Chapter 44 1964–1965
Marzia takes me through Cannaregio, where their townhouse is located. She speaks good English, tells me that her brother insisted that she and her sister learn the language after school each day, that they’ve practiced on English and American guests over the years.
“For an American, you are quiet,” she observes.
I’m quiet because on the tip of my tongue sits one word: Theo. And the memory of my wedding day—when I didn’t get married.
I follow her into and out of churches—so many of them—and listen when she shows me where to catch the vaporetto that will take me up and down the canal streets if I am, like most Americans, afraid to walk.
“I like to walk,” I tell her.
We finish in the Campo Santa Maria Nova at a cafe that spills onto the square. Marzia orders coffee that sits as thick on my tongue as lies.
Eventually she sighs. “You don’t say where you are from or why you are here. Okay, keep your secrets. But now you are here, what will you do?”
“Walk,” I tell her. “I’ll just walk.”
She gives a little shrug, impatient with me for being such a disappointing American. She wouldn’t be disappointed with Calliope or Flitter. They’d make her smile.
“Off you go then.” She points to the square.
Over the coming days I explore the old ghetto in Cannaregio, squeeze myself into Calle Varisco, the narrowest street in the city, startled by the silence.
It was never silent in Los Angeles—and that’s something I only know now because I’ve heard the way a different city exhales.
With only people and boats, you can find sudden swathes where nothing makes a sound at all.
I walk over to the markets near the Rialto Bridge where slippery fish are lined up in rows on ice.
Women shake their heads at the vendors and raise their voices until suddenly they smile and the fish is wrapped in newspaper and put in a basket on the woman’s arm.
There are so many things I’ve never seen before: milky-gray oysters, tiny crabs called moeche and enormous ones that look like rocks.
I’m staring at those when the man who runs the stall picks one up and waggles it in front of me in a way that’s possibly supposed to look tantalizing.
I jump back because those legs are fearsome.
His belly laugh rings out in the square, not unkindly, and it makes me laugh too.
Suddenly I’m surrounded by women telling me, in louder and louder Italian when I fail to understand, something about the crab.
Cooking instructions? Me, Aria Jones, who’s only ever made burgers and grilled cheese, is being told in a language she doesn’t speak how to prepare a terrifying crab for dinner.
There’s so much lip-smacking and smiling encouragement for the piccola ragazza americana that I succumb, leaving the market with a pungent newspaper-wrapped bundle under my arm, smiling when I think of how Bob just paid for a Venetian crab for my dinner—I used some money from his engagement ring to pay for it.
Back at the townhouse, I present Alessia with my bounty and she nods as if I finally did something right.
“You will help,” she tells me.
I spend the afternoon in a lemon-yellow kitchen with a blue-canal view, piano notes exploding from the record player like fireworks.
“Scarlatti. A genius.” Alessia indicates the record player as she cracks open the cooked crab and instructs me to dress it with olive oil, parsley, pepper, salt, and lemon juice.
I scoop the meat into each half of the empty crab shells, which no longer look like rocks, but exotic porcelain bowls. I call for Marzia.
The two sisters share one shell and I eat the other, all of us silent at the wooden table in the kitchen because a Scarlatti sonata is the only sound you need when you eat a Venetian spider crab for the very first time in a life where you never expected Venice or sisters or Scarlatti or crabs that can be tamed into deliciousness.
I would never have lived this moment if I’d married Theo is all I can think once the crab is eaten and the kitchen tidied and Scarlatti silenced and nighttime has enveloped the world.
I plunge back into the streets the next day and the next, the gutsy smell of fish from the markets still caught in my nose. Everything here is stronger: voices, coffee, religion, liquor. The memory of Theo’s face. It lurches up when I brush against a leather jacket in a street.
I take a vaporetto to the Lido where there are beaches rather than leather jackets. But the beach is sallow, waveless; nothing like the beach I had in my mind when I was almost fourteen and thought I’d spend my life alone by the water.
Won’t you get lonely? I spin around. But no one’s there except memory.
Suddenly I’m fourteen years old and a silver dollar is about to squash me flat and it might be days before anyone finds me and then all I’ll be is Jane Doe in a Venetian morgue.
I’ll die alone and is there anything worse than to think, at the end of a life, that you meant absolutely nothing to anyone?
A gull shrieks, pulling me out of the past. There are no silver dollars here. Not even a wave could sweep me off this beach. Perhaps there were more people at the Chateau Marmont who knew who I was than there are here, but the person they knew was half dead.
Here, I’m half alive.
