This morning I came across a stuffed bear that couldn’t make it to work. He couldn’t make it to play, either. A compassionate woman removed him a few minutes later, lifting him from the small sodden concavity in the stone where he lay. Either she took him to the clinic, or to the park.
Here’s some news on sick leave in Italy: There’s a lot of it, especially on Monday.
Today is Monday, as it happens, which is why I bring this up.
A recent statistical analysis reveals that more than 30 percent of workers in the public sector have availed themselves of a doctor who will certify that they aren’t able to come to work that day, the day being Monday, as I mentioned, or what they might prefer to call Sunday 2.0.
In Calabria, the numbers collected for 2012 showed an average number of 34.6 sick days; “average,” of course, means that some people took even more. This number doesn’t specifically say that that month was made up exclusively of Mondays, but we can suppose that at least ten of them were.
Whether this indicates that the environment at the toe of the Italian “boot” is extremely unhealthy, or that there are so many wonderful things to do there that a mere weekend isn’t enough to enjoy even a few of them, I am not qualified to say.
I do have some theories, but will leave you to your own conjectures.
You might assume that the world-famous Riace bronzes would have a hard time getting a doctor’s note excusing them from war, or the Olympic Games, or anything else they had to do on Monday. But Riace is in Calabria.
“The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.” (Bertrand Russell)
Walking along my favorite leafy arbor — otherwise known as viale Garibaldi — one recent afternoon, I glanced at one of the benches.
Something was sitting on it, and it wasn’t a human, though a human had evidently passed that way only recently.
It was a stately cone crowned with chocolate gelato, chastely wrapped in a white paper napkin, and stuck between the slats like a creamy little moa from Easter Island, but much more fragile. While it’s true that the seething elements of time and tide will eventually reduce everything to nothing, this delicacy had a head start on almost all of us.
As I gazed at it, still musing, I heard the softest little thnk.
There had been no heroic struggle. When the meltage reached the perfect point of intersection with gravity, divided by its own weight and volume and the distribution of same (I’m losing track of my geometry here), the brave, if brief, little monument succumbed. And I continued on my way.
Something had given way. Was it the cone? The napkin? A physicist or a mystic could probably tell me, but as I know neither, I can only gaze upon this ruin with wonder and regret. Wonder, especially, that someone would throw away a perfectly good ice cream cone, and chocolate, at that.
Ten minutes later, I returned. The bench was still occupied, but not by the cone and its liquefying burden.
The cone was gone. A man was sitting on the bench, talking to a woman standing in front of him. He didn’t seem concerned about sticky drying ice cream, because there was no sign of it. Apparently only I knew it had ever been there.
Let me review: A gelato-topped cone is placed on a bench by an unseen person, for unfathomable reasons (unfathomable because there are two garbage cans within a few steps of the bench). The cone collapses. A man sits on the bench by the now unseen cone.
Which was real, the unseen man or the unseen cone? And while I’m thinking about it, is ice cream essentially more transitory than the man?
Let me think.
The frozen milk awaits
Heat and heft combine a kiss
Life essence disperses.
More on the meaning of life around here when I find the time.
Another day of expressing yourself draws to a close.
Daily life in the Nation of Venice is made up of occurrences that aren’t uncommon in other latitudes: Unplanned events, things going screwy, people acting weird, having to spend twice as much time as expected doing something simple, and generally starting out with one scheme and ending the day with a mishmash of improvised solutions or brilliant ideas that worked once but will never work again.
Naturally these days do not pass without comment, and Venetians have inevitably devised innumerable expressions to convey the nuances of the aforementioned daily life, as well as the emotions which its many happenstances cause to spring forth in the Venetian bosom. Not that the emotions themselves are so nuanced. Au contraire.
Many of these expressions are used so commonly that they now come to me spontaneously, and I struggle to recall what American expressions might correspond. Not that I try very hard — the Venetian versions are so perfect for Venice that I just stick with them. They’re not all profound, and certainly they aren’t all unique. But a normal day in this abnormal city keeps emotions simmering, and the nearness of you, of them, of everybody, makes the urge to put them into words irresistible. At least I’ve never noticed anybody resisting that urge.
