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

literati came to rest and play. I know that its village of Malamocco, once the Roman settlement of Metamaucus, was the eighth-century seat of the Venetian republic, that the Lido is the stage for the Venice Film Festival, and that there is a casino. And Fernando has told me about it so often, I can imagine the tiny church there, and, in my mind, I can see its plain red stone face looking out to the lagoon. I know that Fernando has lived on the Lido for nearly his whole life. More than this, I have yet to learn.
    After the boatman guides the car onto the ferry, Fernando kisses me, looks at me a long time, then says he is going up on deck to smoke. His not inviting me to come along perplexes me, but vaguely. If I really wanted to go upstairs, I would go. I lean back then and close my eyes, trying to remember what I knew I must be forgetting. Was there no work waiting? Nothing left undone? No. Nothing. I have nothing to do, or perhaps is it that I have everything to do? The car leans into the swells of the sea. Maybe it’s only mekeen to feel some sort of
rhythm
. There is nothing else at this moment but a crisp, fresh, just unrolled space to color. I feel a not unpleasant but curious sort of shift in equilibrium. I
feel
it. One foot is still six thousand miles away. Just as the boat bumps itself into the jetty, Fernando returns to the car, and we drive off the boat.
    In a breezy drive about the island he points out landmarks, personal and cultural. I try to remember how long it’s been since I really slept and I compute fifty-one hours. “Please can we go home now?” I ask from my trance. He turns off the Gran Viale Santa Maria Elisabetta, the broad avenue that follows along the seaside of the island, onto a quiet street behind the Film Festival theaters and the very worn chic of the Casino, and then into a narrow
vicolo
, alleyway, framed in old plane trees whose leaves reach across to each other in a cooling arcade. A great iron gate opens onto a drab courtyard lined in skinny, one-Italian-car garages. Above them rise three levels of windows, most all of which are sheathed in
persiane
, corrugated metal privacy curtains. Exactly as he promised it, home is inside a postwar concrete bunker. There is no one there except a very small woman of indeterminate age who darts about the car in a kind of tarantella.
    â€œEcco Leda
. Here is Leda, our sympathetic gatekeeper,” he says.
“Pazza completa
. Completely crazy.” She is gazing upward, beseeching. Is she emotional because of our arrival? In fact she offers nogreeting, neither uttered, shrugged, nor nodded. “
Ciao
, Leda,” he says, without looking at her or introducing us. Leda gargles out something about not leaving the car in front of the entryway too long.
    I try, “
Buona sera, Leda. Io sono Marlena
. Good evening, Leda. I’m Marlena.”
    â€œSei americana?”
she asks. “Are you American?”
    â€œSi, sono americana,”
I tell her.
    â€œMi sembra più francese
. You seem more French to me,” she says, as if she means Martian. We unload, she continues the tarantella. Much as I try, I can’t resist furtive peeks at her. She is a Faustian troll with black-olive eyes hooded like a hawk’s. Over the next three years I will never once hear her laugh, though I will hear her grizzly shrieks and see her fists extended to the heavens more times than I wish to remember. I will learn too that she wears teeth only to mass. But here, now, I romanticize her. All she needs is some tenderness and a warm bitter-chocolate tart, I think.
    As we shove and pull my bags along the corridor to the elevator, a few people are in arrival or departure.
Buon giorno. Buona sera
. The dialogue is stingy. We might be hauling cadavers in burlap bags for all they care. On the last trips out to the car, I notice more than one person cantilevered out of as many just-unsheathed windows.
L’americana è arrivata
. The American