A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena de Blasi Page A

house is finished, it’s time to die. My house is not finished.
    By the third day, the scrubbing is nearly complete, and I’m ready to begin shopping. Fernando wants us to choose everything together, and so, when his workday ends, I’m there at the bank, and we go off to Jesurum for heavy ocher-colored sheets, a bedspread, a duvet, all dripping with eight inches of embroidered borders. We take masses of thick white towels and bath sheets adorned with milk chocolate-colored lace, a more intense ocher for an embossed damask tablecloth and napkins big as dish towels. These things are more expensive than a baby grand but, at last, there will be vanities in the stranger’s lair.
    Another day we buy a wonderful ivory lace coverlet in a
bottega
near Campo San Barnaba. Our treasure in hand, we walk a few yards round the corner to a sailing barge, a floating vegetable market, which, in one reincarnation or another, has rocked up along the Fondamenta Gherardini every day for seven or eight hundred years. We buy a kilo of peaches. Lace and peaches, the stranger’s hand to hold. This is good. And it’s this scene I think of as I crumple and fasten the lace to the overhead light fixture in the bedroom, stretching its edges taught and tying them to the posts of the headboard.Now we have a
baldacchino
, a canopied bed. Now we have a boudoir.
    A vase of cobalt blue glass I find under the kitchen sink is gorgeous with branches of forsythia from the flower lady on the
imbarcadero
, boat landing. Once an extravagant ashtray, a large square dish of the same blue now holds artichokes nodding on thick long stems and lemons still attached to their leaves and twigs. Reine Claude plums, the color of new grass, are heaped in a basket carried from Madeira to New York to California to Missouri and, most recently, home here to Italy. Books line squeaky-clean glass shelves where once lived wounded model airplanes and tons of old pink newspapers, the
Gazzetta dello Sport
. I stand twenty or so photos in silver frames on the freshly beeswaxed and chammied lid of what seems to be a wonderful pine chest, a
cassapanca
he calls it. He says his father carted it down from Merano, the city that lies on the border with Austria, where the family once lived, where Fernando was born.
    I will die with an unreformed and carnal love for fabric. Fabric matters more to me than furniture. Heirlooms and antiques aside, I’d rather drape and festoon some sorry, wounded relic than open the door to the Ethan Allen man. Shamelessly I head for the Lido market, which sets up on Wednesdays down by the canals. I buy a bolt of beige damask, lengths of which, unhemmed, warm up a black leather sofa. With a bolt of raw creamy silk I sort of gift-package themismatched chairs, fashioning pouches for each one, tying them at their bases with silk cording. The glass and metal dining-room table is draped in a white linen bedspread, the ends of which are twisted into fat knots around its legs. A collection of Georgian candlesticks, rubbed, gleaming, I set like jewels in a row down its middle.
    I find perfect poses for nearly every one of those old pillows I wouldn’t leave behind in Saint Louis. All the surgery-efficient light-bulbs are replaced with
bugie
—literally, “lies”—low-wattage night lights and vanilla- and cinnamon-scented candles. Sunlight by day, candlelight in the evening: electricity can seem redundant. I am blithe while the stranger pouts.
    Fernando is, in fact, livid when I show him the just-washed walls in the bedroom. He says walls in Venice can only be washed in autumn, when the air is relatively dry, or the dreaded black
muffa
, mold, will creep and crawl. Lord, as if it would matter, I think. We take turns on the ladder with my hair dryer.
    He mourns the dead plants I set out on the terrace with the paint cans.
“Non sono morte, sono solo un po’ addormentate
. They are not dead; they’re just