Arrivederci La Serenissima freddo!

And so it comes to pass.  

My last days in this most spectacular of cities have almost ended.  Many of the exhibitions I kept for later viewing have moved on, and the city is almost deserted.  The facades are pulled down. 

The Venetians are as rude as they can be, as their need to be marginally ingratiating to the money throwing tourists has come to a close.  I love it like this.  The city belongs to me.  I walk with a look in my eye that tells everyone I belong here.  I jump on and off the vaporettos with seconds to spare; I don't need to count the stops.  I give directions in Italian to other Italians.  I think in Euros, I think in Italian, I am not aware of translating from one language to another.  Facile. Or Fa chee le. I don't really want to go home - for where is home now - but my intuition about not being here through the long winter was correct - I would probably be the only person left in the city.

Every day the trees are more naked; the light more blue grey.  Venice seems larger, and much more fragile. For the first time, I can smell a bit of the stink, but it's like the old dowager's shoes, when she's slipped them off under the antique table, and, rubbing one arthritic toe against the other, hopes no one notices. I notice, but I don't mind.  For when that fog rolls in over the water and the sky drops to the horizon, and everything has a cast of icy moisture, and even the gondolas seem to huddle together for protection, Venice is a Turner and a Tintoretto and a Dali rolled into one. A Vivaldi Quattro Staglione and a Carnevale.   Who cares about smells enough to make THAT the one thing they can't abide about Venice.  Get a life, you idiots, I mutter. 

But let me rewind 10 days. For something quite interesting is going on in the wings.


I was on my way to Sydney International Airport, returning to Venice after a mad dash home to see my daughter after she told me she was to marry, and that the date would be mid carnevale 2012, just when I had planned to be there and do everything that Carnevale decided for me. I was steaming and boiling and angry and upset that I had to walk away from Carnevale in Venice, but at that stage thought my return would just be delayed.  

With a 36 hour journey via Dubai to Venice looming, I decided to stop for a bite in Northbridge, a trendy cafe strip in Sydney. Walking from my hire car to an Italian coffee shop, I caught the eye of a man driving past. He waved at me, I waved back.  My heart stopped. No, it didn't. It revved up.  I got goosebumps. No I didn't, I was covered in a hot rash.  My blood froze. No it didn't, it pulsed through a canal after a sudden storm.  Hmmm, gorgeous face, I thought. Hmm, I thought, as my mouth went dry and my pulse raced: I am Alive.    He followed me into the cafe. You waved at me, he said. Nope, I said, I waved back, checking out his good suit and sexy tie.   Later, he told me that I had an aura he just had to follow. That he saw a goddess walking in a cloud, and had to follow her. 

He bought me a cup of tea. He bought me brunch. I told him I was on my way back to Venice. I'm Italian, he said. My name is Mr RR.  Have you been to the Guggenheim in Venice yet? We talked and talked. I wished he'd shut up, just for a moment, uno momento, because I was desperate to kiss him. I was desperate to touch his hands.  He reached out and held mine, warm and strong.  I told him I had to go or I'd miss my plane. He said when I returned he wanted to take me to the Picasso exhibition at the AGNSW. So I gave him my phone number - who wouldn't give out a phone number to a very handsome, very eligible, very hot Italian-speaking stranger in a coffee shop?  Who smells like Calvin Klein? Nice ass too, I thought, as he paid the bill. 

I texted Luda and told her I'd met the man I was going to marry. 

At the car hire place, he called me. Dove sei?  Where are you?  I'm at International waiting to check you in and take you to dinner, he said. He did, and he did. 

As a seasoned traveller, there are two items essential to the contents of my handbag. My passport, and clean underwear.  In the passport queue, unsettled by the energy and life of this man who'd followed me down a street, into a cafe, and then into the airport, I whipped out my passport in a flourish, and out flew the red lace panties I'd bought in Venice, tucked in the passport in case of hijacking, crashes or unexpected misadventures.  

This man caught them in mid flight.  Are these yours? he laughed with a twinkle in his lovely brown eyes.  You have good taste in underwear.

