The Politics of Washing (12 page)

So, in these still, elegant and understated spaces 300 teenagers sit for hours on end, tackling big concepts and boring, repetitive tasks. There must be days when they are overwhelmed with inertia in this environment which could not be more different from the small-scale, two-dimensional, constantly moving virtual world of the internet in
which they are also growing up – both imaginatively and conceptually. The speed and colour and noise of the modern media must seem to them so terribly absent in these echoing, monochrome halls. When Michael gets home from school and flops down in front of the computer, his relief is practically audible. School can be horribly tedious at times and also very, very difficult. Little account is taken of individual expression or spontaneous creativity in the study programmes; you either like it, lump it, or get out.

At the same time, I can see that the young people who survive these places (and many don’t last the course, peeling off to other, less heroic but more forgiving institutions) are astonishingly knowledgeable: they have great swathes of
The Odyssey
by heart, they can quote you Dante and translate Ovid without batting an eyelid. They are the last remaining standard bearers of a 2,500-year-old culture and there is, for me, both value and a kind of crazy nobility in that.

And then there’s the question of boredom. I hang on to the conviction that we need the grey spaces in our days; that without the pauses, the daydreaming, the absences, the silence, there is nowhere for imagination and meditative thought to take root. If life is constantly played out on the same sensory plane, centimetres from a screen, if there are no changes of perspective, no refiguring of dimensions outside of a virtual arena, how can we ever be surprised into new or different ways of perceiving?

But how can I communicate to my son, who was born in 1998, that this extraordinary, archaic system, still and only just lumbering on like a dinosaur across Italy, might be of interest or in any way valuable to him? Of course, when parents say just about anything to their adolescent children, it is, by definition, like word coming through from the Jurassic. This has always been the case, but it is clear to me, all the same, that at this particular point in history the gap between the generations is especially yawning.

When I first went to university in 1981, I stood, like a medieval clerk, at high wooden desks in the library and thumbed through dogeared cards in a long wooden drawer, with copper half-moon handles, that were marked Ab – Acc, in order to track down the book I needed.

In 1985, when I returned to postgraduate studies, the system had changed and I learned how to slide brittle squares of plastic into a mini projector in order to access the same information.

By the time I came to spend a year in a third university, in 1989, I sat down in front of a computer screen. My early adult years were set against the backdrop of a revolution I didn’t know was happening. Now, I am, in the lingo, an ‘immigrant’; without going anywhere, I have become a foreigner in the country of the computer. Dorothy has not gone to Oz: Oz has come to Dorothy. And, by an accident of history, I will never entirely be part of the future.

Poor Michael. Poor me. Surely this can only be a terrible handicap to a mother, when it comes to communicating with her fully naturalized-computerized children? Or perhaps not. Might it be both Michael’s and my good fortune that I have found myself free-falling down the rabbit hole of history, one minute straining to get through the wrong-sized door, the next reaching as high as I can, but not high enough, for the antidote on the glass table? I am in the privileged if uncomfortable position of being on the cusp of something. This means that I can look both backwards and forwards in time. Can I start by pointing out to Michael the sort of books he most enjoys reading, the computer games he loves to play? Age of Empire, Age of Mythology, the Roman Mysteries, cartoon versions of the Greek myths, of the Odyssey, the Iliad and the Percy Jackson series in which the son of Poseidon is to be found combating evil in present day North America.

The popular culture my son is lapping up has, as its direct lineage, the civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean. Both the languages he speaks (English and Italian) are intricately laced through with the meanings, metaphors and rhythms of thought of those ‘dead’ cultures. The counterpoint of these and all the other many cultures that make Michael what he is, and who he will become, create a rich music.

So what is this furious, dogged resistance of Michael’s to learning Latin and Greek? A lot of it is about growing up: viscerally resisting an education system that bulldozes across the landscapes of childhood, formalizing myth into history, play into drudgery. He is right to be suspicious: the juggernauts of outmoded traditions and institutions
flatten many children. Five years at the Liceo Classico strikes me as a sort of peculiarly protracted initiation rite. If you survive its
brutality
, then you come out an adult, able to face hard, tedious work and, perhaps, to turn it into something better and bigger. I wonder whether it is preferable to undergo five years of boredom interlaced with panic and despair than to live through a week in the jungle, having your body lacerated by the juice of poisonous plants.

