Winter sunset
The Befana has been and gone, the Christmas decorations are stored or lost or thrown away, and only a few hardy addicts are still eating panettone, making the most of the two-for-one discounts the stores always offer in an effort to get the things off their shelves and make room for the galani coming up for Carnival.
January is a superb month here. Cold and empty. By which I mean empty of the usual battalions of tourists, empty of racket and clutter, not empty of interest or beauty. The lagoon, possibly even more than the city itself, is brimming with enchantment in the winter. Please do not mark your calendar to come to Venice in January. I will hunt you down and slay you.
The day before yesterday I was walking along the brink of the lagoon toward the southern end of the Lido, toward an area called the Alberoni. I was on my way to perform a specific task but the reason I was walking instead of riding the bus was that I wanted to savor the moment. Buses and cars prevent savoring in much the same way that an inner-tube prevents you from sinking. It’s against the laws of physics, or the laws of something.
At this point I was hoping to give you a few filaments of poetry on sunset — not written by me, God forbid. Written by some genius. A few of them worked the angle of comparing sunset to death, but that wasn’t even remotely related to the mysterious magic I was watching. It was like being able to see a sigh.
In any case, even geniuses can only approximate a rough translation of the transparent, transforming loveliness of this silent interval because they are forced to use words. Even Hawaiian words, which are mostly vowels, are too rigid to express either a winter sunset or a summer dawn. As a writer it pains me to acknowledge that, but it’s just the way words are.
Speaking of words, there are a good number of them which describe various phases of sunset — twilight, dusk, gloaming, nightfall, crepuscule — and they all have precise definitions. But I couldn’t find a word for what was happening in front of me. So, no words.
However, if I were forced to describe it, I’d say that the panorama looked as if it were made of mother-of-pearl reproduced as glass.
But happily, I’m not forced to describe it.
Happy Clamsgiving
While the rest of you were lolling amid the wreckage of flightless birds and tangled NFL teams last Thursday, we went for the mollusks. I suppose we could have gone fishing, but considering that the tide was going to be unusually low at a convenient time of day, plus the fact that a few calm, cool, golden days of St. Martin’s Summer had briefly wandered back to the lagoon, probably by mistake, it seemed to fly in the face of Providence not to take a boat and go clamming.
I refer to “we,” in the sense that an anesthetist might refer to “our” brain operation. Lino does the hunting and gathering of the submerged morsels, and I help him by rowing there and back and keeping quiet. I have dug clams in my life, so I know it’s possible. I also know that I do not have the (A) knack (B) patience (C) desire (D) interest in this endeavor. Perhaps if I were to actually find a clam occasionally, all of the above would increase, even if only a little.
But no.
He jams his finger into the sediment where there are NO SIGNS of bivalve habitation, and comes up with one after another. I jam my finger into the sediment where there are NUMEROUS signs, and come up with nothing or — worse — a little castanet full of mud where the clam used to be. This is the clam’s way of wreaking revenge, even though he wasn’t eaten by us but by some passing marine creature such as a sea snail. But if you can be fooled by the shut clamshell, you will happily claim it and throw it into the skillet with the others, where it will duly open up and distribute sandy mud all over its companions. Not a lot of sand. Just enough. So not wishing to risk being the agent of this unpleasant eventuality, I tend to sit in the boat and watch and breathe and listen. And take pictures, or read. Sometimes I even think, if there’s any time left over.
Rowing out in the lagoon when the weather is chilly (or cold, or very cold), but calm and sunny, is almost the best thing ever. The traffic has been slashed to the bone, the light is delicate yet rich, with shifting nuances that overlap in alluring combinations that set themselves on fire in celestial sunsets.
Watching the tide drop is also a beautiful and mysterious thing. Of course you can’t see it drop any more than you can see a leaf changing color, but you can notice it in phases and it’s a pleasant reminder of things that are bigger and even more important than you — I mean me.
Reverence for truth compels me to add, though, that the soundtrack isn’t nearly as seductive as the scene itself. I said there was less traffic — I didn’t say there was no traffic, because since the advent of the motor (or at least since the advent of me), I can tell you that there is no day or night, no season or location, in which you will find silence in the lagoon. There is always — I need to repeat that — always the sound of a motor coming from somewhere.
