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Authors: John Berendt
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months before. She spoke in a swooping, full-throated English drawl that subsided every so often into an incomprehensible mumble before regaining clarity and taking flight again. This remarkable voice materialized, upon my arrival, in the form of a strikingly beautiful woman in her late forties with large, wide-set, smoky-blue eyes, a broad smile, and a billowing mane of shoulder-length brown hair. She was tall, dressed in black, and precariously thin, but fashionably so. As she showed me around the apartment, I discovered she had a wacky charm that expressed itself in emphatic, slightly absurd, often self-mocking remarks. “In Venice,” she said, “no matter what you say, everyone will assume you’re lying. Venetians always embellish, and they take it for granted you will, too. So you might as well. Because, funnily enough, if they discover you’re someone who tells the truth all the time, they’ll simply write you off as a bore.”
Rose explained that the apartment had originally been a storage room with a dirt floor, a magazzino. “We were terribly pleased with ourselves for renovating it,” she said, “until the Comune of Venice, the city government, sent us a letter declaring it illegal! I mean, completely . . . totally . . . illegal! Because we hadn’t got permission. Mind you, the space hadn’t been anything but a rubbish bin for four hundred years, I mean, literally. There was nothing of any architectural value in it. No woodwork, no carvings, no frescoes, no gilt, no anything! I suppose we should have known we had to get permission, but if we had known, we’d probably have dropped the whole idea, because it would have meant having to deal with the Venetian bureaucracy, which is an absolute nightmare, night mare, niiiight mare!”
In the kitchen, Rose demonstrated how to operate the washing machine without causing a flood, and how to light the oven without igniting a fireball.
“At any rate,” she went on, “when the notice from the Comune arrived, Peter had a megawobbly, and I was frantic, because it meant I would have to go to the Comune and sort it out. Nightmare! But all our friends said, ‘Don’t be silly. Nobody ever bothers to get approval. You simply make whatever renovations you like. Then you go to the city officials and confess! You pay a fine. And they give you a piece of paper called a condono, which makes it all perfectly legal.’ ”
Rose showed me into the living room, which was comfortably furnished with club chairs, reading lamps, a dining room table, and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with histories, biographies, art books, travel books, and novels ranging from literary classics to pulp fiction. It was the overflow from the Lauritzens’ library upstairs.
“So I went ’round to the Comune,” she said, “heart in my mouth, and I said, ‘I’m dreadfully sorry. We had no idea! Non lo sapevamo!’ The man didn’t believe a word I was saying, of course, but he took pity on me—how could he not, seeing my face creased with worry, hair a tangle, voice a pathetic whine? Anyway, he gave me a condono, thank God, because he could have made us tear out all the improvements and turn the apartment back into a storage room again. I mean, torture! Torture, torture, tor ture!”
Rose was now standing at the window. She pointed out the various shops on the other side of the canal—the butcher shop, the housewares shop, the local headquarters of the Communist Party, a photo shop with faded wedding pictures in the window. A picturesque trattoria, the Antica Mola, stood at center stage; it had tables set up in front despite the chilly weather. “After you’ve eaten at the Antica Mola a few times,” said Rose, “Giorgio will know you’re not a tourist, and he’ll give you a discount. And that is one of the great secrets of Venice: the discount —lo sconto! Tourists would be furious if they ever found out Venetians pay thirty to
Rose explained that the apartment had originally been a storage room with a dirt floor, a magazzino. “We were terribly pleased with ourselves for renovating it,” she said, “until the Comune of Venice, the city government, sent us a letter declaring it illegal! I mean, completely . . . totally . . . illegal! Because we hadn’t got permission. Mind you, the space hadn’t been anything but a rubbish bin for four hundred years, I mean, literally. There was nothing of any architectural value in it. No woodwork, no carvings, no frescoes, no gilt, no anything! I suppose we should have known we had to get permission, but if we had known, we’d probably have dropped the whole idea, because it would have meant having to deal with the Venetian bureaucracy, which is an absolute nightmare, night mare, niiiight mare!”
In the kitchen, Rose demonstrated how to operate the washing machine without causing a flood, and how to light the oven without igniting a fireball.
“At any rate,” she went on, “when the notice from the Comune arrived, Peter had a megawobbly, and I was frantic, because it meant I would have to go to the Comune and sort it out. Nightmare! But all our friends said, ‘Don’t be silly. Nobody ever bothers to get approval. You simply make whatever renovations you like. Then you go to the city officials and confess! You pay a fine. And they give you a piece of paper called a condono, which makes it all perfectly legal.’ ”
Rose showed me into the living room, which was comfortably furnished with club chairs, reading lamps, a dining room table, and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with histories, biographies, art books, travel books, and novels ranging from literary classics to pulp fiction. It was the overflow from the Lauritzens’ library upstairs.
“So I went ’round to the Comune,” she said, “heart in my mouth, and I said, ‘I’m dreadfully sorry. We had no idea! Non lo sapevamo!’ The man didn’t believe a word I was saying, of course, but he took pity on me—how could he not, seeing my face creased with worry, hair a tangle, voice a pathetic whine? Anyway, he gave me a condono, thank God, because he could have made us tear out all the improvements and turn the apartment back into a storage room again. I mean, torture! Torture, torture, tor ture!”
Rose was now standing at the window. She pointed out the various shops on the other side of the canal—the butcher shop, the housewares shop, the local headquarters of the Communist Party, a photo shop with faded wedding pictures in the window. A picturesque trattoria, the Antica Mola, stood at center stage; it had tables set up in front despite the chilly weather. “After you’ve eaten at the Antica Mola a few times,” said Rose, “Giorgio will know you’re not a tourist, and he’ll give you a discount. And that is one of the great secrets of Venice: the discount —lo sconto! Tourists would be furious if they ever found out Venetians pay thirty to
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