Venetian daze

I HAVE A DATE - WITH MYSELF

Outside Ca' Zenobia, my new school building

I'm past the halfway mark of phase one.  People are greeting me in the calli and I've stopped ignoring the calls of Ciao! Savanna! because I know they're for me.  I no longer carry a map because I know that all roads lead to Rialto or Piazzale Roma.   We've moved Italian classes into the magnificent building of Ca'Zenobia, where we learn in the garden on ancient walls and wrought iron tables. Other students practice music and make gorgeous art.  The wall crumbles and the stairs are eroded from hundred of years of foot slogging.  At high tide, the fondamente is awash with grey water and we splish splash into school, giggling like children. Soon I'll have to get wellington boots - a necessity more than a fashion statement.

I love taking the long new routes to anywhere .. there's always something else wonderful to discover.

The canal outside Ca' Zenobia

I've had a couple of lonely days, isolated days.  Skyping my friends in Pakistan, Sydney, London, Cape Town has helped: Dawn is still in Italy, and knowing MrM is coming to join me has helped even more. Well, he said he's coming, but there was an uncomfortable afternoon when he'd said he was going to call, and I skipped an afternoon class to wait. And wait. And wait. And wait.  And in the end, taking myself out for a long ramble, annoyed and disappointed yet again.  But this was part of my lonely phase and any contact with any one was better than none with nobody.

Not being full conversant in my new language is a huge barrier to making friends as it's as hard work for them to converse as it is for me.  Last Saturday after I'd shopped at the Rialto for my week's frutte e verdue, and I'd hung my washing out on the window lines that sound like peacocks being tortured when I wrench them back to retrieve my undies,  I curled up in a lonely ball under a blanket on the couch, until my sleepy skook - who hasn't had much to do for months - tapped me on the shoulder and shouted : OI! You lazy piece of good for nothing gnocci!  Get Up! Get Out!  Have you forgotten where you are!  Scarafaggio! 

Vegetables at Rialto

I had done my shopping at the Rialto, trundling my carello, and stuffed it with carciofi, pomodori, melanzone, ovi, l'ananas, susine, lettugi; I'd bought breads and cheeses at Bulla, I came home and cleaned the apartment.  Skook was right. So I strapped on my sexy leather sandals and zipped up my tight jeans and wriggled into my slinky  top and my jangling earrings and I took myself on a date in my beautiful sun dapped city. 

The sun deserves worshipping here, so tender and glorious and divine is the sensation of being out in it.  In Australia,  sun exposure is like walking in front of the open doors of a pizza oven during a heat wave. Here, the beams of sun slicing through narrow breaks in rooftops feel as wonderful as sticking your finger into a just baked loaf of bread when you're really hungry. Here, the sun dances on water, slips down stones, slides through cracks, lands gently on skin, softly peels paint and warms my heart. I think it makes people smile.

Cleaning Artichokes at Rialto Market

I walked randomly for hours, heading towards Ferrovia and Piazzale Roma, balancing on the cobbles in my high heels, down more and more deserted calli. In late summer, petunias still cascade from windowboxes and now that the tourists are thinning, the squares and bars are less crowded, and I'm beginning to recognise locals.  

Piazzale Rome is the hub of all things tourist and hideous: wrought iron rotundas manned by Indians selling ghastly Chinese tack of fans, masks, umbrellas, aprons of naked women wearing sprigs of basil, sunglasses and sunhats.  (I bought  two.)  Watch out here,  for there is a current outbreak of luminous green and pink things that splat at your feet;  thrown every three seconds like giant paintballs onto the ground by the Chinese men touting them on every corner.  Fat, greasy, dazed, arguing tourists, dragging bursting suitcases and holding maps upside down,  drop pizza eaten out of butcher paper, and lick gelati melting down their I Love NY tee shirts. It's the only place to buy a cheap fares ticket, the IMob which enables Vaporetto fares from regions E7 to E1.  Escape is imperative.

Along the way I righted several wrong turns of hysterical tourists thinking they were lost.  I saved an ugly American marriage when the trouble screamed at his strife that all he wanted was to fucking get away from the tourists (from the tourists!) when I offered him a nap and a beer in my casa so that his wife and I could go handbag shopping.  He didn't take me up on my generous offer, and stormed off in the wrong direction, trailing his miserable wife, who, if she'd known how, would have whimpered "auito!" and every noble gentleman would have come to her aid.  Three six foot something  Americans wondered where the Rialto had got to on their upside down map, and then nervously asked me, as they clutched their passports stuffed into their bullet proof vests,  if it was safe to walk around at night? I'm two foot six, I'm a woman, I said through slitty eyes, and I walk everywhere at night alone.  This is Venice. Your body will not be washed up in a canal, sans kidneys, I promise.

Well, I didn't know then, did I, about the Calle de Assassani, now filled in with stones, where in the dark days of Venice's past, those that needed to be disposed of would be snuffed out by masked assassins, and their bodies thrown into the canal to float away and later washed up on some one else's doorstep. 

