Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (15 page)

Lance Robbins had long since given up on me. Phone lines to Venice are bad enough in the best of climes, but with the weather so horrid they were positively impossible. I assumed that Raquel or Elizabeth or
someone
had my part. Who cared? It was all unreal to me. I read neither the trades, nor the news magazines, nor the Paris
Herald Trib
, nor the indispensable
New York Times
, nor even my beloved Liz Smith.

“Read not the Times, read the Eternities,” said Thoreau, who knew a thing or two. And really it was quite easy for me to tune out both New York and Los Angeles as if they had never existed (nor did they, in 1592). Being in a time or place is merely a question of accepting its givens, of subscribing to its world view or participating in its
Zeitgeist
. If you feel your career is washed up because you will not play a hooker in
Vegas II
, then it is. But if you don't give a damn because you believe you are in the sixteenth century, then it isn't. It's all that depressingly simple. Actresses kill themselves in LaLa Land because they are trapped in a world view that pronounces them finished, over the hill, washed up, just when they are beginning to command their powers. “She took a taxi,” they say, meaning that the lady in question died—or her career did. But if you reject all that, you can live on, saying: “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” I was determined to do no less.

I saw Per from time to time, just to get the latest news from Björn and Lilli. But Per's drinking depressed me, so I avoided him more and more. The less I drank, the more I could smell the liquor emanating from him, the more I could hear him repeat himself again and again, the more I could see him stagger when he stood up to walk. He thought liquor made him cheerful; I could see that it made him morose. But I was not about to reform him. I had tried that ten years ago, and it had brought our relationship lurching to an end. Per did not want to stop committing suicide slowly—as alcohol enabled him to do. Some deep guilt convinced him he deserved to die, and alcohol was his gradual poison.

Lorelei, despite her beastly divorce, continued to give the best parties in Venice: little soirees where descendants of Borgias and Grittis, Dandolos and Sforzas, Vendramins and Loredans, mingled with Greek and Brazilian millionaires, English and American expatriates, and the odd Eastern European artists who had had the luck (or the political cunning) to make their way to Venice. I felt at home with the flotsam of the world. I always do. Something in my blood tells me that I shall wind up in a Venetian
sestiere
, a Tuscan hill town, or on one of those rocky beaches in the south of France where shady people seek sunny places in their twilight years. I am comfortable with those conversations that switch from Italian to French to English to a smattering of Russian, Czech, Hungarian; with those people who, like me, cannot go home because they have burnt their bridges (if they ever knew where home was, anyway).

“I want to die here,” said an elegant lady at Lorelei's party one freezing night in November, “and so I know I want to live here. The place where you want to die is the place where you want to live.” She was one of those beautifully groomed, blonde ladies of indeterminate age, the widow of a rich Brazilian, and she had the well-preserved look that only money—lots of it—provides. Her clothes were by Valentino, her skin courtesy of La Prairie and Dr. Niehans, and her glow came from a numbered bank account in Zurich, daily massages, two facials a week, and her own yoga teacher (in that order, I believe). She was so rich she never thought about money (or carried it), and having said how much she loved Venice in the autumn, she was departing the next morning for her house in Rio and perhaps another little nip and tuck with Dr. Pitanguy. The other guests were equally elegiac about Venice (though many of them were also leaving soon for warmer climes), and the conversation turned on the Ball to Repopulate Venice—the brainchild of another Venetian artist and designer who had decided that since Venice's population was declining, it would be appropriate to give a benefit with that theme. She designed and had printed these wicked invitations in which a huge blackamoor in a turban was hefting the Campanile in place of his immense, erect penis, and the Venetian authorities, having seen these, were now determined to cancel her ball.

“What a pity,” said Lorelei, shaking her honey-colored curls. “Venice needs something that's really fun, really outrageous. Even the Carnival is finished. It's become a punk nightmare.”

Everyone nodded in agreement and drank more
prosecco
and Pinot Grigio. They would all be back for Carnival, they agreed. Would I?

