The Lauritzens displayed the fervor of converts. Venice had been their chosen home. They had not simply been born in it and stayed. Their spirited defense of the city was, it seemed to me, partly a defense of their decision to live there, in self-imposed exile.
Peter had been born in Oak Park, Illinois. His arrival in Venice had been by way of the Lawrenceville School, Princeton, and a Fulbright Scholarship to Florence, where he studied the Provençal language in the poetry of Dante. His father had wanted him to become a baseball player and enter the business world, but Peter never moved back to the United States. Instead he became an acolyte of the Anglican priest who presided over the American Church in Florence, and when the priest was reassigned to Venice to establish an English church there, Peter came with him, met Rose, fell in love, and married her.
By the time he arrived in Venice, Peter bore little resemblance to the boy from Oak Park, Illinois. He had re-created himself, and he was disarmingly candid about it. “My father never understood why anybody would pick up and move to Italy. Italy of all places. He enjoyed visiting us here, but he could never take my living in Italy seriously. To him it seemed like a nice joke. When our son, Frederick, was born, my father offered to pay for his college tuition, but only on the condition that he go to an American college. He was afraid we were going to make Frederick into an Englishman. He got this notion, no doubt, because of the way I speak and because I married an English girl. However, I’m pleased to say that every bit of Frederick’s education, to date, has been in Venice—he’s a Venetian, not an Englishman. He’ll soon go off to college—but to Oxford, not to America. And as for my living in Italy, it was the best decision I’ve ever made. I luxuriate in this world I’ve invented for myself.”
As for Rose, living in Venice came naturally. She was a member of the British aristocracy. For centuries her family had lived in great manor houses and passed along such titles as Baron of Ashford, Lord Bury, and the Earl of Albemarle among the males. Her ancestral line did have its quirky elements: Rose’s great-great-aunt, Alice Keppel, was the publicly acknowledged mistress of Edward VII. Mrs. Keppel’s daughter, Violet Trefusis—“Aunt Violet” to Rose—had become famous as the eccentric and irrepressible lover of Vita Sackville-West. When Rose was a teenager, she visited her aging, expatriated Aunt Violet in Florence. Violet advised her in matters of style and society, contributing significantly to Rose’s worldliness and dramatic poise. Although Rose was entitled to be addressed as “Lady Rose,” her family background seemed a matter of indifference to her. She had settled in Venice in part to get away from it. And because she had lived for most of her childhood at Mount Stewart, a family estate in Northern Ireland, she often replied to questions about her origins by saying simply, “I’m bog Irish.”
Rose had been coming to Venice since the age of sixteen, usually in the company of her mother, who bought an old gondolier’s cottage as a retreat for summer vacations. Ezra Pound lived next door in an identical cottage, which he had shared with his mistress, Olga Rudge, since the 1920s.
“Pound had just been released from St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane,” Rose recalled, “and by the time I saw him in the early 1960s, he was old and hermitlike. He had taken his famous vow of silence.
“We’d see the two of them, Olga and Ezra, quietly strolling in the neighborhood and having coffee at one of the cafés along the Zattere. She was diminutive and very beautiful. He was tall and dignified and always elegantly dressed: a broad-brimmed felt hat, a wool coat, tweed jacket, a flowing tie. His face was craggy, and his eyes were immensely sad. When people stopped to greet them, he would stand patiently, in silence, while Olga made pleasantries. We never saw him speak in public, but at home we could hear him reading his poetry aloud in a strong, rhythmic voice. My mother was a fan of Pound’s, so she rang the doorbell and asked if she might have an audience with him. Olga very politely told her to go away: It was no use, he wouldn’t talk to anyone. We finally realized we’d been hearing recordings of Pound reading his poems. He’d been sitting on the other side of our common wall, listening quietly, just as we had. Pound died ages ago, but Olga lives on. She’s over a hundred now.”
The Lauritzens’ circle of friends included both Venetians and expatriates, among them the art collector Peggy Guggenheim. Peter frequently accompanied Peggy on late-afternoon rides in her gondola, which was the last private gondola in Venice. “She knew every foot of every back canal,” he said. “She would sit in her little chair with her Lhasa apsos lounging underneath and her gondolier standing behind her on the stern deck, rowing. She’d give him directions with hand signals, as if she were driving a car, without so much as saying a word or looking back at him. Peggy was notoriously stingy. She hired the city’s corpse collector as her gondolier, because he was available at a better price. She didn’t seem to mind that he serenaded her with funeral dirges and that he was very often drunk.
“I went to see Peggy during her final illness,” Peter went on. “She was rereading Henry James. She told me she had given instructions that she was to be buried with her dogs in the garden of her palazzo on the Grand Canal. She made me promise to see that her wishes were carried out, and I did. In fact, by the time she died, fourteen of her dogs were already in the garden waiting for her. Peggy was still alive when the last of them was laid to rest. During the burial ceremony, while the butler was poking around in the dirt with a spade looking for an empty spot, he unearthed a Lhasa apso skull that rolled to a stop at Peggy’s feet. Peggy was sobbing into her handkerchief and didn’t notice.”
