My Venice and Other Essays (9780802194039)

by Leon, Donna

  Time passes. Nothing changes. She is still there and the television, like me, never sleeps.

  Tourists

  It’s peculiar, the things that pop out of your mouth when you’re not paying attention. When we were kids, such phenomena were explained by saying that the devil made us do it. Then came Freudian slips, sounding ever so much more grown-up. Then an American politician told us he “misspoke,” which explanation I hold close to my heart for its delicious mendacity.

  A few days ago, speaking to a French journalist, I attempted to explain the way in which the current government of the United States, in its Orwellian attempt to extend its power, has decided that the patriot’s best friend is the logical error of the appeal to fear. I offered as an example the administration’s paranoid declarations about “the menace of international terrorism,” but it came out as “the menace of international tourism.” I misspoke.

  But let us pause here, gentle reader. Let us consider whether a scintilla of truth might be lurking behind the error. International tourism is one of the chief contributors to global warming, aided by the low-cost airlines, which do everything short of paying tourists to fly with them. Scores of thousands of flights fill the airways each day; tourists drive, they take cruises, they come on buses: think for a moment of how their travel spills into the air we breathe. And where does it end up if not in our lungs, in the earth we sow, the water we drink, and the food we eat? And was it not a tourist ship with full fuel tanks that sank in the pristine waters of the island of Giglio some months ago?

  Because I live in Venice I live amid the results of international tourism. They have, these countless millions, effectively destroyed the fabric of life known to the inhabitants of the city for a thousand years, have made life intolerable for residents for vast periods of the year, have led to the proliferation of shops that sell masks, plastic gondolas, tinted paper, sliced pizza, vulgar jester’s hats, and ice cream, all but the last of which the residents do not want and no one on the planet needs. They consume enormous amounts of drinking water and produce an endless supply of waste.

  Consider, then, the terrorists, if you will. Have they destroyed the life of a city? Have they caused massive pollution of the atmosphere, the water, and the land? Have they transformed shopping into a religious act?

  Granted, they do kill people, but here I must imitate my government’s callous disregard for civilian deaths and argue the possibility that cheap air flights and the construction of thousands of golf courses, swimming pools, and hotels have done far greater harm to the planet than have terrorist bombs. They have not built giant hotels in national parks or littered the coast of Italy, and Greece, and Thailand—and just about any country that has a sliver of land running along the sea—with guest cottages covered with plastic thatch. The name of Osama bin Laden, to the best of my knowledge, is not carved into the pillars of the Parthenon, nor was he ever observed dumping human waste and garbage from his cruise ship.

  Shall we consider aesthetics? Okay, terrorists do run around in plastic flip-flops and pajamas, often wearing kitchen towels on their heads, but are they not thin and wiry, often handsome? They do not crowd into basilicas and museums in their Bermuda shorts and tennis shoes, nor has one ever been observed with a plastic water bottle or wearing an iPod and a baseball cap while ostensibly observing the Pietà.

  People grumble about tourists. I know because I spend an inordinate amount of time doing it. Governments, however, blithely ignore the damage tourists do and devote their energies to the pursuit of other things and more tourists. No one has yet been arrested on a charge of tourism, nor have they been plucked from their buses and taken off to be held prisoner and tortured for five years into confessing that they are despoiling the planet. Nor does a train crash or power blackout lead immediately to the conclusion that it was done by a tourist. Are people who are suspected of tourism refused entry to certain countries; are their phones tapped?

  Nor has the presumption of guilt become the standard by which the authorities regard people who might be tourists. The wearing of Bermuda shorts does not have you dragged into the immigration office for half a day. Nor are you deported from the country where you are a legal resident if you order the Lonely Planet Guide to Italy online. Tourists named Fred, Gladys, and Dick are not automatically assumed to be up to no good, nor can people suspected of tourism be stripped of all legal rights and kept in prison for as long as it is deemed necessary to keep them there.

