Once in Europa

Play Me Something

What is it that men have and women don’t and which is hard and long?

On your left is the city of Verona, announced the bus driver over the loudspeaker. Verona was conquered by the Ostrogoths, later by the Barbarians, and still later by the Austrians. In the fourteenth century Verona was the setting of the love story between Romeo and Juliet.

What is it that men have and women don’t and which is hard and long?

Tell us! demanded the boys.

Military service!

The flatness of the surrounding countryside was unfamiliar, making it difficult to judge distances. The coach was traveling fast, yet it seemed that time passed and nothing changed.

You see their maize? They’re two months ahead of us.

Finally the coach crossed the motor causeway to the Queen of Cities. In the vaporetto the men stood up very straight, as if on parade. This was because they were reminded of the first time they had left the village as conscripts in the army. The women lounged on the deck seats, and the younger ones pulled up their skirts to bare their legs to the sun. The vaporetto swayed first to one side and then to the other, like a woman pedaling very slowly on a bicycle.

How would you like a white suit like the ship’s captain?

Look at those insects!

Where?

There!

She’s been drinking!

He must change it every day.

Look! Along the water line.

Good God, yes, thousands of them.

They come up for the sun.

They’re crabs.

I’ve never seen crabs that size.

You don’t know what to look at.

I tell you, it looks like a flood.

You couldn’t make cheese here!

They disembarked at the Piazza San Marco and climbed the circular staircase of the Campanile. Afterwards the men were thirsty and insisted upon having a drink in one of the cafés on the piazza, which Napoleon called the largest ballroom in Europe.

It costs more to piss here than to drink a whole case at home!

Inside the café he noticed a poster announcing a festival organised by L’Unità, the Communist daily newspaper. Why not?

They crossed the Bridge of Sighs and stopped beneath a statue of Eve in the courtyard of the Doge’s Palace.

It’s a wife like that you need!

Later the men climbed onto the terrace of the Cathedral of San Marco to look at the horses.

The festival was to be held on the island of Giudecca. From the Doge’s Palace he could see the coloured lights decorating the buildings across the water and from time to time he heard a strain of music.

If you’re not at the bus station by two, we’ll know they drowned you.

He’s more adventurous than the rest of you men!

He sat in the stern of the vaporetto with his instrument case on his knees.

You’re not from here.

These words were addressed to him by a young woman with magenta lipstick and white sandals.

How is that?

You look too quiet.

You know what I have in this box?

She shook her head. She had glasses and her black hair was drawn back in a chignon.

A trombone.

It’s not true, she cried. Play it! Please, play something.

Not here on the boat, he said. Are you going to the festival?

If you brought it with you, you must have had the idea of playing it.

We came from the mountains. I didn’t want to leave it in the bus.

Around her neck was a white necklace.

You, do you live down here?

In Mestri, across the bay, where the oil tanks are. And you — I’d say you work on a farm.

How do you know?

I can smell the cows.

If she had been a man, he would have hit her.

What do you think I smell of?

Scent.

Correct. I work in a chemist’s shop.

One look at your hands told me you didn’t work with them.

Do you know what my father calls that?

No.

Infantile proletarianism.

He said nothing. Perhaps it was a Venetian expression.

The vaporetto was approaching the island. Hung from the first-storey windows on the far side of the piazza were banderolas with slogans printed on them. He could make out the hammer and sickle. As he stepped ashore, he held his instrument case tightly under his arm. The festival, he reminded himself, was organised by the Communist Party, but this did not mean there were no thieves there. He could spot them already.

Do you like dancing? she asked.

I can’t dance carrying this.

Give it to me.

She disappeared with his instrument case into one of the nearby buildings.

And if it’s stolen? he said, when she came back empty-handed.

Comrade, she replied, this is a workers’ festival, and workers do not steal from one another.

Peasants do! he said.

What is your name?

Bruno. And yours?

Marietta.

He held up his arm for her to take his hand. He did not dance like a man from here, she thought. He was more single-minded, as if, when dancing, he put everything else out of his mind.

What is it like on your mountain?

There are rhodos and wild goats.

Rhodos?

Little bushes of flowers.

Pink?

Blood-red.

How do they vote in your village?

For the right.

And you?

I vote for anyone who promises to raise the price of milk.

That isn’t good for the workers.

Milk is all we have to sell.

They were dancing round a plane tree in a corner of the piazza. In the tree was a loudspeaker, perched like an owl on one of the branches.

You came here alone? she asked.

With the whole band.

A band of friends?

The brass band of the village.

The next time the owl fell silent he proposed that they should have a drink. She guided him to a table beneath a gigantic portrait, drawn on a sheet and hung from the top windows of a house. The painted face was so large that even the flanks of the nose had been drawn with a six-inch housepainter’s brush. They looked up at it together.

Do you live alone? she asked.

Yes, I’ve lived alone for eight years. A fifth of my life.

She liked the way he hesitated before speaking, it was very deliberate, as if each time he answered one of her questions, he came to the door of a house, opened it to a visitor, and then spoke.

How many mirrors do you have at home? She asked this as if it were a schoolgirl’s riddle.

He paused to count.

One over the sink, one over the drinking trough outside.

She laughed. He poured out more white wine.

That’s Karl Marx, isn’t it? He nodded up at the sheet.

Marx was a great prophet. What do you see in the future? she asked.

The rich getting richer.

I mean your future.

Mine? Everything depends upon my health.

You don’t look sick to me.

If you’re sent to hospital when you are sick, your dog doesn’t look after your cows. I live alone.

She raised her glass to his. I think I could find you work in Mestri.

He was looking at her small feet, thinking: everything between a man and a woman is a question of how much you give up of one thing to have another — an exchange.

