by Polly Coles
The woman is all pointy eagerness as she leans across the table, urging the girl on with her straining smile. But the girl, who arrived in Italy only a few months ago, does not understand, and her cousin, sitting beside her, dressed in Western clothes, translates the question. The teacher waits, smiling, smiling. The girl nods seriously. ‘Si’.
‘Ah …’ The teacher exhales, satisfied and sentimental, as she relaxes back into her seat, content with the answer she so badly needed.
Now she turns her attention to the cousin. ‘And tell me, Amina,’ she says, ‘where do you live in Pakistan – oh!!’ she claps her hand to her mouth, looking at her colleague, wide-eyed, mortified, ‘my first gaffe! I mean –’ she turns back to Amina, pink and breathless, ‘I mean – Bangladesh!’
The Filipina woman produces a tub of noodles and as we eat them off plastic plates, the red-haired teacher moves around the table, photographing everyone, assiduously recording Senegalese and Bangladeshi women eating Filipino noodles. I remember all those occasions I have attended over the years, both as a teacher and as a parent – community events, family days, workshops – when other well-meaning people clicked away and filled albums or pin-up boards with photographs that were always happy mixes of black and white; old and young; male and female. And, I wonder, are the notice boards in the Houses of Parliament covered with friendly photomontages of grey-suited ministers meeting, talking, ‘brainstorming’? Are the coffee tables of Downing Street scattered with albums of merry get-togethers?
The people who consider themselves to be running the serious side of life tend to meet in rooms without photographers; do not, on the whole, feel it necessary to shore themselves up with snapshots of the evidence – might, indeed, prefer to hide it.
All the same, despite my cynicism, the sweet Filipino noodles taste good and, in one of those convoluted, surreal tricks of association that history will deal out, make me too a little homesick for the familiar-unfamiliar flavours that centuries of Imperialism have made British.
The door opens again and someone else enters the room. A man, in his early fifties; baggy, well-pressed jeans hang off narrow hips and a strand of black hair has been smoothed carefully across his white scalp. He wears a spanking new tee-shirt and carries a briefcase. He approaches us beaming in the same, slightly fixed way as the red-haired woman, who rises quickly to her feet, minutely inclining towards him in the beginning of a bow.
‘Can I introduce you all to the headmaster?’ Her hands are clasped at chest level.
‘Please, please,’ the headmaster nods, smiling: we must all stand at ease. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you; I just wanted to say hello.’
And, wreathed in smiles, he retreats, in his immaculate leisure wear, and content, it seems, to have made an appearance.
Once the noodles have been despatched, it is time for the main business of the afternoon: the Senegalese contingent is to show us their national costume. They go to the back of the hall and, in shafts of dust-floating light cast from a high window, start taking from their bags folded pieces of bright, patterned cloth. They slip off their high-heeled shoes and begin, deftly, to wind these lengths of fabric around their hips, soon immersing their jeans in rainbow swathes. Then they take scarves and knot them around their heads, so that the stiff organza-like fabric makes turbans, or extravagant wimples – brilliant head dresses that draw these tall young women taller still: a smiling, chattering band of Amazons in this dim place. Their pleasure in themselves and their clothes fills the room like the sun.
When they have finished, they preen and parade a little, humorously, self-consciously, for us, the seated white women, old enough to be their mothers, looking on.
‘Will you show us one of your dances? Please!’ says the red-haired teacher.
‘Oh yes,’ her colleague urges them, ‘please dance!’
Good-humoured, obliging, barefoot, the Senegalese girls lift up their big skirts in both hands and slap jauntily up on to the stage. A tape is pushed into a cassette player and the volume is turned up full, so that the big, bold, blaring sound of Youssou N’Dour blasts into the dank Adriatic afternoon. Then, the dance begins.
If the Italian women are hoping for some traditional display, they are disappointed. These colourful natives do not oblige with a dramatized story or ritual sequence. It is clear from the start that they are making it up as they go along.
