I say, without the slightest hint of irony, that I had grown a little bored with Venice. The city did not disappoint with it’s serpentine charms and strange haunted water but this was my sixth time here in one of these educational tours and the time spent was artificial: neither long enough to truly enjoy the city nor short enough for you to spend the time in an overpriced café watching really awful Italian music videos – though I did do that as well. Those videos: high production value and cloying hooks. And the singers! Mostly middle aged men! The English Mom’s on Holiday had finished their carafe of wine, had flirted outrageously with the attractive café bar tender, and now they were out the door. I figured I’d leave too, maybe find the ideal place to people watch.
Right off Piazza San Marco there is a little side piazza tucked in tight to the flank of the duomo itself. I figured I’d settle in there, where the sun was filtered. Again, I don’t want to come off the wrong way – as a poor school teacher who lives on the margin of bounced checks every month, I was not blind to the ridiculousness of my Venice-weariness. I was grateful to be here and aware of how lucky I had been to boldly bluff my way into sponsoring a trip to Italy some ten years ago, convincing all and sundry that I knew what I was doing. What hubris! What a hustler! I attended another teacher’s Trip Meeting and then held my own, faking the whole damn thing, affecting a worldliness that was as near to drag in illusion as anything I can think of. That was eleven years ago – and in the intervening years I’d been all over Europe, criss-crossing the continent and becoming familiar in a variety of fabled cities even though I was financially unable to afford to keep my car running without help from my mother-in-law. I had become that worldly traveler teacher that I had affected those eleven years ago and it had cost me next to nothing. My student travel group from the rural chicken and cow farming region of Piedmont Georgia had scraped up the funds to come on this trip, some of them working fast food jobs and socking away money, and they were determined to ride their gondola. Not me, though – I wanted to put my back to the wall of the Duomo and watch the time go by. There’s a saying in Italian: “il dulce fa niente.” The sweetness of doing nothing. As an Italian-American I feel that doing Nothing is a skill that I was born with but that it requires a tremendous amount of practice to do Right. If one wants to learn Kung Fu one goes to China; if one wants to learn the zen art of doing Nothing one goes to Italy . . .
Children were loose in the piazza chasing the pigeons who allowed them to get just so close before rising as one and taking flight. The campanile tolled the hour as campanili do throughout Italy despite the fact that this is a culture that doesn’t recognize the tyranny of time. Asian travel groups moved in platoons and Americans spoke and laughed a little too loudly. The air was dense with decay . . .
Somewhere in the church of San Marco the legendary bones of the legendary Saint Mark were kept as trophies and medieval tourist attractions. My own bones pressed back against the shady side of the church as I decompressed and gave away all the Time that my American psyche was carefully hoarding, tallying, sharing out. Eventually I became aware of what I took to be a father and son sitting next to me. They were Asian of some type but they insisted on speaking together in heavily accented English for some reason. It was like listening to a Samurai film. The father was small and trim and wearing glasses; the son was in his twenties and fat. Something had come between them and the son’s voice, with its peculiar accent, was sour with pout.
“You NEVER let me touch it! I thought this time but no!”
The father did not raise his voice; his dignity was graceful despite the fact that he was on the defensive.
“Yes, yes. It is, of course, my fault. Mine. I made a mistake. Yes.”
“You never let me. You let HER but when I ask, you become angry.”
“You must . . . understand. I think of you . . . differently. Therefore I treat you differently. This is my . . . error. You are my son.”
“It’s embarrassing!”
“Come, come my son. Let us get some gelato. It is my error. Next time! Next time!”
I watched them walk to the gelateria knowing full well that I would never know where this conversation came from and where it ended, after the gelato. I didn’t want to know. Every summer I find myself in Europe and in every city I endeavor to lose my students on a gondola ride or a trip up the Eifel Tower so that I can be loose, the Poor Wayfarer – a mute witness to small objects and events that are avatars of god. Il dulce fa niente.
In Kilarney, Ireland I once found myself in a pub just off the square where the horse carts are tethered. The rain whirled like steam and, despite the fact that it was July, it was chilly so I followed the sound of music into a smoky little public house where a trio sat upon chairs and played folk music while looking past and beyond each other – as if they were three individuals and their confluence here, at this time and place, within the framework of this song, was a strange coincidence. The air was thick and sweet with the smell of cigarette smoke and spilled beer and wet wool; a the faerie music whirled madly and sweetly like a hyperactive child, produced by a man with a guitar, a young lady with a fiddle and a third young lady with a concertina. It was the concertina girl I focused on. Her lovely wedge-heeled slingback kept time with the music and she played that odd instrument like someone who has made her peace with a difficult marriage. She looked away from all of us.
