The Politics of Washing (13 page)

‘If you come this way, Signora,’ a young man says courteously, pointing diagonally across the flooding
fondamenta
, ‘you’ll keep on the high section of the pavement.’

I thank him and wade cautiously across.

In this lull before Christmas the city is as empty as it can be of tourists. The few remaining visitors are bundled up in warm clothes like everybody else and no more disposed to linger in the cold than the locals. The relief of these emptier streets is surprisingly intense. It feels good that we are all here for daily life and spared the elaborate weavings in and out between meandering holidaymakers. I need to go to the bookshop, but have not taken into account that it is at a very low point in the city which is always quick to flood. A steel barrier has been slotted into place on the lower part of the shop’s doorway. These are used all over the city on ground floor premises, but it is clear that the proprietor was not sufficiently ahead of the game today because his shop is already full of water. I gather up my coat, shoulder my trolley, and high step over the barrier.

The scene I find inside reminds me of a famous photograph of Holland Park Library in London, taken immediately after the Blitz. In the ruined, rubbly shell of the bombed-out building, there are respectably homburg-ed and over-coated gentlemen browsing among the miraculously still-standing bookshelves. Here, in this Venetian shop, there is a gentler echo of that scene of devastation: in an atmosphere of quiet concentration, customers stand reading books or scanning the spines, in a good 30 centimetres of water. The bookshop has turned paddling pool, but business, surreally, serenely, carries on.

Back on the
fondamenta
, I wait for a boat to take me to the Co op. The cold is vicious in the sheltering
imbarcadero
. I am only going one stop, so once on the
vaporetto
, I stand outside on the open deck, my scarf wrapped around half of my face, against the biting cross-wind. The boat tips and roils as counter-currents buffet her bows. She grinds to a standstill on the other side of the canal and I pull my trolley off and wade along to the shops.

Inside the Co op it feels beautifully warm and bright. It is full of people, as if they can’t quite bear to leave and brave the elements again and are lingering extra long among the fruit and veg. There is a holiday atmosphere in the queue to the checkout. A fat, elderly woman chats to me in dialect as we stand there. The low season and my full-to-bursting
trolley make me a local. I smile and nod, as I always do when people talk to me in dialect. Since I usually manage to understand about half of what they’re saying it feels like the safest course. It surprises me how much human interaction requires no more reply than a nod and a smile of agreement.

Back outside again, the waters have receded. On the stone paving of the
fondamenta
, there are streaks of seaweed jettisoned by the tide. Because, as usual, I have bought a lot, I drag my purchases home, with considerable effort, against the icy wind, along mud-slimed pavements. That is my morning in Venice, in December.

After lunch, I have business in Padua. A mere twenty minutes away in the car, Padua represents an hour and a half’s travel for me today. First, there is the thirty-minute walk to the station through heavily gusting wind and pelting rain. For as long as I am in the narrow, high-walled
calles
I am reasonably protected from the elements, but as I come out into a wider wind-tunnelling
campo
my umbrella flips dramatically inside out and I am soaked by squalls of wind and rain.

Because it is a quarter of the price of the express train, I get a ticket for the more down-at-heel and graffitied
regionale
that stops at every single station. The train is full but warm, and I am settling down comfortably with my book for the forty-minute journey when I hear a suddenly raised voice at the other end of the carriage. A man is speaking; he has a strong Neapolitan accent and the Neapolitans’ eloquent courtesy:

‘Ladies and gentleman! Forgive this shameful request! I am on the train, but I have no ticket. I must get back to Naples, but they will throw me off at Padua. Please! A euro from fifteen of you and I will have enough to get home! Forgive me, I am ashamed to ask this! Please help, I beg you!’

Several people begin to rummage in their purses and the man steams up and down the carriage, garnering the money, thanking them in his booming, urgent voice. He has a battered, smudged face; a white bandage over one eye, jeans, dirty trainers.

‘Thank you, Signora, you’re very kind! Thank you, Signore! I thank you!’

