The Politics of Washing (5 page)

Filled with the gloomy conviction that I have, as it were, arrived a day late for the party, I begin to notice just how many shut-up premises there are in the city. And how many of those that are still open sell one of four commodities: pizza, ice cream, glass or masks. This is when I begin to ask myself what it is, precisely, that I want of this place?

The fact is that I want – crave even – an ‘authentic’ Venice, where ‘real’ Venetians live ‘real’ lives. And what, after all, is that?

In Venice, you often hear a statement prefaced with the words ‘… as a Venetian …’ or ‘… we Venetians …’ Monica wants to move house and tells me about an apartment she has been to see.

‘But you know,’ she shrugs, ‘It was no good. As a Venetian, when I went in, I didn’t feel as though I was in Venice.’

What could this mean? Certainly something very different from what an American, for example, might have in mind when he says: ‘as an American …’

The catch-all prefix connects the individual American to an abstract national ideal, but this is not what my Venetian friend is
expressing. She is using her group identity to express a condition of belonging physically, even aesthetically, to her city. While an American might bear his American-ness before him wherever he goes in the world, like a passport, or a sheriff’s badge, a Venetian’s sense of shared identity is so much linked to the actual place that it evaporates the minute he or she leaves the collection of tiny islands that is home, and sets foot on
terraferma
.

Announcing yourself as American could be seen as an act of
assertion
; it may even be felt as imperialism. But Venice’s imperial days are long gone, and to appeal to Venetian-ness is now the diametric opposite of imperialism: it is a proud and desperate attempt at survival by a people, whose island home is constantly, daily, invaded by millions of strangers with no real investment in the place.

One evening, we join a group of parents and children from the elementary school for a start-of-year pizza in Campo Santa Margherita. The September night is balmy and we parents sit out at tables while our children swarm over the well at its centre, or play football. As we chat, Flavia, one of the mothers, suddenly breaks off in mid-sentence, stands up abruptly and strides across the
campo
. A young tourist is photographing some of our children as they clamber over the antique well and Flavia collars him furiously, telling him that he has no right to take pictures of children without their parents’ permission. He retreats, visibly confused.

‘We’ve become part of the sideshow,’ Flavia storms, as she sits back down at the table.

Venetians are not going down without a fight. This small community is full of groups and committees promoting local events and activities. There are youth groups, community groups, dance companies, theatre companies, choirs, rowing clubs. There are associations working for residents to change policy on housing, transport, the environment.

Events that come from outside are also, of course, part of the real life of the city. The rich influx of the arts is enthusiastically embraced by many of the people who live here; the Biennale exhibitions, visiting speakers, concerts, opera and theatre are all part of the lives of
Venetians. But the difference between Venice and any other city, the reason why there is so much sensitivity and debate about what is and is not Venetian, lies in the uniquely critical problem of numbers. The citizens of Venice are so vastly outnumbered by the visitors to Venice that there is no balanced relationship between the city and the world at large. There is no equal exchange in which the city offers up her history and her beauty in return for the cultural riches brought in from the outside world. Not surprisingly, this leads to a deeply ambivalent, not to say confused, reaction to outsiders.

As a foreign resident, I encounter this ambivalence daily. I am neither one thing nor the other in the eyes of many ‘true’ Venetians and I am as likely to find myself disgracefully overcharged in a bar and treated with casual disdain by the waiter as I am to be treated with charm and courtesy.

I have been learning how to
voga
, or row in the traditional Venetian style, which is to say, standing up like a gondolier. One day, for the first time, I row up the Grand Canal with my friend Jane. She is steering at the back and I am at the front of her old lagoon craft, a Coda di Gamba, or prawn tail. It would be impossible to say how many times we are photographed in the twenty minutes it takes us to get from Ca’ d’Oro to the Salute. Those tens of people clamouring to record their Venetian experience can have no idea that their subjects are an English and Australian woman, navigating their boat, much, it must be said, to the general hilarity of the
gondolieri
, taxi boat drivers, delivery-boat men and other, assorted, ‘real’ Venetians, who call out to us good-humouredly as we make our zig-zaggy path between the palaces.

