A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena de Blasi Page B

sleeping.”
    â€œYou should know what
that’s
like,” I mutter sotto voce, carrying the plants back into the bedroom, trimming their crunchy leaves down to their sapless stalks. I begin finding how convenient it is to speak a language not understood by one’s beloved. I stamp my feethard through the apartment, flinging a wake of crushed leaves behind me and wondering why there always hovers, just an inch or two above love, some small itch for revenge.
    A white rool rug from Sardinia conceals the ruins in the bathroom, and the red plastic-edged mirror over the sink is displaced by a smoked, beveled one fitted inside a baroque cornice from Gianni Cavalier in Campo Santo Stefano. He convinces us to buy two gold-leafed lily sconces to hang on either side of the mirror, even though there are no outlets for them. “Attach them to the wall and put candles in them,” he tells us, and that’s what we do. Relieved of its melancholy, the space is soft, inviting. We tell each other it feels more like a country house or a cottage than an apartment. I begin calling it “the dacha,” and Fernando loves this. Now it seems a good place to be, to eat and drink and talk, to think, to rest, to make love. Fernando walks the space three, four times every day, surveying, touching, half-smiling in a still-tentative approval.
    Tingling with curiosity, the troll presses the buzzer one evening, waving a piece of withheld mail to secure her entry.
“Posso dare un occhiata?
May I take a quick look?”
    Her twitterings please Fernando.
“Ma qui siamo a Hollywood. Brava, signora, bravissima. Auguri, tanti auguri
. Here we are in Hollywood. Good, signora, very good. Good wishes, many good wishes,” she says, scuttling back down the stairs. The bunker will be informedby midnight. Thanks to the troll I begin to understand that Fernando needs endorsement, confirmation, before he can embrace what I do. If I can please the crowd, he is pleased. Seven years later, three houses later, as I am telling you this now, still he waits for a testimonial, maybe two, before relaxing into approval.
    Rallied then, Fernando begins to summon neighbors and colleagues to stop by for a peek at the place. No one is asked to sit, to drink a glass of wine. Each one knows his office is to reconnoiter and report to the rest of the island. I am part of the furniture, a parlor chair upholstered in vintage Norma Kamali, and no one speaks directly to me. Addressing the air eight inches above my head, one of them might come forth with some flummery like,
“Signora, Le piace Venezia?
Does the lady like Venice?” Then, in a sort of mechanized minuet, he turns smartly around and out the door. I will learn that this is a form of Venetian social life, that some of these “visitors” will wax affectionately for years about what a lovely time they passed in our home. Nothing feels real yet, and I begin wondering if it ever will. More, I begin wondering if I will remember what
real
is, should it resurface. I play house. It’s a little like when the children were babies and I could play dolls. But no, this is different. Then I was much older.
    Though he’s on his own turf, doing the things he has done always, Fernando, too, has slid through the looking glass. He walks up anddown the same avenues, says
buona sera
to the same people, buys his cigarettes from the same tobacconist, gulps the same
aperitivo
in the same bar where he’s gulped it for thirty years, yet now, nothing is the same. Fernando has his own stranger. “You, too, are inside another life,” I say to him.
    He says no. He says this is not another life but a first life. “At least the first life where I’ve been anything more than an observer,” he says. There is a bittersweetness in my stranger. And a long-repressed hot tremor of anger. I think how lonely it would be to just bump along, to hang on, while life drives one about. I believe