The carriage is full of neatly dressed, subdued northerners. I am struck by how much mute generosity is shown to this needy and disturbed man. Then I hear another voice, further along the carriage:

‘Ha, yes. Go on. You go back to Naples! The better for us. Then stay down there. We don’t want you southerners here, understand?’

The speaker is a bullish-looking man in his sixties. He has on a smooth fedora and a dark-green jacket. The Neapolitan curses him harshly and thrusts past and out of the carriage.

An hour and a further bus ride later I arrive at my destination, a school in Padua, where I am going to do some English support teaching. I am early and sit down on the chair outside the secretary’s office to wait for the head teacher. I am cold, wet and rather weary. The secretary comes out:

‘Oh no, Signora. You must wait in the hall. You can’t sit here.’

In the hall, there are no seats, so I stand, with my dripping umbrella at my feet. I can only assume that the apparently meaningless rules and regulations that criss-cross Italian public life give some meaning, some structure to
someone
, a sort of bureaucratic weft and warp. But I only wanted to sit down on that unoccupied chair.

After the midwinter darkness has fallen, I leave the school and head for the bus stop. There is already someone standing there, huddled under the bus shelter, the rain driving through the beam of the streetlight above her head. She is a young English woman who teaches at the school. When the bus arrives, we get in together and sit talking. She is from Hull, a tall, stout girl with a kindly, round face, long bleached hair and thick black-framed spectacles. She is wearing a fluffy white coat and over-sized Peruvian gloves, and she keeps pushing her spectacles back up her nose. She could not look less Italian and, to me, there is something comforting about her broad Yorkshire accent, her lack of vanity. In the warm, almost empty bus with its steamed-up windows we talk about England.

‘I am the first person in my family to go to university. When I go home, people can get a bit sniffy. You know, I didn’t have a baby by the time I was eighteen, like the other girls in my class. They say: “You’re a bit posh, aren’t you? Think you’re better than us?”’

I don’t know this girl from Adam; we come from very different parts of England and of English society, but she is none the less familiar to me and somehow, strangely, more
real
– though more real than what, I cannot say.

It is a relief to be talking in English in a public place, but
outside
Venice; to be foreign, but not one of the invading army. The few other people sitting nearby look up and register that we are not speaking their language, but without judgement. Only at moments like this, when I am away from Venice, do I realize how insidiously unhealthy it can be, living as an unwanted foreigner in a community that is under siege from the rest of the world.

Wind-battered, I get home after eight to find Lily in a state of hysteria, because she has just eaten some pasta made by Michael which
contained
a large chip of china. Freddie, oblivious to this drama, is busy emptying the cupboards optimistically in search of a top hat.

I soothe Lily, fob Freddie off with a rogue tweed cap, and have a man-to-man chat with Roland about making more of an effort at school. I then spend twenty minutes trying to explain to Michael, who is desperately studying for a history test, why knowing the difference between the fine details of romanesque and gothic architecture should even remotely matter to a thirteen-year-old boy.

Once they are all in bed, I leave the house for the last appointment of the day. The dark
calle
is still bitterly cold, but at least the rain has stopped and the high water has sunk back down. As I walk along the water front of the Zattere, a full moon brilliantly illuminates the white face of the church of the Redentore, across on the Giudecca. The wide Canal is like a dark glass filled to the brim. As I stroll through the empty streets I feel, for the first time today, calm. It is after ten and I am exhausted, but it is good to be out in the silent, bewintered city.

I arrive at my destination – the usual, anonymous door in a high wall. I ring the bell and the door snaps open. I pass through and find (Alice again) that I am in a garden. I follow a brick path through bare winter bushes and come to an open door spilling light. I climb the flight of shallow marble steps.

The meeting of the reading group is taking place in a big room where two curving sofas make an oval under an extravagantly sculpted gilt chandelier. Books are artfully heaped on tables and alongside the sofas. On one wall, there hangs an antique tapestry depicting a strangely unpopulated Arcadian landscape: there are trees and rivers and hills and fountains, but not a single living creature in sight. My friends, the members of the group, are sitting around, drinking wine in the candlelight. They are listening to a young woman who is reading aloud.

