In a city full of special news comes something even more special than usual.
The columbarium at the municipal cemetery on the island of San Michele is aging and deteriorating faster than some of its past and future residents. This means that the dear departed are not resting in much peace anymore, and they’re not going to let you be feel too serene either.
Today the Gazzettino announced: “If you want to go put some flowers on your loved one’s tomb, you have to wear a helmet.”
Grieving relative takes cover. (Credit: Il Gazzettino).
Yes, lack of money (“no ghe xe schei“) has brought us to this: A cemetery where you have to protect yourself from your relatives even after they’re dead. Three hundred final resting places have become public hazards.
I can hear the helpful advice now, as you set out with your little bunch of chrysanthemums:
“If you’re going to visit Uncle Max today, watch out — he could be throwing bits of rock and cement at your head.”
“He never liked me very much….. “
Veritas, the private agency that oversees the cemetery (and, let it be noted yet again, also disposes of Venetian garbage), says that the necessary funds for repairing the cemetery have been allocated by the Special Fund (money being spent on something that isn’t part of the MOSE floodgate project? Astounding) — but that the money hasn’t been freed-up yet.
“Dig we must.” It takes on new resonance when the guys are drilling and backhoeing around your family. So meanwhile, wear your hard hat. And try to ignore the fact that the stuff that keeps falling on your head will probably not be raindrops. It could be cousin Lola.
I wasn’t there, but an entirely trustworthy source has reported the following to me:
There is a cafe in our neighborhood which is one of those little social nerve centers. The men have them, and women have them, but this particular one is good for just about everybody. It has coffee and wine, pastries and potato chips, and two rumpsprung one-armed bandits operated feverishly by heavyset women smoking one cigarette right after another. It’s got a few tables outside for your tired tourists. And two tables inside where some of the regulars sit and sort of lounge around.
You can buy the paper if you want, but you get the really important news by word of mouth.
This oasis of refreshment is run by a woman and her late-20ish daughter who — like good bar/cafe/nerve-center proprietors everywhere — know every person who has ever come in there twice. She got the basics of our life story the first time we stopped for a coffee.
They’re not nosy, you understand. It’s just that one wants to put one’s patrons in perspective.
So a few mornings ago, my source stopped by for an espresso. It was clear that he had entered a multi-person conversation that was already in high gear, and had already passed the recounting-the-event-in-detail and moved on to the hilarity-in-reaction-to-the-event.
What had happened was this: At some point in the morning, the proprietor had gone into the bathroom. (I don’t know for what purpose but it’s irrelevant.) Among the plumbing, porcelain, and cleaning supplies was: A pineapple.
An attractive, compact, not cheap but always appreciated tropical fruit which somebody had obviously bought and obviously not wanted to risk losing by leaving it unattended outside when answering the proverbial call.
Then they left. Did they ever come back? I haven’t been able to find out. But I wouldn’t leave my kid with whoever it was, that’s for sure.
The neighborhood (perhaps the entire town) is bestrewn with small human mysteries. As in: Why would anyone think this was the way to dispose of their empty juice box?
But that’s not all. Same cafe — perhaps even the same day, I didn’t think to ask — the daughter was doing a quick buzz around the modest premises, and noticed something sitting on one of the two small tables.
It was a pair of dentures.
Somebody had taken out their teeth and just left them behind.
I know. The questions crash into each other in my brain too. We can all understand that someone might have had to take them out, but how can you forget to put them back in?
Obviously you can, so what about this question: How can you walk away, down the street, perhaps even reaching home, without ever sensing that something about the world (or if maybe it’s just me) was strangely different and, perhaps, even disturbing?
This neatly folded paper bag was obviously of no further use to someone, so it was just neatly left here. Where it has become utterly invisible to everyone, even the garbageman. If you don't want something anymore, just put it down somewhere and everyone agrees that it has ceased to exist.
How far did he or she get in this toothless, crumpled-lips condition? Did any of their friends notice? What about when the person needed to say something to a shopkeeper or a dog or a small rambunctious child? Did not their mouth (or ears, whichever is in better condition) send some kind of signal alerting them to their total lack of dentition?
And why am I even bothering with these questions, since the answer to all of them is obviously no?
One of the great things about staying pretty much in one neighborhood is that as I walk around doing the eternal mundane little things of life — which are just as mundane here as anywhere else, I’m sorry to say — I sometimes have the sensation of being carried along on a gentle current of badinage. Sometimes it’s complaining, sometimes not, but the art of quip and banter has been honed here to a comfortable edge that doesn’t draw blood. It depends on your tone of voice.
