Eating With the Angels (8 page)

He ate at all the nice restaurants, went to all the right parties and was the sort of person so aware of what you should do to fit in that he never quite managed it himself. I’d picked that desperation up in him the first time we met and it rang a nasty little bell inside me too, making me feel like the gawky schoolgirl I had once been and had no interest in being again.

Actually, when I came to think about it, standing there at the bar
at Do’ Mori, my cheeks flushed, palms sweating and heart thumping so loudly in my chest my temples hummed, I couldn’t quite remember how I knew all this. About Ty. I had only met him a couple of times, no more than in passing really. And the last time I had seen him he had wanted to talk to me about something but I had cleverly fobbed him off by going to the bathroom halfway through the conversation.

‘Darling,’ Ty said, to my horror putting his arms around me. ‘You look so pale.’

I looked over at Signora Marinello who had a funny expression on her face, not disappointment — I can recognise that from a hundred paces, I’ve had a lifetime of that — but not something a million miles away either.

‘Try the Giudecca,’ she said to me, and with that I wrenched myself out of Ty Wheatley’s grasp and fled.

The Giudecca was the long thin island at the south of the lagoon known best, according to the sweating tourist squashed up against me on the vaporetto, for its fading palaces and gardens and the glitzy Hotel Cipriani.

The boat dropped me at Il Redentore, the island’s principal monument, and once the crowd dispersed into the church and down the wide quayside facing back to the city I found myself standing on the concrete forecourt not having a clue what to do next.

My headache had gotten worse: it pulsed behind my eyes like an overworked air-conditioning unit. A mild breeze was chilling my body — I was cold despite the warm temperature — yet my face felt flushed and feverish. I didn’t know what was wrong with me but I felt completely unglued. It was an ugly sensation made all the more terrifying by the fact that I was sure Marco was the only cure and I didn’t know if I would ever see him again. It was clear the Giudecca was not a gondoliers’ hangout. The water was rough and choppy between the island and the city, there would be no gondolas out there, and the buildings had a run-down industrial feel about them.

My smelly tourist friend had been vomited off the vaporetto and poured into the church with the rest of the tourist commuters and the only other people still standing outside Il Redentore were two old
men, grandfathers I guessed, each with a sleeping toddler in a stroller. They were smoking and enjoying a lively debate, which continued as I approached.

‘Excuse me,’ I interrupted them. ‘Excuse me, do you have a moment?’

They stopped talking.

‘I was wondering if you could tell me where I might find any gondoliers?’

Could I have asked a more stupid question if I tried? I doubted it.

‘No, no, I don’t mean any gondolier,’ I continued in a panic as the grandfathers exchanged a look that I was pretty sure meant a finger circling an ear was soon to follow.

‘Just one, really,’ I carried on idiotically. ‘No, definitely! One, definitely! One gondolier.’ The grandfathers pushed their strollers around in unison and started to move at a sprightly gait away from me. ‘Marco,’ I cried. ‘Do you know him? It’s just that —’ but they were gone.

The splodge of wet galoshes on the ground drew my attention to a dark and crinkly skinned fisherman who was walking along the wharf from the opposite direction. He had frazzled grey hair and carried a pail full of twitching fish tails, driving his mutt of a big black dog to distraction.

I approached him more carefully than I had the grandfathers. Calling out before I got too close. ‘Excuse me,’ I called. ‘Do you know where I could find Marco, the gondolier?’

‘
Gondolière
?’ He at least acknowledged my question. I couldn’t even see his eyes; his skin was wrinkled into so many folds it covered them completely. But he threw back his head so he could get a good look at me, slowly checked me out, then pointed towards the other side of the island. ‘
Squero
,’ he said, as I heard a fish tail slap against the side of his pail making his dog whine with longing. ‘Boatyard. Boats.’

I walked briskly along until I found an alleyway that went 
through to the other side, emerging onto a narrower, shabbier quay that faced out to the wider lagoon.

‘Squero?’ I asked an ancient, shrivelled woman sitting outside her crumbling apartment, the window box next to her full to overflowing with the crisp brown heads of long-dead flowers. She pointed to my right and off I went, not really knowing what I was looking for until I came upon the wide opening of what looked like an old factory. When I looked in I saw the skeleton of a gondola, pale and naked like the bones of a slender whale, being worked on by a silver-haired man in a red polo shirt.

‘Hello?’ I called.

He looked up, carefully placed his tools on the workbench next to him and walked over to me. Up close, I saw he was not as old as his hair would have had me believe. Fifty, maybe, I thought, or even late 40s. And his eyes were a shade of pale green so clear they made me shiver. I couldn’t stop looking at them. He smiled and his crow’s feet winked at me. His skin was sun-darkened and pleasantly wrinkled.

