several turns of the shadowy wooden staircase to a soundtrack of distant cisterns. In my room there was a radiator which was cold, so that my scarce breath turned into translucent, billowing clouds. I went to bed to keep warm, and read for an hour or so before turning off the lamp and falling asleep.
I woke to voices, disembodied voices in the utter darkness of my room. Clear, jovial voices. I took a moment to realise that they were outside, below my window, three floors down in the alleyway. Two men, Italian. I turned to my alarm clock: twenty to one. From the rhythm of the conversation, I guessed that they were saying their goodbyes, patching the farewells with arrangements to meet again and then swapping suddenly-recalled, last-minute gossip: all the usual. What was unusual was that the voices were undiluted by any sounds of traffic; the silence around them, and beyond them, was stunning.
I was there for four days. I did very little traditional sightseeing, avoiding the interiors of most of the famous buildings and all of the galleries. Instead, I walked: in this city of water, I walked myself into the ground. Frequently, I stopped for coffee in tiny bakeries and bars, where, despite my attempts to conduct the exchange in Italian, the staff would reply in English and smile as if my nationality were a joke between us. As I downed musky little coffees at chrome counters, I watched the proprietors wiping surfaces, washing crockery, conversing dolefully with customers, and wondered whether they had come from elsewhere to try to make their living in this flood-troubled city. Every day, I breakfasted, lunched and dined on bread, cheese and fruit from the Rialto market, and developed the predictable but passionate conviction that this was how I should spend the rest of my life. All day, every day, I wandered, going nowhere in particular but purposefully crisscrossing the many, narrow, smooth canals of jade water.
The first two days I was freezing; the next two days I was too warm because the fog which seeped from the sea into the lagoon had burned away into a clear continental sky. I walked after dark, too, but never late because the locals seemed to be home by ten and most of the tourists were daytrippers. I sensed that no one was afraid of anyone else, that there was no one to be afraid of; but I was afraid of losing my way. Even on the main routes, the lanterns were few and sepia.
So, in the evenings I would venture from the Piazza San Marco along the main, broad waterfront, with the crowds of disembarking, homeward-bound Italians. Passing the Doges’ Palace, I heard the dozens of moored gondolas flapping on wavelets. Twenty minutes further down the esplanade was another world: no one but a few dog-walkers; and perhaps a young couple clinging to each other, theatrically threatening each other with the sheer drop into deeper water. Here, I would turn inland and take a detour down the Via Garibaldi – crowds, again, around market stalls, and in hardware shops – before returning to the open water and walking as far as the parkland that my map named as Giardini Pubblici. The greenery always came as a shock to me in the disused dockland darkness, in the far corner of such a treeless city.
By my second day, sore from so much walking, I was desperate to loosen up with a swim. At the tourist information office I was told that I would have to travel to Mestre, on the mainland, to find an indoor pool.
Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to swim in.
The woman who was advising me, who was dressed and made up like an air stewardess, drew my attention to the map beneath the glass surface of the desk. She tapped three specific areas, announcing with an air of efficiency, ‘One, two, three.’
‘Times?’ I asked, unnecessarily pidgin. ‘Open?’
She shrugged elaborately, and her gaze switched to the person who was behind me. But one of her colleagues stepped towards me. ‘Sports centre?’ she checked.
I shook my head, specified, ‘Swimming pool.’
The tip of a pink-painted fingernail landed on the glass and scratched circles of deliberation before skidding to the far south-west of the island of La Giudecca. ‘Here,’ she said, dubiously, then a little more decisively, ‘yes, here.’
‘There?’ Perilously close to the island marked inceneritore was a small extension of the furthest inhabited island.
Smiling, she reached for a phone and a phone book in which she re-enacted the ritual of the fingernail for some time and with increasing ferocity before she was satisfied. Then, having dialled, she had a brief conversation which sounded like a blazing row before she turned back to me with a slip of paper on which she had scribbled some days and times. Bashing the paper with the busy nail, she explained, ‘Open for the public.’
And so that was why, on my second day in Venice, I went out to Sacca Fisola, home to many of the workers. I travelled on a vaporetto away from the city into the wide Canale della Giudecca, the sludge-coloured water churned by a wind from the sea. When I reached the island and stepped from the wooden platform on to dry land, I bumped into a man who was running with a baby in a pushchair. Behind me, I heard the vaporetto perform a slow, aquatic equivalent of a skid, the ringing of the bollard by the rope lasso, the cheers of the crowd on deck in reply to his breathless thanks.
To cross the island, I took paths across patchy communal lawns and around blocks of flats which were concrete but comfortably low. In the shadows, children played ball, and above them, laundry flared on balconies. Every step of the way, I was scrutinised by cats; dozens of cats, marooned but content. I imagined a life for myself, there. On the far shore was a small, bridged swamp beyond which was a brick building. And that was how I came to spend half an hour swimming lengths in a brand new indoor glass-walled pool on the tip of an ancient, convoluted, and sinking city.
For four days, I never once looked at a painting and there was no one with me to know. Despite my aversion to sightseeing, though, I did read my guidebook from cover to cover, and, occasionally, I was enticed. I went to see the church which had a keel for a roof and loomed from Campo Francesco Morosini like a capsized ship; the work of ship-builders during a slack period. My only serious excursions were to the Basilica. Heeding the guidebook, I returned at various times of day to see the mosaic-encrusted ceilings and walls in differently-angled daylight. Mostly, they were lit by their own gold: that half a square mile of biblical scenes begun in the twelfth century and not completed until the nineteenth. I loved the thin but muscular angels, prophets, disciples and saints of the early scenes, with their cheekbone-sharpened scowls, ramrod spines and strappy sandals. By the fifteenth century, the Virgin Mary had developed jointed fingers and a slouch. The few nineteenth-century mosaics featured crowds of pastel-coloured characters who were swooning, reclining, or lunging with spears. As I paced the intricately patterned and unevenly worn floors, the only women who appeared in the scenes above me were the many Marys and a lone thirteenth-century Salome with a slinky, scarlet, furtrimmed dress, a suggestion of high heels and a pronounced wiggle to her hips.
I was inside another church when I realised what had happened to me. I was trawling the distant, dilapidated Cannaregio, looking through a pane of glass at something tiny and white that my guidebook told me was St Catherine’s foot. That was when I realised: if anyone from home pushed through the door and glanced over, they would almost certainly fail to see me. They would see somebody, an anonymous body, but not me, because I was so unlikely to be there, on my own, peering at a relic in the chilly gloom of an unexceptional church in a work-a-day area of Venice. I was invisible, I had disappeared.
The only traces of my disappeared days are in some of the thousands or millions of photos taken by my fellow tourists. In those photos, there are pieces of me – perhaps a turning shoulder, the toe of a shoe, a swing of my hair – and they are all over the world, making a worldwide splintered mosaic of my disappearance. There was something else that I realised: Venice had become mine, mine alone rather than the place where Philip and I had had our honeymoon. Never once, for me, was Venice missing Philip; never once did I miss him.
Pondering,
