The Politics of Washing

by Polly Coles

  I push open the door and enter a very small office. Behind a large desk in the middle of the room, there lounges a policeman in full regalia, down to his elaborate gun holster, peaked, militaristic cap and black shades. He carries on writing for some seconds and, when he finally looks up, does not smile. In fact, he says nothing. He does not offer me a chair, but leaves me to explain, falteringly, apologetically, that I have been robbed. When I have finished, he rises silently to his feet, pushes his chair back with his black-booted heel, and strolls to the iron-grey filing cabinet. That he manages to stroll convincingly across half a metre of space is a tribute to him.

  Idly, he leafs through papers. Languidly, he draws one out. He turns, with the elegance of a dancer and the hatchet face of an executioner, to lay the form on the table in front of me. I am mildly panicky and fill it in wrong, but it is clear by now that this is immaterial; we are both engaged in some balletic piece of bureaucracy which will have no outcome and serves no purpose.

  The carabiniere now returns to his seat. The wide expanse of desk in front of him has nothing on it except for an open packet of Malboro cigarettes. On the otherwise bare walls there is a single large poster showing a black-clad, balaclavaed figure half-crouching and wielding a submachine gun, in an urban landscape of flat rooftops and fire escapes, which has more of downtown Chicago about it than La Serenissima.

  I watch the policeman as he signs the documents. He is a strikingly handsome man. If he smiled, he would be all beauty; but smiling is the last thing he has in mind, taken up, as he is, with his dreams, somewhere out there in Malboro Country, Chigaco or the sweating central American jungle, lone ranging it on the Italian Job – not tangled up in the Venetian Effect.

  Eating Cake

  IT IS THE perfect cog in the machinery of the Venetian day – a place to stop, to drink and eat and gossip before carrying on with one’s business. It represents the best balance between production and consumption, work and play, nutrition and gastronomy. This is why my favourite pasticceria seems to me to be the apex of civilization and why, most days, on my way back from dropping the children at school, I stop off here for a cappuccino and a pastry.

  The pasticceria, which is a cake shop and café, is small and wood-panelled. The curved bar is a half glassed-in case that is always filled with cakes. In the morning, the central section, under the cash register, is heaped with warm croissants and pastry puffs of pear and chocolate, apple and ricotta, and rich crème patissiere. This is the breakfast section and, if you arrive after ten, you are likely to find it already empty.

  The pasticceria is run by two energetic and attractive women in their late thirties. They move swiftly and capably about their work, keeping the coffee coming from the silver Gaggia machine; washing cups and glasses; packing cakes to take away in neat parcels, with a knotted ribbon around the paper; chatting with their customers. They are always cheerful; their children drop by on the way home from school; their friends and neighbours go in and out, and at all times of day the pasticceria is full of people.

  First thing in the morning, the carabinieri park their boats outside and saunter in for coffee, laughing and joking in their absurd flak jackets. Passing gondoliers call out for a cold drink, stalling their gondolas by lodging one foot on the wall of the canal, like a bargeman.

  ‘Hey, bella, bring me a Coke!’

  The young waitress hurries out to hand it over.

  When Freddie walks through the door on his way home from school, he gets a similar treatment: the signoras behind the counter take one look and, without so much as asking, they fish his favourite chocolate puff out of the cabinet, wrap it in a paper napkin and hand it over.

  As I stand drinking my coffee and greedily savouring every crumb of my pastry, a door in the back of the shop opens and a man in white overalls and a chef’s hat comes out carrying a tray of fresh cakes. Behind him, I glimpse the small kitchen, where another baker is rolling out pastry, or piping icing on to biscuits. They are making zabaione puffs, chocolate and chestnut pies, Sicilian cannoli, fruit and custard tartlets, almond slices.

  That’s when I understand the genius of the pasticceria – its perfect, circular logic: the expert industry of two pastry chefs, presented and sold by two amiable and efficient women, bought and consumed by a community of local people for whom the pasticceria is breakfast and the proper starting point of every day, or a sandwich at lunchtime, or an aperitif with friends on the way home from work. Two people plus two people plus a community: creative, sociable, local, sustainable, viable – this is good business, this is living well.

