Vitale Rossi was the last luganegher (yoo-ghan-eh-GHAIR) in Venice, and  his shop and workshop happened to be  just across the canal from our first apartment.   In the shop, he and his implacable wife Anna sold the myriad pork products he had created: prosciutto (cured and cooked), pancetta (smoked and otherwise), sopressa, salame, culatello, zampone, and so on.   If it had been any relation to scrofa domesticus, it was fair game to him.

More important to me — as after all this time I still have only a cordial, if not passionate, relationship with swine products — Signor Vitale was my guardian angel.   I deeply regret not ever having taken even one picture of him, but I doubt that a mere camera could have captured, much less conveyed, the profound kindness that radiated from his eyes, his smile, his follicles, his synapses, his DNA.  

Back when I was totally new here, knowing nobody and speaking only the most rudimentary pidgin Italian, he would gaze at me as I attempted to order with the gentlest and most patient expression I’ve ever seen.   If I came into the shop on the verge of closing time, at the end of a long and tiring day, and asked for a mere bottle of water or  two rolls,  in some silent way he convinced me that this transaction  was the best thing that had happened to him all day.  

There were many, many afternoons around 4:00 or so when I would go over to buy some fragment of something   just so I could absorb for a moment his extraordinary aura.   He would relax for a few minutes by expressing some opinion on the current state of anything, or relating  assorted tidbits about his past, or about the business, or the finer points (explained very carefully but lovingly) of curing prosciutto.   Occasionally he would take me back into the laboratory and show me the various pieces of meat undergoing treatments and processes involving smoke, salt, and time.  

As a workplace, it couldn’t have changed much from the pork labs of the Dark Ages.   But for Signor Vitale, raising a herd of Olympic heptathletes would not have required more devotion or given him  more satisfaction than he felt every day as he tested and turned and smelled the progress of his assorted hanging hocks.

On dark, foggy winter nights, the light shining from the shop window was the only illumination on that entire stretch of fondamenta.   It was the lighthouse of the neighborhood, in more ways than one.

As my language skills improved, so did our conversations, obviously.   I still depended on the smile, but now was much more curious to hear his opinions and ruminations.   He never disappointed me.   Talking with him did me more good than five homilies.

One January morning I stopped in for something and there he was, alone.   This was great — it meant he had a minute to “exchange four words” with me, as he put it.

I started: “Did you see the eclipse of the moon this morning?”   (We had gotten up before dawn to go out and witness the event.)

He smiled.   “I have to work.”

“Working at 4:30 in the morning??” I asked.

“I was sleeping.”   His eyes  smiled at me.   I don’t know how he does it.   If I were a pig, I’d say “Yes, come slaughter me.   Just as long as you’re happy.”  

I said, “Well, it was beautiful.   We didn’t get up at 4:30 — we saw it from 5:30 to 6:00.   But we’re up then anyway.”

He looked startled.   “I get up at 6:30,” he said.   “If I’m going to work a 12-hour day, at nearly 80 years old, I need to get some rest.   No point staying up late or getting up too early.”  

Which brought to mind the subject of age, which segued almost immediately into the topic of one’s departure from this life.   The notorious exiled politician Benito Craxi had died of a heart attack the day before, and the funeral was today, in Tunisia.   So people out and around have been discussing him, with heavy moralistic overtones (anything from “What a pity, he was a good, innocent person who didn’t deserve to die” to “What a crook, he should have died years ago”).   No one, clearly, taking into account that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, and whatever you do, your train is headed in the same direction as everybody else’s.

“Look at Craxi,” Signor Vitale volunteered.   “”What use was all that struggling for power and money?   There he is, dead at 66.   Didn’t do him any good at all.   You don’t need a lot of money in order to live.”   He touched his forehead, to indicate that the only requirement was a functioning brain.   “People need to learn to content themselves with what they have.   We need to learn how to take life for what it is.”

“Yes, but he wanted to be big,”  was my  very unoriginal observation.

“You can’t be big,” Signor Vitale stated.   “Or anyway, not past a certain point.   You know the balloons kids have at  the fair?   They blow them up and blow them up to the point where the balloon can’t hold anymore and it explodes.   The same thing for us.   We can’t be big past a certain point.   After a hundred years, nobody will remember we even existed.   You know?”   He seemed  completely at peace with that fact.

“He wanted more,” I said, just to keep things going.

“Well sure,” Signor Vitale replied,  one of his large, machete-like knives in his hand.   “Mussolini wanted more, and he  got it, too” — he made a thrusting motion with the knife and smiled seraphically.   “Yep, he got more.”