‘I’m looking for Marco,’ I said. ‘Do you know where I can find him?’

‘Luca,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ I was flustered; that headache was killing me. ‘Connie. Connie Farrell. Pleased to meet you too.’ I grasped the outstretched hand and it felt warm and strong. I could feel the calluses on his palm and my head was suddenly filled with the faint scent of lemons. He was having a very odd effect on me. I felt floaty and strange. I’d never taken Ecstasy — Emmet had abused enough drugs for both of us — but I wondered if this was what it felt like. My innards felt kind of warm, despite the fact my skin still felt the ache of a chill, and my head was full of puffy clouds.

‘Come in, Connie,’ he said, and although his voice was sort of muffled, I thought he too spoke perfect English. I could not detect one trace of an Italian accent. Dazed, I followed him into the
workshop and over to the skeleton of the half-built gondola.

He picked up his tools — they looked like gynaecological instruments to me — and said: ‘Do you mind?’

I nodded dopily, hoping like hell I wasn’t agreeing to an internal examination. I had a terrible thirst that raged from the pit of my stomach up through my chest to my throat and my mouth, leaving my tongue stuck to the roof. I wanted desperately to ask for a glass of water but couldn’t find the words.

Luca had picked up a chisel and turned back to his boat, gently chipping at it, smoothing the lip of the gondola — although it already looked pretty level to me.

‘It’s a dying art, you know,’ he said, his back to me, as I watched the outline of his ribs under his red shirt, just the faintest patches of sweat under his armpits, the scent of citrus still hanging in the air. ‘Gondola-making. There are only three of us left.’ He ran his hands over the stretch of wood he’d just been working on, back and forth, back and forth, as though his skin itself might soothe the splinters. ‘Nobody cares about the boats any more. It’s all about the money.’

The way he leaned over the gondola, his tools in his hands, his arms outstretched reminded me of a pool player, of Paul Newman in
Cool Hand Luke
with that silver hair, nutty skin and those piercing eyes.

‘Hard to believe only 50 years ago most people got around this city rowing,’ he said, his voice lapping at me like the waters of the Grand Canal against the sunken walls of the Gritti Palace. ‘Sure, the tourists go for a spin these days but if you wanted to go from here to Burano in a gondola, the way you might have done back then?’ He crouched down so his eye was level with his handiwork. ‘Not a chance,’ he answered himself, standing up again. ‘And you want to know why? Because to be able to do that, the gondolier would have to know how to row properly and how to master and manage his boat. And he would have had to come to me and work with me to create a gondola in the first place that could actually make it to
Burano. In good time. Without killing him in the process. He would have had to be interested from the very beginning. In the gondola.’

It was as though we had picked up the threads of some earlier conversation, the way his voice just kept sailing smoothly along through the peaks and troughs of his words. It was mesmerising, lulling me into some sense of, I don’t what, but I was pretty happy just standing there listening. Plus, my tongue was still stuck to the roof of my mouth, which kind of stymied my chances of joining in anyway.

‘So there are only three of us left who know how to make boats the old way now — and two of them are nearly past it — and not among us can we find a single apprentice who is interested in learning what we have to teach about the craft. So, the tradition is already lost. It’s a tragedy. Simple as that. It’s a goddamn tragedy. Don’t you think?’

He stopped what he was doing, and turned around to look at me. I nodded as vigorously as I could without falling over. My bones felt like dead weights. I blinked to make sure I still had some sort of control.

‘I mean, they’re not just any boats, they’re gondolas!’ He had gone back to work. ‘They’re the symbol of Venice, for crissakes, our emblem, our logo. You see them in pictures painted a thousand years ago and they are still the same today as they were then. They’re what stop us from being a big wet amusement park for fat tourists who for the most part don’t spend more than one precious day of their whole miserable lives here. But the gondola’s era is over. It’s finished.
Finito
. And every now and then someone stands up and asks, ‘Why is this tradition dying out?’ but nobody does a goddamned thing about it. Our sons are still more interested in making 100 euro an hour paddling around that swimming pool of a canal than they are protecting a tradition that’s survived 10 centuries but won’t last another two decades. And when it has gone, when it has died out, there will be such a hue and cry, let me tell you, it’ll be all “Oh, how could they?” and “If only somebody had done something.” And you
know what else, once these beautiful boats have gone you may as well sink the whole damn city or drain it dry and stick taxi cabs on every corner because once the gondola has disappeared we’re just the same as every other tourist town on the planet.’