  Good heavens, what have I been forgetting? Tourists shop, they spend, they contribute to the glory of international consumption, so we had best forget about the possibility of waking up someday soon to see CNN bringing us breaking news: “Minnesota Couple Seized in Raid on Tourist Hotel.”

  Da Giorgio

  Some months ago, I found myself waiting for the plumber, who was supposed to arrive at three. Three. Four. Five. And finally, a bit before six, he arrived, most apologetic and explaining that he had gotten caught up in a job that had become bigger the more he worked. Since Venetian plumbers are to be treated with reverence, I said it didn’t matter and asked, out of politeness, what the job was that had caused him to be late.

  “Giorgio’s putting in a new bathroom,” he explained. The plumber lives in my neighborhood, and both of us buy our fruit and vegetables from Signor Giorgio. Since the work was, in a sense, all in the family, it mattered less, somehow, that he’d been late.

  Curious about any bit of neighborhood gossip, I asked, “What’s he doing to the bathroom?”

  “He’s putting in new fixtures and lining the walls with black marble.”

  “Black marble?”

  “Yes.”

  “Giorgio?”

  “Yes.”

  “Giorgio il fruttivendolo?”

  “Oh, no, that other Giorgio. The nice one from Rome who bought the palazzo around the corner. Giorgio What’s-His-Name? Olmini? Olmoni?”

  This couldn’t be. “Giorgio Armani?” I asked, voice tentative.

  “Yes, that’s right. Armani, that’s his name. Is he a friend of yours? Do you know him?”

  No, I didn’t know him, but I wish I did, for I’d love to tell him the story.

  On Poor People

  In the popular imagination, the name Venice summons up many images and historical memories: precious gems, palazzi, lavishly dressed aristocrats dancing at carnevale balls. Or it calls up visions of rich spices, glorious paintings, velvet, opulence in all its forms. Conversely, it can also summon the opposite images: disease, pestilence, death. But one image that seldom forms when the magic name of Venice is invoked is poverty, though poverty is surely to be found among the palazzi and noble homes of La Serenissima. There is the unwilled poverty of old people, forced to survive on meager state pensions, and there is the willed poverty of wealthy people who have given in to the mad vice of avarice. These two forms have it in common that they remain invisible, hidden behind the doors of buildings and the doors of shame.

  The only form of poverty on public display, to both residents and tourists, is that presented by the beggars of the city, though the fact that their poverty is public in no way ensures that it is true. For years, a number of beggars have served as fixed markers in various parts of the city, though as so often has happened in modern times, the local workers are being driven out by the influx of, as it were, immigrants.

  First, the locals. There remains, often huddled on Ponte San Antonio, but a few hundred meters from the Rialto, a grizzle-haired man in his sixties who holds the stump of his severed arm in his lap like a puppy. The other hand is raised above his head to beg alms of each passerby. A seasonal worker, he is to be seen only in the cold weather but never wearing a jacket, no doubt because this adds shivers to the general effect of the tableau.

  Rumor has it that he lives on Burano, where he is said to own many houses. At Christmas, my friend Roberto gave him 5,000 lire,
not because of his poverty but to compensate for his lack of pride in making such a spectacle of himself.

  There is the woman with the dark hair said to have been a teacher until a man broke her heart twenty years ago, ever since which she has shambled up and down Strada Nuova, head lowered in despair, feet slowed by whatever drug the doctors of the public health system decided to give her. During these two decades I’ve watched her age. I’ve seen the rings under her eyes darken, her hair grow long and then short as someone cuts it for her or, for all I know, she cuts it off herself with a knife.

  Sometimes she stops people and asks for a thousand lire or a cigarette. I don’t smoke, so I always give her the note, placing it in her hand while smiling and trying to meet her eyes. Once, out of the house without my bag, I could find only 500 lire, but she refused it. “Mi servono mille lire,” she insisted, pained to be refused. Not angry. Pained. How much better anger would have been.

