Britical

 
        Venice, ITALY

Blame the dwarf. Nic Roeg’s elusive but eventually deadly present red dwarf, the sinister emblem of his gorgeous film, ‘Don’t Look Now’. Years ago that film made me fall in love with Venice. I’m sure I’m not the only one. And that’s the problem here. It is irksome, embarassing even, to arrive in this shimmering place and know that any and everything I could possibly think or say about it has already been thunk or said - and by people both stupider and a lot, lot cleverer than me.( ‘Death in Venice’, anyone?)

It is famously impossible to get away from being a tourist here. Even in winter. Even if you’re Italian. Because unless you’re properly Venetian you’re painfully aware of being the pesky foreigner that you suspect you are. And in many places you are treated as such: a bit of a nuisance and rather to be put up with. But it’s beautiful in Venice and so you let it get to you only a little.

The first night we arrived, I thought of how movies can set you up for certain cities, and how so very few are actually able to deliver on these promises. It was late, the canal traffic quiet, and so we crept, unsure of our geography here, out of the hotel and crossed the Grand Canal over the Accademia bridge. On the other side, as the dark little street opened out into a square, we heard music coming from inside the church - strings, probably Vivaldi (inescapable in Venice). This was serendipitous enough, but from inside came a woman’s tinkling laugh. Yes, I said “tinkling” because there is no other word to describe the little melodious shriek of laughter that it was. It “tinkled” musically as you would expect it to do in a book or a film. And hearing this we stopped dead in the street, looking at each other in disbelief. It was all too absurdly perfect to be true. Even for a film it would seem cliched. We laughed. It had the whiff of having been laid on, like something out of Fantasy island.

The place also makes me think of my childhood, reading Enid Blyton, or C.S. Lewis or any number of books where children descend or climb into some magical fairyland. I was always envious of these fictional children and their intriguing little worlds. I spent many an afternoon knocking at the flimsy walls of our pre-fab house looking for secret passages, even dreaming one night that I was able to crawl through the central heating outlet to a new land. But here they all are in Venice. Who knew? as they say back in New York.

Venice is a maze and so I have the urge to run with my friend as fast as we can, barrelling through the empty streets giggling like madpeople. We’d see where at last we finished up. Through passages and tunnels, we’d run, only to arrive at dead ends - narrow alleys ending in tiny courtyards full of fat, disconsolate looking pigeons or streets full of water. And every time we’d be astonished all over again.

Tonight, our last night here, we walked back through the quiet, smoky streets. Somewhere, there must be a fire. (”Dove incendere?” I asked this morning in my dodgy Italian as the haze lingered, but no one seemed to know, nodding and shrugging their shoulders.) Somewhere, perhaps, someone’s life was going up in flames, all their precious photos in cinders. I tried not to think about this. We continued along one of the canals, across from us a filmic-ly ruined looking palazzo garden, all statues and bedraggled trees. Turning a corner, another alley lit here and there from windows still lit by Christmas fairylights, and other places the glow of a candle placed in an alcove high up in a wall, dead flowers stuffed by someone (someone very tall!) into the grille.

We were close to the hotel now, back past the Chiesa San Vidal, and approaching the bridge, when suddenly we caught the smell of lilies, and mixing with the smoke, the air was suddenly, not unpleasantly, reminiscent of a church or crematory. Then it was gone, vanished. How strange; fairlyland again. Everything was hushed, the only sounds the occasional boat motor and the odd sound of voices from who knows where and how far away.

Every night here was some version of this and they all added up to remind me of something or somewhere else but I could not quite place what. It took me until this last night to realise what it was (a small epiphany on The Epiphany): It’s New York. (Another city which lives up to its Hollywood image, I moved there after seeing Woody Allen’s ‘Manhattan’.) But New York in a snowstorm. The rare stopping of traffic, the snatches of conversation, the speakers unseen but the sound clear from even a block away, and the muffled scrunching of snowy footfalls - everything both clear and not, quiet, indistinct, changed. Then both cities, islands after all, feel like worlds unto themselves. It is easy to imagine them just floating absentmindedly away into space - the inhabitants of New York newly careful not to go too fast lest they fall, not into a canal, but off the very edge of the world.

 

 

Copyright Britical 2007