He put his tools down again and stood up, stretching his back and lifting his arm to wipe the sweat off his brow, catching sight of me as he did. He wore faded blue jeans and had narrow hips and broad shoulders that were tight with muscle. He wasn’t bitter. I could tell that. But there was a sorrow in him, a disenchantment that resonated in me in ways I could not understand.

I thought about Marco and his cheap gondolas from Switzerland. It made sense to me now why talk of them had irked me so much. I believed in tradition too. I just hadn’t known it.

‘I’m sorry,’ Luca said. ‘Didn’t mean to get on my soap box.’

I swayed slightly on my feet.

‘Hey,’ he cried, alarmed, leaping forward and grabbing my elbow. ‘Are you all right? Connie? Is there anything I can get you?’

‘A glass of water,’ I croaked. ‘Could I have a glass of water?’ Not so much as a please or thank you.

‘I’m sorry, I should have asked if you wanted anything,’ he said. ‘You looked kind of parched when you arrived. Here, come outside, get some fresh air. I was just about to take a break anyway.’

He led me back out to the opening of the workshop and pulled two rickety chairs into the shade then disappeared inside again, returning with a bottle of water and two glasses.

I gulped down the first glass of water he poured me like I’d been in the desert for 40 days, then drained a second, a third and a fourth, yet still felt as dry as a chip, that odd taste penetrating my cheeks with an acridness I couldn’t place.

‘That’s quite some thirst you have there,’ Luca said, leaning back in his chair. ‘So, want to tell me what’s happening?’

‘I’m on the world’s worst second honeymoon,’ I found myself saying. My tongue was obviously no longer stuck to the roof of my
mouth. The water had loosened it. ‘My husband Tom and I have been going through a bit of a down time and so he didn’t come with me. He’s at home in New York. So, it’s just been me here on my own in your big wet amusement park, which believe me is not ideal when you’re having a second honeymoon on your own, even with gondolas.’

Luca laughed and my chill started to evaporate.

‘He wants to have children, I mean that’s basically the problem, I guess, when I think about it, but I’m just not sure.’ So, my tongue had not only come unstuck, it was now flapping about in the breeze, blowing any which way it wanted.

‘The thing is, I know it’s a cliché and I know plenty women like me are probably all lamenting the same stupid thing but I don’t know what I want these days. I know what everyone else wants. I know what everyone else wants me to want. Just not me. I have a great job and I love where I live, I really do “heart” New York, but everything else in the equation doesn’t seem to add up.’

‘What’s the job?’ Luca asked.

‘I write restaurant reviews for the
Village Voice
,’ I said, my aching chest swelling with pride the way it always did when I heard myself saying those words. ‘I’m a critic.’

Luca raised his eyebrows. ‘So you know about food.’

‘Uh-huh,’ I answered. ‘I’m an eating machine.’

He laughed again and I smiled along with him. ‘Sounds like you should be the happiest woman on the planet.’

‘Well, work’s not everything,’ I surprised myself by saying, because my job meant the world to me. ‘I should be thinking about having a family but I have a lousy mother so I guess I’m scared I’ll end up being one myself.’

‘Just about every woman I’ve ever met has survived a lousy mother,’ Luca said matter-of-factly, staring out across the lagoon, ‘and gone on to be a good one herself. Makes you think maybe all those mothers weren’t so lousy in the first place.’

‘Puh-leease,’ I felt forced to point out. ‘My mother told me she
was changing the name of her dog to Connie because she wanted to try calling out that name and for once have someone pay her some attention.’

Luca laughed again and filled my glass with water. ‘So,’ he said. ‘Marco.’

‘You know him?’ I asked. In truth, the fire in my loins for Marco had been doused somewhat by the man sitting next to me and I could not for the life of me tell you why. I mean all I knew about him was that he had a heart full of passion for something that he didn’t believe anyone else cared about, which struck a chord with me. But he certainly didn’t radiate hot sex like my gondolier.

‘Oh, I know Marco all right,’ said Luca. ‘Where did he take you?’

‘Do’ Mori,’ I said, ‘for cichetti.’

‘You have the polpette?’ he wanted to know.

‘Did I heck,’ I told him, ‘and the tuna and the sardines and Signora Marinello’s fresh bread with fried shrimp and zucchini.’

‘Ah,’ Luca sighed appreciatively. ‘Signora Marinello. And then where?’

‘We went to Bentigodi in the Cannaregio and I had more sardines with pine nuts and breadcrumbs and fondi, my God, the most exquisite artichoke hearts. Have you been there?’