You are bound to be influenced by the property relations of which you are a part. Her voice was tender, as if she were explaining something intimate. The Kulaks sided with the bourgeoisie, and the little peasants with the petit bourgeoisie. You are wrong to think only about the price of milk.

She comes, he told himself, from this place of water and islands where there is no earth at all.

The fact is peasants will disappear, she continued, the future lies elsewhere.

I’d like to have children, he said.

You have to find a wife.

He poured out more wine.

You’d find a wife if you moved here.

I’d cut off my right hand rather than work in a factory.

All the men dancing there, she said, they’re nearly all factory workers.

He had never seen so many men in white shirts. They wore their shirts tied round their waists to show off their stomachs. They were as cunning as weasels. Their cuffs were rolled back only halfway up their forearms, as if they had just got out of bed.

Do they caress well? he asked.

Who?

The weasels over there.

Caress?

What a man should do to a woman.

Let’s dance, she said.

The owl was hooting a tango.

Who’s milking the cows tonight? she whispered.

Who am I dancing with?

Marietta is dancing with Bruno, she said, as he pulled her hand up and looked along their arms — as if taking aim with a gun.

As the tempo increased they advanced and turned more and more quickly. People began to watch them. His shirt and his heavy shoes announced he was from the country. But he danced well, they made a couple. Some of the bystanders began to clap in time with the music. It was like watching a duel — a duel between the paving stones and their four feet. How long would they keep it up?

Now they were walking down a narrow street, with old men on wicker chairs, and grandmothers playing with balloons to amuse their grandchildren. At the end of the street was suspended another gigantic portrait: a great domed head, like a beehive of thought, wearing glasses.

That’s Gramsci.

He put his arm round her shoulders so that she could lean her head against his damp flannel shirt.

Antonio Gramsci, she said. He taught us all.

You wouldn’t mistake him for a horse dealer! he said.

Past the portrait, they came to a cobbled quayside overlooking the lagoon toward Murano. In places grass had grown over the cobbles. He stared across the black water and she, carrying her sandals, wandered over to an abandoned gondola, moored by the corner of the Rio di Santa Eufemia. She sat down on the platform by the stern near the wooden oarlock. Sun and water had stripped the gondola of its paint, which was now wood grey. It must once have belonged to a wine merchant, for several demijohns lay on their sides in the prow.

Do you think they are empty? she asked him.

Instead of answering, he jumped into the gondola, which rocked violently. Making his way forward to the prow, he did his best to correct every lurch by leaning in the opposite direction, like someone dancing in a conga line.

Sit down, for God’s sake, sit down! she shouted.

She was crouching in the bottom of the boat. Its sides were smacking the water and splashing the air.

He picked up a demijohn and held it against the sky with one hand as if wringing the neck of a goose.

Empty! he boomed.

Sit! she shrieked. Sit!

This is how they found themselves lying on the rush mat in the bottom of the gondola. After a while the smacking of the water ceased and a quiet lapping took its place. Yet the calm did not last long. Soon the gondola was again lurching from side to side with water dripping from its gunwales and its staves thumping the lagoon.

If we capsize, can you swim? she whispered.

No.

Yes, Bruno, yes, yes, yes …

Afterwards they lay on their backs, panting.

Look at the stars. Don’t they make you feel small? she said.

The stars look down at us, she continued, and sometimes I think everything, everything except killing, everything takes so long because they are so far away.

His other hand was trailing in the water. Her teeth bit his ear.

The world changes so slowly.

His hand from the water grasped her breast.

One day there’ll be no more classes. I believe that, don’t you? she murmured and pulled his head down to her other breast.

There’s always been good and bad, he said.

We’re making progress, don’t you believe that?

All our ancestors asked the same thing, he said, you and I will never know in this life why it was made the way it is.

He entered her again. The gondola smacked the water and splashed the air.

When they crossed the narrow island to the pierhead, where the last vaporetto would stop, the music was over. Only a few drunks, immobile as statues, remained in the piazza. Marietta went to fetch his instrument case. He gazed across the lagoon. He could see the bell-tower they had climbed. The guide said it had toppled over at the beginning of the century. No roots. He remembered the date: 14th July 1902, the year of his father’s birth. To the right there were still lights in the Doge’s Palace. According to the guide, the Palace had been destroyed or partly destroyed by fire seven times. There had never been peace in that building. Too much power and no roots. One day it would be robbed and pillaged and after that it would be used as a hen house.

Marietta handed him his instrument case.

Play for me. Play me something.

He put the case down on the quayside. Out of his pocket he took a small mouth organ, and turning toward the Doge’s Palace, began to play. The music was speaking to him.

Before it is light—

She was staring at his back, relaxed and downcast like the back of a man peeing, except that his hands were to his mouth.

— Before it is light … when you’ve dressed and gone into the stable—

With her fingers she was touching the nape of his neck.

— the animals are lying there—

She was pressing her hand between his shoulder blades and could feel his lungs and the music in the roof of his mouth.

— lying there on beech leaves, and your tiredness like a child you have dragged from its sleep—

Her hand felt under the belt of his trousers.

— and through the window you see the span of the stars—

She noticed that one of his bootlaces was undone. She knelt down to tie it for him.

— the span of the stars into whose well we are thrown at birth like salt into water—

Neither of them noticed the vaporetto approaching the pierhead.

Come to Mestri, she sighed, come to Mestri. I’ll find you work.

The bus left at 3 A.M. Most of the band wanted to sleep. Some husbands put their heads on their wives’ shoulders, in other cases the wife leaned her head against her man. The lights were switched out one by one as the coach took the road for Verona. The young drummer sitting beside Bruno tried one last joke.

Do you know what hell is?

Do you?

Hell is where bottles have two holes and women have none.

[For Jacob]