by Polly Coles
Everything is lapped and framed by the sea: panels of marble, each one different, swirling, rippling, flowing so that you feel you are swimming underwater, kicking idly along, your masked face down, following the maverick currents, the ridges of waving sand and the passing shadows.
Now, the bishop processes to the pulpit to give his homily and the people get to their feet, bulky in their winter clothes. In the exact moment that he begins his address, the high water siren starts to sound. First the miserable wartime wail; then the pips: one tone … up to the second … and a third. Now, no one is listening to the bishop, and everybody is wondering if they will get home dry as God causes his waters to cover the face of the earth.
The singing begins again and the inaudible words move like a slow and ungainly oral Mexican wave from corner to corner of the great church, with its many alcoves and inner spaces.
At last, the service is over and the chain-swinging priests pace solemnly away from the altar and down the aisle. Once they have gone, the welly-booted congregation begins its slow shuffle out towards the night.
The water is already creeping in through the main doors so the crowd has to edge its way along raised wooden walkways. We duck back into the Basilica to avoid this funereal catwalk and move against the flow of people, heading towards a side door.
We pass an altar where three Franciscan monks are kneeling in front of an ancient icon and praying intensely. The pink-cheeked virgin looks down on them, like a paper doll coloured lovingly by a little girl. Her sweet, two-dimensional face has a holiness and simple religiosity that is otherwise absent here tonight. Even the great building is wild and strange, somehow (should one say it?) pagan. Its aqueous marble and veins of deep gold are imbued more with the animus of the prehistoric cave and the Shaman than with Christianity.
I stop for a moment, moved by the stillness of these monks and the gently human image of divinity to which they pray.
Then, quite suddenly, the monk closest to the altar lifts his head, lowers his praying hands and, in a seamlessly elegant single movement, rises to his feet, whips from the brown folds of his robes a camera, and snaps the glowing icon.
PART 6: January
The Old Man and the Sea
‘Those are pearls that were his eyes.’
SICK OF THE dog-shit-smeared streets of Venice, I take a vaporetto out to a distant island, on a frozen January morning. The world of the Lagoon is empty, the water torpid, and the boat moves through it like scissors searing through silk. Only light and the absence of light, water and air and movement figure here. I sit outside, at the back of the vaporetto, and feel my mind become cool and grey and old. Diving birds pierce the water with their needle beaks and the points multiply in circles of magical stitches, dimpling, replicating.
When the boat pulls up at the island quay only a few people get off, though even at this most benighted moment of the year nowhere associated with Venice is entirely without its ebb and flow of visitors.
I dawdle and let my fellow passengers go on ahead. I walk slowly along the pristine brick path that winds its way beside a canal, to the centre of the island. The savannah of reeds on either side of the path moves, even in the air deadened by cold, making subtle waves of dry, unmodulated sound.
On the island there is a solitary church, all that remains of a once populous settlement. In the space outside the main doors of this church – perhaps once a piazza, now a bowl of uneven, ragged grass – there is a stall and I stop here for hot chocolate. A short way off, a group of tourists is huddled around a guide, as if for warmth.
‘There are tours even at this time of year …’ I say to the woman who is preparing my chocolate.
‘There are tours all through the year.’
‘It wasn’t like this last time I came here.’
‘When was that?’
‘Fifteen years ago perhaps …’
‘E! Cio!’ she shrugs humorously in that way Venetians have of saying: well, there you are: I could have told you that everything goes to the bad.
‘You should see it in the summer!’ she adds, handing me the hot, soft plastic cup of thick chocolate.
Afterwards, I start off towards the church but then, on an impulse, turn to walk instead around the outside of the plain, brick building. Here, too, is another expanse of balding grass divided by a narrow path leading out towards agricultural land. I set off along the track, which is lined by high bushes of tamarisk sensing, but not seeing, the water close by.
