“I have an idea,” I said.
Dr. Scattolin raised his eyebrows.
“I’ve noticed there are eight corn-vending stands in St. Mark’s Square. Why not just get rid of them?”
“Ah!” he said. “Because that would be the sensible thing to do.”
“But really, why not?”
“Two reasons. One: because Venice wants to keep the tourists amused, and the tourists are amused by pigeons, and two: because, believe it or not, selling corn at four thousand lire a bag is such a lucrative business that each vendor can afford to pay the city three hundred million lire [a hundred fifty thousand dollars] for a license. However, we do place a strict limit on where the pigeons can be fed. It is legal only in St. Mark’s Square, nowhere else in Venice. If you are caught feeding pigeons even ten feet outside St. Mark’s, you will be fined a hundred thousand lire.”
“That’s absurd,” I said.
“It’s worse than absurd,” said Dr. Scattolin. “It’s contradictory, hypocritical, irresponsible, dangerous, dishonest, corrupt, unfair, and completely mad.” He leaned back in his chair. “Welcome to Venice.”
IT HAS BEEN OBSERVED THAT ON A MAP Venice looks something like a fish swimming east to west. The tail fins are the outlying neighborhoods of Castello and Sant’Elena. The body is the busy heart of Venice: St. Mark’s and the Rialto. The head is the train station and the parking area, Piazzale Roma, which are connected by a long bridge to the mainland. The bridge itself could be the line that the fish has taken in its mouth. One could even go so far as to designate the Grand Canal, which travels an S-shaped course through town, as the fish’s alimentary canal.
To the south of Venice, immediately underneath the fish, is a long, slender island that could be seen as a platter for the fish to be served on: the Giudecca.
Whatever else it might be, the Giudecca is a now-bucolic spit of land, three hundred yards across the Giudecca Canal from the heart of Venice. It has one important church, no major tourist attractions, and no tourist shops. It was the site of the last real factories in Venice and has thus been associated with a somewhat different, rougher working class than elsewhere in the city. People who live on the Giudecca consider themselves a breed apart, which, in one way or another, is how residents of all the islands in the lagoon feel about themselves.
For a long time, I had hoped to get a look at a mysterious walled garden on the Giudecca that I had read about but never seen. Designed and built in the late nineteenth century by Frederic Eden, the great-uncle of the British prime minister Anthony Eden, it was called, naturally enough, the Garden of Eden. At four acres, it was the largest private garden in Venice. No one I knew had ever been inside the walls.
It was only a three-minute ride to the Giudecca on the vaporetto, that clanging, groaning water bus with a flat roof over an open foredeck that bears an odd resemblance to Humphrey Bogart’s river-boat in
The African Queen.
On this occasion, our vaporetto was met at the landing platform by a uniformed conductor who guided it to the dock with an extravagant waving of arms and excited instructions to the pilot: “Come forward a bit! Now back up! A little more! Closer, closer! Now wind the rope around. That’s right!” The man reminded me of the policemen in Milan who used to direct traffic with a comical ballet of swinging arms and pirouettes. The conductor—tall, thin, about fifty-five—had a look of angelic ebullience and seemed overjoyed to see the passengers arrive.
As we disembarked, he stood at attention and saluted. I heard someone address him as “Capitano Mario.” I was charmed, but all of this struck me as highly unusual, if not bizarre. I had never seen a conductor guide a vaporetto to a landing. Pilots managed it well enough by themselves. Docking a vaporetto was no more complicated than pulling up to a bus stop.
In any case, that afternoon I had no luck getting into the Garden of Eden and came away with nothing more than a tantalizing view of the tops of magnolias, cypresses, and pollarded willows protruding above its twenty-foot walls. When I inquired at one of the wine bars on the quay, I was told the garden now belonged to an Austrian painter named Hundertwasser, who did not live there and who had purposely allowed it to revert to its wild state. However, the garden’s former caretaker invariably came to the bar at predictable hours, and if I returned on Friday afternoon, I might be able to talk to him. When I came back on Friday, I met the ex-caretaker, but he said he was no longer in touch with the owner and that, as far as he knew, nobody had been allowed into the garden for years.
I was on the point of leaving when I noticed a carabiniere standing at the bar having a drink. He was in full uniform—white shirt, blue tie, and dark blue suit with wide, bright red stripes down the sides of the trouser legs. I had been mildly surprised by the sight of the two uniformed carabinieri casually smoking cigarettes while standing guard at the Fenice some days before. But drinking in a bar? Even for the famously nonmilitary Italians, this seemed beyond the pale. That is, until I realized that the carabiniere was the same man who had been the vaporetto conductor earlier in the week.
Looking at him more carefully now, I saw that his shirt was a bit rumpled, his tie soiled and askew, and his suit in need of a few repairs and a good dry cleaning. The scuffed black shoes were, if I was not mistaken, the same ones he had worn as a vaporetto conductor. It was all becoming a little clearer, and a week later it became clearer still, when I was on my way to an appointment on the Giudecca and saw him sitting at a table outside a quayside wine bar. This time he was decked out in naval dress whites and the same black shoes. I was about half an hour early for my appointment, so I took a seat at the table next to him and ordered a beer. When the man turned my way, I nodded and said,
“Buon giorno, Capitano.”
