My Venice and Other Essays (9780802194039)

by Leon, Donna

  We’ve all heard it so many times we could puke: it culls the herd; it gets rid of the sick and improves the blood strain; if we didn’t do it they’d all starve to death. One thinks of the delicious explanation given by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War: “It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.” Well, it’s the same sort of thinking, isn’t it? We’ve got to kill them to save them.

  Ever since I bought a house in the province of Belluno, I’ve had a yearly confrontation with hunters. The first two years, new girl on the block, I kept my head down (though the deer can’t) and said nothing as they drove up and parked beyond my land, emerging from their cars with guns the size of bazookas, game bags large enough for polar bear, dogs they keep starved all year by way of encouragement, and then off into the woods for a day of good clean fun. During September and October, I awoke to the predawn blasts of their shotguns ringing out from every side as they broke what few laws exist by firing while it was still dark. I found their empty shells on the hillside behind my house, far closer to it than one hundred meters.

  It was only by reading the papers the day after the season opened that I could find any consolation, for each year four or five of them are killed or kill themselves on the first day of hunting. More, it seems, die from heart attacks brought on by overexertion than from guns. It is only by the fierce exercise of will that I prevent myself from imagining their bodies trussed up and displayed on the roofs of their own Range Rovers, for to do so would be unkind and unsporting.

  Two years ago, fed up with their bloody joy, I began my protest. Every hunting morning, three times a week, I mowed my lawn, mowed it for hours, up and down and up and down, back and forth across the grass until it was as short as the hair on a marine’s skull, and I’m sure the sound of the motor was loud enough to scare anything with four legs or wings into the next province. This continued until, one morning, a hunter on the other side of the hill shot at a bird that was flying above me, or at least that’s what I’ve convinced myself he was doing. The pellets rained down on my shoulders, but by the time I climbed the hill he’d disappeared. I’ve stopped my protest mowing.

  This year, one of them walked past my land two days before the season began and asked me if I’d seen any deer that year. “Not one,” I lied with a smile. When he announced that he’d hunt on my land anyway, I warned him that I didn’t want to see him close to my house, a remark that catapulted him into anger so fierce I marveled such a person could be trusted with a gun.

  The first day of hunting season I emerged from my house to hear a veritable choir of birdsong, all coming from the top of that same hill. I climbed it, calling out my neighbor’s name so that he would know that what was approaching came on two, not four, legs. I paused at the top and looked over to his land, where I saw his hunting blind, carefully camouflaged with branches and leaves. In front of it, tied to the ground by their legs, was a row of birds of different varieties, all peeping out—whether in joy or fear I have no idea—and by their peeps summoning birds of the same species to fly down and land beside them, when my neighbor would blast them into shreds. Sport. Bullshit.

  Gladys

  How embarrassing to have a pet chicken. Other people have classy pets: Irish wolfhounds, Siamese cats, even cheetahs. But the best I’ve got is a chicken, and she’s not even mine; she belongs to my eighty-year-old next door neighbor in the mountains near Belluno. It could be that this chicken is simply in love with my lawn mower and merely puts up with me to have access to that. It’s all very unclear and not at all classy.

  It started two years ago when one of the six chickens of my neighbor—beige and white, quite as ordinary as a chicken can look—came across the road whenever I mowed the grass and began to follow the swath left by the lawn mower, pecking at the bugs and crickets who were disturbed or exposed by it. Soon all she needed was the sound of the engine starting up and she’d be up that driveway in a shot and across the street to run alongside the lawn mower with absolutely no fear of what the combination of its blades and one rash step could do to her.

  Some days, she’d appear in front of the house even if there was no grass to be cut, and as chickens are apparently always hungry I started to toss her pieces of bread or cheese or whatever happened to be in the house. And so she was soon in the habit of appearing whenever my car pulled into the driveway. It has a certain charm, having a pet run out to meet you when you arrive at your summer home. If it were, say, an English setter, even a flop-eared mongrel, it would have a kind of grace about it; there is nothing graceful whatsoever in the lopsided, head-wobbling gallop of a chicken, however happy she might be at your arrival.