At 6:00 the same evening I found myself back in the shop.   Needed milk and butter.    Signor Vitale was at the helm alone again, but this time there’ was a lady wearing an extremely gorgeous mink coat buying some milk and few other oddities.   As I waited, I stared at the mink,  struggling not to reach out and caress it — it was one of those furs that is so lush and gleaming  that it not only screams “Money,” it also screams “Touch me.”     I didn’t, but I stared.

When she left, I said to Signor Vitale, “Did you see that coat?”

He shrugged.   “I’m no expert on fur.”

“I’m not either, but even a civilian like me could tell that it was something exceptional.”

He looked unimpressed.   “Doesn’t it seem a little much, to wear something like that to go shopping?”   I’ve gotten so used to see women here wearing fur coats, especially mink, that it hadn’t occurred to me.   She has to wear something, after all.   But of course he was right.

“Was it mink?” he asked.

“Indubitably,” I replied.

“I guess it usually is.”

“Well yes,” I said, “but there’s mink and mink.”

“I don’t know,” he went on.   “Some people try to make themselves appear to be something greater than they are.   Look at Craxi.”   This was clearly the topic du jour, a very useful tool  should you  want to calibrate your personal values along with the barometer.    

“He went so high, but people who go so high, who achieve all those glories, usually have humiliations to match.   It’s better to be content with what you have.   All that money.   What was it for?   He could still be alive” — he seemed to be implying that the desire for pelf was one contributing cause to the man’s demise.   I didn’t know that “love of lucre” could be listed as a cause of death, but there was no doubt in Signor Vitale’s mind.

“The important thing is to love your work,” he declared, smiling that incredibly benevolent smile.   His eyes beamed on me.   I felt like a mink coat.   “If you can work with serenity, you’ve got all you need in life.   You need to be honest.”   Evidently Craxi’s dishonesty — which he dishonestly denied, of course, up to the last palpitation of his flawed little heart — was another reason for his dying so young.

“What you need in life,” he continued, “is to work, to listen to the birdsong, to look at a beautiful woman” — he smiled, but seemed to sense he might be wandering onto tricky terrain, “to read a good book,” he neatly recovered.   “This is what matters in life.”  

 These were  clearly  not opinions he was expressing, but facts.   You can’t argue with a philosophy like this, especially when you know that the person expressing it spent several years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany during World War II, and raised four children, at least one of whom is a doctor, on the money he made from a batch of prosciutto.  

Anyway, he was preaching to the converted.   I had just noticed, crossing the bridge, the exquisitely pale, violet gleam of  the winter sunset, and how the transparent sky was beginning to show tiny dots of stars.   (I had also noticed a small water rat swimming sturdily from the drainpipe on one side of the canal to the other, leaving a perfect rippling V behind him or her.   It’s all nature.)  

I wondered if the woman in the mink coat would have noticed the same things, and if they’d have given her spirit the same lift they gave mine.    Or does mink act as a sort of protective layer against more than mere cold?   (Let’s be fair here, even philistines have to keep warm.)   I have to watch out that I don’t fall into the mindset of those Russians who  boast that they’re more spiritually alive than the materialistic clods in the West, even as they’re scraping the  mold off their last piece of bread.   It’s a very tempting frame of mind sometimes.   The old “less is more,” but taken to  metaphysical extremes.

This is the sort of musing that Signor Vitale almost always lures me into.   Still, it so  obviously works for him that you’re really, really tempted to believe it.

Now I’m going to reveal something that I have confided in only a few people:   my passion for laundry.   Not just mine, everybody’s.  It’s more than a mere passion, it’s more like a  fixation, really.   A mania.

Clotheslines, fluttering with their victorious domestic banners, are like daily bulletins, footnotes in the ongoing family story.   Plenty of people walk around Venice snapping pictures of laundry, I suppose because by now it’s something you don’t see very often back home.   I can tell you that when I see people photographing my laundry, it annoys me.   I don’t regard it or myself as either quaint or picturesque.

 But why do I love it so much, in my own secret connoisseur’s heart?   It’s not the laundry itself, but the drying thereof, because that is the linchpin of the entire domestic enterprise.   Not having a clothes dryer (I only know one person here who has one, and she uses it about twice a year, in the winter), you develop, quickly or slowly, a sense about the weather and its capacity to dry your garments that you’d never have imagined possessing   in more appliance-laden towns.   It’s a jungle-lore sort of skill.

