by Polly Coles
Everyone is listening now: lanky, restless adolescent bodies suddenly still. This is good sport; this is the best.
Marcellio stares at the girl. The girl, with her elfin face and sharp black eyes, stares back. The big man’s facial muscles flicker with the effort to martial thoughts, to navigate his temper; his fat hands, on the desk, flex. Then, somewhere, he finds the single impetus he needs; he opens his mouth and yells:
‘I AM NOT ITALIAN! I – am – VENETIAN.’
Letizia does not miss a beat.
‘Professore,’ she says, ‘may I draw your attention to the fact that Venice has not been an independent republic since 1797.’
PART 4: November
High Water 1
THE VERY OLD or the over-imaginative might feel unsettled by the siren. It sounds like the long, rising whine of an air raid warning as it curls plaintively up over the city in the months between October and March, alerting us to an imminent and excessive high tide: acqua alta.
When they hear the siren, Venetians know that they need to put on their wellies, so they can wade, with dry feet, to work or school; or that they must avoid certain vaporetto routes which won’t be operational because an abnormally high water level is preventing the boats from clearing the bridges; or take the routes where temporary raised walkways, like long lines of trestle tables, allow you to get through the flooded areas more or less dry.
One wail of the siren tells us that the waters will climb to a metre above sea level. If this is followed by a burst of staccato beeps, you add on 10 centimetres. If there is then a second series of slightly higher beeps, that means another 10 – and so on up the scale. The beeps climb up four tones: the tide is going to rise to 140 centimetres above sea level. The city is in danger of serious flooding, perhaps even to the level of the legendarily damaging floods of 1968.
‘Don’t be silly,’ I say, packing the children off to school briskly, after we have listened to the ever more urgent keening of the siren.
‘You won’t be hurt by a spot of water!’
Ten minutes later they are back.
‘It’s too high to get to the vaporetto stop,’ they tell me triumphantly.
I am having none of that.
‘OK,’ I say, pulling on my wellies, ‘I’ll come with you,’ and I march off down the stairs, the children following behind.
Everything seems normal, until I turn the corner to the last short flight of steps leading to ground level. The metre-high stone lions that keep guard at the bottom of the stairs are practically submerged in water; only their eyes and some tufts of petrified mane are peeking out of the dirty swill. The entire hall of the building has been transformed into a swimming pool. Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have been here, weeping her giant, salt tears, except that there are no birds or mice or lizards afloat in this hall, but rather shopping trolleys and bicycles and footballs – in fact, all the paraphernalia of daily life that the residents of the palazzo usually leave on the ground floor, to avoid hulking it upstairs to their apartments.
I slow down, but do not stop. The water is only a few centimetres below the top of my boots, so I advance carefully, wading across the wide hall. When I reach the front door, the pressure of the current out in the calle is so strong that I have to lean hard to force it ajar. Once outside, the scene in narrow, grey Calle del Vin is not far off apocalyptic. People are wading urgently through the rising water, but in a kind of nightmarish slow motion, with their belongings held above their heads and coats gathered up to their waists. The water through which they are pressing is neither glistening nor limpid nor blue, but an unleashed cesspit. Every bit of vile and filthy detritus imaginable swirls there – human shit, rotten food, a family of drowned baby rats. The drains of the city have disgorged their worst.
Gleefully, Freddie launches himself into this disgusting broth and within five seconds is soaked to the waist.
‘OK,’ I say, with the same masterful decisiveness I adopted five minutes ago, at the top of the stairs, ‘back inside!’
For the next hour, we watch from the fourth floor, as normal life continues to retreat from the canal turned flood torrent below. For a while, the welly wearers struggle staunchly on, but before long the water level rises too high and this is when the men in waders begin to appear – fishermen, boatmen, the real water professionals, with the professional kit.
When the tide eventually gets too high even for waders, boats are the only solution, except that soon it stops being possible to pass under any of the bridges and the small craft begin to navigate around them, over the submerged pavements. The last people we see daring the waters, now at the maximum level of 1.4 metres, are two canoeists, jaunty in their fluorescent orange rain jackets, who double over flat as their canoe slides under the bridge, and clears it with only a few centimetres to spare.
As the day goes on, friends and relatives call us from different parts of the world to ask what’s going on. They have seen the dramatic television footage of Piazza San Marco submerged in water and imagine us islanded and in a state of emergency. But of course the truth is, by the middle of the day, the waters have gone back down; acqua alta is not a flood, but a very high tide that can turn nasty. Which is why, the next morning, the bright early sunshine reveals a city quietly drying out. The shops and restaurateurs with premises at ground level are stoically stacking chairs and tables and unrolling sodden carpets outside in the calle. They spend the morning with buckets and mops, swabbing down the floors and walls of their properties. Their good humour and resignation as they get on with the job say just one thing: there’s nothing to be done; this is how things are in Venice.
High Water 2
RISING WATER IS not the only threat to Venice. There are other tides that flood the city every day of the year and threaten its existence in very different ways. Each year about 16.5 million tourists pass through the city; this has a devastating effect on the resident community. Anybody who has known Venice over the past two decades is painfully aware of this and also of the frightening speed at which change is taking place.