  Another shambler is the egg-shaped young man in overalls, often with painted face or wildly dyed hair. The local mythology is that he went to the East years ago, left as a bright young man and returned in that piteous state, his brain left behind, sacrificed to the drug gods of India. He has stopped asking for money and seems calmer these past few years. Sometimes he can be seen sprawled in a doorway, smiling at the people who pass him by, no more threatening than a cat.

  Memory still holds the image of my special favorite, the white-haired woman who stood for years at the bottom of Ponte delle Erbe, not far from the Casa di Cura of the Ospedale of SS Giovanni e Paolo, where she was said to live. Wearing her bedroom slippers and dressing gown, she moved with the sun during the day, gradually taking herself and her outstretched hand farther down the canal and toward Campo Santa Marina. Every six months or so, she would disappear for a day or more and then return to her post, hair newly cut and permanented. She’s been gone for years now but people still remember her and speak of her with great fondness.

  The new ones lack charm and are devoid of all imagination or flair. Most of them are Gypsies, and most of these seem to be of the same band or family, for I see them arriving in a group, punctual as German factory workers, striding up Strada Nuova from the train station every morning a bit after nine. At Campo Santi Apostoli they separate, each going to his or her work place, later to reconvene for a picnic lunch in Campo Santa Maria Nova.

  What strikes me about them is their tremendous organization: they all seem to display the same signs, usually painted by hand but sometimes generated by computer and printed in letters as large as headlines, each bearing the same carefully created grammatical errors. “Ho tre bambino.” “Sono profogo dal Bosnia.” And there is always that old standby, the equivalent of the incremental repetition so favored by the Beowulf poet—“Ho fame.” That’s hard to misspell. Though these people have been here for as long as I can remember, they became Bosnian refugees a few years ago. Meant to be Muslims suffering for their faith, each of them places at the bottom of their begging hat or cup a holy card with a garishly painted Madonna.

  A few months ago, there was a general change in tactic, surprising in Italy, the one country said still to worship the baby. In a week, all of the babies, either on the shoulder, at the breast, or trailing dirtily behind their mothers, all of them disappeared. And were replaced by puppies.

  The Italians? They give, dropping a few hundred lire into the cups or hats, often a thousand lire, sometimes more. Mothers hand money to their children and tell them to take it and give it to the beggar. I have no idea if the puppies are more remunerative than the babies. For Italy’s sake, for all our sakes, I hope they aren’t.

  ON MUSIC

  A Bad Hair Night

  at the Opera

  Last month a friend persuaded me to leave the aesthetic security of Baroque opera and come along to hear Bellini’s I Puritani at the Zurich Opera. Bellini, he argued, wasn’t all that far from Baroque; the change would do me good; I’d love it. No more than weak flesh, I agreed but, during the more than three hours of the performance, I saw nothing that in any way moved me away from my preference for Baroque music.

  Subsequent, and sober, reflection upon the cumulative awfulness of that evening has led me to formulate a number of warnings meant to govern attendance at the opera. Though they were formulated in response to a particular performance, I suspect they might serve equally for all opera productions, and so I offer them in a spirit of goodwill and aesthetic generosity, hoping that opera goers who find themselves in a theater where any of these rules are broken will find the courage to leap from their seats and flee screaming into the night.

  1. Beware of beds. If, at any time during a performance, a bed appears on stage in a place other than a bedroom it is probably being used as a symbol. Opera directors often use symbols in place of ideas. They are not the same. The Puritani bed came gift wrapped in a red (another symbol) bow.

  2.Characters must not be dressed like Walt Disney cartoon figures. In this case, the queen of England wore a dress frighteningly similar to that worn by Cinderella’s wicked stepmother, complete with the high-raised collar, which supported her neck as if she’d suffered whiplash while trying to hijack Cinderella’s carriage.

  3.The tenor’s hair must never be longer than the soprano’s, especially when his is a vile persimmon red.

  4.Animals should be kept from the stage. In this instance, when the hero appeared on stage, looking rather like Prince Charming (see Rule 2, above), he carried on his wrist a feathered thing meant, I suspect, to be a hawk or other bird of prey. With clocklike regularity, this feathered creature flapped both wings in perfect mechanical unison, as if attempting to hasten the drying of its deodorant, then looked sharply right, then left, its search as vain as my own for something worth looking at on that stage.

