To the Wedding

29

Water. Stagnant salt water, which protects the life of a city. Without it the city would drown in the high sea. For centuries Venice has learnt to live with the lagoon and its shifting sands, its dykes, its narrow channels for navigation, its salt and its strange pallor.

Zdena is sitting high above the water on the top deck of a motonave which has just cast off and is bound for Chioggia, forty kilometres to the southeast. Her gabardine coat is folded in a neat pile on her suitcase, placed on the bench beside her. She is wearing sunglasses, for the lagoon is pitilessly reflecting the hot sun.

Along the quayside, just beneath her, stroll thousands of tourists. Seen from above, they form, as they drift, two opposing currents, one going towards the Doges’ Palace, bone-white in the sunlight with its naked statues and carved loggias, and the other current flowing east past the notorious Hotel Danieli, whose green shutters and gothic windows hide salons and staircases decorated in gold and wine-red.

Although her skin is pale and her striped dress looks foreign, Zdena does not have the air of a tourist. She gives the impression of having taken this boat many times. Her small actions and gestures are all deliberate — as though she knows precisely what she is doing and where she is going. A ship’s officer who has noticed her because, with her high cheekbones and sad eyes, she is pretty, and, like himself, no longer young, wonders whether she’s a foreign engineer — on her way to inspect one of the old salt refineries — there is talk of them being renovated.

At present she is taking objects one by one out of her handbag and placing them methodically on her lap or on her folded coat. As the motonave gathers a little speed, a breeze stirs her hair so that one of her ears becomes naked like a boy’s. Perps she’s not an engineer, the officer in his immaculate white uniform decides, maybe she’s a dietician or a physiotherapist.

She takes out of her bag a keyring with a keepsake of a silver bear attached. A black diary. A small packet of Kleenex. A headscarf all screwed up. A stub of a pencil. An eraser. Some walnuts. From time to time she raises her head to take in the receding waterline of the city. A line like a signature known across the entire world. Venezia!

Beyond the Doges’ Palace soars the tall brick campanile on the Piazza San Marco. The previous tower constructed there foundered and collapsed in 1902, yet miraculously no one was hurt.

Beyond the San Giorgio Maggiore, on the island of Giudecca, far away, something is catching the light on the low wide dome of the Church of the Redeemer. It flashes like a message. A loose sheet of metal? Or the sun playing with the water somewhere? In its time, the Church of the Redeemer was a kind of tama, if I may compare such a noble edifice with the humble objects I sell.

It was planned in 1576, the result of a vow. Venice was being devastated by The Plague. A third of the population had already agonised and died. The Plague took the young as well as the old. Gruesome men, dressed as birds of prey and carrying a stick, crossed the bridges of the canals going from infirmary to infirmary. They were rumoured to be doctors who, to avoid contagion, dressed themselves from head to foot in oiled cloth or tarpaulin and wore black hats, spectacles, earpads, gloves, boots and, over their mouths, a contraption like a giant bird’s beak. They picked their way between the shivering bodies of the dying and, lifting up a blanket here or there with their stick, they sprinkled from their beaks on to the plague-ridden their powders and dried leaves. At night, like real birds, even vultures, the plague doctors vanished.

The vow, made in 1576, was that, if Christ in his mercy spared the rest of the population, Venice would build him another legendary church. Straightaway the City Council asked the great architect Palladio to begin drawing. The masons began cutting stones. Half the population survived. Four years later Palladio himself died. But the work went on and the church, built on a green field on the island of the Jews, the most beautiful church ever conceived by Palladio, was finished in 1592.

Zdena takes from her bag a hairbrush with minute white globules on the end of its metal darts, and draws it once through her hair before placing it on her coat. Next, her new Slovak passport. Ninon’s last letter. A purse she has set aside for Italian money with its fantastic currency of hundreds of thousands. A packet of aspirins. A powder compact. A photo of Ninon at school.

Until recently, the annual problem for Venice was drinking water. The wells and cisterns often went dry. And so water had to be brought in barges across the lagoon from the river Brenta. The barges followed the same lane through the shallow salt waters as the motonave is now slowly navigating. But the water barges came in the opposite direction.

Again Zdena raises her head, touches her sunglasses and gazes towards the southwest. The motonave is going too slowly to create a wake. The water astern simply undulates, and in it the seaweed moves like hair. The imposing Santa Maria della Salute, built opposite the Doges’ Palace on the very tip of the Island of the Trinity, is now the size of Zdena’s cigarette lighter laid flat on the Kleenex packet.

I might call the Salute too a tama.