One of the great things about using a common saying, rather than blurting out what you really feel or think, is that clichés, truisms, proverbs, make it socially acceptable to say something which, if you expressed it impulsively in your own original heartfelt way, would create worlds of grief and embarrassment for you. Sincerity? Highly overrated. But thanks to these aphorisms you can say what you think without endangering the social equilibrium.
No matter how glamorous the boat — here, the “disdotona” of the Querini rowing club — a coffin is still just that. Odd how death turns out to be such a useful concept for expressing things about life.
“Morte” — death — is a highly versatile word. You’d be surprised how often it can turn up in the most banal situations.
“Vedemo de che morte che morimo“ (veh-DEH-mo de keh MOR-teh keh mo-REE-mo): “Let’s see by what death we’re going to die.” Cheerful, no? I said it only a while ago, and I meant it. However, death itself isn’t intended in this remark, but it usefully conveys a foreboding of a probably unpleasant experience you can’t get out of.
In my case, we were on our way to the mainland to help some friends move an unspecified number of heavy, cumbersome, dirty objects for an unspecified length of time, on a searingly hot afternoon in a location which was almost certainly going to be infested with mosquitoes. (The instinctive American version of my emotions would have been “What was I thinking?”).
My saying the above conveyed that I assumed it was going to be a terrible experience but that I was going to do it anyway. (Note: There were no mosquitoes.) You can vary the intensity of this expression; it can be almost jaunty, depending on circumstances, but will always communicate at least some element of apprehension, or at least unwillingness.
“Gaver la morte con qualchedun” (gah-VEHR ya MOR-teh con kwal-keh-DOON). “To have the death with someone.” The American expression “Have it in for someone” serves the same purpose but doesn’t pack anywhere near the same punch.
You would say this about someone you really hated. Naturally there is a word for “hate,” but to call in “death” amps up your hostility to a complete, total, 100 per cent direness, an aversion which has no chinks or cracks through which second thoughts, forgiveness, or extenuating circumstances might enter. It’s a feeling that’s going to last forever. Unless the other person does something amazing to rectify whatever it was that went wrong, which can happen.
“Esser la morte de qualcossa.” (ESS-er ly MORE-te deh kahl-KOSS-ah). “To be the death of something.” In this case, “death” is a positive thing. And it almost always is related to food, the quintessential positive thing in life.
Let’s say that a certain item is more or less good prepared in various ways. But if there is one way in which a particular ingredient has reached its reason for being, that would be its “death.”
For example, you might really like seppie in their ink with polenta, and you’d be happy to eat seppie in their ink with pasta. But if you think that risotto is the best way on earth to eat seppie and ink, you’d say that risotto was their “morte.” A normal person might just comment, “Well, I think seppie risotto is best of all.” But if you are convinced that seppie were born to die in a plate of rice, you’d say “Risotto xe i so morte.”
Or take gray mullet. Lino states “Rosto xe i so morte.” You can fix them them any way you want, but he says that being grilled is their (correct, ideal, perfect) death. Think “destiny.” It sounds a little less drastic, but means the same thing.
Any boat event — here, the launch of a new mascareta — calls for at least 400 salame or mortadella sandwiches, beverages, potato chips, and when things are really going well (as in this case) a bottomless vat of pasta e fagioli.
Ghe gera per cani e porchi, or Ghe gera per santi e paoli. (Geh JEH-ra pehr CAH-nee eh POR-kee… pehr SAN-tee eh PAO-lee). “There was enough for dogs and pigs,” or “There was enough for saints and Pauls,” specifically Saint Paul. I cannot discover any reason why Paul would have been singled out for special mention. I’ve often heard the former, but only the other day did Lino come up with “saints and Pauls.”
They both mean the same thing: Abundance. Food and drink beyond any measurement that could be considered prudent or rational. It is a positive thing to say — it doesn’t imply waste, it implies generosity, hospitality, all you could ever deem necessary or acceptable in putting on a picnic or a wedding reception or a committee banquet. (If you use it to describe what was available on your cruise, it only implies that you got what you paid for.)
