A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena de Blasi Read Free Book Online Page A

meeting with my partners before lunch. A father and son, the elder is a rancorous old magistrate, the younger, a gentle-hearted philosopher who is restaurateuring to please his magisterial old papa. That it is papa’s choice to never be pleased has yet to impress the son. It’s a brief, cool discourse between us, an almost luscious divorce, and we agree that June 15, the day after our last programmed event and one year, to the day, from when I’d moved into my house, would be my last. I call Fernando. He says to book my ticket even though it is only December 19. It is not yet noon, and I’ve sold my house and drawn up a graceful exit from a piece of my business. All that’s left to do now is the slow braising of fifty baby lamb shanks.

4

Did It Ever Happen to You?
    Before Fernando returned to Venice, we had scribbled a time line of sorts, establishing priorities and settling on definitive dates by which everything would be accomplished. It was he who thought it best to sell the house immediately rather than rent it for a while, to wait and see. Sell the car, too, he had said. And the few pieces of good artwork, the furnishings. I should come to Italy with only those things that were absolutely
indispensabili
. I balked until I remembered the talk I’d already had with myself about “house, fancy car, etc.” Still, I thought him callous, talking as he did about the house as though it were only a pretty container in which I would wait until it was time to go, a nicely decorated launchpad. But, also, I remembered another talk I’d had with myself after knowing Fernando only a few days. He needed to lead.
    I already knew how to lead. For better and for worse, I had always been more than ready to carve away at life whenever the fatesleft me a little room. But he had been a sleepy observer of his life, watching its events and embracing them in a kind of passive obedience. He said that telephoning me that afternoon when we first saw each other in Venice and, more, chasing me back to America were among the first acts of sheer will he’d ever dared to undertake. Fragile, I think. There is a new gossamer-thin self-awareness about him, and Fernando needs desperately to be in charge. So be it. As much as I know how to lead I know how to follow, when I trust someone. But I know, too, that the following sometimes chafes.
    â€œLet’s just begin at the beginning,” said he who’d lived his most of his life in two apartments on an island less than a mile wide and seven miles long, said he who’d gone to work in a bank at age twenty-three when what he really wanted was to fly airplanes and play the saxophone. Yet, unsolicited, his father had secured a post for him and then laid out a new suit and shirt and tie on his bed, new shoes on the floor below it, and told Fernando they’d be waiting for him at the bank at eight the next morning. He went. And he goes there still. It was curious, his telling me to be a beginner when so many things in his life would remain exactly as they were. Or would they?
    And so I had to decide what would go over the sea and what would stay, and the most puzzling things made the short list. A small oval table, black, marble-topped with ornate carved legs; nearly ahundred crystal wineglasses (going to the kingdom of hand-blown glass!); too many books, too few photos, fewer clothes than I thought I would take (the waitresses in the café were presented with a life’s worth of Loehmann’s and Syms’s final markdowns); an old Ralph Lauren quilt; a set of antique sterling flatware (packed and shipped separately for reasons of security and which never arrived in Venice); and pillows, dozens of small, less small, tasseled, corded, ruffled, chintz, silk, tapestry, velvet pillows, like so many pieces of so many places where I’d lived. Small evidences of past lives, I thought. Proof of my well-decorated nests. Were they, perhaps, to cushion my