In his study, Peter showed me the 1922 edition of the works of Henry James that Peggy had bequeathed to him. Each volume was signed with the first of her three married names: “Peggy Vail.”
Peggy Guggenheim was never accepted by members of Venetian society, who professed to be appalled by her sexual promiscuity. But the Lauritzens had been taken up by Venetians and frequently attended Venetian parties. On the evening I first met them, Peter picked up an engraved invitation from his desk, studied it for a moment, and then glanced up at Rose with a look that seemed to ask, “Should I?” Rose nodded her assent. Twelve Venetian families were giving a formal Carnival costume ball in two weeks. The Lauritzens had been invited to come and to bring a guest of their own. When Peter extended the invitation to me, I readily accepted. “You’ll see what I mean when I say Venice is really just a small village,” said Rose.
Before leaving, I signed the Lauritzens’ guest book, and as I did, a question that had occurred to me earlier in the evening came to mind again.
“By the way,” I said to Rose, “how did the Comune ever find out you had renovated the apartment downstairs?”
Rose smiled conspiratorially. “Someone informed on us, apparently. We don’t know who. It might have been a neighbor.”
“Ah,” I said, “so if Venice is a village, it’s a village . . . with an edge?”
“Oh, absolutely,” she said with a broad smile. “It definitely has an edge.”
{4}
SLEEPWALKING
QUITE APART FROM THE TWICE-DAILY TIDAL RISE AND FALL of the Misericordia Canal, life outside my window had a special rhythm of its own. Typically the day began in the predawn stillness when a fruit-and-vegetable dealer stepped into his boat, moored opposite my window, gently started his motor, and chugged slowly and quietly down the canal—the equivalent, for a motorboat, of tiptoeing. Then everything fell silent again, except for the lapping of water against the stones.
At about eight o’clock, life along the canal officially awoke, as shopkeepers on the other side started opening their doors and rolling up their metal gates. Giorgio set his tables and chairs out in front of the trattoria. The butcher took delivery of meat from a passing barge.
Pedestrians began moving across my field of vision like actors crossing a stage: a laborer shambling unhurriedly, a man in a business suit walking at a more purposeful pace. Customers stopped in at the trattoria for coffee and a glance at the mornin
g’s Gazzettino. Next door, at the local Communists’ storefront headquarters, with posters bearing the hammer-and-sickle insignia on the walls, there were generally one or two people sitting at a desk, talking on the phone or reading a newspaper. The small shop next to that one had been the workshop of Renato Bona, one of the last Venetian craftsmen who specialized in making oars and oar posts for gondolas. Bona’s genius as a sculptor—particularly his mastery of the curving, twisting oar posts—had made him a demigod among gondoliers. Since his death two years earlier, his shop had become something of a shrine, commemorated by a plaque next to the door. The Misericordia Canal was not on any of the usual gondola routes, but every so often a gondola would glide by in silent tribute to Bona. One gondola, however, had its regular mooring spot in front of the house. It was a wedding gondola, so it had elaborate carving and ornamentation, but it was still black like all the others. At some point during the day, the gondolier would ready it for a wedding by putting gold-and-white slipcovers over the chairs and cushions.
At one o’clock, the rolling of metal gates sounded again as the shops closed for midday. Only the trattoria stayed open, serving local seafood specialties to a predominantly neighborhood clientele. The pace of life slowed until late afternoon, when the shops reopened and people walked at a quickened step: students released from class, housewives hurriedly shopping for dinner.
As darkness fell, the metal gates rolled down again, and the lights of the trattoria came up at stage center. People moved now at a leisurely stroll, and convivial voices floated in the nighttime air. Toward midnight, the sounds of boats and backwash died down. The voices drifted away. Giorgio dragged the chairs and tables back inside and turned off the lights. By that time, the fruit-and-vegetable dealer had long since tethered his boat to its mooring poles, and Pino, the owner of the white water taxi, had pulled a canvas sheet over the open part of his deck and retired to his apartment above the Communists.
Venice could be a disorienting place, even for people who lived there and thought they knew it well. The narrow, winding streets, together with the serpentine course of the Grand Canal and the absence of any landmarks visible from a distance, made it difficult to keep one’s bearings. Ernest Hemingway described Venice as “a strange, tricky town” and walking in it as “better than working crossword puzzles.” To me it occasionally felt like walking through a funhouse, especially at times when, twenty minutes after having set out on a course that I had thought was a straight line, I discovered I was right back where I started. But the streets and squares of Cannaregio became familiar to me sooner than I expected, and so did some of its characters. I had been in residence barely a week when I met the Plant Man.
He appeared at first to be a shrub that moved. He was an oasis of rubber plants, ficus trees, heather, and ivy that floated along Strada Nuova, calling out in a voice that carried in all directions. “O-la! O-la! Have you got a house? Have you got somewhere to go?” As he drew closer, I made him out to be a short, solid man with wiry gray hair who loped along half hidden at the center of a mass of greenery protruding out of sacks hanging from his shoulders and clutched in both hands. He stopped to talk to a stout woman with short, battleship gray hair.