So what is it we are after when we hunt for the ‘authentic’? The very notion of the real or genuine – the original – is problematic where Venice is concerned; how could there ever have been a truly aboriginal inhabitant in this particular Garden of Eden – an artificial
construction
on water, an historic meeting place between east and west, in a millennial flux of trade and war?

‘Ha!’ snorts Giovanni, the historian, ‘True Venetians? There are
FIVE of them!’

‘Ah yes, dialect …’ Donatella thinks carefully for a moment. Then, eyes lighting up, hand poised. ‘Yes, I know! The best speaker of dialect is Alvise’s brother’s wife’s mother-in-law.’

This is a city where even the locals have to peer hard to find the genuine article and then, the very last of their race, they count them on the fingers of one hand.

And what, after all, is this authentic Venice?

Walking along a back canal on a soft, sunny September morning, heading for a market no tourist will ever see unless they have got really, chronically lost, I pass two men sitting on the
fondamenta
on upturned oil cans.

One of them is large, black-bearded and piratical; the other is small, with a typically wiry Venetian build. They are talking with animation in the thick, consonantal, sometimes nasal Venetian dialect that is so far from the pretty, lilting melodies of Italian. As they bellow amiably at each other, the pirate is sorting deftly through a stream of hundreds of very small crabs scuttling and slipping down a long, metal tray that he has balanced across his knees. The other man is untangling a matted bunch of fishing nets.

How delighted I am to have come upon this scene! How sentimentally gratified! Hungry, as I am, for proof that I have not, after all, arrived in Venice too late to witness and perhaps even participate in its Real Life, these two men seem heaven sent: Real Venetians, doing Real Venetian Things.

Not long after this, I am out with a friend, strolling peaceably among the pines at the outer edge of the city, while her dog pursues invisible sniffing trails through the mangy grass and stops intensely at the foot of trees or lamp posts.

A little way from us, there is a short, fat old woman, with an equally short and fat dog, of uncertain provenance, which proceeds to poo abundantly in the middle of the path. The woman seems not to register the steaming heap her dog has deposited, and waddles on.

‘Signora!’ calls out my friend. ‘Your dog –’ she smiles and points. The old woman turns on us with a look of undiluted contempt, her
pencilled orange eyebrows riding high into her sparse, candy-floss hairline, her scarlet lips pursed with pantomime dame disdain.

‘I,’ she says, ‘live here.’

‘So do I,’ replies my Scottish friend, ‘and I think it’s important that we clean up after our dogs – there are lots of children playing in the park.’

‘I,’ spits the old woman definitively, ‘have lived here for seventy-four years.’

When my sons come home from school they take the
vaporetto
to ferry them across the Grand Canal. One afternoon, they get on a Number Three, the short-lived line introduced for residents only. They show the
marinaio
their season tickets to prove that they live in the city and then stand by the rail and chat together in English for the few minutes of the crossing. This is when an aged woman approaches the
marinaio
and hisses loudly:

‘Those three – they’re not Venetians!’

The
marinaio
shrugs, ‘I’ve seen their passes.’

But mere residency never satisfied the true racist.

Everyone in Venice is, it seems, engaged in the debate about what is authentically Venetian and, given the numbers of visitors, it is hardly surprising that certain sections of the population are no longer able to distinguish between the valuable and the destructive when it comes to newcomers. Older Venetians mourn the passing of the Venice of their youth, where children played out in every
calle
and communities were strong. Yet those three half-Italian boys, rucksacks on their backs, travelling home from school, are not enough for the woman on the
vaporetto
because they were not born Venetians.

At first sight, it seems extraordinary that in one of the most visited metropolises in the world there still exist people who cannot,
will
not, conceive of a community which could encompass both an ‘indigenous’ and an immigrant population. But, of course, it is precisely because Venice is so incessantly tramped over, so repeatedly used for one purpose only – the passing gratification of its visitors – that some ‘real’ Venetians have closed down and switched off.