He saluted and then put out his hand. “Capitano Mario Moro!”
“Nice to meet you,” I said. “Wasn’t that you I saw at the vaporetto stop the other day?”
“At Palanca? Yes, it was! Sometimes I’m over at the Redentore stop, or Zitelle.” He gestured with his beer bottle at the location of the other two stops farther down the quay.
“And then again on Friday,” I said, “if I’m not mistaken, I did see you here at the wine bar in a carabiniere uniform, didn’t I?”
He snapped to attention in his chair again and saluted.
“Today,” I said, “I take it you’re a naval man.”
“Yes!” he said. “But tomorrow . . .
tomorrow
. . . !”
“What’s tomorrow?”
He leaned toward me, his eyes wide. “Guardia di Finanza!” The financial police.
“Splendid!” I said. “And what color is that one?”
He drew back, surprised at my ignorance. “Gray, of course,” he said.
“Yes, of course. And where does it go from there? I mean, what others have you got?”
“Very many,” he said. “Many, many.”
“Soldier?”
“But of course!”
“Airman?”
“Yes. That, too.”
“And what about fireman?”
Suddenly he jumped up, turned on his heel, and strutted off, disappearing into a passageway between two buildings. A man sitting at another table had watched the whole exchange.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have been so inquisitive,” I said. “I hope I didn’t offend him.”
“I don’t think you did,” the man said. “Mario doesn’t take offense that easily.”
“What made him leave so quickly?”
The man cast a glance in the direction Mario had gone. “I don’t know,” he said. “Mario’s in his own world. He’s an electrician, you know, and a very good one. He does little jobs for people here on the Giudecca. And if you saw him at work, especially before ten in the morning, before he’s had a beer, you wouldn’t notice much unusual about him—although one time when he came to my house to repair some wiring, he was dressed as a prison guard. He’s been wearing those uniforms as long as I can remember.”
“Where does he get them?”
“People are always giving him things. Sometimes a full uniform, sometimes just parts—like a hat, a jacket, and no trousers. He’s got uniforms from the army, the navy, the marines, the fire brigade, and the Guardia di Finanza, as he just told you. Lately I’ve seen him wearing a bright orange jumpsuit that someone at the gas company must have given him.”
“Not exactly a common hobby,” I ventured.
“No,” the man said, “his head is in the clouds. He’s in a dream state. Just as we all are at times.”
“Only more so.”
“True, but as I said, he’s not the only one. Our waiter here, for example. He dreams of being a soccer star. He’s obsessed by it. He can’t talk about anything else. At home the walls of his room are covered with soccer posters and banners and photographs of his heroes. Once in a while, you’ll see him give the air a sharp kick, as if he’s about to score a goal, and then he’ll pump his fist. If he were Mario, right now he’d be wearing knee socks, shorts, and a regulation jersey. That’s the only difference.”
I glanced inside the restaurant. A television set over the bar was tuned to a soccer game. The waiter looked at it as he passed.
“It’s the same with the families who’ve lived in palaces for generations,” the man went on. “They think it’s still three hundred years ago, when being nobility really meant something. Every artist you see setting up an easel around here—in their heads they see themselves as the next Tintoretto or de Chirico. And believe me, fishermen who float in the lagoon all day do not think only about fish. It’s the same with Mario.”
The man lowered his voice, as if to impart a confidence. “And, like some people, Mario sometimes forgets he’s only dreaming.”
As we were finishing our beers, Mario reappeared at our table with a click of his heels and a crisp salute. He had changed into fireman’s gear—black hat, black boots, and a long black coat emblazoned with eye-catching yellow reflective stripes.
“Bravo, Mario!” said the man at the other table.
Mario spun around to show us the words VIGILI DEL FUOCO, “Firefighters,” spelled out in reflective letters across his back. “When there’s a fire,” he said proudly, “they call me.”
“And you go and help put out the fire?” I asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Tell me, what did you do on the night the Fenice burned? Did you help?”
“I was in Do Mori when I heard about it,” he said, gesturing toward the restaurant. We all came outdoors, and we could see the flames from here.” He swept his outstretched hand along the panorama on the other side of the Giudecca Canal: the littoral of the Zattere, Santa Maria della Salute, the St. Mark’s Bell Tower, and the island of San Giorgio Maggiore.
“The sky was red,” he said. “Burning pieces of wood were flying overhead, all the way from the Fenice. I went home right away and changed into my uniform.”
“And then you went to the Fenice?”
“No. That night my . . . my colleagues were there instead. I had to be here to direct the helicopter.”
Mario reached into a voluminous pocket and pulled out a pair of bright orange plastic earphones. He put them on his head. In one hand he held a megaphone, in the other a pair of binoculars. Then, looking up at the sky above St. Mark’s, he fanned his arms in imitation of a ground-crew technician on the tarmac signaling to an airplane pilot. His motions were so exaggerated that he could just as easily have been taken for a man marooned on a desert island desperately trying to catch the attention of a passing plane.