When I met Alberto nineteen years ago, he was making violins in a workshop on a canal at the west of the city. At around half-past twelve I would call by, passing from the baking, white stones of the fondamenta into this cool, dim space. The walls were unclad stone; the ceiling was striped with ancient, blackened beams. It smelt rich and sweet – of linseed oil and varnish and wood – which made me think of frankincense and myrrh.
I would sit on one of Alberto’s high stools while he finished off a piece of work at his bench before lunch. Once, when I arrived, he was sketching a violin scroll in pencil, on a block of wood. Then, with a fine knife, he began to carve the image into three dimensions. Over the following days, I saw the scroll emerging delicately from the wood, like a fern uncurling.
Here, in Alberto’s workshop, an antique craft was being pursued, but the students from the Conservatorio and the musicians who came in for repairs or to buy a new instrument were, of course, as modern as anybody anywhere. This was Venice at its best: a place of artisanal excellence, keeping alive ancient traditions and techniques for the modern world.
When Alberto had finished what he was doing, he would close the dark green shutters and we would go out, locking the shop behind us.
At the bar around the corner, we often found Luigi drinking coffee and smoking his pipe in the corner. The dry, mildly piratical painter had his studio close to Alberto’s workshop and they were friends.
At other times, Daniele and Pietro might be there too. Their bookshop, Patagonia, was opposite the bar. Slight, wry, bookish Pietro with his hunched shoulders and pebble spectacles, and his business partner Daniele, Venetian wideboy and self-ironizing literary showman, made an odd couple, but their shop was a fine space for browsing or chatting and a small local centre for literary events – talks, readings, discussions.
These were the four energetic, creative men I came to know when they were working on one small Venetian block, in 198
2.
When I return to Venice in 2009, Alberto’s workshop has become an office for a company organizing tourist lets; Patagonia has gone and a kebab shop has taken its place; and Luigi has left his studio for cheaper premises on the mainland.
This is a small anecdote, of course, but it reflects bigger and more widespread processes in a city where the tourist dollar is king and the inhabitants struggle to keep their environment alive and adapted to a rich daily life.
One morning, I have a doctor’s appointment. The surgery is some distance from where I live, but I set off in good time and head for the vaporetto stop. The boat is moving towards the stop as I arrive, but there are so many people waiting there that I cannot get on. This would be frustrating anywhere and might happen in any city in the world; but what makes it different in Venice is, that as I stand watching the vaporetto glide off, I see that the boat is packed full of tourists with that dreamy, relaxed holiday look plastered all over their faces. I feel a disproportionate rage swelling in me – I cannot go about my daily business because these people have overrun the public transport system. Evidently no one individual is to blame here but, like it or not, this is how Venetians – born and adopted – often feel.
Thrusting down my bitter thoughts, I abandon the boat option and set off at a run towards the surgery. Often there are alternative, back routes to be taken in Venice, but this particular journey unavoidably involves passing along a main drag between one tourist hotspot and another.
The words ‘main drag’ suggest something wide and boulevardish; this main drag, however, is a very narrow alley, only just wide enough for two people to walk abreast, and it is stuffed with tourists. I am stuck behind a clot of people for a few seconds, then, seeing a gap ahead, sprint around the man in front and manage to get ahead. The illusion of speed is temporary though, because I now find myself at a total standstill behind a group that has stopped to admire the window display in a mask shop. Having wriggled my way past this impediment, I am now slowed right down by a couple who are trundling along, pulling their suitcases on wheels behind them. There are two Venetian women ahead of me and I can practically see the smoke coming out of their ears.
‘Why the hell can’t they just pick up the suitcases and carry them?’ one of them says loudly to the other. Her tone is rude; the tourists are, in a sense, innocent – certainly unaware – but the point is this: the city is not functioning for the people who live here.
I arrive late for my appointment, very hot and sweaty and red in the face.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say to the doctor, ‘there were so many tourists, I couldn’t get on the boat. I had to walk and that was impossible too.’
The doctor is a sweet-faced elderly woman.
‘Povera Venezia – poor Venice,’ she says sadly. ‘What hope is there?’
Meanwhile, out beyond the Lido and Pellestrina, the vast concrete structure of the Mose is being built in the Adriatic Sea. This system of barriers designed to control the high waters, and costing around six billion euros, is a controversial attempt to control the high waters. Scheduled to be completed in 2011, it is still being constructed. On the mainland side of the city, however, absolutely nothing is being done to stem the vast tide of tourists flowing incessantly into Venice and drowning its daily life, its heart and soul.
San Martino Went Up to the Attic
‘San Martin xè andà in sofita
A trovar la so novizia
La so novizia non ghe gera
’L xè cascà con cul per tera
El s’à messo ’n boletin
Viva, viva San Martin.’
(‘St Martin went up to the attic
To find his fiancée.
His fiancée was not there,
St Martin fell flat on his bottom
And put a bandage on himself.
Hurrah, hurrah, St Martin!’)