One year we were in Lucerne, Switzerland during a folk festival. White tents made up temporary beer gardens that were full of singing and heroic drinking. Sausages were for sale at every corner and mustard was de rigeur. For a while I made my way along the waterfront, visiting the junk vendors with several of my students. At one such I found a sheep bell on a deeply worn leather collar; when I shook it, the fey tone summoned a memory of another trip to Switzerland when we stayed at an inn at the foot of a mountain that was shrouded by high altitude weather. Sitting in the back garden and drinking wine you could hear the plaintive tolling of sheep bells in the clouds and I thought I’d never heard anything lovelier.
I asked the price of this bell and the young, preteen beauty with her porcelain skin and clear eyes, put her palms together and smiled shyly at me. “So!” she said. It was a word to buy time. She raised her fingers to indicate four Swiss Francs. As we were walking away one of my students laughed at me for making the purchase but when I shook the bell it again brought me to that hill up in the Alps . . .
The streets of Lucerne were filled with people in folk costumes and from time to time a group would coalesce and then the air would still as their voices came together in harmony to sing old hymns a capella. Men with alpenhorns would come together in synchronicity to produce that low cetacean thrum that seemed to have the power of transportation. I again slipped away from my crowd and found a park where I could sit and watch young men stand with acumen, carefully arranging chess pieces the size of elementary school children on a board that was affixed to the ground. Chess creates its own time and now when I shake my shepherd’s bell I feel the mountain in the mist but also the diffusion of time that is chess played in a park on a July afternoon in Lucerne while alpenhorns moan theatrically in the distance . . .
Parks – why don’t we have parks like these in the States? Music again steered me to a trio, this time in a park in Dublin where the music wheeled and whirled capriciously while swans cruised like ships of the line on station. I lay on my back on a bench and watched a young couple make up from something or other. He held her hands in his and faced her, speaking softly and urgently; she looked dubious.
One suitably rainy day I slipped away from my group and travelled through the tin-type weather to the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris to walk the narrow lanes between the houses of the dead while rain drops slipped from the leaves of plane trees like tears. All alone I navigated among the bones of poets to find Jim Morrison’s grave tucked away in a fold of the land. There, to prevent desecration, a guard stood watch. We caught each other’s eyes and he smiled like a child found during Hide and Seek.
On another visit to Paris I sat alone outside the Louvre and watched young girls with the stage presence only young girls can have shrieking and laughing while chasing each other through the dour and dignified adults, spraying each other with condiments. Asian tourists stopped and watched woodenly – I would say, inscrutably – their women folk wearing bonnets like something out of a Ford Western to keep their skin lily white.
In Innsbruck I ate herring and listened to two American priests argue hotly over some matter of theology. On the island of Capri I watched a well dressed gentleman saunter casually over towards a wall near the harbor, away from the shops hawking brick a brack. Despite his elegant and philosophical air, I could see that he had unzipped and was peeing against someone’s garden wall while studying the turquoise water philosophically. In Athens a gentleman from Argentina was giving away fliers in the Plaka. He attempted to explain to me his idea for hovering airships that would enforce the law from above. He spoke in conspiratorial tones.
In Rome, alone again, the gypsies stalked me with the glacial insistence of lizards. You could find solace in the old Forum beneath the olive trees. You could also find solace among the ruins of the tower atop the hill of Assisi where the cultivated plains of Umbria roll away in feminine curves.
In Amsterdam I watched the hotel staff unhurriedly pursue a man in his underwear who held his head and continuously called out in English, “You must call ze ambulance! You must call ze ambulance!” The hotel staff moved implacably toward him, herding him the way you might a chicken loose from the coop.
In Venice we stayed at an inn that was formerly a 19th century palazzo. The halls and stairs wound here and there without pattern and, on my way to my room that first night I became lost and tiptoed through old ball rooms and music salons that were dense with resentment at my lack of propriety. My chambers had once been one large room but now they were trisected by modern walls that created sleeping chamber, bathroom and walk-closet. The night was cool with rain and so I slept with the window open, the white curtains undulating like surf. At some time in the night I had a dream – was it a dream? – where a servant girl in antique clothes walked insistently across my room to close the window and smooth the curtains. When she was done she turned to glare at me, pivoted on her heel, and marched away. When I woke up the window was closed . . .
I could tell more: the stone stairways down the cliffs of Sorrento that lead to the beaches and the feral cats and the sound of conversation and laughter from young men and women drinking wine in the moonlight; the English dames on the train out of London who had nowhere to sit, and who spoke of me in the third person as someone who might move if I had a shred of decency; the cloying, mildewed smell of the ovens at Dachau . . .
I am the Poor Wayfarer. I’ve been a mute witness to ten thousand small things in cities where I am an alien. The natives look through me and the tourists bump me as they pass. I am as at home in these cities as I am in the town where my tiny house sits among the oak trees.