  Tourists do pass by the pasticceria, but it remains, none the less, that rare phenomenon in Venice: a local place. One day, I am there when an Indian couple comes in. The woman has a red bindi painted on her forehead and is wearing a purple silk sari, edged with gold. They order coffee and cakes and are warmly appreciative, marvelling at the decent prices and the excellent pastries. When they have paid for their food, they politely ask the way to San Marco. The Piazza is innumerable twists and turns away from the pasticceria and on the other side of the Grand Canal. It is a half-hour walk, if you know the route. For someone living in this quarter of the city it is on the other side of the world. No serious explanation is given to the couple; hands are waved in roughly the right direction and they are told to go straight on, straight on, in the time-honoured Venetian style.

  A smart, elderly lady in a fur coat and very red lipstick is standing by the bar and watching all of this. As the door clicks shut behind the couple, she snorts, and remarks tightly to the room in general:

  ‘Hmm! There she was with her third eye and she can’t even find her way to San Marco! Ha! These people!’

  And everybody in the pasticceria laughs – complicit, racist, redneck.

  PART 8: March

  Bloodlines

  The elegant apartments were much appreciated, notably the grand salon Louis XVI, where one admired the head of king Midas, a marvel by Luca della Robbia … The reception was very lively, and there was a very beautiful musical programme performed by the tziganes. The Princesse Mathilde didn’t leave … until 7 o’clock.

  (Paris society newspaper, Le Gaulois, 1893)

  THE CONTESSA ELENA de Barbarin lives in a palace that bears her name. The land entrance of the Palazzo de Barbarin is an inconspicuous door in a grey stone wall, in a narrow and unremarkable calle. The palace’s great classical façade can only be approached by water and gives, gloriously, on to the Grand Canal.

  The Contessa is a small, vital woman. She inhabits the main floor or piano nobile of her family palace, in an unfolding vista of rooms through which she moves with quick energy, her eyes sharp and bright, as though she were one of the Borrowers, come up from under the floorboards to reconnoitre the giant and fantastical world of human beings.

  Almost everything in the Contessa’s home, other than the Contessa herself, is on the largest of scales. The principal salon is an archipelago of vast and gently moulting gold velvet sofas arranged in clusters among elegant occasional tables of the Louis Quinze variety, a grand piano and the serene lap and spread of Persian carpets. On the walls, dark oil paintings of obscure mythological scenes are borne aloft in frames that are frenzied gilt extravaganzas of leaves and grapes and Roman weaponry.

  When the Contessa entertains in these rooms she cuts an elegant, darting figure in her black cocktail dress. Drinks are poured by an ancient servant in an outsized white jacket, with twisted gold brocade epaulettes. The Contessa helps him as he struggles to lift the bottle of prosecco from a silver tray. But despite her gilded life, the Contessa has dreams of elsewhere and they are the perfect inverse of my own, which are mildly envious of such ancient opulence.

  On the upper floor, high under the roofs of the Palazzo de Barbarin, Elena has commandeered a room. I say a room, but it is more likely to have been a cupboard in the glory days of the palazzo. It is an average-sized space that would sit quite easily in a far humbler dwelling and, being so high up a
nd therefore not crowded in by other buildings, it is full of light. The walls are painted white and Elena has furnished it simply and sparely – from IKEA.

  There is a plain pine table in front of the window, at which she has placed a foldable pine chair. A pine bookcase in a blond-coloured wood stands against one wall and there is a two-seater sofa – square, neat and cream. Beside a glass and steel coffee table, there is a brand-new, pale blue armchair. And that is all: IKEA heaven, nestling in the heart of antiquity.

  ‘Isn’t it lovely,’ beams the Contessa de Barbarin, sweeping her arm wide in a gesture of triumphant pleasure.

  One day in March, Elena de Barbarin calls me with an invitation. A group of Slovak gypsy children are making a day trip to Venice, as part of an Italian tour in which they are performing their traditional singing and dancing. Would we like to come and hear them sing in the campo near to where she lives?