We sat curled around each other in the airport lounge, talking non stop, or just looking at each other,  until the last calls called me back to Venice.  Then he kissed me like that famous French postcard,  and a lot of heads turned, including five nuns in blue robes.

When you arrive in Venice,  he said, tell me where you are staying so I can google map you.  Instead, when I returned from walking on the first day, he'd sent me a bucket of roses and a very romantic note (in Italian) that got the wrist wringing Catholic housekeepers in a flurry because they thought I had stolen one of theirs. He called in the mornings, when I was breakfasting with the stern matrons of the hotel.  He sent me texts that cracked me up with their off beat humour, that elicited odd looks from the staff, unused to guests giggling into phones in dusty dining rooms.  I went to the Gug, and I looked at the sculptures he'd told me about.  We talked late at night.   What he loved most about Europe, he told me, was it's art.  I spent a day up the Campanile, and in the Doges palace, and looking at artworks in a way I hadn't thought to do.   I managed to get a ticket to La Fenice, that most famous opera house, for a performance of Il Trovatore. Oh, I have that recording, he said. I can't believe you love opera too. And he sang me bits of arias.  My sister's name is Carmen, he said, after the Opera. I cried during Il Trovatore, because I was sitting in a box at La Fenice, and I was in love with Italy, and I was so at peace with myself.  I've been doing a lot of quite happy crying lately.  Love felt as it was creeping out from under dry dusty leaves in all the soon to be abandoned piazzas of my favourite city in the world. 

Send me a picture of your bum, he said, so I sent this one from the window of an art gallery. Send me a photo of your toes, he said, but I said I'd freeze if I did. Instead, I put my booted foot on the edge of ponte L'accademia and that made him happy.  

I visited the Guggenheim, and, wrapped to the eyeballs in cashmere, crunched over brittle brown leaves in its sculpture garden. I peered at a Dali at close range and finally understood his genius. I leaned against Henry Moore.  I sat on Peggy’s old white leather sofa.  I stumbled into a 16th century church and saw an exhibition of string instruments from Medieval times. I visited Vivaldi's church, and I listened to his music in my favourite concert hall.

I stomped around in the fog, and, mittened to the gills, took the churning, empty of tourists vaporetto to Murano on the chase of chevrons, but alas everyone had flown south for the winter and the furnaces were all barred up.  I lunched on a pontoon in deserted Murano, eating my scallops and calamari and sipping a frozen vino, pondering the meaning of this wintery Venetian journey, and decided then that I wanted to start my business again, and that I wanted to be home in Sydney, for a while. Venice is so much a part of me that I can't let it go ..... there has to be a reason I'm here, and a reason to bring me back.  

RR called during lunch while I was making love to my scallops. I told him I had to bring Murano to Sydney. I walked around the island until I found a glass maker who was open and I bought my first batch of Murano glass.  It will make my return fare.  I said I was upset that I was going to miss Carnevale.  Don't worry, cara, said RR, I will bring you back to Carnevale one day. I bought a glass rose from a tourist shop, just before the metal blinds came down for the winter, to give to my new Romeo.

I shopped till I’ve dropped.  I stocked up with gorgeous underwear, (looking at red racy undies pre Christmas, and laughing with RR on the phone, he said buy them Cara - all italians wear red underwear this time of the year)   (I did) and red leather gloves, boots, a dozen pairs of calzone (tights) and crazy coloured hats for each day of the week.  I know my way around the back streets and the short cuts and my time is my own now because the upside down map reading tourists have flown the coop. Even the pooping dogs are warming their booties on velvet cushions inside their villas. It's dark at four, and light at nine.  I don't know where everyone eats in winter: most of the restaurants are boarded up for the long haul, and those that do open close at sunset.  I've been living on crackers and peppermint tea for my evening meal: the only sustenance available at the Hotel bel Arti besides breakfast of crackers and cheese. 

