The Boatman’s Tenure: A Story of Venice

I couldn’t believe I was actually waiting for her to call. The next morning I didn’t even go out for my morning coffee ritual. After showering and washing my hair, I stood at the hall window looking down at the service boats going by on the canal and alternately at the people on the fondamenta on the other side. The water was unusually high on the walls. At a low place in front of an apartment entrance directly across the way the fondamenta had collected about three inches of water nine to ten feet wide. When I got bored with watching the redness of tomatoes and the yellowness of squash on the boats going by just below my window I focused on the people puzzling over the problem of the flooded area in front of the apartment entrance. You could almost see their thoughts. They would come merrily along—from both directions—and suddenly stop upon seeing the water. The approaches to the problem varied. About half tried to wade or tip-toe or hop or skip through, the others took the time to retrace their steps either over the bridge by the post office or going all the way back down to Hotel Navona and crossing at the little stone bridge there. There were exceptions of course. A boy hoisted his girlfriend onto his back and waded through the mess in his tennis shoes just to show, I guess, how tough he was. Two boys climbed the wall of the building, holding onto electrical tubing, which ran along above the doorway.

The water was high like this because it had rained in the night and the tide probably had come in but more probably the flooding—which no doubt was a problem in spots all over the city—was due to those damned channels they dug years ago from the sea into the lagoon to let the great ships in. Because of those profit-motivated trenches the whole of Venice was slowly, slowly sinking into the mud, I had read.

In one sense I was waiting for her to call because she had without knowing it given me new hope and in another, she had stirred some emotion in me I had not felt in a long while. I wasn’t yet ready to identify this emotion but it was interesting to watch it from the distance I placed between it and myself. Meanwhile, being in the apartment like this gave me a slight feeling of uneasiness akin to claustrophobia. By noon on the first day I was as restless as a fifteen ounce Yorkshire terrier.

I didn’t go out for lunch. I settled for scrambled eggs and a hard roll. I ate at the kitchen table although I had a large dining room. As I sat in the kitchen I could hear the expressive fellows downstairs in the restaurant below my window talking politics and philosophizing about life in general and about life in Italy in particular. I’d eaten lunch in that restaurant two or three times and could picture the guys crowded at the bar drinking to delay lunch as long as possible. They did it every day and it was fun listening to their urgency and seriousness. The wife of the owner washed tablecloths and napkins all day and she strung them on the ropes that ran parallel to their kitchen window and mine. As I ate I could hear her pulling the lines and taking in the dry stuff. No doubt she’d hang up the things she’d just taken from the washer.

I waited and the phone still didn’t ring. I went over my notes, and coming across the manuscript of the rough bibliography of Faber I had in progress, I remembered that I had not yet made a photocopy for Angel. I made a mental note to do so. I also made a mental note to remind myself to remember the mental note. By mid-afternoon I was exhausted from waiting and went to bed. I dreamed the phone was ringing. I got...