Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (16 page)

“The synagogue,” said Arlecchina again, cackling. Then our gondolas drifted apart and I was left with the ring burning through my finger, and a feeling of unreality about what had occurred.

I put my hands in my pockets, as if the very sight of the ring could blind me, and I tried to put the disturbing event out of my mind.

Later, at the graveside, I asked Lorelei how it happened that Arlecchina knew English.

“Oh, didn't you know?” Lorelei said. “She's American, though she's lived here since the twenties.” Lorelei shuddered. “
Una Strega
,” she said. “I do not like her. Do you?”

I shrugged. I did not tell Lorelei about the ring.

If Lorelei's problems were solved by the funeral, mine were only just beginning. I kept trying to find the strength to go to the synagogue, but my courage failed me.

This was the real thing, I thought, the showdown, the witchy transport back in time I craved. Or perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps Arlecchina was mad. Perhaps the ring was bogus—a bit of cliched stagecraft, gothic crapula, the magic ring to the magic kingdom, the magic ringdom of all my desires…

It was finally on a cold and gray Friday afternoon in early December that I made my way to the Spanish synagogue, the Scuola Spagnuola, in the ghetto (for I assumed it was that synagogue she meant). Venice once possessed a fully functioning synagogue for each nationality, but these days that was no longer the case. The other synagogues, or
scuole
, in the ghetto—the Luzzato, the Levantina, the Scuola Grande Tedesca, the Scuola Canton—are, in particular, either no longer open for regular worship or only opened at certain times for tour groups. (The German synagogue is part of the museum of the Jewish community and has those maddeningly minimal hours that so tantalize and infuriate expatriates in Italy.) The population of Jews in Venice has dwindled, just as the population of Christians has. Venice is no longer the center of the commercial world; New York is. But I was drawn back to a time when Venice was as frantic, competitive, and cutthroat as today's New York.

It was not yet Chanukah, but it was the Sabbath, and nightfall comes early in Venice in December. Of course, the Jews of Venice no longer all live in the ghetto. Some have ornate palazzi on the Grand Canal, some starkly modern ones, some villas on the Lido, and some cramped little apartments here and there about the city, but those who worship in the ghetto all seem to know each other and many are kissing cousins. It is a small and closely knit community—and a jolly one. The outside of the Spanish synagogue is simple, almost austere. A plaque commemorating the Venetian Jews deported in 1943–44 is a somber reminder that the persecutions of the Jews have accelerated, not diminished, throughout history, but inside the Spanish synagogue the mood is far from somber. It is more Italian than Jewish (though Italian and Jewish often seem identical to someone who is heir to WASP family melancholia of the alcoholic, suicidal sort
my
crazy family knew). Boisterous, noisy, full of the sounds of laughter, children, music, the Spanish synagogue is, above all, cheery. (Oh, I knew that Jews were neurotic, but what wouldn't I have given to have
their
neuroses rather than my own.) My sense of intruding upon alien mysteries was counterbalanced by the curious informality of this jovial place.

Although there is a latticed women's gallery upstairs, it has fallen into desuetude and the men and women sit facing one another in separate galleries on the main floor. Even so, one doesn't have the feeling of abrupt division of sexes thanks to the celebratory atmosphere and the omnipresence of children. Sometimes a little boy sits on his mother's lap in the women's section, and there is much waving and greeting and chatter back and forth across the dividing aisle with its inlaid marble floor, its red carpet.

I found the synagogue extraordinarily beautiful, with its dazzling brass chandelier at the center, brass wall sconces between the windows and red window hangings, and tall brass candlesticks before the altar. Sitting, in the dark walnut pews, among the women, even a WASP can experience a feeling of homecoming.