A little creakily, after so much trudging and huddling and battling against the elements, I sit down cross-legged on the floor, at the edge of the circle. I do not listen to a word the reader is saying, but the warm, subtle, open spaces around me, the intimacy of the group and its quiet unhurriedness, feel like heaven and it occurs to me that, at the end of it all, we might climb into the tapestry, like the children of Hamelin following the Pied Piper back into the hillside, and never come out again.

I
T IS NINE
o’clock at night, the bells are tolling and we are wading to church. Piazza San Marco is a shallow, luminescent lake across which we must walk in order to reach the Basilica. Around all four sides of the great rectangular space lights shine and are reflected in the rising water. It is Christmas Eve and we are going to Midnight Mass which has, this year, been brought forward two hours because by midnight the waters will be impassable.

So far, so good: we are well within the territory of Venetian cliché: bells, lights, water and architectural wonders.

Inside the Basilica, the key notes are more prosaic: packed along pews, in the side aisles and leaning around the walls are hundreds of people wearing wellington boots. Rigged up to the marble pillars that line the nave are large flat screens relaying a close-up view of the priest and prelates conducting the Mass. Whether it’s the boots or the
screens, the atmosphere is neither hushed nor holy. A light steam rises from the hundreds of damp bodies.

The service is being delivered in a strange mishmash of languages – Italian, Latin, French, German and English – and as it winds its way along, between chanting and intoning and song, much of the congregation is busy taking clandestine or not so clandestine photographs of the glorious mosaic ceilings. Different sensibilities are revealed here, but they are united in their need to immortalize the Immortal.

A little way into the Mass, a cameraman appears and walks up the central aisle. He is a strange, amphibious creature who seems just to have emerged from some post-apocalyptic swamp. He is wearing brown thigh-high waders, a dark woolly hat and a damp, sludge-green rain-jacket. He balances his bulky television camera on one shoulder and on his back he carries a rucksack, out of which protrudes a black umbrella. He wanders up and down the church, filming the people watching the film of the priests who are droning on, joylessly, up at the front.

The whole occasion has an entirely random feeling to it; there is a general air of distraction, what with the weather and the cameras and the fidgeting, shuffling congregation. What is most alive here, it strikes me, is the building itself: a dim, breathing presence that surrounds us like a sleeping beast, into whose leviathan belly we have entered and found caverns encrusted with blood and minerals.

The mosaics are all lit up tonight and the millions of gold tessellations glitter and merge, like the constellations of the Milky Way, so heaving with stars that no single point is visible any more, except in the brief glint of an individual star. Vaulted ceilings link one to the other and recede into shadowy distances of chapel and aisle. Ancient saints raise their flat hands in benediction. At the high altar the Pala d’Oro, the bejewelled treasure of San Marco, has been turned to face the body of the church. From where I sit at the back, it looks like a vast piece of gold bullion and is brutishly dazzling.

Everything is lapped and framed by the sea: panels of marble, each one different, swirling, rippling, flowing so that you feel you are swimming underwater, kicking idly along, your masked face down,
following the maverick currents, the ridges of waving sand and the passing shadows.

Now, the bishop processes to the pulpit to give his homily and the people get to their feet, bulky in their winter clothes. In the exact moment that he begins his address, the high water siren starts to sound. First the miserable wartime wail; then the pips: one tone … up to the second … and a third. Now, no one is listening to the bishop, and everybody is wondering if they will get home dry as God causes his waters to cover the face of the earth.

The singing begins again and the inaudible words move like a slow and ungainly oral Mexican wave from corner to corner of the great church, with its many alcoves and inner spaces.

At last, the service is over and the chain-swinging priests pace solemnly away from the altar and down the aisle. Once they have gone, the welly-booted congregation begins its slow shuffle out towards the night.