A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena de Blasi

machine’s status for him. “This represents the ultimate in Italian technology,” says the churlish stranger. After it bucks him across the living room, we silently tuck the thing away, and I have never seen it since. Surely he sent Dorina home with it one day.
    Next morning I splash vinegar-water everywhere and swab the floors with a new, green, string-headed mop. A splattering of pungent brown liquid from a tin labeled Marmi Splendenti, Resplendent Marbles, and I polish the floors by skating over them, my feet ensconced in the soft, felt envelopes Fernando wears as slippers. Under long, smooth glissades, the marbles give up a sheen. My thigh muscles burn. Though they are not truly resplendent, the floors’ rusty-veined anthracite is beautiful to me, and I am eager to proceed.For Fernando it’s not quite so. Each phase of the work causes him to grieve, before he shrugs into a temperate enthusiasm. We excavate the site, sifting things with anthropological sympathy, kneeling over moldering lockers and reproduction sea chests. In one I find a fifty-four piece audiocassette kit, its plastic coverings intact and labeled
Memoria e Metodo
, Memory and Method. It promises to “order one’s mind.”
    â€œAccidenti,”
he says. “Damn, I’ve searched everywhere for these.” Each evening we relieve the apartment of another layer of its past, and Fernando’s eyes are like those of a dying bird; his journeys to the trash dump are funereal. He is the one spurring on this interim cleanup, yet he is anguished by it. He desires progress without change.
    I begin to establish survival rituals. As soon as Fernando leaves in the morning, I bathe and dress and, avoiding the elevator, run down the stairs, past the troll, out the gate, and to the left—fourteen yards to the yeast-perfumed, sugar-dusted threshold of Maggion. A tiny and glorious
pasticceria
whose resident pastry cook looks as a gingerbread man would look if he were a cherub. Inside it, I am near to a fever of joy.
This pastry shop is next door to my house
, I think. I take two apricot
cornetti
, crisp, burnished croissant-like beauties, and eat one on the way to the bar to drink cappuccino (fifty yards), the second on the way to investigate the
panificio
, the bakery (perhaps seventyyards, perhaps less), where I buy two hundred grams, not quite half a pound, of biscotti
al vino
, crisp cookies made with white wine and olive oil, fennel seeds, and orange peel. I tell myself these will be my lunch. In fact, they are to eat while I walk by the water, along a strip of sea-beaten sand that is the private beach of the Excelsior Hotel. Though Fernando assures me I can walk through its lobby, out its grand glass backdoors, and down to the sea without intervention, I prefer to swing my legs over the low stone wall of a terrace that looks to the water, edge my way down the embankment and onto the wet brown fringes of the Adriatic Sea. I am nearer yet to the fever.
The sea is across the street from my house
, I think. In summer and winter, in the rain, wrapped in furs, in a towel, once in a while in despair, I will walk this stretch of the Adriatic each day for three years of my life.
    Back up the stairs to work, then back down the stairs two or three times more during the morning for espresso, for deep drafts of unmusty air, for one, maybe two, tiny strawberry tarts from the gingerbread cherub. Exits and reentries are recorded by the troll and her posse, each of whom is uniformed in a flower-printed smock.
Buon giorno
is all we say. I have lost hope for the welcoming black-stockinged lady, and I am less certain about the potency of tenderness and bitter chocolate. There is a stereo in the apartment but the only cassettes, besides
Memoria e Metodo
, are, of course, Elvisand Roy, and so I sing. I sing for the sheer joy of another beginning. How many houses have I made? I wonder. How many more will I make? Some people say that when your