This week is a case in point.  We have been having a stretch of dream weather: breezy, sunny, dry, cloudless.   It’s weather which inspires rational people — and there are more of them than I imagined, judging by the  troop  transports  which are the overloaded vaporettos heading to the Lido  — as I say, rational people to obey the   seductive call,  “Beeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaach.”

But I, and I think I’m not alone, look out the window and think “Laundry!!!”   Because with this perfect concatenation of elements you feel invincible, capable of drying anything, and by the look of the clotheslines around this part of the neighborhood this weather inspires a sort of primal instinct (cue the voice of David Attenborough), an irresistible urge to wash heavy cotton terrycloth bathrobes, double-bed-size comforters, vast thick beach towels, all sorts of blankets.   Mattress covers.   Sweatshirts (Go Big Red!).   Many pairs of jeans.

 If you have ever  tried to dry anything on a winter day of chilly fog, or even those few days when it’s so cold your underwear literally freezes solid (I did not make that up),    you don’t need to be reading this, because you know.   Also, I think laundry is beautiful.  

So what happens is that I am not only in love with the texture and fragrance of the socks and T-shirts as I gather them in (is that really what sunshine smells like?), I can’t resist looking at other women’s laundry.   How’s it going?   What time did she start the washing machine to have it out already at this hour?   How can one family have so many black undergarments?   This is an irrefutable sign of going bush.

Speaking of mysteries, there was a person living in the top floor corner apartment on the west side of Campazzo San Sebastian who every day hung out a man’s medium-blue dress shirt.   I became fascinated with this, not because it was happening but why.   Does he have only one?   And more to the point, where is the rest of his garb?   In ten years I never saw any other item of clothing, for man, woman, or beast, hanging out there over the street.   It almost reached the point where I was ready to ring his doorbell to find out.   But then I realized that I was enjoying  wondering  more than I would knowing.

My friend, Cristina, who has the clothes dryer, told me this: When she and her husband and twins moved into their new apartment in a very unprocessed part of Dorsoduro called Santa Marta, she accepted that as newcomers they would be under round-the-clock surveillance by the other women in the neighborhood.   Everybody pretends nothing is going on, but they  see everything.  

She  already knew that a certain type of housewife — I use the term not in a sociological but technical  sense, because here housewifery still a respected full-time occupation,  as respected as being an airplane mechanic — cadres of such women inspect  the hung-out laundry with  a  terrific list of parameters.   They draw numerous conclusions about you, your mother, your ancestors,  how many languages you speak, whether you’ve ever read Proust, not so much according to what you hang out to dry (there’s only so many items a family uses) but how you do it.  

Socks hung out at random?   Say, colors not matching, or thrown in with the briefs or bras?   Bad.   Do you hang your husband/son/uncle’s  shirt out by the hem, or by the shoulder?   (Ditto any kind of trouser — there are two distinct schools of thought on  whether hanging them by the waistband or the leg-hems is more effective, aesthetically pleasing, appropriate, etc.   Pantyhose also falls in this category.)   Matching items grouped together in perfect sequence are what you want to aim for, as they bespeak scrupulosity, forethought, and a commitment to doing things the Right Way.   (I am not making this up.)

But Cristina happened to be  using her dryer in  those early days  and therefore not hanging out any laundry at all.   The neighbor women couldn’t stand it.  Eventually one of them stopped her on the street and asked her, point-blank, where her laundry was.   “I don’t know what they were thinking,” she told me, “like maybe we never washed….”  

All you need is sun, at least for a little while (we get it in our courtyard for approximately an hour), no humidity, and a certain kind of breeze — not so strong (though of course it’s gratifying to watch your laundry thrashing around outside), but steady.   Today it’s perfect, a sturdy, efficient little zephyr that has  kept going all day.   I feel such a sense of triumph when I bring in the heavy stuff, all dry, that I have to remind myself that I get absolutely no credit for either  the sun or the wind.

Daily trivia: The common word here for laundry is bucato.   This literally means “holed,” as in, having holes in it.   Not holes that it came with, holes that were caused by countless washings, which until not so long ago was still accomplished with a washboard and tub.  

More trivia:   The washboard was the perfect tool by which to teach your kid how to swim.   Generations of Venetian children learned how to swim by hanging onto their mother’s washboard.  

So all those people photographing laundry on the line might as well be photographing Neolithic rock art.   They know what it looks like, but they have no idea what it means.  

I am convinced that when the Last Trump blows on Judgment Day, there will be at least one woman in the world who is too busy hanging out socks to even hear it.