Trying to imagine the lagoon without the sound of motors — and believe me, I do try to imagine it, on a regular basis — is like trying to imagine the Garden of Eden, or being Angelina Jolie, or even inventing some stupid little app that makes you five million dollars in six months. That is, your brain can’t do it. Because no matter how divine may be the velvety midnight sky, how nacreous the dawn, how resplendent the vault of heaven seared by the flaming rays of sunset, there will always be motor noise. Small, but steady and grinding, like a dentist’s drill, or deep and ponderous, or silly and busy and self-important. It’s the aural equivalent of the vandalage inflicted by The Society for Putting Broken Bedsteads into Ponds identified by Flanders and Swann. Only not so funny.
Back to clams. Lino was happy, I was happy, the clams — well, I try not to think about their mood. They were put in the lagoon to be consumed, not to write bi-lingual dictionaries or form a sacred harp choir. Apologies to any Catholic vegetarian readers, but I have to say that clams make a beautiful death. And broth.
There goes summer
We knew it couldn’t last, all that sun and warmth and autumnal glow.
And it didn’t.
Friday morning we woke up early to the insistent clattering of the Venetian blinds against the window. The message they were tapping out was “Let us in, it’s cold out here.”
Did I say wind? We got to the vaporetto in record time, rushed along by a powerful southwest wind known officially as the libeccio but here is called garbin (gar-BEEN). What was happening was a highly invigorating “garbinata.”
The lagoon was having a seizure. Between the waves caused by the wind and those created by boats with motors, the water didn’t know which way it was supposed to go, so it pretty much went everywhere.
But we knew it wasn’t going to go on for long, because when the tide turned the wind was going to turn too, leaving the stage for the next performer, its opposite number, a northeast wind officially known as the grecale but here is called borin (bore-EEN).
This has been ordained by the Great Ordainer and is so dependable a phenomenon that there’s a phrase that goes with it: “Garbin ciama borin” (gar-BEEN chama bor-EEN): the southwest wind “calls” the northeast wind.
It also rained for several hours in a sort of “Get it all out, you’ll feel better” kind of way.
I certainly felt better. I loved hearing the rain, it was visit from a long-lost friend. And I’d say that even if I had had to be out in it. You know me.
Springing Venice
Spring here is in constant evolution, as it is anywhere else, so it’s slightly silly to talk about it at all, considering that by the time you read this, things will have changed. A few of the earliest (and therefore best) highlights are already gone, making way for subsequent highlights, and so on till we get to summer, which would probably like to have highlights except that the heat and humidity kind of destroy them. Or at least destroy my will to notice or care about them.
When we lived at the other end of the city, near Santa Marta, my spring herald was a small weeping willow tree that drooped over a brick wall bordering the rio di Tre Ponti (canal of Three Bridges). Its first minuscule leaves created the faintest conceivable film of pale tea green, or pale celadon, or pale eau de nil, or pale honeydew melon, or probably a combination of all of these. Maybe I should call it “pale first leaves of weeping willow” green.
I would check up on this little tree as if it were on probation. But all my watching didn’t reveal its very best moment, I’m sure, because the tree always seemed to leaf too fast. I suspect it was working at night, like an illegal Moldovan bricklayer. In any case, it passed its exquisite birth stage and grew up far too quickly for my taste. It should have lasted just two days longer and I’d have been happy. But no.
Now we live at the other extreme of the city — as of everything else — and instead of a willow tree my heralds are one little plum tree, and a whole slew of blackbirds who seem to be able to sing everything up to Elizabethan motets.
There are also the flying heralds: I’ve seen scatterings of bees, of course, and unexpected little apprentice herald showed up today in the form of a roaming fly that buzzed through the house. He seemed to be on some sort of reconnaissance mission.
The plum and cherry blossoms have come and gone; the wisteria is just beginning to take their place, to be followed by the magnolia, and the jasmine. It sounds as if I’m living on some Veneto-Byzantine tropical plantation.
Flowering Venice: I hope you’ll add this to your list of images of this city, along with the bridges and canals and ogee arches.