Forty years after Palladio’s death, The Plague returned to the city of Venice. Within sixteen months fifty thousand people had died, their corpses burnt or ferried across the waters. Then, for a moment, the epidemic seemed to abate: a temporary reprieve. Hastily the authorities organised a competition for the design of another church and vowed that if the city was again spared, this new church would stand at the very entrance to Venice and its Grand Canal as a thanksgiving!

Baldassare Longhena, who won the competition, arranged an imposing monument with two domed octagonal rotundas, and with carved daylights and buttresses like gigantic abalone shells.

Yet to build this massive baroque tama on the very tip of the island so that it would be the first and last thing that any visitor coming across the water to the city would see, it was necessary to reinforce and give support to the soil. Otherwise the whole edifice ran the risk of drowning. So a million posts of oak and larch and elder were driven into the earth to make a wooden raft to support the stone building.

Today the Venetians call the Salute’s whorled buttresses her orecchioni, her big ears.

A comb. A lipstick. A green notebook. A shopping list. A pair of earrings. Some traveller’s checks. On this journey to her daughter’s wedding, Zdena wants everything to be tidily arranged and cared for. The contents of her handbag are the last touch. Like this she hopes that everything about herself will have a clear, crisp outline, which, when she meets her daughter, will offer and express confidence. In her own way Zdena arranges for the same reasons as Baldassare Longhena and Palladio.

The ship’s officer, more and more intrigued by the behaviour of the foreign woman, strolls past her twice trying to make up his mind. The first time he smiled at her, but her response was to go to the ship’s railing and, holding her handbag upside down, shake it. Three gulls swooped near and their shrieks trailed behind them. Then they disappeared and she came back to her seat.

It’s hot, isn’t it, Signora?

Sorry, no Italian me, she replies in her inappropriately expressive voice.

You speak English?

Too hot for English …

Meticulously, Zdena puts things back into the bag. The ship is surrounded by the quiet and stillness of the lagoon, just as a person who leaves home on an early summer morning is surrounded by a new and endless day. The powder compact. The black diary. The stub of pencil. The Italian money.

The ship is sailing away even from me.

On the first pages of the diary, which she didn’t open, is written a note for Zdena’s dictionary. Her handwriting is small and very upright as if the letters were numerals:

“K. Kautsky. Karl. Born 1854 Prague. (Looked for his house but couldn’t find it.) A man’s long life of unceasing political struggle against exploitation, colonialism, war. (He had a beard like they all did.) Remained steadfast in his belief that History can have a sense. Marxist. (Was Engels’s secretary.) During his life he had to flee into exile at least four times. (Four times he had to begin again.) When he was in his sixties, he laboriously came to the conclusion that violent revolution was unnecessary. In 1919 Lenin called him a renegade. After 1947 in our country (he died in 1938, exiled in Amsterdam) his name became synonymous with cowardice, craven ambition and counterrevolutionary plotting. To be bracketed with Kautsky by the State Prosecutor was tantamount to a demand for a death sentence.”

The motonave is out of my hearing, and the water makes no noise at all. All is silence now.

On a later page of the same diary Zdena has copied out an extract from an article she read in a newspaper. At the top of the page, in capital letters, written in pencil, is the word Pain.

“Those treated for the illness, states a doctor, are frequently not treated for their suffering and pain. Yet physical pain produces anguish which in turn increases the pain. The infections and parasites which the body cannot resist when SIDA has declared itself, provoke hellish itchings, nausea, cramps of the stomach, open sores in the mouth, migraines following radiotherapies, shooting pains along the legs, and all these, accompanied by a crippling fatigue, strike one after the other; consequently they shut every horizon and prevent the sick person from thinking about anything else — as well-meaning advisors sometimes recommend. Pain cuts off, isolates and paralyses. It also produces a feeling of total failure and defeat. Often, in order for the pain of SIDA patients to be taken account of, their suffering has to reach such a paroxysm that it disturbs other patients and only then are steps taken to alleviate it …”

May I ask your mission, Signora?

Blow up your ship!

Ha! Ha! The Signora has a fine sense of humour.

The ship’s officer waits and then abruptly leaves as if he has remembered something he has to do.

Her handbag arranged, Zdena goes to the railing and gazes into the still lagoon water that reflects nothing. The ship, changing direction, creates a momentary breeze which lifts a lock of hair from her damp forehead.

She walks to the bows and waits there, letting the breeze cool her face; later she returns to her bench.

There, she opens her bag, which is now in perfect order, and finds the diary and the pencil stub. On the page for June 6 she writes in her upright handwriting: Let these days never end, let them be long like centuries!