“I have no intention of leaving Venice,” I said. This was greeted by oohs and ahhs of admiration by the departing guests.

Venice is a city that has only passionate lovers or vehement detractors; no one is indifferent to her. I was more lover than tourist, but lovers are, of course, the most passionate tourists. I wandered through the Scuola di San Rocco, squinting at the Tintorettos in the bad light. I took the
vaporetto
to San Michele and dutifully stood by the graves of Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Pound. But even more than the famous dead I loved the obscure dead, particularly the foreigners who had died in this feverish lagoon city. I would sometimes stand in the Protestant corner of the cemetery and read their tombstones, imagining their faces and inventing stories about them to myself, pretending that I knew them, weeping as if I were a bereaved relative. Some of them—Germans, English, Dutch, French—had died in the nineteenth century, but still I could weep for them, couldn't I? For what was time but a convention, a habit of mind, a custom of dress? Anyone whose fate I could imagine might be my brother, my sister, myself. And what is an actress, anyway, but someone who can put on other modes of being as a model puts on clothes? Sometimes I slipped in and out of so many modes of being that I truly forgot who I was.

Anywhere one lives for a period of time, a sort of life accretes around one. No matter how you prize your solitude, you must commune with
someone—
the vegetable man, the cleaning woman, the bag lady who feeds the stray cats in the corner of the
campo
. The joy of Venice is that it is in fact a village; you see the same people over and over, and even if you don't know their names, you come to nod and smile at their faces. Life is very much as it was centuries ago. Life revolves around procuring food, cooking it, eating it, disposing of waste. Nourishment, garbage, excrement—the eternal circle. Take sex, art, and poetry away, and that is basically what life is. Human beings are tubes. Food goes in one end. Shit comes out the other. Without love, without poetry, without the longing for the divine, we are no more than that. The wonder is that so many people seem so contented with so little. How
can
they be? Or are they really discontented, numbing their discontent with alcohol, dope, television, compulsive shopping?

A puzzlement. I had nothing to numb me. I was open to the elements—open and raw.

I kept running into the same cast of characters over and over in my crisscrossing of the city in the freezing rain. There was the ancient silent-film actress called Arlecchina, whose heyday had been in the twenties, and who these days claimed to be a witch. She certainly looked like one—with that larger right eye, her bent-over posture, the evil glitter of her gaze, and the jagged sparks of her laugh. I had not known who she was when I saw her lurking about the film festival in August (she had even tried to talk to me at one of the screenings), but unlike the others, she had not gone home. Arlecchina lived near the Accademia, on the garret floor of a palazzo, attended by one remaining retainer, whom some said was her lover, or her familiar—a pleasant, plump blond man, about thirty years her junior and with no front teeth. It was said in Venice that she had knocked his teeth out in a quarrel, or bewitched them out. But Venice thrives on gossip, and half of what you hear cannot be believed. It is the labyrinthine nature of the place that often causes even one's own stories to come back to one, as original, with certain particular details heightened or changed.

It was said that Arlecchina made love philtres and poisons; it was said that she could cause
acqua alta
or banish it. It was said that she was heiress to the old alchemical formulae for which the ghetto of Venice was famous in centuries past. It was said that she had the power to raise spirits and interrogate them. Who knew?

I only know that I would meet her again and again on my ramblings through the city—she was always trailed at six paces by her toothless retainer—and she would croak to me, in English, “I
know
you!” And then she would wave her silver-headed walking stick at me, cackle maniacally, and move on.

There was also a Bulgarian painter with an exophthalmic gaze whom I met again and again on my shopping excursions. I had been introduced to him at one of Lorelei's soirees, and I knew he wanted to pay me court, but I was indifferent to him. I understood that he was married and in search of a convenient Venetian liaison. Besides, I didn't fancy him. Sometimes I thought I had become sexually numb, except in my dreams—I who in the past had lived great portions of my life only for love, or was it lust? How could I be so uninterested in sex? I wondered. I scarcely missed it.