I keep on until I reach a bridge spanning a fairly wide canal, which cuts between reed beds. I stop at the midpoint of the bridge and rest both hands on the rail. The wood feels slightly warm, though my breath plumes in the dank air. I watch bands of robber gulls tussling over a fish. The ripping flesh shows black, red and silver and the marauders tear it into shreds in their orgy of greed, then reel out from the fracas, like white petals scattering.
A bloody drama of survival and social life is being enacted in this serene world of sky and glassy water. The rustling chorus of reeds is neither animal nor elemental. Standing here, I understand the ancient thought that, blended into stems and leaves, there is another invisible life which inhabits a mythical space between flesh and blood and sap. This is the life of dryads, nymphs, fairies, sprites.
When a hand touches my arm I am not even surprised. Standing beside me, there is a very small, very old man.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ His grin is gap-toothed; he is wrinkled like a smoked kipper; his muddy eyes are eager. I smile back and nod.
‘I’m eighty-five,’ he chuckles. ‘Think of that! My sons look after the vines now. And my grandsons.’ He touches my arm again. ‘Come. I’ll show you something.’
I follow the old man over the bridge, through the flanking reeds, into a flat expanse of vineyard.
‘Come!’ He crab-scuttles ahead of me, neat and quick and creaky, along a row of vines. We arrive at a wooden hut, streaked and darkened by rain. He pushes the door open and beckons me in.
The shed is lined from floor to low ceiling with shelves; they are packed with tools, bundles of magazines, balls of string, loops of rope. The only light comes from one porthole of a window. The old man bends and pulls forward an empty oil can. ‘Sit!’ he says and hauls out a three-legged stool for himself.
But he does not sit down and begins instead to rummage around at the back of the shed where he finds a large unlabelled bottle and two glasses. He wipes them clean with a rag and then places them on an upturned wooden crate. Then, having unscrewed the bottle cap, he pours an inch of red wine into each small glass. He hands me one, settles himself on the stool, and raises his glass.
‘Saluti, Signora!’ he wheezes and drinks.
The wine is strong and vinegary; the rough alcohol warms me.
Quickly now, the old man puts down his glass and stands up again.
‘Shall I show you what I found?’
Again, he pokes around in his elaborate filing system of shelves, every so often pulling out a parcel wrapped in newspaper, which he lays on the bench beside him.
‘I’ve dug these up over the years, or sometimes, when I was fishing, I found them in the Lagoon. Once, a long time ago, there was a great city here, a lot of people. These things come from that time.’
With the slow precision of those who work with their hands and whose intellectual life is expressed physically, he unwraps the parcels one by one. He brings out many fragments of pottery: a blue curve of renaissance majolica, patches of ancient pavement, gobbets of gold-leafed mosaic, deep glazes holding terracotta like meat in aspic. He shows me dented silver cups and archaic cutlery: fork prongs undulating like tentacles, a bone knife handle.
I take each new treasure and turn it over and admire it. There is a rhythm and an enchantment in the slow examination of these bits and pieces of history, in the mild intoxication of the wine and the serendipity of being here at all, in this hut, among the vines and the rushes.
The old man too is relishing the unl
ikely theatre and his captive audience of one. He is like an aged Caliban, tranquil now on his island, long ago abandoned by Prospero, the court and princely knowledge. Rickety on his rickety stool, fond, nostalgic, gleeful, he handles his master’s relics: the beautiful, broken, glittering and useless memorabilia of the past.
‘But this – you must see!’ he says suddenly, as if deciding on something there and then, and, climbing on to his stool, he reaches up to the highest shelf for a parcel the size of a melon. He brings it down with extreme care.
‘Ecco!’ he says.
From its newspaper sarcophagus he produces a sphere of silver filigree which seems to have been spun from a living filament of silk. It is a renaissance censer; the silver chain lies slack over his brown hands, as he holds the ball up, offering it to the meagre light from the window. The pallid winter sun barely penetrates, but the censer seems to hold an inner illumination, which runs like electric currents around the sweeps and curves of palely shining metal to its spiralling core.