It’s a skill you’d expect to find developed in any small area where people have known each other for a long time (convent, factory, school, office, etc.) and can’t really avoid each other.
Truckers and haulers -- which is what Queequeg and his friends here are -- are famous for their repartee in most parts of the world, except when they have to concentrate.
This morning we went into the pharmacy; someone was there to get something for a strained muscle. After some conversation about this item or that, he decided, paid, and turned to leave. “I don’t know,” grumbled the client/patient, somewhat loudly, “it seems like I’ve got just one pain after another.”
Filippo the pharmacist has undoubtedly heard this far too many times. “Pains are like money,” he bounced back: “The more you’ve got, the more you keep.” Was that comforting, or did laughing just make the person feel better? I wonder if they teach you these witticisms in pharmacy school. I hope not. I’d rather think he made it up.
We moved on to the butcher shop, where the ever-smiling Marcello was doing his usual micro-surgery on shapeless masses of meat. It’s kind of hypnotic to watch him work, using just the right knife of just the right length and shape and sharpness, deftly stripping away strata of fat and dislodging inappropriate pieces of bone.
He smiled at us. “By now the knife can do it all by itself,” he said, smiling at our fascination.
“Well, you need hands that know what they’re doing,” Lino remarked.
“Sure,” Marcello replied. “But after 50 years, it’s like there are little eyes on the point of the knife.” A self-guiding butcher knife; a knifebot. I like it.
Then there are plays on words. I realize this may be hopelessly hard to explain, but I heard it just yesterday, and not for the first time — a minor quip that was probably funny the first ten times or so, back in 1329. You might need to have already had a few to find it amusing anymore. Here goes:
“La porta” means “the door.” “La” also means “she,” or “you” addressed to a female. “Porta” can also mean “bring” or “carry.”
So on the vaporetto, it is happening more and more often that someone entering or leaving doesn’t shut the sliding door. In the winter, this is rude and also kind of dumb (is it not obvious that these doors aren’t automatic?? Does the freezing wind somehow not touch that person?). These will be the same people — or their relatives — who, when we are suffocating with heat and humidity in the depths of July, will make a point of closing the door.
But it’s winter, and the door’s open, and sometimes a person (Venetian) near the door will just get up and close it. Or sometimes an exasperated passenger will call out to the offending party: “La porta!” (The door!)
To which someone else (Venetian), feeling frivolous, might respond: “Un litro!” (A liter). Saying this has instantly shifted the scene from a frigid, real vaporetto to a warm and stuffy imaginary osteria, where the men clustered around a table playing cards would be very likely utter the same exclamation, but in this case “A liter” means “Bring us a liter of wine.”
Maybe I’ve crushed the humor, but thought I’d give it a try. I think it’s funny.
Then there was the other morning. I was standing in line at the cash register at the little super-low-price supermarket wedged back into a corner of the campo behind and beyond us, a remote locale not far from the geographical frontier past which there are only sea monsters, just before you drop off the edge of the world.
Then you eventually reach the point where you don't even have to talk anymore.
The man in front of me, a grizzled, generic sort of retired working-class dude, had put his few items on the conveyor belt and the young man at the cash register had picked up one of them, a small plastic bottle of honey. I tuned in at the moment when the cashier had decided (I don’t know why) that he needed to explain how the nozzle-top worked. Perhaps the man had inquired, though he didn’t look like the type that would even have noticed it had a nozzle. Or cared.
“So you just take off the top, like this,” the cashier was saying, “and turn it over, and squeeze, and out comes just however much you need,”
“Oh this isn’t for me,” the man replied. God forbid anyone should think he had degenerated to the point of eating honey. “This stuff is for my wife.”
“So you don’t eat anything calling for honey in the morning?” the cashier confirmed in a friendly way.
“God no,” the man said. “I have a mortadella sandwich and a glass of red wine.”
This makes me smile. First, because it’s kind of a distinctive breakfast concept (I’m guessing it would be the “Canal-Dredger’s Special” on the coffeehouse menu). And second, because it sounded normal. Not good, not healthy, not to be recommended under any circumstances — but totally normal. Not only do I know that this is absolutely what he would have been expected to have in the morning (mortadella, being probably the cheapest cold cut you can get, sometimes goes by the nickname of the “plasterer’s prosciutto”). I don’t even see anything … how can I put this … wrong with it. I mean, I wouldn’t have it — but I wouldn’t not have it, either.