  She needed a name. Summoned, it came: Gladys. It seemed somehow right for a small beige chicken with a special fondness for Carr’s Table Water Crackers and mozzarella. Within days, she was eating out of my hand or coming when I went across the road and called her name. In no time at all it was I who responded to her summons: Gladys appeared in front of my door and I hastened to do her bidding, tossing her a piece of bread or a grape. Someone even took a picture of her and had it put on a white T-shirt for me, which I wear sometimes when cutting the grass. Venice is not ready for this T-shirt.

  Three weeks ago, I arrived late in the afternoon, and my neighbor, looking shaken, came across the road to speak to me, even before I’d gotten out of the car. “Èmorta,” she said, visibly disturbed, and I knew who she was talking about. One of the men from the village had walked past two days before with his two German shepherds and they, being dogs, had done what dogs do when they see chickens: they’d attacked and shaken one of them, savaging it so badly that my neighbor had had to kill it.

  I found myself much troubled by this. When it’s the only pet you’ve got, when it’s shown some sort of attachment to you, well, it’s sad to see her die, even if she was only a chicken and not even yours. I asked my neighbor if she were sure—after all, four of them were identical—but she assured me, “Era la Gladi.” As two days had passed since the dreadful event, I didn’t ask if I could have what remained to put under the sunflowers she loved so much. There was no sign of the other chickens, but I doubted that any one of them had the charm to take my girl’s place.

  Yesterday, I took the lawn mower out, put in the gas, and started up the engine. Drown your grief in work, my dear. Within minutes, a small beige chicken was walking quite blithely beside the lawn mower, happily picking at bugs and crickets. Like Saint Thomas, I could not be sure until I’d been given proof, so I went into the kitchen and got a piece of bread. Sure enough, she jumped down from the upper garden and came right up to me, pecking it out of my hand. Gladys lives, Gladys lives. There’s still no class to having a pet chicken, especially one that is not quite your own, but I found myself immeasurably cheered by her return to life.

  It was only then that I had the nerve to inquire about the fate of the other. This is the countryside, and I am surrounded by people whose families have been poor for centuries. Broth.

  Cesare

  One of my neighbors up here in the mountains is Signor Cesare, otherwise known as “il Francese” because he spent thirty-five years working in the coal mines of Alsace and returned here to the family farm when he retired about twenty years ago. He’s a small man, wiry in the way of many small men. He seems brown to me: brown face, brown hands, brown clothing, with winter and summer the same brown woolen hat pulled down over his ears. He is said to be seventy, but he is also said to be seventy-five. He lives down on the next farm and spends most of his days, at least during the summer, working his fields and taking care of his rabbits.

  People up here eat rabbit. Most of them keep ten or twenty (with rabbits, ten seem to become twenty overnight) and eat their meat at least once a week. Cesare, however, doesn’t eat them, for he thinks it is wrong to kill animals. Instead, he keeps them in wooden cages on the first floor of his house and, when they die their natural deaths, buries them in a sp
ecial plot in one of his fields. Because rabbits eat a great deal of grass, Cesare works all summer tending his fields, cutting the tall grass twice a year, and gathering and storing it to feed to his rabbits. In order to fertilize these fields so that they will produce richly for the rabbits, he takes the rabbit droppings from under the cages and spreads it on the fields.

  Cesare lives alone, and no one in the village has been known to enter his house. In winter, heat is provided by a fireplace and a wood-burning stove. In summer, his brother comes down from France and spends a month with him, sleeping in the room above the rabbit cages but in a sleeping bag he brings with him. The brother’s wife came once, about fifteen years ago, but refused to return.