“This one costs eighty thousand lire,” he said, “but I’ll give it to you for twenty thousand. It’ll last for years!”
“Don’t lie to me,” the woman said.
The man set his sacks on the ground and emerged from his personal forest. He was barely five feet tall and wore a bright red jacket, a yellow shirt, a tie that was far too short, and high-top sneakers.
“It will last!” he crowed. “I’ve known you for a lifetime, sister. O-la! And you love plants, really love ’em. All the better, all the better. The man that marries you will be a lucky one!”
“She’s already married,” a man standing nearby said.
The woman handed the Plant Man ten thousand lire (five dollars) and took the plant, somewhat dubiously.
“Thank you, sister,” he said. “May God let you live to be a hundred! Give it a little chamomile tea for the vitamins, but no water from the tap unless you filter out the chlorine first! Chlorine is poison.”
A teenager coming the other way called out, “Hey, man! You got a house? You got somewhere to go?”
The Plant Man looked at me. “See? They know me. Hey, kid! You’ve known me all your life, right?”
“Yeah, you’re always singing,” the boy said.
“See?” he said. “I invented this song when I was at the Zamparini Stadium, where the Venice soccer team plays. I sing it to the losing team—‘You got a house?’ It means, ‘What are you hanging around here for? What’s the use? You got a house? You might as well go home!’ And now all the kids sing it. They’ve even made it into banners that they wave at the games. Yeah, I invented it.”
“Where do these plants come from?” I asked.
“We have our own farm half an hour outside Venice—my wife and me. We work it ourselves. It’s near Padua. I’ve been coming to Venice every day for twenty-eight years. Only to Venice, nowhere else, because Venice is the only city I truly have in my heart. Venetians are the best people, kind people, courteous. Monday I did a terrace for a doctor near the Rialto fish market. I brought him veronica. I go to all the parishes and the churches. I do them all, from Sant’Elena to San Giobbe. I’m the only one who does it. I have chickens, too.” He reached deep into one of his sacks and pulled out a chicken. It had been beheaded, gutted, plucked, but it still had feet.
“I just gave one to the pharmacist in Campo San Pantalon, and I now have to deliver this one to Luigi Candiani, the notary.”
“Will it still be fresh by the time you get it there?” I asked.
“Fresh? O-la! Yes, my good man, it will be fresh! It won’t smell! This is not commercial stuff. We raise these chickens on grains, grass, and vegetables, all from our fields. You can eat it now, or in two days, or if you put it in the freezer, three months. . . . Hey, brother,” he called to an old man walking past, “you got a house?”
“Nah, I don’t have a house,” the man said with a smile.
“You want to buy a live chicken?”
“Nah.”
“You want half a live chicken? No? Well, it was worth asking.” Then, turning back to me, “And you? You want anything?”
I pointed to a small pot of heather.
“Perfect choice!” he said. “It sprouts nice pink flowers, and when you get tired of watering it, you can just let it dry out. That way you’ll have it forever.”
He patted my shoulder. “My name is Adriano Delon. I come to Venice every day except Sunday. That’s when I go ballroom dancing with my wife. It’s on television. You can see us on channel nine! We waltz, we tango, and we samba.” Adriano raised his arms in the air and swiveled his hips. “O-la! Ballroom dancing will never go out of style. Well, I’d better go and deliver Candiani’s chicken.”
With that, Adriano Delon hoisted his sacks into position. Then, once again surrounded by his portable thicket and singing at the top of his lungs, he set off down Strada Nuova, this time with a sweeping stride that, to my inexpert eyes, resembled something between a waltz and a tango.
ONE MORNING I ROSE VERY EARLY with the intention of taking a walk when the streets would be virtually empty. I headed in the direction of the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, and as I came into Campo San Vio, I noticed four men in work clothes standing by the side of the English Church. Two of them were crouching at the base of the church wall, about thirty feet apart, at opposite ends of a net that lay loosely gathered on the ground between them. Each man drove a single nail through a corner of the net, anchoring one side of it to the pavement. Then each held a free corner in his hand and, still crouching, watched a third man, who was carrying a canvas sack. The man walked to the center of the campo, reached into his sack, and started tossing bread crumbs onto the ground. Within minutes, pigeons began to alight and peck at the crumbs—forty pigeons, fifty pigeons. The man now threw th
e bread crumbs slightly closer to the men with the net. And then closer still. The pigeons followed the moving feast, jostling each other as they pecked and hopped. When they were within a few feet of the net, the two men flung the free end over the pigeons and trapped them. A furious fluttering and tumbling swelled the net as the men skillfully pulled it around and under the pigeons until they were fully enclosed. Only a few escaped. The fourth workman now rushed over and threw a large black cloth over the pigeons. They were instantly becalmed. The men then picked up the net, now heavy with pigeons, and carried it to a boat waiting in the canal.