ON 11 NOVEMBER Venetians celebrate the feast day of San Martino, an early Christian saint, who met a freezing beggar on the road and, in an act of somewhat qualified largesse, cut his cloak in two, giving half to the ragged man.
For a few days before the festival the windows of the cake shops of Venice fill with biscuit cut-outs of San Martino on his horse, draped in the as-yet unsevered mantle. They are iced in bright colours and crudely decorated with hundreds and thousands, silver balls, chocolates and sweets. The biggest and showiest of them can be as much as a metre high, but they are usually the size of a cake.
The feast of San Martino belongs to the children of the city. In the late afternoon, when the winter dark has fallen, they take pots and pans and wooden spoons and troop around their neighbourhood, bashing their tinny homemade drums with gusto and going from shop to shop singing the song of San Martino and asking for goodies. The shopkeepers hand over sweets or fruit and the children come home laden with edible loot.
In the busy shopping street near to Calle del Vin, you see the little groups of kids, wrapped up tight in coats, hats and scarves, scampering between the shops in a state of high excitement, while a protective parent lingers tactfully in the shadows.
But now, a potent competitor to the time-honoured Venetian ritual has arrived in the city and its threat lies in its very similarity to the Feast of San Martino.
This festival, which is itself an ancient rite, but relatively new to Italy, takes place ten days before San Martino, on 31 October. It has many of the same ingredients: the thrill of being out on the hunt, after dark, on a wintry evening, with your hot breath pluming into the chill air; the jewel-like brightness of the shops as their lights flood out into the night, and their promise of good things; a rhyme or song declaimed in return for gifts of sweets and a general licence to shout and crash and announce your presence wherever you go, in the company of other gleeful children.
But the imported Hallowe’en has an added glamour, with which San Martino – pious as he is – simply cannot compete. The problem is an old one: the Devil and his doings are altogether more titillating and entertaining than all the goodness in the world, even if it is dressed up with the bait of sweets, and biscuits shaped like a man on horseback. What San Martino lacks is the glamour of evil, the thrill of ghostly fear.
In this period of transition and, I suspect, inevitable usurpation, of the saint’s feast day by the forces of devilish (American) Misrule, the children of Venice are enjoying a brief season of double glut. On 31 October, they pour into the streets in ghoulish masks, black capes and witches’ hats and descend on the shopkeepers, calling out: ‘Dolcetto o scherzetto!’ (‘Sweet or trick!’). Then, a mere ten days later, they set out again, singing San Martino’s song, hands out for another handout. Some shopkeepers refuse to give anything for Hallowe’en, telling them to come back the following week for San Martino, but the majority are indulgent of both festivals and vast quantities of sweets are consumed.
This is not simply a swallowing up of the old ways by the new. Hallowe’en is most likely a considerably more ancient jamboree than the saint’s day, which might be seen as another of the beatified shop windows in which early Christianity advertised its pious credentials. Either way, they both overlap with end of harvest rituals, marking the transition from summer to winter.
Does the gradual demise of the festival of San Martino matter all that much? Perhaps not: the passing of any pleasure or happy memory has its melancholy edge, but traditions are mutating or perishing or appearing all the time and all over the world. The Venetian anxiety about the loss of San Martino has more to do with that peculiarly Venetian problem of feeling that the indigenous life of the city is so very fragile that every blow, however slight, may be terminal.
In the meantime, my friend Ginevra is altogether more pragmatic:
‘Well,’ she says, as we watch our kids go rampaging off in full witchy and ghostly regalia on 31 October, ‘it’s no surprise Hallowe’en is winning. It’s just much more fun being bad.’
Trailing Clouds of Glory
‘… trailing clouds of glory do we come
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy …’
(From Wordsworth’s ‘Ode to Immortality’)
THE PARENTS OF the children of 3E wander into the classroom. We take off our coats, prop up our dripping umbrellas and, still faintly exuding the damp of the Venetian November evening outside, we sit down in the circle of chairs laid out for us.
Several of the teachers are already seated at an L-shaped arrangement of tables placed at the front of the class. This layout suggests either that we are gathered here as an audience for a panel of experts or else that we are the shuffling-in accused, but despite the hierarchical furniture arrangements, the atmosphere is relaxed and people are chatting amiably. As is so often the case in Italy, no one appears to regard themselves as inferior to anyone else, but the conventions are being observed.
Professor Gasparini arrives – last and to a certain effect – as befits his station as teacher of Italian and unofficial head of year. He is a diminutive man, but all muscle, and he has a serious handshake. I like a strong handshake. I practise a strong handshake. But Gasparini’s handshake is mythic. It is a handshake you must survive in order to continue the Quest. Whenever we meet, I spend ten minutes afterwards straightening out my crushed fingers.
Every inch of Gasparini expresses determination, direction and, above all, Opinion. He sits at the central point of the High Table, the other, female, teachers flanking him like a Prada-clad Praetorian Guard. We wait in silence.
First, Gasparini presses the fingertips of both hands together like a doctor in a 1950s film (he lacks only the crisp white coat and the stethoscope). He breathes in deeply, looks severely at us through his black-framed glasses (something of the Clark Kent here); he sighs heavily; he goes in.