  “Dust we are and to dust we shall return,” Cesare believes and says. “The earth is always clean. It washes itself and cleans itself perpetually.” Because of this belief, Cesare does not wash himself, nor does he wash his clothing.

  When I first moved into my house, Cesare often stopped on the way to his fields and chatted. He has a surprisingly wide knowledge and can discuss intelligently many subjects: history, agriculture, anthropology. French friends of mine said he spoke a surprisingly elegant French. Rumor reached me that he approved of me, no doubt because I spend a great deal of time working outside and have listened to him with interest and respect.

  Once he walked by while I was planting some grape seedlings, a sweet table grape imported from France, and on an impulse of neighborliness I asked him if he would like one of the tiny plants. He thanked me and when I handed it to him he asked if he could have two, as all plants needed to be planted in pairs. When I asked why this was so, he explained that plants, like people, preferred to be in the company of their fellows and grew lonely if they were forced to live alone. Unfortunately I could give him only one, but I felt the need to apologize for this as I gave it to him.

  Months passed, during which we would occasionally discuss our methods and successes in farming, each of us probably just as content as the other to have found a neutral topic that would allow us to exchange words while yet maintaining a polite distance.

  Our formal relationship continued for another three years, after which he asked me if, the next time I went to the United States, I would bring back for him twenty kilos of potato seedlings. He explained that he had heard that American potatoes were especially good for rabbits, and so he wanted to plant some for them.

  I told him there were laws against importing plants from one country to another, but Cesare did not want to hear that. I explained that passengers on international flights are allowed to carry with them a maximum of twenty kilos of baggage, but he didn’t want to listen to that, either. In the end, I stopped attempting to explain and failed to bring him the potato seedlings.

  Since then Signor Cesare no longer speaks to me, and he has told other villagers that I am greedy and mean-spirited. When I pass him working in his fields, I wave and say, “Buon giorno,” but Signor Cesare does not wave back, and he does not answer me.

  Badgers

  It’s probably because I read The Wind in the Willows when I was a kid, but I confess to having a special affection for badgers. Since then, I’ve read a great deal about them: the American ones who share burrows with groundhogs, the European ones who are wrongly accused of carrying bovine tuberculosis. I’ve even sat gap-mouthed watching animal programs on television; my favorite one from the BBC showed thirteen badgers asleep in a man’s living room, sated with the candies and cookies he fed them every night and lured into his home by his consistent good behavior.

  Imagine my joy when my neighbor here in the mountains told me about the sett just at the edge of my property, a vast three-holed affair that has, according to local report, been there for centuries. Sure enough, it’s got it all, the multiple entrances, the mound of smoothed dung just outside the entrance, the scratching tree with hairs attached, and, running horizontally just above the line of lilacs on my property, a badger trail, an unmistakable path in the tall grass, worn down into a distinctive half-tunnel by what I’m sure are scores of dear little, furry little badger feet going off each evening at dusk to forage for roots and worms.

  Unfortunately, they also go off to forage for corn, which brings me to the war that has broken out up here. On a recent trip to the entrance of the sett, I noticed a wire noose positioned in front of one of the exits, just at the height of a badger’s neck. Now, I’ve long been of the opinion that Italians don’t like nature. In fact, I’ve seen precious little evidence in thirty years that they see nature as much more than something to be brought into submission so that they can either profit, look good wearing it, or cook it. Emily Dickinson writes of the “transport of cordiality” we feel for nature’s creatures; she was not Italian, and hence the badger trap, though the species is protected and there are severe fines and penalties for anyone caught killing or attempting to trap one.

  I moved the noose aside, then pulled it halfway closed so that no badger neck could possibly fit in it and left it there. The next day, when I went to check, it was back in place, and so again I moved it aside. This has now been going on for a week: each afternoon I move it and, each time I go to do so, I find that it is back in place. Though the stand of trees around the sett is visible from my house, I never see anyone near it, just as I hope the setter of the noose never sees me slipping under the branches to move it aside.