  Spring has been slow in coming and the city still holds in its bones the damp of a sea-bound winter. We feel the chill in our bodies, too, as we wait for the Rom children to arrive. Elena’s talk of a European tour has not prepared me for what I eventually see when they come, tumbling and chattering, into the campo. There are about twenty kids, aged from five to seventeen. Raggle-taggle and eager, they quickly draw together, the tallest standing at the back, the little ones at the front, and launch straight into full-throated, hip-swaying song.

  They are led by a tall man in late middle age, with a flyaway shock of grey hair and a gaunt, sympathetic face. Smiling delightedly, he accompanies the troupe on his balalaika with frenetic energy; his hand strums the strings so fast, it becomes a blur.

  That song is a wild and joyful challenge laid down to winter, to the wealthy, weary, aged city and to all of us, huddled in our monochrome overcoats, on this dreary afternoon.

  First, the girls step forward. They begin, slowly, to weave around each other, twisting their wrists with the languid elegance of Indian dancers, then rotating their hips like belly-dancers before shaking and shimmying their shoulders and limboing precipitously backwards, their long, shining black hair dipping to the pavement behind.

  Next come the boys, springing forward like a band of juvenile Cossacks, knees bent, side-kicking out, arms folded rigid in front. They straighten up and begin a kind of frenzied tap dance, whacking out the staccato rhythm on their own bodies – flat hands on thighs, arms, chests: a drum roll of the flesh.

  Alongside the bigger boys, three miniature tikes hip-hop the same manic tattoo. The smallest of them cannot be more than five years old. He has a snubby, merry, knowing face; his thatch of black hair is dyed a strangely flat orange colour; he is wearing a faded Hawaiian shirt, worn-out jeans and no socks, and a pair of ancient, flaking gym shoes. He seems half animated puppet, half child.

  Two of the older boys now step up and lift him on to their shoulders. The tiny boy surveys the crowd that has gathered to watch him. Then, every muscle in his body rises to the occasion as he opens his wide mouth and lets out a sinuous, minor-key wail so holleringly loud that the vein in his scrawny neck swells and pulses.

  Up there on his shoulder-top eyrie, he throws his arms wide and, with consummate showmanship, holds the note for what feels like several long minutes. It is a defiant, bellowing lament of such world-weary pain that it does not seem possible from an infant’s mouth.

  But the fact is, of course, that we are not simply watching as one small boy sings. In that comic Pinocchio, in those drawn-out moments, there inhere generations of shared knowledge and shared experience. His actual age is spectacularly irrelevant, because this child of a rootless people embodies a longer and more unbroken lineage of experience than I myself (old enough to be his grandmother) could dream of.

  These Rom children, whose language uses the same word to express both ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ have a grip on time, a foothold in it, born of a social unity, and through that a historical continuity, of which I have no notion, to which I can only bear astonished witness.

  My own ragged family tree more or less disappears from sight in different places in the nineteenth century – some of my ancestors came from Scotland, some from Denmark and Hungary, some from England. The odd, mythical drift leads further back, to a medieval Cornish church register; to France, through the resonance of a beautiful Huguenot name; then further afield again, to the rumoured wreck of a Portuguese galleon off the coast of fifteenth-century Jamaica and the subsequent settlement in Kingston of a community of Sephardic Jews. These threads are mere secondhand stories for me, pretty fragments of exotica.

  As we sit watching the gypsy children singing and dancing, my friend Enrico leans over and nods at Elena and the Rom.

  ‘You’ll never in your life have been in the presence of two such different groups of people,’ he says quietly.

  But later, it occurs to me that, in a certain way, this is not right. What Elena de Barbarin and the Rom children have in common, what has been denied to me, is a powerful sense of who they are that is rooted in their clan, their lineage, their bloodline. My own feeble gleanings of emigrations and the exigencies of an empire that cast its people all around the earth, until they became, in name at least, citizens of other cultures, leave me, not Elena, not the gypsy children, without a home, without a name or ancient family.