Now, the old man cradles the sphere back in towards him as though still unable to believe that he possesses such a marvel. He pulls the sleeve of his jacket into his fist and rubs at the metal which begins to gleam darkly.
‘I was catching crabs,’ he looks at me keenly. ‘It was buried in mud.’
He lays the censer back in its newspaper and wraps it tightly, before stowing it away again, on the top shelf.
Then he quickly rewraps some of the pottery pieces, putting them into a plastic carrier.
‘I can’t give you that,’ he nods in the direction of the censer, ‘but these are for you.’ He hands me the bag. I stand up to take it, formally.
‘Grazie,’ I say.
Then, on a whim, mildly intoxicated, perhaps inappropriate, I lean down and kiss the old man on his leather cheek and run for the last vaporetto.
Three, or Is Dead Beautiful?
YOU CAN SPOT it a long way off: it is a sleeker beast than its sisters, the vaporetti Numbers One and Two, because it does not bristle with passengers, leaning over the side, pointing, photographing, gazing or gawping at the slipping-by splendours of the Grand Canal. It is also differently coloured, altogether more subdued. As it pulls up to a stop, the people who step swiftly off the Number Three are uniformly dressed in black, brown, grey, dark green and blue, but never – ever – the slippery white of leisure wear; never the fluorescent orange or acid yellow rain-jackets emblazoned with swashbuckling names like Everest, Trekker, North Face, Arctic, Sahara.
Despite the more muted tones, there is a relaxed, almost holiday atmosphere aboard the Number Three. Strangers pass comments to each other about the weather or the state of the water; the marinaio has time to joke with the passengers as he throws the rope and ties the boat up to the landing stage, before drawing back the barrier and letting them off. Only aboard the Number Three can a Venetian be more or less certain of being understood by the person sitting next to him; there is a feeling of being at home, of closing the door on the outside world, of being among friends. This is because everyone on board the Number Three does, actually, live in Venice.
‘No tourists!’ the marinaio calls out as the Three comes up to a stop, ‘Season ticket holders only!’ and visitors to the city fall back, confused, accepting or irritated, as the residents stream past them on to the boat. The Number Three is always pleasantly uncrowded; in high tourist season, the old, the disabled, those with buggies or toddlers or a lot of shopping, let the One and Two, bursting with tourists, go by, and wait instead for the calm of the Three.
Within weeks of its inauguration, I overhear a man in the street referring to someone as having a head as empty as the Number Three; it has already become part of the proverbial landscape.
But it is not only colour and numbers that distinguish the passengers on the Three; it is a subtle but unmistakable difference of purpose that infuses every pore of the people who use it. Tourists are visibly mystified when the marinaio does not even stop to look at individual passes, and yet suddenly, unaccountably, prevents certain people from getting on to the vaporetto. But to those of us who are hurrying to school, or university, or the market, or work, it is perfectly clear that the man on the right is a tourist, while the man on the left is going to fetch his son from nursery. The marinaio does not need to see their tickets to know that. Why? Because human beings on holiday are radically different from human beings who are negotiating their way through the myriad small hurdles of daily life. It is as if the billions of atoms of which we are made become somehow more compacted when there is a job to be done, so that we exude purpose like a powerful scent – even, somehow, look different.
Holidaymakers inhabit a different skin; they are, above all else, in no hurry. The long day ahead contains no appointments, commitments, decisions or duties; all they have to do is eat and sleep and enjoy themselves as much as they possibly can. In this happy state of no-responsibility the body, so often tensed for action, relaxes. Their aura is unmistakably looser, their pace slower: they amble, pause to admire, hesitate about which direction to take, turn back to pass comment to a companion. They are, in a way, infantilized because they have been relieved of all the pressure to keep up to speed, on track or any of the other heart-racing metaphors favoured by Western culture in the world of work.