  Yes, I could destroy it, tear it loose and take it away. Or I could alert the Guardia Forestale and have them come and investigate. But this is a small paese—there can’t be many more than a hundred people—and I am a stranger, and so I don’t want to be the cause of someone’s receiving an enormous fine (though in my wilder moments I’d gladly see the noose fit tightly about his own neck) or a criminal conviction. Nor do I remove it entirely because that would be to display that it is human intervention at work and not, perhaps, a clever badger who, each night, shoves it aside with his snout before going off to pull down scores of corn plants in order to nibble small parts from two or three ears.

  Here in the village, the various poisons with which villagers cover their fields are all referred to as medicina, my neighbor recently cut down a century-old cherry tree to use as firewood, and each hunting season brings a holocaust of winged and furred creatures, and so I shall, as the English say, save my breath to cool my porridge and not talk to them of ecology or respect for the world in which we all live. Instead, I shall continue with my cold war, each afternoon moving the noose aside. But what happens when I close up the house and move back to Venice in October?

  The Woman from

  Dübendorf (Gastone)

  Somewhere in the Protestant part of a German-speaking country, I fear there is a woman who has fled from Venice, horrified at the sight of the weird and sinister forms of worship engaged in by Italian Catholics. Should she chance upon this, I want to put her heart at rest.

  Some months ago, the French couple who live below me brought home a cat whose job was to dispose of the rats who slip in from the canal behind our building and spend more time than desirable nesting in the various storerooms that encircle our common courtyard. He was to be a work cat; he was not to enter the house; he was to be fed but ignored; we were to think of him as a paid killer, a hit cat, as it were, whose job was to kill rats and who was not to be turned into a pet.

  The first mistake was giving him a name: Gastone. Then there was the cork tied to the string as a toy (to teach him to hunt, you understand, not to amuse him). Then the first cuddle, the random scratch behind the ears. Because it is in the nature of the universe and because his race has, for millennia, reduced ours to slavish obedience, Gastone was soon completely at home in both houses and was already demonstrating a strong preference for salmon and chicken nuggets.

  We held strong to one principle, however. Gastone was not to be allowed to leave our large courtyard to venture out into the streets of Venice. This forced us to devise
complex entering and exiting rituals whenever we opened the large portone that opened from the calle to the courtyard. Finally, a month ago, he being an uncastrated male and it being il mese del gatto, he escaped through a window and spent two nights away, only to be delivered to us by the Dingo people, the animalisti, who found his address and phone number on his collar and returned him to us.

  This afternoon, rendered inattentive by a long train trip, I opened the portone, only to see a flash of brown beneath me. Gastone disappeared around the corner, into the nearest calle. I put my bags inside the courtyard, closed the door, and followed him, crooning in that false voice we use when trying to lure animals who have outsmarted us, “Gastone, Gastone, vieni qua Gastone.”

  He came toward me, eluded me, and ran toward the bridge that leads down into Campo dei Miracoli. I followed, smiling falsely at the people on the bridge who could see what I was doing.

  The restoration is completed, and so the Church of the Miracoli, believed by many to be the most beautiful in the city, is again open for visits by tourists. And cats. Six or seven people stood on line waiting to buy tickets. Gastone, not pausing to explain that he was a resident and therefore exempt from payment, ran past them and down the center aisle. Nor did I stop to explain that I too was a resident, but walked casually up the aisle, crooning falsely. He saw the door to the crypt and went through it. I followed, only to have the ticket seller come down after me, asking angrily what I was doing. My explanation was rendered redundant as Gastone ran past us, back into the church.

  He was quickly up the steps to the high altar. I followed. He roamed around, ignoring the tourists, sniffing, pausing, gliding from one place to another, eluding me. I smiled and nodded to the people in the front pews and the people clustered on the steps and followed. He came near. I knelt, cooing and whispering false promises of salmon. He came nearer. I lunged and grabbed him up by the scruff of his neck.