The African girls begin to sway, vaguely at first, to the trumpet call of their man Youssou. They seem unsure which way to go. But then, suddenly, they know. Elbows go spiky-perpendicular to hips, skirts are hoiked up to reveal bent, splayed knees and they cluck and rollick and splutter in a wild, raunchy, chicken-staggering walk. They lift their tops to reveal their navels, pelvis thrust forward, muscles rolling in impromptu belly-dances. They strut and wink and shake their stuff; they prance and stagger, self-satirizing, laughing uproariously in their gorgeous, ungainly, unbridled display of comic sexuality. It is a dance to draw men and they are a scrumptious coven of colour and flesh, of loose hips, of elbows akimbo, breasts high, headgear fabulously aloft, and everything ablaze for this row of ageing European women or, is it, in defiance of them?
The red-haired teacher titters and glances sideways at her colleagues, somewhere between delight and unease. They exchange looks of self-satisfaction (the enablers, the co-ordinators), amusement and uncertainty because, there is no doubting it, in these ten minutes of misrule, five Senegalese girls have the last laugh – Big Time.
Steps
AT HALF-PAST TEN every morning, the street door bell rings. If I am at home and get to the door phone in time to ask, in the clipped, wary tone I have learnt from the Venetians: ‘Chi e?’, the postman’s disembodied and despairing voice comes back: ‘La posta’, dragging out all his vowels like a Venetian Eeyore who knows that everything will go to the bad, if it hasn’t already.
Occasionally I see him in the street; he is an earnest-looking, middle-aged man with thick, black-framed glasses; he has a bookish, weary look and is visibly ill-at-ease in his fluorescent yellow Poste Italia tabard.
If I am not at home to sign for a recorded delivery, he leaves a card on the bench in the hall. Providing a place for the dumping of such odds and ends is the only purpose now served by the two elegantly carved marble seats that flank the wide entrance. Sometimes the boys upstairs leave their Ninja Turtle backpacks on them; or a sheaf of advertisements for the Panorama Megastore in Mestre might end up there.
What purpose these benches have ever served, even in their eighteenth-century heyday, is not obvious. They certainly imply grandeur; they suggest a charming young girl in a Longhi painting resting for a moment to catch her breath or adjusting the satin bow on her shoe, before she sallies forth into the street. The truth is, I suppose, they were never more than ornamental; probably, school bags and shopping have always been dumped on them.
Having found the Poste Italia card, I must now go and retrieve my package. Only a few metres off the tacky tourist jangle of the Rialto bridge, an unobtrusive entrance, on a narrow calle, leads into the vast, grey stone courtyard of the Central Post Office. Three tiers of open galleries run around the quadrangle and in the centre there is a marble well. The covered courtyard is cast in a permanent, monochrome stillness. The only clue that you have entered anything other than the palace of Jadis, Queen of Narnia, frozen in time, are the twisted red cord ropes, looped between brass stands, suggesting an official occasion for which crowds might imminently have to be lined up and organized.
Parcels must be fetched from an office in a far corner of the courtyard. Someone has rigged up a brown curtain across most of the window. It is the kind of curtain you might find in a heap at a jumble sale, smelling of mould. Through the window I see many wooden pigeon holes filled with packages and I watch as a tall, bearded, slightly bent man in a cardigan rifles through them hopelessly. As usual, there are several other people in the office; as usual, serving the public seems to be the least of their worries and they sit back on t
heir chairs and chat among themselves.
After a long time, the bearded man finds my parcel. Now, I must head to another department in order to pay a bill. Making for the second floor, I walk up a great, empty stone staircase. It is unlit and unadorned. Again, there is no sign that I am either in a post office or, indeed, in the twenty-first century. The staircase is stripped of any detail of its past, and all that remains is the massive, sixteenth-century armature of the building.