But you wouldn’t say this, however complimentary it may be, to the provider himself. You wouldn’t go up to the bride’s father and say “Wow, great party — there’s enough here for dogs and pigs.” You would describe the festivities thus to your friends the next day in answer to the question, “How was it?” If you say this, you’ve said it all, whether or not you go on to say there was Iranian caviar and Peach Melba and truffle risotto and millions of little salame sandwiches.
Multiplying a single saint (1: Paul, Unit: each) into a plural is an old-fashioned custom from the early 20th century; Lino says that his father, and many other Venetians, would make plurals out of names (not unlike the similar habit they have in Philadelphia of pluralizing nouns: “She writes for National Geographics,” for instance).
An example: In the old days Lino says it was normal to hear someone refer to the island, not as San Giorgio in Alga, but as San Zorzi in Alga (pronounced AH-eh-gah). Or, instead of Sant’ Angelo delle Polvere, it was “San Anzeli de le Polvere.” A linguist or etymologist would understand this shift. But people said it anyway, without wondering why.
Lino brought me roses for my birthday. Three, of course.
Uno no xe da dar, Do no xe da tor, Tre xe d’amor, Quatro da mato, e Cinque d’inamorato. “One isn’t to give, two aren’t to take, three are for love, four are from a crazy person, and five are from someone who’s in love.” A curious bit of doggerel which defines the significance of the number of roses which a man might give to a lady.
It isn’t something you’d say every day, but this morning at the supermarket I was surprised to discover that Lino isn’t the only person left who still knows it.
The cashier had finished with me, and had just begun with the man behind me. She saw that he had only three bottles of mineral water. “Tre d’amor,” she quipped, to no one in particular, as she moved them down the belt, and on she went, ringing it up. It was great — it was like discovering I knew the secret password.
The numbers stop at five. Perhaps more than five roses are too expensive to consider. Anyway, if the number of roses were to continue past being in love, we’d be facing, say, Six is for your first fight, Seven is for getting lost because you wouldn’t stop to ask directions, Eight is for that vacation with the in-laws, Nine is for having gone to the soccer match with your buddies on your anniversary, and Ten is for having forgotten to close the car windows at the carwash. Or whatever the Venetian equivalent might be.
This is a strope bush/tree, a species which loves humid environments. How convenient for the ingenious Venetians.Need to tie or bind up something? Just break off the right-length twig and strip away its leaves…As you see, this flexible little sprig can be bent and tightened and knotted. Not shown: The intermediate step of placing the twig, or preferably many of them, in a basin of water, to soften even more before using. The twig in its natural state still has a little too much spring in it to be reliable.
Stringer le strope (STRIN-jer eh STRO-peh). Essentially it means to tighten your belt — drastic economizing. I don’t know what they say in the rest of Italy, but in Venice this expression still does the job.
You could say “Gavemo da stringer le strope” (we’ve got to tighten the strope), or “Gavemo streto le strope” (we’ve tightened the strope). Given that for the past eight years all we’ve heard is how there isn’t any money in the city, those municipal strope must be worn to mere threads by now. Not to mention ours.
“Strope” are twigs of the Salix viminalis which have been soaked to become flexible, thereby serving, among other things, as natural cords for tying up things such as vine branches, bunches of flowers, or to make baskets, fish-traps, and so on. I believe that the correct term for these natural twist-ties is “withy.” The twigs also are used to make wicker-work objects. (“Wicker” in Italian is “vimini,” as per the scientific name.)
Bushes which could grow even to the size of small trees are found along the edges of canals and islands in the lagoon, and were just another of the innumerable useful things which the old Venetians harvested and used. Everybody knew what strope were. And most of those also knew what it meant to tighten them, either literally or figuratively.
Betony, or “betonica” (photo: Aroche, Wikipedia).