When you can look at something and grasp it as being both weird and normal, you’ve been wherever you are for too long. If I were a police officer they’d long since have rotated me out, sent me somewhere on the dark side of Sardinia. But here I am.
Carnival was definitely over early for the family who owns this tobacco shop; the sign on the door says they're closed for mourning. The blind left askew on the door emphasizes the point. And all that cheerful confetti has been swept up by the trash squad and left right here. Still feel like partying?
It’s not as if the city goes into mourning when Carnival is over (the merchants are too busy with their calculators to feel sad), but if you had gone out with me for a walk this morning, you wouldn’t just feel that something was missing (like, say 100,000 people). You would have the distinct sensation that you were at the bedside of a patient whose fever had finally broken and was sleeping peacfully.
A tranquillity comes over the city that is nothing less than miraculous. All that’s left to do is to clean the room and change the sweat-drenched sheets. So to speak. (I do hear some desultory sweeping going on outside.) And now we can see the simple, austere, monochromatic 40 days of Lent stretching before us.
Here’s what I won’t miss: The mighty force of the touristic masses being sucked into the city’s gullet as if through some colossal straw. The wall of humanity blocking entire streets, a good number of which had to be organized as strictly one-way. The incessant rumble of the launches hauling and re-hauling loads of countless people from the mainland to San Marco, not to mention the choking poison of their engines’ exhaust as they idle by the Fondamenta degli Schiavoni waiting for the next batch.
Here’s what I will miss: The neighborhood in full frivolity, the kids of all sizes in all sorts of costumes, their entourages of relatives, doting or beleaguered as they may be. And — you know what I’m going to say — the fritole and galani.
Lent personified during Carnival; detail from "The Battle between Carnival and Lent (Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1559).
Food seems to be the standard by which every human experience is measured here, and now we’re supposed to get serious. The list of (technically) forbidden goodies for the next month and ten days is well known and can be fairly detailed. But I narrow the “forbidden” list to two items: Fat and sugar, which means no more fritole or galani (sob). And you are expected (technically) to pretty much give up on meat, at least on Ash Wednesday and Fridays.
In this officially Catholic country where hardly anybody (it is said) goes to church anymore, today the butcher shops are closed. You’re supposed to eat fish. Or nothing, I suppose — maybe you get extra points for fasting, which wouldn’t hurt anybody after the gorge-fest we’ve been through.
We stopped by Marcello the butcher yesterday, looking for a cheap steak to eat before the culinary window slams shut on our fingers. He was busy doing brain surgery on a batch of chicken breasts so we watched his deft slittings and peelings and trimming while waiting our turn. Now that I think of it, it’s not so much brain surgery as couture tailoring.
Lino said, “I’ve always loved watching butchers work on meat. It’s a real art.”
“All the work that artisans used to do were arts,” Marcello replied. “I used to love watching the baker making bread. He could twist and tie and arrange it in all sorts of shapes. You don’t see that anymore — now it’s all stamped out by some kind of form. I’d stand there for hours to watch him.”
“You going to be closed tomorrow?” Lino asked, not having noticed the handwritten sign in the window saying “Closed Tomorrow.”
“Yes,” said Marcello. “It used to be that on Ash Wednesday all the butchers would be closed. The butchers, and the salumieri [butchers who work only with pork], and the pastry-makers. Those were the only ones to close, and we still respect that.”
No need to have mentioned the pastry-makers: it’s obvious. They are the CENTCOM of fat and sugar. They also must be worn out by now.
Even if nowadays anybody can go to the supermarket on Ash Wednesday and buy chops and ground beef and veal brains and so on, it wouldn’t really be in the spirit of the day. We’re hanging tough with vegetables, mostly. So healthy, so spiritually fortifying.
While we’re thinking of food, have you ever noticed that fasting, instead of clearing the mental decks for you to contemplate matters of the soul, usually has the opposite effect? That’s something to meditate on when you run out of repentance.
Meanwhile, we ate seppie in their ink tonight with polenta made the old-fashioned way (40 minutes of constant stirring). The seppie were so fresh that they practically smiled at us from their plastic bag — Nardo the fisherman had struck again, and we scored his last two. Technically the menu was well within the Ash Wednesday rules, but we totally violated their spirit — it was outrageously good.
I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to repent of that too.