Once at the top of the stairs, I push open a swing door, more suggestive of 1955 than 1555, and enter a space that is, at last, reassuringly like the kind of post offices I know. Here, there are the Formica counters and the capable, severe-looking women perched behind glass and processing the endless forms and receipts that make up so much of the substance of official Italian life. In another serpentine corral of cords and posts, the people wait, silent and passive in the inevitable queue. Every so often, it nudges wearily forward.
Because the spaces of Venice – both public and domestic – have been recycled so many times, over so many centuries, they are generally, in some way or another, ill-fitted to their current purpose. Public spaces are often very grand, but because they now house more compact enterprises and are run by many fewer people than were once needed, they seem echoey and empty. On the other hand, private apartments can be warren-like and cramped, even in the finest buildings.
But the fact is, for all its unlikely appearance, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi makes, in some ways, a fitting enough home for the Central Post Office. Built as a warehouse, market place and accommodation for the Slav and Germanic merchants trading in Venice in the sixteenth century, it still has a thoroughly practical purpose – processing the flux of letters and consignments in and out of the city.
In the early morning, the post boats are tied up outside and bundles of letters are handed down to the postmen who then distribute them around the sestieri or boroughs (literally: the sixths) of Venice. And in this office, on the second floor, people are queuing in the longest of traditions: supplicants, applicants, individuals who need something from the system and are required to wait, until officialdom is ready to issue a permit, an authorization, a rubber stamp.
Still, I think, as I go back down the staircase, my business done, it would be a mistake to assume nothing at all is different: the very pitch of the stairs on which I am walking gives the lie to that. These wide, marble steps force me to slow down, hobble me somehow, into a more ceremonious or respectful descent than a purpose-built, twenty-first-century post office building might require. No smart, quick, clickety-clackety trot down to street level here; the building imposes its own ancient rhythms, gives a clue to the kind of slow-stepping, low-voiced, confidential confabulations between foreign merchants as they came down, shoulder to negotiating shoulder.
Despite the fact that it continues to be used for practical business, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi is no longer a place where deals are brokered. It has gone down the scale of influence, become far less important, with its despairing, cardiganed clerks and wish-you-were-here postcards taking the place of trafficking, bartering, strutting merchants, convening in Venice from all around the globe. Its next planned incarnation as a Benetton-financed shopping centre is not, in this sense at least, news.
The uneasy relationship between the Venice in which a few thousand people live out their daily lives and the Venice that is an impossibly beautiful stage set, to which the whole gawping world flocks, is played out in the bricks and mortar of the city. Even when it is engaged in a thoroughly modern enterprise, the drag of past glories seems irresistible because, somehow, however hard it tries, Venice cannot be modern.
The controversial fourth bridge over the Grand Canal was opened in September 2008. Though its official name is the Ponte della Costituzione, it is known locally as the Calatrava Bridge, after its Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. I know that this bridge works, both aesthetically and physically, because three times a week I walk over it with my children on our way home from judo classes at the university sports’ centre. On other days, I hurry across it to the monthly farmers’ market, to Freddie’s tennis lesson, to visit friends in another part of the city, and this is how it works: if you are heading across the Calatrava Bridge in the direction of the railway station, you must first cross Piazzale Roma, the dowdy bus station and drop-off point quite incongruent with its role of welcoming millions of people into the world’s most beautiful city. For this reason alone, Piazzale Roma inspires in me a kind of fondness: there is something comforting in its normality, its ugliness. There is also the smallest fillip of excitement to be had there, among the purring buses and car fumes, at the thought of all those places at the end of the causeway, and the roads that lead to them.
Moving towards the bridge, I dodge through the coaches, the taxis, the school kids, the men and women with their bags and briefcases waiting to travel back into the real world on the other side of the Lagoon, and I feel as though I am in a play grown-up world. Even stepping off the road and up on to the pavement has a certain novelty, since this particular move is not possible anywhere else in this city where the only ascent and descent is either up and down stairs or off the fondamenta into a boat.