The next week I wind my way through Castello, Dorsoduro, dodge tourists and pigeons in San Marco.
I need to walk far enough that every dark-haired man on the street doesn’t remind me of Theo, until music drifting from a window doesn’t make me stop to listen in case it’s one of Theo’s songs, until he isn’t the first thing I think of when I wake—even before I wake; until he doesn’t live inside every dream that disturbs my sleep.
Along the Calle de la Bande, I look at the window of every shop. There are painted masks—how Calliope would love those—and leather-bound notebooks in whose pages I can see Theo writing a song.
Keep walking, Aria.
I pass stores selling colored glass, white lace, blue velvet brocade, iron door knockers shaped like lions.
In another window, there’s a typewriter in a creamy shade of celadon green.
Hermes 3000, it says on the front panel of this box-sized little beauty. The sign propped up beside it reads: Compagno di viaggio portatile.
Viaggio means travel. After a month as a tourist, that’s one word I recognize. Portable travel companion? Is that really what it means, or is the flicker of loneliness from the Lido still traveling alongside me?
What would I do with a typewriter anyway? Pen and paper have always been good enough for my journals before now.
I continue on into the next street. Now it’s a store with brightly colored dresses in the window that arrests me. The dresses look so happy, as if you could put them on and nothing sad or terrible could ever penetrate all of that joy.
I push open the door, go inside.
“Buongiorno!” A woman made out of sunbeams and smiles welcomes me.
“Guardo, solo,” I say haltingly, hoping to tell her I’m just taking a look, but possibly telling her I have a million dollars to spend.
“Try,” she tells me. She scoops up an armful of things, not even asking my size, and shoos me into a fitting room.
For the very first time in my life, I shop for clothes.
I try everything on slowly, half-expecting her to tell me to hurry up, but instead she flings open the curtain whenever she wants to, no matter if I’m in my underwear, and offers her opinions freely. “No,” and “Mamma mia”—which I’m not sure is approval or disapproval.
Finally, when I’m the one who flings open the curtain because I’ve found the one that makes me smile—an adorable mustard-gold coatdress with long sleeves and a short skirt—she claps her hands with delight.
“Perfect,” she pronounces. “Made for you.”
I sit on a stool at the counter while she wraps the dress in bright pink paper. In a jumble of English and Italian words, we talk and she tells me—I think—that she’s twenty-two years old and opened her shop last year.
“You come back,” she says as she passes me the shopping bag and I promise I will.
I walk away, taking with me not just my dress but some of the happiness she radiated—so much that it drew me in from the street.
She’s just one year older than me and already has her own shop.
If I sat on a bed beside her and wondered what jobs women could have, like Calliope and I once did, she probably wouldn’t ever run out of ideas.
What could I do, what talent do I have that would make me smile the same way?
I walk on, making discoveries, but finding no answers.
I discover a cafe where the coffee is milkier and thinner than most Venetians drink, coffee that tastes more like truth than lies. I discover another that makes the best cicchetti for lunch. I look at my money and discover that walking won’t pay my rent, just like it doesn’t cure broken hearts.
I discover that no matter how far I walk, how many dresses I buy, how many coffees I drink and crabs I crack, I will always think of Theo.
But as I stand in my room in my new mustard coatdress, I understand that I have to think of Aria Jones too.
If Aria Jones hadn’t seen Theo embrace another woman, if Flitter hadn’t put ambition ahead of friendship, if Bob hadn’t been so intent on revenge, then I wouldn’t know how lovely a Venetian canal can be when touched by the sun.
I thought love was beautiful, but the world is beautiful too. The real world. The world that you have to live in.
I’ve never lived on solid ground. My domain has been proscribed by my name, which is Italian for air, Isaiah once told me.
Air: the place of dreams. Dreams of water and running.
Dreams of a wedding to Theo, dreams that never considered the everydayness of how marriage would work—as if we were just going to remain as we were, him riding freeways, me teaching Adele and scooping up starlets.
The pain of my parents’ deaths hit my body like a wrecking ball and I’ve tried to live out of my body ever since.
Like Calliope, who wants to pin herself to the sky.
But human beings aren’t meant to live in the air.
The next day I go into every cafe in Cannaregio and ask for a job.
They refuse; I’m troppa americana and my Italian is orribile.
I try the ones close to San Marco where the tourists gather.
I ask at three cafes, then four. Five. I try an osteria, a trattoria, until I finally get offered a position as a waitress at one of the most touristy, right on the piazza.
I walk home satisfied. I have the means to live. Now I need to figure out how to live.