A Venetian Weekend: Part 2

Burgundy tapestries and gold-painted trim adorned the ebony skeleton of the gondola.  Four pillows made a perch at the front.  Two stools balanced next to the low sides.  The boat was sumptuous in colors, surprising in length, but touristic.  Ours nestled into the dock areas, next to dozens of others.  Together they bobbed in full sight of every group of attentive city goers that passed.  The visitors couldn’t see the boats over the insistence of the person shouting history and theatrically sighing in the direction of the Ponte dei Sospiri.

As lunch drew closer,  the gondoliers lost interest in attracting potential clients.  Instead, hats folded over eyes and the waves rocked the world into a doze.  When roused later, the men began talking.  They greeted each other by name as there boats stilled in the currents.  As they uncoiled ropes and pushed off, the murmuring voices became sharp whistles and hees that carried around sharp corners, announcing their arrival long before the bows could meet.  In all of the noise surrounding us as we tripped into the boat, there was no singing.

I had imagined singing, as I always do when I am confronted with Italy.  A kitsch “When the moon hits your eye” bellowing deep from the belly of the striped man dancing with his pole would have sufficed.  My normal preference for “O Sole Mio" was too heavy to balance here.  Pizza pie was an easier thought, more palpable than an opera.

As we passed others like us, I thought of the sexism of gondoliers.  There must be hundreds of them in Venice, weaving around as the canals narrow, floating up and down with the tide, scraping against barnacles— but not a single woman was to be found on the back of the boat.  Men texted as they pushed.  Men wore Northface.  Men shouted at each other over the water.  But women were non-existant.  Was the work so arduous?  It couldn’t be.  I chalked it up to the stereotypical Italian sexism.  Only, stereotype is the four-letter word of academics.

Leaning back on the cushion, I tried to forget the word.  A boat passed to the left of ours.  The striped man was there, a mirror of our own, but there was another as well.  A man tapping at his accordion with vigor and singing to the six tourists squished along the edges.  We glided by too quickly to hear what song was playing.  It wasn’t the one I had imagined.  It wasn’t “In the Jungle” either, which I had heard earlier from a rowdy group of Americans overflowing to boats.  Like always, the accordion sounded like Paris.  Like metro rides and quayside walks.  Like full-sized cups of espresso and open space.

A Venetian Weekend: Part 1

Every time I enter a new city, I expect the glamour to be immediate.  I imagine an artist waiting for me at Charles de Gaulle a pastel-covered canvas under her left arm, her right extended toward me, beckoning.  In Rio, an entire a samba school dances toward me, quivering their feathers as they pull me into the melee.  In this world, my first steps into the city are straight from the concourse to the quais and beaches.  

Only, it is never like this.  I fly into a city and see the poverty of the surrounding areas, then the pseudo-location of the airport itself surrounds me.  I am in a queue with hundreds of others as I wait for my baggage to make an appearance on the slowly turning belt.

No matter where the final destination is, the transit between airplane and city drains the imagination.   As the graffiti thickens and the potholes widen, the allure of the city disappears, and I become cynical of the very idea of traveling.

Venice was the same.  I arrived after an hour bus ride to the Lyon airport, an hour wait (and delayed boarding), an 80 minute flight, then a twenty minute bus ride.  The limbo of between was overwhelming, more so than the terrestrial change from mountains to seaside.  Before I could lose myself in the wandering streets, I saw the industrial power plants, canal covered farmland, and crawling barges.  Before I experienced a gondola, I became car sick in a bus as it wound around the suburbs.    

   

Then though, then I was met by the city, more welcoming than any artist.  The first bridge engulfed me and the canals began to flow.  Despite the press of others, the footpaths became mine.  The people took wider paths, as my own narrowed until outstretched fingers brushed the walls of two embracing buildings, forever leaning closer to each other.  In the sinking sunlight, the cobblestones shone.  Pheasants sang from inside the cloistered churchyard gardens.

As the sacred bells began to ring, I stood enthralled.  Venice came alive, as one tower then another beckoned in the coming evening in a cacophonous medley of different times.  Five minutes separated the first note from the last one.  

Time there, was a notion different than in other places.  It was fluid.  Exactitude is of no import in a city of tides.  Dinner reservations could bend and morning plans change.  The bells would continue in their own way, without acknowledging the seeming certitude of the hour.

As the final noises faded, I crossed the last bridge of the afternoon and I entered into my two day home, another pseudo-place I could have found in any quaint city the world over.  I was greeted in English.  A British couple was next to me.  The warmth and glass doors separated me from the closeness of Venice.  Fifteen minutes later, when the bells should have begun again, I couldn’t hear through the thick walls of the hotel foyer.  Inside, you couldn’t see the disappearing gold of the sun either.