On the Train

By some oversight there are still mostly fields between Bologna and Venice, intimately familiar to me after the eight years I spent translating Italian sonnets about farm implements and irrigation troughs by a guy improbably celebrated as the founder of modern Italian poetry. From the train, vast lengths of raked, dry dirt seem to stumble over the long, thin ditches of water. Mostly cypress trees rim the far fields; they look as if they were attacked long ago by a terribly ferocious, single-minded wind.

At the center of one field, a small hill of earth has grown up around the rubble of what may have been a house, bricks cluttering its edges like a suggestion—or memory—of walls. The field is raked and ready for planting, but the hill remains vivid with soft, long grass. I wonder if the farmer who raked the field knows what house the bricks once made. In Bologna last week, I heard an oboist-turned-author speak at a reading on how the objects we make will outlive us; how the wooden chair in the little bookstore where he spoke would be here long after we’re gone; and whether objects feel nostalgia too. Sweet wooden chair, remembering way back when.

Finally, I have become indifferent to nostalgia—that primary emotion of my first forty years for which George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” and Sade’s “Is It a Crime” were like anthems. As I move toward this fifth decade along sidewalks where men don’t look at me, something is happening to my mind and my body—and happening as if both all at once, and in slow motion. That set, female value assigned to me at . . . age eleven? . . . has gone, yet it’s still me in this body, with my same one face. This new decade feels porous, immune to chronology; past and future decades flutter through without ceremony, as unsettled and evanescent as the hot flashes that spread like a loosened root through my face. The wonder of being five has returned alongside the lusty recklessness I felt in my twenties, but these ages mingle with a wilder, almost reptilian form of bewilderment, which pushes up more as promise than memory.

Fields and fields, and between them highways, and parking lots, and tiny old train stations, and the crumbling ruins of castles. And a woman in a white shirt pinning white sheets up to dry, the sun like expected forgiveness. And a pear blossom tree, looking as if it wants to become lace, or the mane of a huge wild animal.

Now the train has left the mainland’s Mestre—the city inhabited by actual Venetians—to cross over water into the glitter and glue of Venice itself—the city inhabited by selfie sticks. Two men in black rubber lean toward the back of a motorboat. Smaller islands made of nothing but mud and rocks scar the water. The idea of Venice—pink arched doorways and coppery green church domes—rises up in front of the train like the picture that it is, track wires and construction cranes be damned.

Venice is irresistible until it turns unbearable. The only Venetians who still live here are gondoliers, and they all seem to have Chinese characters tattooed on one side of their necks. I made that up. In fact, they don’t live here; they take a bus from Mestre, then a train across the water. Then they walk over five or ten bridges to arrive at their boats. Holy shit, says an Australian tourist sitting in the seat behind mine. In her voice the word shit becomes sheet and seems to flop to the ground, drenched in orange juice, or something equally sticky.

Last spring after a reading, Orhan Pamuk spoke about the terms by which we define authenticity. How people see him as a particularly Turkish writer who writes about the authentic Istanbul, and we read him to experience or claim that authenticity. I wish I could remember, now, why he framed this point with his memory of a man digging a well in some smaller Turkish town, while the man’s son dug beside him. Were they digging for water? Pamuk was musing on the question of origin. He meant to question who is most from a place, of a place, and on our impulse to prove it. And—I think—he was suggesting that this quest to lay claim or to prove authenticity lives at the root of our mutation into globalism.

It’s also possible he didn’t suggest this. He definitely didn’t use the word “mutation.” He may not have mentioned a well. Oh, mind, where are you taking me? The word perimenopause sounds like an elaborate dance, performed by many couples wearing many ruffles.

The island of Venice might be more fascinating now for its globalism than for its floating stone palaces. Over the next three days, I’ll see a tiny makeshift library built by a British ceramicist to house translated books by exiled authors between porcelain replications of a bilingual sixteenth-century Talmud. I’ll listen to whale calls in a defunct cathedral which an American performance artist has filled with images of algae, Emily Dickinson poems, and her own shadow dancing with an octopus. In the famous Café Florian off Saint Mark’s Square, I’ll watch five carefully pretty women in hijabs drink afternoon tea. In the square itself, a Chinese man will fly the Chinese flag above his head while his middle-aged friends take pictures. Parents from Sweden, Germany, Korea, the United States, Scotland, England, Saudi Arabia, and Russia will take pictures of their children against a background of Byzantine domes. The French, as far as I can tell, will take no pictures of anyone, but instead seem to look at each other with genuine interest over restaurant tables while ordering adventurously. Italian tour guides will tell groups of old Americans and Germans not to get lost and that, interestingly, for a city on water, Venice is particularly vulnerable to fires. A large family from India will pose in front of the bell tower where one night four hundred years ago, Galileo tested his telescope. And where one dawn fifteen years ago, the local racist political party (since risen to full power in all of Italy) climbed up to announce, via loudspeaker, that they were taking over the city. Then the lovely Venetian mayor convinced them to come down.

On my third and last night in Venice, I’ll eat at a restaurant whose name translates as “The Antique Cellar,” which opened—the sign promises—in 1878, in this very spot on this very canal. The French, German, English, and Italian vacationers around me will pay precipitous amounts for typical Venetian dishes with typical Venetian wines, and afterward the owner of the restaurant will offer me a glass of something as he prepares my bill. He’s from a little town outside Cairo, he will tell me, and he came to Venice sixteen years ago, and he bought the restaurant six years ago, and he has taken a course in wine selection. He has a ten-year-old and a three-year-old, whom he speaks to in Arabic, but they won’t learn to write it because it’s too difficult. After the glass of amaro, we will walk a short distance to what seems the very end of the island, absent of light. Dark, wild water will bang against the stone shore—surprising after the intense containment of Venice. The restaurant owner’s sadness and hope will both feel ancient, though we are probably contemporaries, arriving together into the untether of middle age. As if from a script men have been told to memorize, he will say he wants to kiss me, and I will be struck by the incongruence of his words against the huge darkness of the water. With the water’s bluntness I will say I don’t want to kiss him, to which he will reply that my eyes say something other than my mouth. As he speaks, I will think about the moveable feast of authenticity, and how language only embeds itself in what we are willing to hear. My anger at his words, at how many times I have heard them, will feel vast, imprecise, and as dark as the water’s darkness. There’s no desire for you in my eyes, I will say. He will share that his wife has lost interest in having sex with him. Everyone is more different than they are similar, he will tell me, when I ask if she, like me, is filled with rage at men.

Now these three days are past, and I’m back on the train, returning south from Venice toward Bologna, to the home that friends offered me for the month of June. Next stop Ferrara, which is where my seat mate Alessandro, who boarded two stops earlier in Padova, will get off, going home to his amorosa (I can’t translate: the adjective amorous as a noun). She works five minutes from their house, which is why they moved to Ferrara in the first place, though Alessandro says everyone in Ferrara and Padova are cold and zombie-like. He wants to return home to Naples, where people are exuberant. Esuberante. Now the train is passing a perfectly whole castle on top of a cliff, carved from the rock on which it sits. Miles of fields have tripped into this massive and sudden cliff, too steep for any road beyond slim paths that, centuries ago, donkeys might have tracked. The castle is a long, infinitely windowed block, so integral to the stone from which it was hewn as to be almost invisible. I like thinking about the cool in the castle’s empty rooms: no facsimiles of furniture or fake catapults, nor ropes around the doors. It’s clear, Alessandro agrees, that now it must be unreachable.