I sat taking in the jollity and warmth of the synagogue while the rabbi began the services, while the cantor sang, while the children fidgeted and the mothers scolded, while time stopped as it sometimes does in holy places. I felt, as I have often felt in my life (felt with that nostalgia for belonging, which is the fate of orphans), that being a Jew would be so
cozy
. They seemed to have more blood, more poetry, more sensuality than my people—whoever my people were. And then I suddenly realized how lost Shakespeare's Jessica was—how lost, self-hating, and finally anti-Semitic—to pawn her mother's ring for a monkey, to betray her father for a foppish young man who never quite treated her like an equal because she was a Jew. “A wilderness of monkeys,” Shylock said after her elopement. And that was Jessica's legacy, wasn't it? A wilderness of Christian monkeys and, finally, no home to go to. Exile was the worst punishment one could think of. Exile was worse than death.

I stared at the ring. The knot of auburn hair might have been Shakespeare's. Or mine. And the letters around the bezel appeared, in this light, to be runic. I knew no runic prayer so I chose Hebrew—as strange to me as runic.
Baruch atoh adonai
, I thought, not knowing what it meant but liking the sound—as I also liked the sound of the cantor's voice, the warm golden lights, the red and gold of this antique synagogue (which was quite new in Shakespeare's day). “
Baruch atoh adonai
,” I muttered to the ring.

Were these words witchy enough? I wondered. Or was there some incantation for shape-shifting (through wishing on rings) that I should know? Shakespeare had written reams about rings, magic rings, rings that symbolized bonds, that conveyed magical powers. In
The Merchant of Venice
, which I continued to study in the hope of Björn's return, many central lines are devoted to rings—as when Bassanio says to Portia:

If you did know to whom I gave the ring,

If you did know for whom I gave the ring,

And would conceive for what I gave the ring,

And how unwillingly I left the ring

When naught would be accepted but the ring,

You would abate the strength of your displeasure…

But would these serve as magical incantations? Surely something stronger was needed. Some ferocious formula from an Elizabethan grimoire, or perhaps some Ovidian verses that might have inspired Shakespeare, who loved Ovid, to attempt metamorphoses with his verse.

This was absurd, I thought. I should have gone to Arlecchina and requested a spell from her. But was a spell really needed? “Wish on the ring,” she had said. The strong force of wishing could do much in life, that I knew. In fact, it was best not to wish for something unless you were sure you earnestly desired it, for wishing could make things happen—strange things, terrible things, things you could not later control.

I wished. I wished with all my might. I squeezed my hands together, shut my eyes, clenched my bowels, and held my breath. I thought of my mother and remembered how I could summon her, despite the number of years she had been dead, just by inhaling her perfume, Joy; calling up the odor of her cigarette butts in her Steuben ashtrays; or looking at her old-fashioned diamond rings, which she had left me and which I uselessly kept in a vault at the Morgan Bank in New York. It was only, finally, a question of missing her enough—for strong force of longing could bring back the dead.

So I wished, knowing that all time was eternally present and that we can, any of us, slip into other times, other modes of being, just by wanting to badly enough, just by believing that they are still there, lingering in the air.

And then I opened my eyes. The twentieth-century rabbi still stood before me. The twentieth-century cantor was still singing. And the twentieth-century Jews of Venice were still around me in their twentieth-century costumes. The magick had failed. Devastated (yet oddly relieved), I did not wait for the end of the service, but got up, excused myself, and left the synagogue. As I made my way down the white marble steps, past the wrought-iron gates that stand open at their bottom and out into the dark Campiello delle Scuole, I felt desperate. Perhaps it was, in fact, time to go home to Pacific Palisades and resume my life, such as it was. Perhaps it was time to contact my daughter, Antonia, whom I deliberately stayed away from these days because she was in her father's custody (living on Park Avenue with a wicked stepmother, attending Chapin as I had), and I sensed that my visits made her feel even more torn, more pained—though they comforted
me
. She was the dearest thing in life to me, but I deprived myself of her company for
her
sake, knowing somehow that when she was old enough she would come back of her own sweet will, and we would talk of many things, of cabbages and kings, and if the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings…

I stood in the darkness of the Campiello delle Scuole and looked about me. The paving stones were shiny wet, the cold rain came drizzling down. I made an abrupt turn at the corner of the
campiello
in search of the
fondamenta
and, eventually, a
vaporetto
, but I found myself instead going deeper into the Ghetto Vecchio.

