo-Futurists in their show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and others. He teaches at SCAD in Savannah, Georgia. On Twitter, he’s @HarrisonKey.
Peter LaSalle is the author of several books of fiction, most recently the short story collection What I Found Out About Her and a novel, Mariposa’s Song. A collection of his essays on literary travel, The City at Three P.M.: Writing, Reading, and Traveling, is forthcoming in 2015 and includes pieces from magazines such as Tin House, WorldView, The Nation, Creative Nonfiction, Agni, Profils Américains (France), and Memoir Journal, as well as The Best American Travel Writing 2010. He divides his time between Austin, Texas—where he teaches creative writing at the University of Texas—and Narragansett in his native Rhode Island, while also continuing to travel as much as he can to explore the various places where hi
s favorite literature is set.
Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett are authors of the book A House in the Sky. Lindhout is the founder of the Global Enrichment Foundation, a nonprofit that works with women in Somalia and Kenya. Sara Corbett is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine.
Andrew McCarthy is the author of the New York Times best-selling travel memoir The Longest Way Home. He is an editor-at-large at National Geographic Traveler. He has written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications. McCarthy is also an actor and director.
Michael Paterniti is the New York Times best-selling author of Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain and most recently of The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese. His writing has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Harper’s Magazine, Outside, Esquire, and GQ, where he works as a correspondent. Paterniti has been nominated eight times for a National Magazine Award and has been the recipient of an NEA grant and two MacDowell Fellowships. He is the cofounder of a children’s storytelling center in Portland, Maine, where he lives with his wife and their three children.
Stephanie Pearson is a freelance journalist and contributing editor to Outside magazine. Her work has appeared in Outside, O: The Oprah Magazine, National Geographic Traveler, Men’s Journal, Popular Photography, and the Lonely Planet Great Escapes book series, among others. She splits her time between northern Minnesota and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