Then, rising from the edge of this higgledy-piggledy municipal parking lot-cum-bus station, I can see the marble foot of the new bridge. There is something in the way the wide, shallow glass steps curve upwards in a long sweep that invites you to quicken your step and widen your stride; it makes you feel suddenly lifted and for a few lovely moments drawn up into the sky. It is these moments that make of the bridge a masterpiece.
But it is not the beauty of the bridge that places this recent construction firmly in the ranks of Venice’s glorious, secondhand spaces. There are other, far more practical considerations. Almost immediately after it is opened, people start hurting themselves on the bridge. When they aren’t feeling gloriously uplifted, they are twisting their ankles and crashing to their knees. There is something in the way the stripes of metal, glass and concrete play with the eye that leads people to misjudge their next step and fall. Add to that the fact that the many steps, elegantly pleated as a piece of Fortuny silk, are negotiable only by the entirely able-bodied and even they are in a certain amount of difficulty if they are also lugging heavy bags or pushing a child in a buggy. My shopping trolley, stuffed full of judo kit, clacks jarringly down the steps to the other side.
So, it seems, even when they come to build a major new piece of Venice at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the imperative of beauty and bella figura triumphs over functionality. The living city has fallen victim to its own myth.
This would certainly not have been the case when the Fondaco dei Tedeschi was built in its current form in 1508. With its 200 rooms, it would have provided a comprehensive hotel, conference centre and warehouse. It was highly functional in its conception and also impressive enough to boost the clout of those who operated there.
The fact that the Calatrava bridge is, for all its splendour, often impractical, not to say dangerous, is a subtle and depressing symbol of the demise of Venice as a place where people can really live and function efficiently from day to day. No concession has been made to the elderly, the disabled, the baby pushers, the luggage-laden, and Venice the stage set has triumphed, yet again, over Venice the city of Venetians.
Letizia and the Professor
IT IS THE last period on Friday and the top class of the Canova Middle School, Venice, is bored and restless. Their scourge and mentor, Professore Gasparini, is away at a meeting and so the mildly notorious 3E is being babysat by another teacher.
Professore Marcellio is also bored, but more by fatigue than restlessness. He is to retire at the end of the year and sits at the front of the class, slightly slumped in his crumpled cotton jacket, and shuffling vacantly through papers. The riot of sound in front of him that is twenty unfocused thirteen-year-olds might have been distant gunfire, across the border: Marcellio is elsewhere. Until, that is, he is
struck in the side of the head by a missile.
The ball of paper falls into his lap and his head jerks up in time to see Francesco’s cupped hand drop. The Professore fills up with a huge, weary fury, like a slowly expanding hot air balloon. He heaves to his feet, plants both meaty hands on the desk, and bellows blearily into the room:
‘YOU ENGLISH!’
This is not what anyone might have expected. Francesco is indeed half English, but it is difficult to see any link between this and the paper ball that has now dropped to the floor and is lying beneath the teacher’s desk.
Marcellio pulls his sagging shoulders up once more, leans harder forward, his eyes narrow with anger, and prepares to roar again:
‘You ENGLISH!’ His moustache flutters out this time, with the force of his rage. ‘I’ve had enough of the LOT of you!’
Francesco’s friend, my own half-English son Michael, glances nervously around. His Italian is not yet fluent, but it is clear that Marcellio’s net is widening and that anybody even slightly foreign might need to look out.
‘Why don’t you English just get out of here, the whole damn lot of you! Clear off back to where you came from and leave us in peace!’
The silence is tight and expectant, as Marcellio draws in another gusty breath in preparation for the next blast. But before he can get it out, Letizia, who is sitting in the front row rises quickly to her feet. She too lays both hands on the table in front of her. She looks Marcellio in the eye.
‘Professore,’ she begins, her voice high and light. ‘I would like to draw your attention to Article three of the Italian Constitution in which it states that: “All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of gender, race, language or religion, political opinions or personal and social circumstances.” ’