Ti xe come parsemolo (tee zeh coh-meh par-SEH-mo-lo) or Ti xe pezio de la betonega (de ya beh-TON-eh-gah). “You’re like parsley,” or “You’re worse than betony.” What? The first is easy: Lazy or unscrupulous or unimaginative cooks are prone to cover a dish with chopped parsley when they are aware that it needs a little help but they can’t be bothered to figure out what.
Parsley, like many things, does not improve in quality along with the quantity. In fact, the more parsley on your plate, the more suspicious you should become. There are people who throw parsley on everything, like there are people who find a word they like and just keep using it. We had a neighbor when I was little who called everything “cunning.” That would have been like parsley.
Therefore, to compare a person to parsley is not to comment on his/her nutritional or aesthetic qualities, but merely to say that the person is ubiquitous. We used to see a certain man around town in so many different places and situations Lino nicknamed him “Parsemolo.” It was years before we found out what his real name was.
Betony, another plant (Stachys officinalis), is now lost to everyday medicinal use — its first use was to defend a person from sorcery, but soon demonstrated more helpful daily qualities, especially as a diuretic, but which apparently could also deal with everything from gout to gallstones to drunkenness to dog bites. Although nobody cultivates it around here, as far as I know, the expression lives on.
The Dizionario del Dialetto Veneziano (the touchstone of all Venetian words) says that this plant was once extensively cultivated in Venice, and that the usual phrase was “esser cognossuo come la betonega” — to be as well-known as betony.
The first time I heard somebody refer to betony, they were referring to Lino. He was “worse than betony” because he seemed to know everybody we ran across. They weren’t far wrong; a few days ago we were on a bus coming back from the mountains, and a lady got on at Strigno, a wide spot in the road about 130 km (80 miles) from Venice. As she climbed aboard, Lino murmured to me, “We were in nursery school together.”
It isn’t totally strange that a Venetian would be found up in the Sugana valley in the summer; thousands of Venetians have headed that way since forever, spending at least part of August in a cooler clime. But of all the Venetians to climb aboard at a truly insignificant place, it does strike me as noteworthy that Lino knew her.
But it just keeps happening. He opened the Gazzettino this morning and saw a little article in which don F. B., a parish priest in a small town on the mainland, was quoted. There was a picture of a conventional silver-haired priest with a one-size-fits-all expression.
“We were kids together,” Lino said. “His family lived where Giamberto lives” (that is to say, near Campo San Vio). Not enough information? How about this: “One of his brothers died when he (the brother) was very young. Their mother ran a casin (brothel).”
These are the round-breadstick bussolai.And these are the sweet-cookie bussolai. They’re both good.
Chi ga santoli ga bussolai. (kee gah SAN-to-ee gah boo-so-YAH-ee). “He who has santoli has bussolai.” A “santolo” is like a godparent, but in a wider sense is someone who is perfectly positioned, with the perfect amount of power, to be the perfect person to help you do something important that you couldn’t manage to do yourself. A person who could find a job for your son would be a major santolo. Further, a santolo would be someone available to you, but perhaps not available to your friends at the bar. If you turn out to have a santolo who can help you resolve some difficulty, you automatically acquire an aura of special potency which you cannot — or won’t — share with anyone else.
So what are bussolai? Technically speaking, the word comes from “bussola,” or compass. They are circular baked goods which can either be crunchy dried bread (like a round breadstick), or softer and flatter and sweeter, essentially a heavy cookie laden with butter and eggs and sugar. The former is a specialty of Chioggia, or the islands, and the latter is a specialty of Burano (even though today the commercial bussolai are made on the mainland in Jesolo).
The overall meaning is: If you’ve got a protector, you’ll have food.
This was little M’s first day at the beach in his life, and everything — sand, sun, water — made for a perfect moment to snanarar.
Snanarar(znah-nah-RAR). To futz around in a happy aimless way. I’ve heard it used almost exclusively aimed at children. (The adult version for any harmless incoherent activity is “tatarar via” (tah-tah-rar VEE-ah). You’d take your toddler to the beach to let him/her snanarar in the water, though you can snanarar doing enjoyable, meaningless things in other places. Perhaps “pottering about” might be a rough equivalent.