  Commuters

  ARTURO MARCON is small, but perfectly formed – a wiry, muscular man, with a square face, white hair and a brisk, grey moustache. His large, black-framed spectacles give even more weight to his commanding head. Arturo is sixty-nine years old and walks with the confident strut of a general. His wife Lucia is shorter still and considerably wider. Her thin hair is dyed a surprising, dense red that has no equivalent in nature; her lost eyebrows have been forcefully redefined; her skin, tanned over decades of sea wind and beach sun, is heavily wrinkled. She is a year younger than her husband, though she looks fifteen years older. In this, they are a typical Venetian couple of the older generation: the man, limber-fit after a lifetime of rowing, of jumping on and off boats, of manhandling cargo; the woman, spreading widely sideways, despite her decades of cleaning and cooking, and now waddling, comfortably, to a standstill.

  Their family is Venetian from as far back as anyone knows. Lucia, gossiping with me one day, stops abruptly in mid-sentence:

  ‘Madonna! I find it hard not to speak dialect when I’m talking like this!’

  What she means is that gossip is intimate talk; friends gossip and it requires a degree of trust. One’s own argot is the natural place for that kind of confidence, and while to Lucia the Italian language is public, official and formal, Venetian is private and personal and expresses who she really is and what she wants to say. All of this I understand very well, spending my days as I do, attempting to be myself in a language that is not my own.

  In the streets of Venice there are many people like the Marcons. If you look, you will see them. They often share the same melancholy secret: at the end of the day, these Venetians button up their jackets, shoulder their bags, and head for the bus station at Piazzale Roma. These Venetians sleep elsewhere.

  Arturo and Lucia live in an apartment in a modern block in Marghera, on the mainland. Every morning they get up, dress, drink their coffee and leave the house. They walk down the street to the bus stop through a landscape of 1970s developments. The traffic at this time – half-past seven – is heavy on the busy main road. They wait patiently at the bus stop, like all the other workers, except that they are ten years past retirement age and have a different, rugged, homely look, more fisherman than commuter. But commuters they are. Arturo and Lucia commute daily to their home. They, like many Venetians, have been denied a basic right – to lay their heads down in their own home – by the greed of landlords, hungry for the tourist rentals that bring in much higher rates than residential lets, and the vertiginous ascent of real estate prices.

  Ask them, and they will tell you that they dream of living their last years back home. Not on this terraferma, among the fores
tieri – the forest dwellers, the landlubbers – but out there, in their city on water. Venice is their village, their place.

  Arturo and Lucia left twenty years ago when yet another disastrous high water flooded their apartment.

  ‘I couldn’t take it any more,’ Arturo tells me. ‘I said to Lucia: “That’s enough! We’re leaving. We’ll get a well-built, dry new house on terraferma.”’

  The bus moves quickly across the causeway which links Venice to the mainland. Arturo, through his huge spectacles, follows the progress of a lone rower, moving in his sandolo across to Campalto. He knows the boy; it’s Andrea Zen, Franco’s grandson. He’s training for the regatta next weekend. He needs to improve that grip if he wants to have a chance of winning.

  The bus passes the petrol station and slows into the one-way system of Piazzale Roma. It comes to a standstill among the ranks of other buses, and the office workers, the tourism servicers, the cleaners, the trinket-sellers, the waiters all pile out and Lucia and Arturo step down too. The Marcons’ job is, after all, perhaps more specialized than Venice. Their job is being Venetian.

  Together, they walk eastward. Lucia will spend the morning cooking and cleaning for her brother who lives alone near the Arsenale. Arturo will go to the boat club, where he is a stalwart and elder, and coaches the younger members in their rowing skills. When he is not out in a boat, he sits on the waterfront with the other members, surveying the great, glittering panorama of his city, and arguing about who should be the next club president.

  Like all ageing migrants, these displaced Venetians yearn for home and gather in their little ghettos. But uniquely, perhaps, they have been forced into a sort of halfway existence in which they partake of, but do not fully possess, their city. Were they not so solid, you might think that they are ghosts. Like ghosts, they walk down the narrow streets, between the chic and gleaming art galleries, where there were once (not long ago – five, ten years) butchers and bakers, a dairy, a greengrocer. They have, in a way, been condemned to the status of tourist in their own city. It is hard to imagine how foreign these shiny, modern outlets must seem, how very far from home.