I found I was drawn again and again to the ghetto: those curious, tall, narrow buildings where the Jews of Venice lived in centuries past, pursuing their traditional occupations of old-clothes dealing, alchemy, astrology, medicine, the teaching of music and dance, maritime trade…for the Jews of Venice were not all moneylenders, as aficionados of Shakespeare might imagine. They pursued a wide variety of occupations even under the multitude of restrictions that the Serenissima imposed upon them. As in all of Venice, gambling flourished even in the ghetto—except in times of plague, when the rabbinical warnings against it were heeded because the people suddenly feared the wrath of God. And the Jews of Venice were famous for astrology, alchemy, medicine, as well as music and theater—those other alchemical pursuits.

Stolen things, lost things, bartered things, things gambled away, tended to turn up in the ghetto too. Paintings, plate, jewelry, tapestries, cloth of gold. Scarcely a sixteenth-century traveler left Venice without a trip to the ghetto—either for curiosity's sake, or to acquire some item, or else to hear its famous orators, or to see its plays, its women players, its astoundingly beautiful women.

In limbo between two worlds, I wandered daily in the ghetto in the freezing rain—hoping, I suppose, to meet with my two Elizabethans, but I did not encounter them. Occasionally I had the mad notion of going to Arlecchina, and asking her help, when a most unexpected occurrence suddenly changed my plan.

L
ORELEI'S HUSBAND DIED. THEY
had been feuding bitterly over a divorce (even to the point of constructing a wall across their fifteenth-century house, dividing it in two), when suddenly he had the good manners, the courtesy, the
gentilezza
, to drop dead. For he literally dropped dead, on the front steps of the Fenice Theater, after a concert, in midsentence. (He was inviting a young woman out for drinks.) A hale and dapper yachtsman of sixty or so who had never worked a day in his life, he had looked rather like Claus von Bülow—as Venetians can sometimes look like Danes, having their complement of Celtic blood. (Many Venetians are blond and blue-eyed, with tawny skin.) Alvise Rattazzi—for that was the dead man's name—died as if on cue, becoming more of a gentleman in death than he ever was in life.

His funeral was one of those wonderfully somber Venetian affairs, with a gilded four-postered barge embellished by gilded lions, rowed by four lugubrious, elderly gondoliers in tattered livery, and a train of mourners in smaller gondolas, holding black umbrellas aloft. The weather was chill and damp, with fierce interludes of icy rain. Little rain squalls painted the sky above San Michele with washes of gray and black, and the cypress tops whipped frantically about in the wind.

Most of the expatriates had left Venice by now, so only the die-hards were present in that train of gondolas that followed the funeral barge as baby ducklings follow a big mother duck. In one of the gondolas were Arlecchina and her loyal toothless retainer.

Hunched under her umbrella (held for her by the toothless one), Arlecchina smiled as if she loved funerals. I guess certain very old people reach an age where every funeral becomes some sort of insane confirmation of strength, rather than of vulnerability, as it is when we are in our thirties or forties and our friends die.

“I
know
you!” she called to me, as she always did, when our gondolas came abreast at the landing of the
cimitero
. “Jessica,” she said, looking into my eyes with her uneven, witchy gaze. “But which Jessica
are
you?” And then she cackled wildly like a cartoon witch.

Presently, she pulled off long black gloves (that looked to be of some strange fur—cat fur, could it be?) and she drew a gold ring off a gnarled finger. She handed it to me across the arm's length of freezing water.

“Wear it,” she said. “And if you go to the synagogue and wish on it there, so much the better.”

Thunderstruck, I took the ring, put it on—it fit perfectly—and looked at it.

Did I imagine this or did it really scald my finger as if it were heated in some flame? (Or was the flame in Arlecchina's flesh?) The ring had a transparent crystal enclosing an elaborate knot of auburn hair. It was the sort of ring they used to give away at funerals centuries ago, distributing the deceased's hair (and thus his magic) among his loyal friends. Around the bezel were inscribed some letters, nearly rubbed out of the gold by time, but what they were I could not make out. Or even which language. Was it Latin, English, Italian? The letters were so faint that I could not tell.