I can’t find it in Boerio, but Lino’s assertion that its root is “anatra,” or duck, sounds good to me. Ducks splashing and plotzing around with their webbed feet expresses at least a little of the delicious sense of formless pleasure doing whatever it is you enjoy. I don’t mean needlepoint or ceramics; I think there has to be some element of frittering away the time in the process. Sorry I can’t be more helpful, but every time I hear Lino say it about something it makes me smile.
If a lion were inclined to squaquarar about somebody, he might look like this.
Squaquarar(skwah-kwah-RAR). Another word obviously derived from ducks, but less benevolent than snanarar. In this case, the quacking would be from the mouth of somebody talking behind your back, saying unpleasant or untrue things. Gossiping, spreading tales, speaking disparagingly in a particularly thoughtless and unscrupulous way. I heard it for the first time not long ago when Lino said, “Well I’m not going to say anything about this to (name here), because he’ll just go and squaquarar around.”
It’s not surprising there are so many words in Venetian for the numberless ways in which people can talk about each other. Venice is, as I’ve often said, essentially a small town in Ohio, where you see the same people many times a day, and propinquity inevitably creates some instinctive interest in their history, their character, their behavior, their clothes, their dogs, their children, how they behave in church, whether they even go to church, and so on.
Today I saw the woman who hangs out for hours at the bar/cafe with her two hysterical tiny dogs; she was walking down the fondamenta without the dogs. And I thought, “How strange — I’ve never seen her without the dogs before. Are they sick? Did somebody kill them? Were they arrested? I never thought she could spend 20 minutes without the little vermin shrieking at her feet. Have they been impounded?” By the time she was out of sight I was still wondering about all this. That’s what propinquity does to your brain.
If you see little bunches of women, or even bunches of men, standing around on the street or on the bridges and talking, obliviously blocking your way, I can promise you they are not talking about the Milan stock market or the melting polar ice caps or the latest Bruce Willis movie. They’re talking about themselves, or their family, or your family, or retired people they used to work with, and they may well be squaquararing about them. You’d never squaquarar about somebody you didn’t know. What would be the point?
“Piova e sol, le muneghe va in amor.” “Rain and sun, the nuns are falling in love.” I have no idea where this came from, and it doesn’t seem to have any hidden meaning. Maybe the saying is intended to convey improbability, but I wouldn’t say one is much more unlikely than another. I may be wrong.
Sun that’s strong enough to make shadows this black is sun that is drying your clothes like a blowtorch.
As everyone knows by now, laundry, over time, has become a minor obsession with me.
I’m not alone; to judge by the number of tourists who stop daily to snap photos of lines of drying clothes, hanging out your garments has become as quaint as hand-grinding your cornmeal.
Drying clothes, though, requires only a cord, a handful of clothespins, and sun and breeze. Or sun or breeze. Or lots of time and hope. One memorable day I hung out an excellent collection of raiment, and we went for a long walk. It rained. (Bad.) It stopped. (Good.) This happened three times before we got home. This sort of day will make you appreciate the sun more than eight days on the beach in Curacao.
The washing of said garb, however, is an entirely different matter. Since I’ve been on Earth, there have always been washing machines of some sort. But Lino, and anybody else born before, say, 1950, recalls otherwise. If you’re a woman, you recall it vividly.
How do I know this? Thank you for asking.
And if you can add wind to the sun, you’ve got the perfect menu for clothes which may or may not be totally clean, but they WILL be dry. Only in a place that is humid much of the year can you come to appreciate the glorious sensation of truly dry clothes.
One morning, my phone rang. It was one of my dearest elderly friends, and she was asking for help. Not for herself, but for her equally elderly cousin, L.G, 84 years old, who, in the middle of their morning walk to the supermarket, began to feel seriously faint.
My friend called the ambulance, and waited with L.G., of course. But she couldn’t manage also to accompany her cousin to the hospital, because she herself didn’t have any strength to spare. When you’re over 85 and have constant pain in most of your joints, especially your right knee, you have to ration your energy, and she had already used up her allotment for the day. Would I be willing to run to the hospital, intercept L.G. when she was delivered to the Emergency Room, and see her through whatever had to be seen through? There is only one answer to that question, and that’s the answer I gave.