And then, the final few days.  I used up all my museum passes, and my Imob transport passes, and I braved the evening zero temperatures and arctic winds so that Venice would imprint itself on me even deeper. I rode those boats until the sun set and my nose froze, and I remember every bridge and every sigh and so many pebbles.

I bought beautiful winter knitwear.  I found a courier to take my beads back to Sydney.  S&G had disappeared for the winter and closed shop so I couldn't farewell them. The maids came in every day to water my flowers, and insisted on seeing a photo of Mr Meraviglioso: Mr Wonderful.  A muscled man, in a pink t-shirt,  whose face could be on a Roman coin. Bene, bene, was the general comment.

I cried when I left Venice. I cried while I waited outside the church at Zattere for the ferry. I cried on the Ali Laguna. I cried as my beloved ancient toppling buildings and gorgeous restorations and crumbling villas stood on the fondamente to wave me goodbye with their mildewed hankies. A dapper Italian man, returning to Murano, leaned forward to wipe my tears with his own lace hanky.  "Bella donna, perche sei cosi triste? Guarda ci sono lacrime sulle guance!"  I told him I was leaving my heart in Venice. That I didn't want to go home. "Ah, bella," he sighed, looking across the foggy waters.  Then you shall return."

When I arrived in Sydney close to midnight after 36 hours flying, RR was waiting for me.  He ran up to me and swooped me in his arms.  "You bring out the Italian in me, Cara," he said.  "And you'll probably put the Italian in me, Caro .... " I winked.


I've promised myself that I'm going to be fluent in two years.  You can take the Australian out of Sydney, but you'll never get the Italian out of Savanna!  After all, I do have my personal language assistant .... 

 

On ponte l'accademia

Moi, in Italian mode

 

Moi, happy.

Moi, warm in Venice

San Marco in the fog

Murano glass works

En route Murano

Murano glass ware

Add caption

Dance me to the end of time

Hats off to Venice ...

Through the looking glass, frostily.

Return to La Serenissima.  Or Rolling the Dice.  Or Houses of Cards.

Sometime during this journey, I ruminated about how when someone else makes a choice that is even one degree left of plans,  one’s carefully constructed house of cards comes tumbling down. And so it came to pass.  One unexpected toss of the dice and every ensuring plan has altered which left me in an anxious flurry of Now What? on my pilgrimage of Yes.

The S&G not-happening thing, for reasons stated earlier,  was a major disappointment, as I was anticipating some income here, albeit, given I’m not a Nigerian Prada bag seller,  highly illegal.  When my “benefactors”  pulled out, I lost the opportunity to stay in the subsidised accommodation around the corner from their shop.  Dawn found me a magnificent apartment in Cannareggio, that I'd stay in on my return,  but it cost much more. Then I got a fit of the blues because much as I love this city with something bordering on divine devotion, Venetians are not friendly.  My Italian can get me around, but it won’t make me friends. And there is only so much shoe and bag shopping I can do before I’ll start having psychological problems related to the merits of retail therapy and my bank manager’s patience.

I liked the Cannareggio accommodation, and decided to re-enrol at the Institute.  I reasoned I’d master a modicum of the language, write my book, and continue to make jewellery from the beads I’d sent from Australia during the long winter. Friends would come and go.  I stored some bags with Mario and others in Cannareggio.  I'd returned to Sydney for the cruise,  with full intentions of returning to Venice for my final three months.

Except I hadn’t computed how much I wanted - no - needed to be with people I love, with warm friends and sunshine and a language that doesn’t cripple my tongue.  I had serious recurrent wobblies about the long winter haul.  Sure, friends may visit, but I couldn’t depend on them to allay my winter blues or make the sun set later than 3.30pm. And that old initial problem that would have alleviated all the above:  I didn’t have the work I’d been promised. Then the friend with whom I was staying in Sydney had her family move in - and I had store my beads in a hurry and move out.  This falling card collapsed upon the one on which was written my scheduled pre Christmas bead show that I was to hold in her house- compounding the no-income card. Should I go?  Should I stay?

