Provoked in Venice: The Rider Quintet, vol. 3

Provoked in Venice

PROVOKED IN VENICE The 9:20 train from Arezzo to Venicevia Florence. Good-bye to Siena, and the glow of electric lights and fireflies in the night sky above the ancient parapets and the terra cotta condos and the black canopies of the umbrella pines. The girl across from me on the train, her skirt riding higher with each stop. As noon approaches, she drowses over Centi anni di solitudine and lifts her pale face toward the sun; toward life. How were Piero's frescoes? Mostly destroyed, or worn away, and yet impeccably preserved in reproductions. . . . How? Infra-red photography? But how can that which has been effaced retain its color? Do we live in a world in which the fake is an actual improvement over the real, like the Palenque at the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, where you get the idea without the flies? Maybe a child yellingout for a Calypo in a cafe at 9 in the morning isa welcome antidote to the somber, sober faces ordering coal-black espresso and staring into the doom-haunted pages of Le Nazione, or The Guardian . . . Rome in grainy black and white; Siena in sepia; Venice in color. But you haven'tyet been here in winter, when the cold, hard winds come downfrom the mountains, and the watergets rough, and waves flood the piazzas. The fog rolls in. You can't watch your back. You can't see the Lido, 59 I San Erasmo, or the cypresses on the cemetery island of Francesco del Deserto. You're at the mercy of echoing footsteps, the creepy silence of the gondolas on the inner canals and, as a non-native Venetian crossing humpbacked bridges and moving through streets and alleys tense as corridors, you're praying that it's just someone H A R M L E S S TO O T H E R S LIKE Y O U R S E L F . . . someone who . . . would be more prone to fall back or faint rather than approach and attack. You wouldn't believe the sieges this city has withstood. YouAmericans are at a loss when devastation conies around, having no blood on the ground. No points for the Civil War? When was the last time you spent an afternoon at Antietam and pondered the thousands who went to their graves in one day? What cannot be effaced, erased, or reproduced, is experience. Falling apart from fatigue a mere hundred yards shy of the hilltop fort, Fortressa Medicea, atop Arezzo, repairing instead to the video parlor with a pool table where the child clears the table in an inspired display of rapid fire left handed (the only thing he does left handed . . .why?) shooting, knocking in as many balls by chance as by design. The local teens stand aside and watch. The day starts later and ends later in Venice. At 9:30 AMin June it's still as fragrant and cool as it is at 9:30 PM. It's still light enough to gaze out, as far as your sight can reach, over the Guidecca, and watch turbulent waves chop at the resilient docks. Before sleep, sleepy-eyed and yawning, the child reads aloud from Treasure Island; then asks, yawning, "did you ever call me "L.G." (little guy) "No," Madelaine answers, "but Daddy did." I can't anymore . . . when my nine year old son is one inch shy of Keats' full height. He wakes with his arm 60 swollen from mosquito bites. "Or a spider," Madelaine suggests, pulling back his bed to look for cracks in the wall. It's not that you're encircled by water; it's more that everything is swirling, like Tintoretto in his quest to capture everything at one time in defiance of space and time. Perspective? Venice is the place. Street names resist. Palaces and piazzas collapse into one another. The harbor shape-shifts in the mist. Nowhere is it easier to get lost. My attention is enticed, incited, to circle , to keep roving, if not like the water itself around the fixed points of the quays, then like the palaces on the Grand Canal, the gondolas, taxis, vaporettos, police boats, wherries top-heavy with mounds of cement and crisscrossed planks, and other water-bound vehicles, that swirl like brush strokes in action across the canals and wider reaches of theAdriatic. Siena, an homage to stasis; Venice an homage to...