We were at the hospital seven hours, which isn’t important to this story; most Emergency Rooms take a leisurely approach to people whose life is not in imminent danger (perhaps not recognizing that the accumulated tedium can be deleterious to your health). So I spent the day on my feet, standing next to her in her wheelchair and strolling along with her to whatever X-rays or other tests had to be made. No food for either one of us all day, because I knew if I were to wander away even for 20 seconds, the doctor who hadn’t been born yet when we signed in would suddenly appear and take her someplace I would never find her again.
All of this is preamble.
We were chatting away (she had begun to feel less faint rather quickly). She was telling me about her other assorted physical problems.
“And my wrist really hurts,” she told me, holding up her right arm. “It hurts so much I can hardly move it.”
“What happened?” I asked, imagining a fall, or her running into the furniture in the middle of the night.
“It happened when I was wringing out the sheets.”
Excuse me?
“I had washed the sheets and I was wringing them out.” Obvious? Not in the third millennium.
I stared at her. I once mopped up all the water in the bottom of Lino’s boat using a terrycloth hand-towel from my hotel, and I can tell you that after about an hour, wringing out sodden cotton begins to hurt. It has never been my fate to have to hand-wash a sheet, but I can imagine it.
What I couldn’t imagine was an 84-year-old woman doing it. But she does.
She grew up washing sheets by hand; it’s not as if she had been forced to start doing it when she turned 70. This has always been normal, and while she’s perfectly aware that the washing machine has been invented, she doesn’t see any need for it.
If I had to wash this sheet by hand, I swear I’d never use it. I’d leave it in its coruscating splendor and go sleep on newspapers and sawdust.
When she was discharged, I accompanied her back to her apartment, where I got a look at how this particular lady lives. I don’t say that her situation is typical, but I wouldn’t say it’s unique, either.
First, the climb to her apartment is up two flights of stairs which are as steep as the ratlines on a square-rigger. She does this every day, though when she goes to the mountains she has to ask her neighbor to help her horse her suitcase down (and up) the stairs.
On the other hand, she has lived in this apartment her entire life; she was born here. So she’s had time to get used to the degree of ascent involved. I can tell you that if it were a mountain trail, plenty of people would just turn around and go back to the lodge.
The apartment itself reminded me of my grandfather’s house, primarily because the furniture was old, and although in reasonable condition, it showed every sign of having been left to fend for itself. If something wasn’t broken — I mean totally broken and useless — it would be there forever. A little break, or nick, or crack, doesn’t count as damage. Everything was old, and seemed to be tinted with the same general, faded-all-over earth-tone from the distant days when the concept of color scheme was simpler, or perhaps hadn’t been invented yet. The whole apartment smelled kind of tired.
Among the many things that hadn’t been changed since she was a girl was the kitchen sink. It is a rectangular slab of granite, with a shallow rectangular hollow in the center, and I’ve been told that a sink like this could be sold for its weight in almost any currency you choose. I’ve seen another like this — even bigger — in the kitchen of a palace, installed next to another amazing artifact: A fireplace remaining from the days when you cooked in cauldrons over the flames. (More about that in a moment.) But the palace residents were not aged widows living on a pension. Au extremely contraire.
Back to L.G. This granite receptacle is where she washes everything — dishes, sheets, herself. She doesn’t have a shower or a bathtub. She doesn’t have a hot-water heater, either. If you want water, it’s cold. She does have heat, though, and she has a toilet, in a tiny cubicle about two inches larger than the appliance itself.
Someone actually made this sign. That person never had to do the laundry, he was so busy being funny.
I wondered silently whether this arrangement was the result of habit, or parsimony, or sloth. You can make a case for all of these factors. But the truth is otherwise.
The reason, I was informed by a reliable source, is that she isn’t sharp enough to understand how to operate it.