Sydney beckoned, but Venice called, loudly for a dame of her age;  we have unfinished business, young lady, she admonished.  

So I rearranged my return flights to coincide with Carnevale, and be back for Liza and Ben’s wedding. That would mean Christmas in the cold and fog, but another season to unravel Venice. I'd have some more of my "fix", I'd return with more words.  Time was still on my side.  Opportunity still had a habit of knocking.

But fate has her own way. And Italians don't like to be kept waiting.  A handshake deal is finite.  Paperwork doesn't matter. Hand over heart and I have your blood, and if you cross me, you die.  Or your lose your apartment. You lose your place in school.  You lose your new best friends, your job, your income, your status, your favourite table in your favourite restaurant, and suddenly even the woman on the vaporetto must have heard you'd betrayed the system, because she too won't keep those ropes open as you run for your life to leap on board.

This much is true. I told the owner of the Canareggio apartment that I'd like to push my accommodation forward a few weeks because my daughter was getting married. Mama Mia.  I would have had a better reception if I'd told her I was going to entertain a hundred and one poodles over the silly season.  She sternly told me she couldn’t keep it that long: I would need to and fetch my bags immediately. She kept my deposit.  Mario also told me that I couldn't leave my bags with him, because they'd be damaged during Aqua Alta.  Mama Mia!  Mama Mia! The logistics of trying to get the baggage back to Sydney from Venice when I'm not there -  is prohibitive: besides, it was nobody’s responsibility except mine.  I cancelled one ticket.  I booked another. The dollars mounted.  The points dismounted. Suddenly, urgently, my Venetian plans drowned with the tides and there was no longer a 3 month plan. Now I had to return to Sydney, even though I was far from ready to end this adventure, far from ready to give up on becoming Italian.  Far too soon to relinquish the aroma of leather and the tap tap of the cobble.

This also meant financial wranglings. I now needed to buy a car and find a place to live in Sydney.  Pre Christmas, I had less chance  of doing both than making friends in Venice.  I was, for the first time in my life, homeless.  Friends offered a room, but I need a home to unpack and restart Travelling Bead.  Inspecting hideous units in a crowd of 20 anxious nail biting couples was excruciating. I want a house.

Once again, my life had become a shambles.  I stood on the fondamente like the bedraggled French Lieuenant's Woman, tears dribbling down my cold cheeks, wondering what would become of me, just as I thought my trajectory would continue.

For several nights I did the 3am stare at the ceiling what the Fook is to become of me thing, I’m just a bag lady, I’m homeless, I’m dependent, I’ll never have sex again, one day I’m going to be 70,  how many Valium will I need to eradicate myself, what happens if I fall into a canal and there is nobody there to see the splash, this is all that scumbag D’s fault, I love Venice .... blah blah blah blah blah blah blah until five minutes before sunrise and the clop clop clop in the calli woke me.  I thought I was going to unravel. 

On my app, I watched Venice’s temperatures plummet. Sydney’s improve.  I was upset with myself that my year is not yet over and I feel as if I’ve let myself down.  But nowhere did I say that I should force myself to do something that troubled me deeply - coping through the bleak, damp winter.  And nowhere did I promise that my year had to exclude Australia.  Perhaps my “happy ending” is in Australia ... and to quote TS Elliott loosely again - the aim of all our travelling is to return to the place and know it for the first time.  I stopped berating myself and sniffling about lost opportunities.  I licked my wounds, I booked a third ticket with a 12 day turnaround and I returned to Venice  to pick up my luggage, visit the museums I’d missed,  and buy some orange leather boots. And red ones. And a bag or two or three. And more underwear from Intimissimi. And walk till I know the calli like the back of my gloved hand.   Because Mr M had vanished, with his plans and his ideas and his promises.  Teste di Cazzo.  Dickhead.

There are a few cities in the world that each time I return, I feel as if I am coming home.  Venice is my city.  I know its cobbles, and its tides, and its shadows. I understand the boats, and how to buy fruit (with a disposable glove) and I know its smell.   Sydney fills me with light.  Cape Town fills me with the music and mountains of my childhood.  But Venice?  Venice fills me with love.