When we become tourists, we become childlike in our faint uncertainty: away from our known environment, we are not entirely confident, might be downright bamboozled. Banal details of life become major obstacles: how to navigate a transport system or match the look of a shop with what it is selling. As tourists, we are never precisely sure what is going on around us. This is both freeing and perplexing.
None of this need be a problem: people have always travelled in foreign places, briefly inhabited and observed them, moved on. The difference in Venice, though, is all down to numbers.
There is a pharmacy in a central Venetian campo with a digital sign displayed in the window. This records, defiantly, heartbreakingly, from month to month, the current resident population of the city. The officially registered population of Venice is about 60,000. This is around a third of what it was sixty years ago. Approximately 16.5 million tourists visit the city every year.
Often, I hear visitors say, in smugly pragmatic vein, ‘Yes, but without the tourists, Venice wouldn’t survive.’
And I want to scream: ‘DO THE SUMS! This is not a healthily balanced ecosystem! Make the leap: understand that for every one person who lives in this place, there are approximately another 267 extra (and extraneous) tourists milling around her as she attempts to move through the city.’
‘The population of Venice is about the same as that of Hereford. Think how it would be if you lived in a medium-sized town like this and every time you left the house to go to the shops, to school, to work or to visit a friend, you found yourself wading through seas of day trippers (about 12.5 million of the total annual number of visitors to Venice come for the day only). These people have no investment in your town; they have come here merely to look, pay, leave. Every way you turn, there are people taking photographs of your washing, your children, your shopping trolley, your dog. Imagine what it might feel like to be condemned to a lifetime as walk-on parts in a picturesque stage set which just happens to be your home as well. Giorgio tells me how, one Saturday afternoon in June, he left his house in a quiet corner of the city, with the intention of going to see his mother on the other side of the Grand Canal.
‘I got to the Strada Nuova,’ he smiles gently, ‘and I looked at all those hundreds of people streaming past and I just thought, “I can’t handle it” and I turned round and went back home.’
Lilli jokes grimly: ‘I live in the industrial zone of Venice.’ Her house is, in fact, near to Piazza San Marco which ‘processes’ tens of thousands of tourists a day.
The extreme numbers of drifting visitors affect the rhythm of the place. A bridge becomes impassable because twenty people have sat down to eat sandwiches on its steps; a narrow stre
et is barely navigable for a person in a hurry when others are stopping in front of shop windows, passing the long, lovely, empty holiday hours of the day. And this bridge, this narrow street which almost anywhere else in the world would be pretty by-ways, are in Venice major thoroughfares linking one part of the city to another so that the easy flow of everyday life is chronically inhibited. As a result, some areas have become deserts: places where the only people who go there by choice are tourists.
What puts Venice in peril (may already have done for it) is that its economy is hugely, disproportionately dependent on a single commodity: tourism. This means that the vast majority of people who walk its streets are in some way dependent on that system, either for their livelihood, or as its consumers. In this monoculture people are constantly re-enacting the same limited roles: as purveyors or consumers of the city as museum or playground. Venice becomes, merely, a transient place. But what any city needs to survive are the people who stay, the people who put down roots and nourish it and hold it together and give back to it a lasting diversity.
Much of Venice is now, you might say, chronically deforested and swathes of the city are effectively desert because real life is no longer taking place in them. There is nothing to make them fertile: as the hardware shops and butchers and shoe-menders and bakeries shut down; as the inhabitants are driven out by landlords greedy for the high tourist rents. Mask outlets and pizza vendors and tacky souvenir stalls usurp all other shops, and the many, varied transactions that should take place in daily life are fatally limited.
A city is impoverished at the profoundest of levels when the only exchanges taking place are between strangers and are all to do with the transitory experience of a short visit, with four limited goals: to look, to sleep, to feed and to buy. Of course there is still the beauty – there’s always that. But what kind of beauty is barren? Is dead beautiful?