I bought a ticket for Verdi's La Traviata, from a woman in a powdered wig and medieval skirts, playing  at the splendid 17thc Scuola Grande di san Teodoro, in Campo San Salvador, near the Rialto.  

San Marco

I rode the longest vaporetto ride I could find, from Piazzale Roma to San Marco, giving more directions to frightened, lost tourists, down the Guidecca canal, where ancient palazzos dip their timid, slimy toes in the churned up water.  Sitting at the back, wind in my hair,  I oogled and aahed and sighed and carried on like the rest of the gaga tourists, but I had a certain proprietorial glint to my eye, knowing they'd have to go - and take their upside down maps and greasy pizzas and dripping gelati with them - and I would be staying and have San Marco and the Florian and the little back lanes all to myself.

Arches at San Marco Square

I lunched alone in a little square, reading books on Venice I'd just bought from a shop I'd been hunting out for days,  on grilled sea bass, a green salad, and a glass of gingerino while the constant pealing bells shut everyone up.

My favourite word of the week is that for doggie do.  It's la cacca di cane.  There isn't a single il gatti here, but thousands of puffed, perfumed, pampered pooches who leave their stinking caccas in the calli. We Venetians know to look out for them ... but the tourists are so busy with their upside down maps and their Daliesque pizza slices and their dribbling gelatis staring up to the crennalations and turrets and window boxes that they tramp on these caccas and spread them far and wide. Only a stupid tourist would be foolish enough to wade out barefoot into l'acqua alta ... we Venetians know what lies beneath.  Wet squishy cacca.

On the vaporetto to the Rialto for the concert, I met two hysterical lost men in flak jackets with their upside maps waving two tickets for the opera who had just been fleeced by a smart man who fished old vaporetti biglietti out the bins and resold them : basta, useless, touristico stupido - smart smart garbage fisher!  The US folks were almost crying in their panic; they were ageing queens who pretended they were uncle and nephew and thought they were going into the Venetian clink, there to live on cold pasta for eternity if the inspector turned up.  Sono problemo!  I said. It's Saturday night. You might be lucky - the inspectors are probably home watching football. 

We hopped off at Rialto in the blazing dark while they panted and limped behind me, petrified I was going to dart into an alley and they'd be attacked by the midnight murderers.  Lost for the first time in weeks, I asked a dreadlocked beggar (in Italian) who wore a silver lurex skirt and halter top,  sitting on her silver suitcase outside a church, for directions to the Scuola. Fuck Me, she said in English. How should I know, I don't live here and I don't speak fucking Italian.  But you're begging, I said.  Yah, so? She replied. It's a free world. Go bother someone else!

Beggar outside Ca' Goldoni

Ah, the beggars.  They arrive for work when I leave for school, and settle into their damp corners with their crumpled cups. Some of them crouch on their knees, hunched up, head down, hand with cup out, all day.  If they died on the spot, they'd have to be carried out on a chair. They'd get more money if people offered them a tip to move, or if they painted themselves silver. One beggar is always there on Wednesdays and Saturdays.  He looks like a Rabbi, with a long grey beard and grizzly eye. Another old woman, there the rest of the week on the second step, wails non stop ..  Mama mia santissima, madonna, triste, maladorata, mango, mangiare, alternately renting her sleeves and stopping just short of grabbing an ankle as people avoid her jiggling paper cup.

At the scuola, bookended by my nervous fairies,  I sat under fantastically painted ceilings of tragic madonnas and plump cherubs and bleeding martyrs while I watched gorgeous amazing singers doing their la Traviata operatic bits and pieces. The horn players  spent most of the time laughing and narrowly getting their cues;   Loretta's maid was heavily pregnant so sat for most of her arias, the Baritone had a LISPA!!!  a lisp!  FFS, have you ever heard of an opera singer with a lisp!  And the two naughty boys from the ferry sobbed into their lace hankies when Loretta died of TB just as Snr Lisp was professing his eternal love for her.  l had rigor mortis when the show was over after two hours from slouching in canvas chairs on the antique marble floors. 

Grand Canal from Accademia Bridge

Out into into the warm night, and home on the vaporetto, hanging over the edge listening to the champagne bubbles pop and the chandeliers blazing in the palazzi, watching this city dance with night light and candles, and nighttime serenaders sliding across the water.  Peeled off my Max Mara silk skirt and ballet pumps with pom poms bought for a song, and feel into bed, exhausted and happy, and almost delirious with delight.

Thanks, Skook, I murmured as I fell into a sleep better than I've had for ages, that was a really cool self-date. But still I struggled to sleep; what with the goings on in the calli below, like cats on hot tin roofs, bottles being thrown and raucous youths returning home, and my hard lumpy mattress that I am convinced is stuffed with old gnocci. I don't have to do situps or stomach crunches - my nocturnal get-comfortable activites take care of that.

For Skook was right. She reminded me of  the lesson I keep telling anyone who travels: if you think where you are is too hard or too lonely, think about where you would be as a safe alternative. Home, alone, in front of television, worrying about mowing the lawn. Instead, take yourself for a walk in your new territory!  It's good for the soles. And the heart.  You never know who you'll meet or who you will help with a small kindness.