I have not yet been on a gondola;  I would like to honeymoon here, walk the streets hand in hand, be imbued with the majesty of the city and see it through other eyes.  

A man wrote to me a few days ago:  “I would like to make love in Venice to someone who is in love with Venice.”  Beautiful sentiments that sound even better in Italian.

When I left Venice five weeks ago, it was in the death throes of summer where the light had a burning orange intensity with definite outlines.  Now, galloping into winter, the city has turned silver. Boundaries are blurred. Skylines appear like mirages. Gulls fly lower. Pigeons peck brazenly and sparrows hijack the sugar on tables, storing crumbs for winter.  The leaves have fallen, brittle and brown, soaked by the high, slurping tides.  The sun is weak and pink and noon shadows are as long as my arm.  Long, dark Giacometti shapes appear around corners before their owners; and rugged to their earlobes, the Venetians - able to get around now without being accosted by tourists - may have opened their shutters and displayed their cyclamens - but hunkered down beneath their hats and scarves, they are are even less friendly.

The air is as thin as a blade:  mist taps at my morning windows in the dusty, dark hotel in which I’m staying - midway between Zattere and Accademia water stations.  All day I hear different music played by optimistic buskers: an accordion, a violin, a cello, even a medieval lute: and sometimes the plink of a euro as it hits an offering cup. The bent-double woman, still in her spot with plastic cup and picture of Christ at her knees, is the bleak subject of photographers who steal her misery from a safe distance. The Nigerian dudes selling knock off handbags are now left alone by the carabinieri who gave chase in summer just for the thrill of it.  Voices are sharp and high, the gelati dripping, pizza dribbling, upside down map holding tourists have gone, bar a few dazed myopic Japanese in odd socks and pompoms.

The domes, turrets and parapets, the lives behind the doge windows, the long midday shadows, the bounteous buckets of white cyclamen, the shimmering expanses of water that resemble mercury and reflect Venetian lives upside down are all softly veiled with a gossamer web that softens the colours and silvers what's left.  It is possible that hearts can break in this fragile city. A dowager to her mossy slippers,  Venice is so gently feminine, so precious, so haughty,   riddled as she is with an invisible tuberculosis of the stones; creeping with vivid slime and grey moss like an incurable skin disease; aristocratic to her foundations and arthritic to her heart, pared to its gaunt bones from centuries of high living.

Vulnerable to her core, you wonder what would happened if she coughed.  The tides would swell.  Gondoliers would nudge the fondamente.  Certainly skeletons would tumble from behind rotting doors.   Spiders and rats would scatter to higher ground.  Pampered pooches would whimper and leap back into their Prada handbags.  The ladies who take cafe and biscotti at 17th century Florian, would allow the cello pause,  tut and dab their lips with lace napkins: Venice will survive whatever she is given. Casanova's sexual exploits. Thieving marauders.  Masked revellers.  Plunderers, geniuses, philosophers and Royalty.  Vivaldi's music. Tintoretto's masterpieces.  Doges with grand designs.  Marco Polo's booty.  The titled, the poor, the place of the first jewish ghetto; decadence and high living.  Leather. Lace, Glass, wool. Improbable skylines.  The purest of skies. The first beads in trading history.

What a city.  What a city.   I walk around with my heart pounding, my face stretched from smiling.  My hair shines more here.  My eyes glisten; dilated with the grande amore this testament to all that is gracious and magnificent deserves.

I cried when I collected my luggage because I closed the door on a longer stay and what might eventuate,  and the guts to stick with Yes even though I was trembling in my boots.  I am delighted and enthralled to be here: I am sorry I didn’t have the courage to endure the winter;  but I also want to return to Sydney in ten days. 

I may have lost the chance to design and become famous here; the counts have left for the Alps; and all the restaurants and shops are closing for the long bleak winter.  

I am not finished with Venice.  I still haven’t ridden that gondola.