  5.The chorus should never be made to run in aimless circles. Even the fact that the circle is made of grass cut from a putting green does not make this behavior significant.

  6.Cast members should be discouraged from wearing pot holders on their heads. A shaven-headed male performer appeared, in the absence of my opera glasses, to be wearing just that. Perhaps it was meant to be a wig, but wigs are usually larger than compact discs, and so I am forced to believe it was a pot holder, a particularly nasty brown, greasy one. The other characters’ wigs, though equally nasty, were large enough to be perceived as wigs.

  7.The soprano, during the course of the evening, should not repeatedly glance about in horror as if wishing desperately that she had listened to her agent when he suggested that, instead of this, she accept the contract to sing The Merry Widow in Graz.

  On Beauty and Freedom

  in the Opera

  An argument could be made, though I fear it would be a facile one, that the desire for freedom is the animating force of many opera plots. Just think of the stories of some of the bowwow showstoppers: Aida wants to be free of the chains of slavery as well as the forces that keep her from loving Radamès; Tosca wants to be free of the menaces of Scarpia and wants to be free to sing too; Rodelinda, queen of the Longobards, wants to be free of the importuning Grimoaldo; Don Carlo and Florestan want political freedom; and even Figaro expresses that subversive idea. The list goes on and most opera goers could easily toss in a dozen more names, though no matter how long the list, the observation about freedom would never be less than self-evident.

  What I find more interesting is the freedom that opera, indeed all art, bestows upon both artist and audience. We do not speak in iambic pentameter; in fact, the meter imposes a discipline upon language that language ordinarily does not support. But its flow and cadence, at least when in the hands of the greatest English poets, frees language from the weight and inertia of uninspired prose and tosses it up into the air, there to take flight alongside the images it creates.

  Nor do people, even in moments of highest passion, burst into spontaneous song, but opera lets them do so, freein
g the earthbound expression of love or passion or rage to sing with a finer voice.

  As to the audience, few readers jump about while in the act of reading; fewer still break the silence of a museum or gallery to give voice to whatever joy or rage a painting might inspire in them. But opera allows—one might even say encourages—just this excessive response. Whether this is a result of the darkened anonymity of the opera house, or whether fans are spurred on by the company of their peers, opera does seem to drive those in its thrall to behave in ways that, in ordinary life, they would view as both ridiculous and embarrassing. It allows us to shout, it allows us to clap our hands and stomp our feet in rhythm as if we were members of a forest-bound tribe, capable of expressing satisfaction only by rhythmic thumpings. It further allows us to cry out, hoot, whistle, shout in response to the noise made by a performer, reducing us all to soccer hooligans in evening dress.

  It allows us, as well, the freedom of I-don’t-give-a-damn excess. So what if a weekend at Salzburg costs more than a month’s rent? Wasn’t it Cecilia Bartoli whom God had in mind when He created the credit card? You won’t come see your poor old mother on Christmas and you’re going to the opera instead? (But your poor old mother isn’t singing Elisabetta with Joyce DiDonato on Christmas, is she?) Going to San Francisco for one day? In short, this urge or passion or helplessness in the face of beauty—whatever it is—frees us to be willing to pay the price of following the trail of beauty wherever it will lead.

  In return for our excesses what do we get? Some notes thrown together by a few dozen musicians, a couple of singers, and a man waving a stick. Some costumes, perhaps an ostrich plume, a backdrop or two, people moving around on the stage with greater or lesser skill. That, I’m afraid, is pretty much it, or so it would be without the magic of art. With that present, we get the deep rush of joy and excitement that comes when we are in the presence of glory. We get those moments, even if they last no longer than a few heartbeats, when perfection is achieved and we are freed of the dross of our own existence and get a glimpse of what Aristotle, utterly at a loss for words, called “celestial isness.”