In the meantime, Michael has his own take on the matter.

‘I know what you would say about those dead languages, Mum,’ he tells me some time into his relentless first term at the Liceo Classico. ‘You’d say that if aliens landed on earth, they would communicate with us in ancient Greek. But you’re wrong, because the nearest habitable planet is 500 light years from earth, so they will have been observing us in Tudor times, which means that what they’ll actually say when they arrive is: “Hail, sire!” ’

But, having accepted the spirit if not the accuracy of Michael’s creative physics, this isn’t right either: travellers in sixteenth-century Europe would, in fact, have used Latin as their lingua franca; a ‘Hail, sire!’ was much less likely to have been understood than the Roman greeting ‘Salve!’

All of which goes to prove, once again, that history and time have wonderful ways of slipping sideways, backwards and forwards, and that Michael, when he finally comes face to face with his Martian, might have to start thinking it through all over again.

The historian Theodore Zeldin thinks that boredom has taken over from loneliness in the modern consciousness. I wish neither boredom nor loneliness on anyone, but mental repose and solitude are another matter. Turning back and trying to wade against the tide of history is a hopeless enterprise, just as being seduced by its great forward surge can also bring disaster, but I wonder if we could only harness as a metaphor and manifesto this ancient, improbable Venice, built such a long time ago, out of long dead necessities, to our
future
good?

There must be room in our vision of the future for a world of changing perspectives – where an individual can move from the virtual to the actual, from history to the present day; where, emerging
from the maze-like networks of the internet, a child can come out into the open and see, ahead, across space, that great white church and say – ‘Ah …’

W
HEN MY WASHING
machine breaks down, Oscar arrives. He is a small, elderly man, in a perfectly laundered white shirt, trousers and jacket and shining shoes. He moves in a fragrant cloud of aftershave and brings with him his
tecnico
– the electrician – a young man with a wry smile, whose clothes, though neat, are workers’ clothes and, unlike Oscar’s, show some signs of use.

The two men edge gingerly into our narrow strip of kitchen. Having examined the machine, the
tecnico
starts to explain to me why we will need to get a new one. Oscar breaks in.

‘Oh no. You need to speak with the landlord. The signora is renting the house. And anyway, she is not Venetian.’

‘All the same,’ I smile, ‘I still need a washing machine.’

Oscar smiles brightly, uncomprehendingly, back.

The new machine is to be delivered next week. The main landing stage closest to our house is on the Grand Canal, which is a ten-minute walk away. The machine will have to be unloaded from a boat and then trundled to Calle del Vin on a trolley. Once at number 3460 it must be transported up the four flights of stairs to our apartment. It will be a small miracle of muscle power and logistics if this large piece of white goods ever gets to our kitchen.

When the street door bell rings, I buzz in the delivery men. Then, I open the door of the flat and wait. Many minutes later and still two floors down, I hear the sounds of extreme effort: grunting and hard breathing. Eventually, the gleaming new washing machine appears around the corner, on the landing below, in the arms of the largest human being I have ever seen. Helping him with the fancier footwork is a second man, the size of a leprechaun.

When at last this unlikely couple manages to manoeuvre the
washing machine through our front door and into the kitchen, the big man is a red mountain of fleshy, sweating effort. As they plumb it in, they chat away to me, but in such a dense Venetian dialect that I can only smile and nod and hazard a guess at what they might be saying.

Next, they drag the old machine into the narrow hall and leave it blocking the front door, in a growing pool of water that is dripping from the disconnected tube.

‘All right,’ they say. ‘Goodbye, Signora,’ and start off down the stairs.

‘But,’ I call at their disappearing backs, ‘what about this?’ – waving hopelessly at the abandoned machine – ‘you’re going to take it away, aren’t you?’

The fat man turns around again and grins up at me from the landing below.

‘Oh no, Signora. It only says: “consignment” on our instructions. That’s your problem.’