Faced with the challenge of attempting to operate a washing machine, and almost certainly failing, a wet sheet is just simpler, even if it does have to be washed and wrung out using nothing but her own ten little toothpick-sized fingers. Just like she has always done.
The history of washing machines (by which I mean the mechanical invention, not the woman herself), begins in 1851. Many improvements in the design rapidly followed. I realize that not everyone could afford one, but buying a washing machine wasn’t as unusual as, say, buying a flying saucer. Anyone in Venice who had the means to get one did not hesitate.
This alacrity was inspired by the fact that virtually everyone washed everything by hand until the end of World War II, and often beyond. Lino and his older sister (born in 1929) have educated me on how Wash Day proceeded at their house.
They had running water in their second-floor apartment, and a sink. But their mother, like many Venetians, was still cooking over a wood fire in a fireplace, just like Little House on the Canal. “There was a chain that hung down,” Lino said; “the cooking pot was attached to it, and that’s how my mother cooked.”
Wood fires make ashes. Ashes plus boiling water make lye, or in Venetian, “lissia” (YEE-see-ah). Lye makes soap.
Lino’s father made their soap from the aforementioned lye and the fat and bones that had been saved from whatever meat they had eaten. He boiled it all, as Lino remembers, in a big pot in the kitchen and then poured it into a wooden container, where it dried and could be cut into pieces.
The advertisers tried to make doing the laundry look like more fun than dancing the maypole, but I don’t believe any woman was taken in.
When it was wash-day, your clothes or other fabric items such as tablecloths went into a big wooden tub, and you got to work with a washboard. The washboard in a Venetian family had two uses.
First, to scrub clothes (over time, the scrubbing could begin to wear out the fabric, to the point of producing holes. Hence “bucato” as the general word for “laundry” — it means “holed.”)
The second use was a kickboard to help children learn to swim. Generations of Venetian babies, up to and including Lino, clung to mom’s washboard as they thrashed their way around the water — usually out in the lagoon, but a nearby canal was just as good, and more convenient, too. That which does not kill me makes me stronger.
But lissia also makes bleach. As Lino’s sister explained it, they would carefully layer the items to be bleached into the wooden washtub, and cover them with a cloth. Then they would pour the lissia into the tub and leave it all to soak for a while. “Your clothes came out perfectly white,” she said, and smiled, remembering how her mother would look at the result with a sort of bedrock satisfaction.
You can understand her smile if you know that Lino’s father drove a steam train, fueled by coal, of course, on the Venice-Trento line. He came home in the evening black all over. That’s not the inspiration of the phrase “ashes to ashes,” but wood-ash seems to have been the perfect weapon against coal dust.
Now this would truly be a white to be proud of. Maybe you have to sell your soul to the devil to get your clothes this white.I don’t know who she is, but I’d bet anything she made lissia at home when she was a girl.
Lissia was such a common element of life that, like so many common elements, it became a very useful term to express all kinds of situations, and some of these expressions are still used.
“Far lissia” (to make lissia), to really clean right down to the ground. You could also say this if you’ve eaten up everything in the house (as we would say “really cleaned out”).
“Perder el lissia e ‘l saon” (pehr-dehr el EE-see-ha ehl sah-OHN — to lose the lye and the soap). It means you’ve totally wasted effort and money and have nothing to show for it all.
“Mi sugaro’ sta lissia” (Mee soo-gah-ROH sta EE-see-ah — I’ll dry out this lye). You’d say this when you mean to really settle an issue or deal with a problem once and for all.
“Co e done fa pan e lissia, i omeni scampa via” (coe eh doe-neh fa pahn eh EE-see-ah, ee OH-men-ee scampa vee-ah –When the women make bread or lye, the men get the heck out of there). Centuries of domestic conflict-resolution are contained in this phrase, which I think must have been coined by a man. Making really good bread, and making lye, were two strenuous tasks that would inevitably exhaust the wife. And an exhausted wife, as all husbands discover, is a dangerous person to be around. Flee!
On the island of Burano, housewives can still rig up their temporary clotheslines the way women did in Venice a century ago. I like this method. It’s simple, cheap, and efficient.