Has this largely unregulated mono-economy destroyed Venice once and for all – leaving a monument that is indubitably more attractive, but no less dead, than any other burnt-out place, where a few last natives still hobble around, forever uselessly debating who is really Venetian?

Sacca Fisola is a residential area that sits at the end of the large island of the Giudecca. All the cruise ships that go through the city pass by there.

In April, I am sitting on the
vaporetto
heading towards the Sacca and see that somebody has draped a vast banner across the trees growing along the edge of the water. It reads:

This is a protest against the damage caused by the liners that blunder daily up and down the Giudecca Canal. These monstrously large
floating
hotels threaten environmental devastation to the city and to the ecosystem of the Lagoon. They disgorge more than a million people every year, who then flood through Venice for an hour or two, leaving their rubbish, clogging the narrow streets, and bringing little benefit to the local traders, beyond the purchase of a few souvenirs or the odd bottle of water.

The banners could not be better positioned. The pinprick figures lining the decks, listening to the booming guided commentaries, watching the pinnacles of the fabled city passing by, can easily make out the big red letters. But there is one problem: how many of those people can read Italian?

Around the same time, the newspapers publish an extraordinary photograph taken in quite another part of the planet. The picture has been shot from an aeroplane flying low over the Amazon jungle. Below, in a forest clearing, there is a group of naked men, daubed in bright red paint. They are standing among grass huts and are shooting up at the aircraft with bows and arrows. They are, the caption explains,
members of a tribe that has never before had contact with modern society. Desperately trying to ward off these intruders from the sky, their arrows are not even touching the side of the plane.

This is all part of an ancient debate about the Authentic, a conversation as revealing of cultural anxiety – Who am I? Where do I belong? – as it is of cultural breakdown. And, of course, the question of what is or is not authentic will inevitably come to a head at times and in places where the ‘authentic’ status quo seems to be radically threatened. In a climate of political, economic or spiritual uncertainty people crave safety, and what could be safer than the past: a place of origins, of fixed values and predictable outcomes? Arcadia always was a heavenly place.

Globalization and the right to, and possibility of, unlimited access (both of which are central to most tourism) run radically counter to the local, the private, the traditional. It occurs to me that those two fishermen, chatting in the sun on the
fondamenta
, might begin to appear as precious, as rare and as doomed as the Red Men of Amazonia.

Meanwhile, back in the Calle del Vin, new developments are underway. The young Chinese man, who has tried without success to fish in the stream of the passing tourist trade with his Perspex photo frames, has decided on another strategy: he has reinvented the wheel and is filling his shop with pens, reams of paper, files and folders, until it is as stuffed with stationery as ever before and the local students and schoolchildren are beginning to go back there again for their supplies.

Shortly before Christmas, to my great relief, the brown paper on the windows of the haberdasher’s shop at the end of our
calle
comes down and a gorgeous fantasia of haberdashery is revealed: looped swathes of satin ribbons in pink and purple; balls of emerald and sky blue cashmere heaped in pyramids; scatterings of fabric roses, tumbling-forward rolls of shimmering gold velvet. And in the place of the bent old woman, in her fawn knits and slippers, who once fussed and shuffled behind the counter, is a slender and beautiful young woman who might have belonged to another species altogether, except that she sweeps and scrubs the shop’s stone threshold as obsessively as any other Venetian matron before her.

At about the same time, halfway up the
calle
in the other direction, the shy, plain haberdasher’s granddaughter emerges from her chrysalis. The cotton reels and buttons, it is true, have been consigned to history, but the granddaughter has not. Sounds of sawing and drilling begin to come from the boarded shop. Something is up. At last, after several weeks of noisy activity, all is revealed: a poster in the window announces the opening of her new clothes shop. On the first day of the new enterprise, the haberdasher’s granddaughter is wearing tight jeans and vertiginous stilettos; her face is brighter and bigger with
make-up
.. In the shop window, headless female dummies sport plunge-neck tops and gold-trimmed mini-skirts, while their muscular, plasticated male counterparts appear in cap-sleeved tee-shirts with slogans like ‘Hollywood Look’ or ‘James Dean Bikers Academy’ emblazoned across their ample chests.