Panic seized me. Suddenly I felt lost, even though I knew that in Venice you are never lost but only a few echoing footsteps and deft turnings from your intended destination. I turned back and found myself in the Calle del Forno—the street of the great oven where, to this day, matzohs are baked. Then I turned again and ran along this
calle
until it rejoined the Fondamenta di Cannaregio, the street that runs along the Canale di Cannaregio, which presently feeds into the Canal Grande. I looked, and then I looked again.

Something felt different, but I couldn't figure out exactly what it was. Something was a little off. Fog was rising from the canal before me, giving me the sense that all boundaries were permeable and perishable—even the boundary of time. I thought I would walk a bit, find a
vaporetto
, and go back to Lorelei's. I was cold and lonely, and Lorelei always had a glass of wine for me, a funny story, and some cheer. I looked for a
vaporetto
in the familiar yet unfamiliar scene—but there was no
vaporetto
in sight, not even a light piercing the fog. Not only were there no
vaporetti
, no
motoscafi
, but the misty Canalozzo seemed now to be filled with
gondole
,
sandali
,
topi
, little wherries of every description—many of which I had seen in the regatta but many of which I had never seen at all.

Humble working people were rowing home; magnificently dressed aristocrats were venturing forth for a night of dancing, gaming, whoring. The aspect of
the fondamenta
was otherwise not so different than it had been before: paving stones glistering with misty rain—the tall, tottering houses of the ghetto, their shutters closed to the night. But suddenly I looked up and saw the telltale sign, the final proof: no TV antennae among the chimney pots on the tilting tile roofs! Could it be? Or was this just another Venetian mirage?

I turned and ran back into the Campiello delle Scuole—arriving not a moment too soon, for all the doors of the synagogues were just now opening and Jews were pouring out of the Friday night services. Yellow-turbaned Levantine Jews were coming down from the Scuola Levantina. The Scuola Meshullanim and the Scuola Cohanim (both destroyed at least a century ago) were, to my astonishment, disgorging worshippers: men in their distinctive red hats (the hated sign of the Jew in the sixteenth century) and women in their magnificent Sabbath finery. Even the Scuola Spagnuola, where I had recently been and which I had found so homey and simple, was now opening its doors to fill the streets with splendidly dressed marrano refugees, clean shaven, wearing the goffered ruffs and velvet Venetian breeches of sixteenth-century men of fashion, but above it all, the distinctive scarlet hats of the Venetian Jews.

This was a movie I was in, wasn't it? Presently the extras, the “ambiance,” would disperse and we would all find ourselves back in our trailers, drinking wine, kidding around with the crew and with each other in that quasifamilial way people fall into on movie sets, the young and foolish ones smoking a few joints, snorting some toot. But this crowd of extras seemed oddly earnest about their work. The red-hatted Jews didn't seem to
know
they were extras, nor did the Christians. For there were Christians in the crowd as well, and yellow-hatted Jews from the Papal States. Nor could you tell a Christian from a Jew except by the hat—that desperate mark of humiliation forced on a people who otherwise would thrive and prosper too well.

At once exhilarated and terrified, I tried to run (terribly impeded by the high clogs I wore—
zoccoli—
against the
acqua alta
so prevalent in the Venetian winters). My feathered fan flapped against my waist (to which it was chained in the Venetian fashion), my tight bodice—long, pointed, and padded in the front, and high and laced in back—and my trailing brocaded skirts all made running difficult. I wrapped my cloak about me, covering my half-naked breasts upon which my enormous pearls from the Orient tossed heavily with every step. I could feel the stiff ruff, which rose like one large ornamental wing at the back of my neck, and putting my hand to my hair, I could feel my forelocks divided into two hennaed horns in the persistent fashion of Venetian ladies. All this I had seen in old prints—and now I had entered one!

With no thought but to get home, home to Dorsoduro and my strange little house, or back to Lorelei's so that I could tell her of these marvels, I hobbled along down the Ghetto Vecchio toward the locked and gated Ponte di Ghetto Vecchio, hearing the clatter of my own clogs, fearing the slippery stones and my footing. Suddenly a guard shouted at me from a passing gondola patrolling the waters.