And he turns his great, drenched back on me and stumps heavily away, his miniature side-kick skittering close behind.

I stand at the door for a second then sprint back into the flat to check the paperwork. There it is: ‘previous appliance to be removed’. I leap into action, squeeze past the jettisoned washing machine in the hall, and race, three steps at a time, down the stairs and out into the street. I fly along the
calle
, dodging tottery old ladies and buggies and dogs, breathless, desperate, until I have almost reached the quay on the Grand Canal and see – thank God – the massive hulk of the delivery man and his scampering partner about to get back on their boat.

‘Hey, hey!’ I gasp, waving the form wildly at them, ‘it says you have to take the old one away, too.’

The fat man registers neither surprise, nor irritation.

‘Oh yes,’ he says, glancing at the paper. ‘All right then,’ and turns back towards my house. It was, it seems, at least worth a try.

At the Friday market there is a stall run by farmers who bring their produce by boat from one of the market garden islands of the Venetian Lagoon. A heavily built man in his forties with a wide, mild, ingenuous
face and a surprisingly high voice serves the customers and a smiling woman, perhaps his wife, works alongside him.

Sitting a metre or so behind the stall is another man, in his sixties, and strikingly like the younger man at front of house. He straddles a small, three-legged stool and has, next to him, a stack of crates filled with artichokes and a plastic washing-up bowl of water. He takes an artichoke from a crate and, with his sharp knife, quickly and efficiently pares the dark, stringy leaves from the tender lower part of the flower. Then he drops the cream disc of flesh into the clean water and throws the leaves into a bin.

Having spent years dutifully gnawing minuscule bits of artichoke flesh off woody leaves, in the French way, I relish this peremptory Italian rejection of all that nonsense, cutting to the quick and the best part of the plant.

The farmers from the island sell a limited number of vegetables – only those, in fact, that grow in their proper season, a few kilometres away from the city. Occasionally, they have something extra: heaps of sour, walnut-sized fruit that are, the younger man explains, a sort of plum. These clearly do not come from any kind of cultivated stock; they look like little, wild crab apples, and must have been gleaned from trees around the fields.

In the spring, they sell ungainly bunches of mimosa: masses of lovely, lollopy yellow heads, the stalks bound together with twigs. They will not sit up in any kind of container and shed their fluffy blooms within hours, but I buy them all the same.

There are often several people waiting to buy from the farmers, whose produce has been harvested that morning and carried the shortest of distances to market. But even if there is a long queue, the procedure remains the same: the fluty-voiced son and his smiling wife serve, while the father sits, legs planted wide apart, peacefully paring artichokes.

Once, soon after my arrival, I say to the son: ‘So, you have a farm on the island?’

He looks at me, visibly surprised, and says: ‘We
are
the island.’

Although we are standing and talking together in the market
square, I see in that moment that this island farmer and I come from separate universes.

One day, when I am teaching English to a class of thirteen-year-olds at a local school, I ask them what their ambitions are. One boy, with a cocky smile, a slick of black hair and a satiny bomber jacket says:

‘I want to be a taxi driver.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I like the water.’

It takes me, bred in London as I was, some moments to understand what on earth he could mean.

I
N THE MORNING
, I need to do some shopping. It is cold outside and I rug up well in coat, hat, gloves and wellies and set off along the
calle
, pulling my pink flowery shopping trolley behind me.

The city is grey and tired. It registers nothing of the impending festivities: Christmas is always surprisingly absent from the streets of Venice. Walking along the
fondamenta
towards the boat stop, I slush through several inches of water and more is slopping up from the canal and running across the paving stones, like waves fanning out over the sand at the beach. Everyone in the
calle
is wading along very slowly, taking care not to splash water over the top of their boots. The
acqua alta
is high but not excessive and there is a strangely peaceful, slow motion feeling to it all; people are friendly and talkative, advising one another on the best routes to take from one place to another. It reminds me of those rare days in England when, after a heavy snowfall, there is the same good-humoured complicity of people united in the face of extreme weather. I stand and hesitate at a certain point, wondering which tack to take.