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

has arrived. Holdingout for a scene from
Cinema Paradiso
, I wait for at least one black-stockinged, kerchiefed old woman to come forth and press me to a generous bosom scented in rosewater and sage. But there is no one.
    Elevators are announcements, and, as much as do entry halls, they tell the house’s story. This one, its atmospheric composition oxygen-free after fifty years of carting smoking human cargo, is three feet square, paved in linoleum, and painted a shiny aquamarine. Its cables screech and creek under the weight of more than one of us. I read that it is approved to transport three hundred kilos. We send the bags up alone, a few at a time, while we race up three flights to meet them at the apartment door. We do this six times. Fernando can no longer avoid opening the door. He braves it with,
“Ecco la casuccia
. Behold the little house.”
    At first I can’t see a thing except the outlines of cartons and cardboard boxes, which seem to be stacked everywhere. Universal Flood aromas lie thick in the air. With the flicking on of an overhead bulb Fernando illuminates the space, and then I know it’s a gag. I hope it’s a gag. He has taken me to an abandoned space, some third-floor storage room just for laughs, and so that’s what I begin to do. I just laugh and giggle,
“Che bellezza
. How lovely,” cupping my face in my hands and shaking my head. Perhaps this is where the black-stockinged old lady comes forth to press me to her bosom and leadme to my real house. I recognize my handwriting on one of the boxes, and it becomes clear that
this
is my real house. Scoured of all vanities, it is the lair of an ascetic, the mean hut of an acolyte. Savonarola could have lived here, all of it bespeaking reverence for a medieval patina, undisturbed by the passing of time or someone’s rifling about with a dust cloth. I have come to live in the shuttered-up gloom of Bleak House. I begin to understand the real meaning of Venetian blinds.
    The space is astonishingly small, and I think immediately that this is good, that a tiny bleak house will be easier to reform than a large one. Fernando hugs me from behind. I go about lifting the wretched
persiane
, letting in air and sunlight. The kitchen is a cell with a Playskool stove. In the bedroom there is a bizzare oriental carpet covering one wall, a collection of very old ski medals hang from rusty claw-shaped hooks and, like ashen specters, tatters of curtains float over a windowed door that opens to a cramped terrace piled in paint cans. The bed is a double mattress on the floor, a massive and ornate burled-wood headboard leans against the wall behind it. There is perilous walking in the bathroom, what with missing and broken tiles and the great girth of an ancient washing machine dead center between the sink and the bidet. I notice the washer’s hose empties out into the bathtub. There are three other tiny rooms whose stories are too terrible to tell. There is no evidenceof preparation for his bride’s arrival, and he is neither fey nor apologetic when he tells me, “A little at a time, we will make things suit us.”
    Over and over again he had talked with candor about where and how he lived, that the
where
and
how
were passive symptoms of his life, that the apartment was the space in which he slept, watched television, took a shower. If I am reeling from first-sight shock, it’s the fault of my own glossing over. This is neither more nor less than an honest homecoming. It’s good that Fernando knows it is for him I have come to Italy, not for his house. Houses are easier to find than are sweet strangers, I think. I think again, this time to a man I knew in California. Jeffrey was an obstetrician, successful, madly in love with Sarah, an artist, starving, who was madly in love with him. After years of fencing, he set Sarah aside for an ophthalmologist, extremely successful, whom he married almost immediately. His