Read Online A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena de Blasi - Free Book Online

for me?” I ask him.
    â€œC’ è sempre un uomo,”
he answers with a salute. “There’s always a man.” I sling two carry-ons over squared shoulders and follow my bags out into the crowd of those waiting. I hear him before I see him.
    â€œMa, tu sei tutta nuda,”
he is saying from behind a sheaf of yellow daisies, yellow, like the Izod shirt he wears loose over green plaidslacks. He looks like a technicolor anchovy, so thin—small almost—standing among the others behind the cordons. Blueberry eyes set in sun-bronzed skin, so different from his winter face. I am going to marry that stranger there in the yellow Izod shirt, I say to myself. I am going to marry a man whom I’ve never known in summer. This is the first time I’ve walked toward him while he stood still. Everything around him in sepia, only Fernando is in color. Even now whenever I come upon him, meet him in a restaurant, under the clock tower at noon, at the potato lady’s table in the market, in our own dining room when it’s full of friends, I flash back to that scene and, for half a moment, once again only he is in color.
    â€œBut you’re all naked,” he is saying again, crushing me into the daisies he still holds tight to his chest with one hand. My legs are bare, stretching up from my new sandals to a short navy skirt and a white T-shirt. He’s never seen me in summer either. We stay fixed, quiet for a long time in that first embrace. We are shy. We are comfortably shy.
    Most of the bags and cases we fit into the the car’s trunk and backseat, neat as fish in a tin. What’s left he secures to the roof with a length of plastic rope.
“Pronta?”
he asks. “Ready?” A blithe transfiguration of Bonnie and Clyde off to burgle the romance of our lives, we race northwest at eighty miles per hour. The air conditioner is blasting out great puffs of icy air, the windows are rolleddown, inviting in the already hot, wet air outside. He must have both.
    Elvis purls out his heart. Fernando knows all the words but only phonetically. “What does it mean?” he wants to know. “I can’t stop loving you. It’s useless to try.” I translate lyrics that I’d never before paid attention to, words he’d been listening to forever. “I’ve missed you since I was fourteen,” he says. “At least that’s when I began to notice that I missed you. Maybe it was even earlier. Why did you wait so long to come to me?” There is about all this a sensation of mise-en-scène. I wonder if he feels it. Could anything really be this good? I, who think Shostakovich a modernist, belt out “I can’t stop loving you” into the great plain of the Padana stretched out flat and treeless over Italy’s unlovely industrial belly. Perhaps this is the date I was always expecting to have.
    Two and a half hours later, we take the exit for Mestre, the belching, black-breathed port that warehouses petroleum for all of north Italy. Can it be true that Venice lives cheek to cheek with this horror? Almost immediately there is the bridge, the Ponte della Libertà, the Bridge of Liberty, five miles of it, raised up a scant fifteen feet and hurled out over the waters, riveting Venice to terra firma, dry land. We’re nearly home. It’s high noon under a straight-up sun, and the lagoon is a great smashed mirror that glints and blinds. We eat thick trenchers of crusty bread laid with ruffles of mortadella, lunch fromthe little bar in the car park while we wait for the ferry that will carry us to the Lido.
    It is a forty-minute cruise on the
Marco Polo
, traversing the lagoon and slicing down the Guidecca Canal to the island that is called Lido di Venezia, the beach of Venice. Thirteen hundred years ago fishermen and farmers lived here. I know that now it is a faded fin de siècle watering hole where, during its heyday, European and American