Serenissima

I'm back in Venice enjoying the last days of no-permanent-address-ness before I start a summer job in Paris. Two great luxuries of travel are leaving a place, and coming back to a place. You never know how you're going to feel when you come to a new town, but leaving one always has the thrill of a decadent act, like smashing a plate just to hear the sound it makes--all those museums still unseen, views still unphotographed, and you flit off, unconcerned.

Backtracking is a more dangerous pleasure--a luxury, because it is a rejection of the novel--Bad tourist! You've seen this piazza before! But it is hazardous if you loved the place the first time you saw it, because a shift in the light or a rude encounter might make you love it less the second time around. Venice, I had to see twice. It took two visits for me to realise that the happiness I feel here is not just a response to the miraculous beauty--it's the happiness of feeling at home. I know, it's bizarre. It's like strolling into the Emerald City and shopping around for a bedsit and a Casa Mia doormat. Now I have this idea, what will I do with it?

Actually I just came back for a weekend break from the job junt, which wasn't going so great. I threw myself on the mercy of the Zambonis, just hoping for a few kind words and a place on the sofa bed. Their kindness is too big to be contained in words and a change of sheets, though, so they set about calling every language school and university in northern Italy to find me a job. Within a day, the offer came through from Macgregor in Paris--a room in his apartment, and a job at his language school--but I can't help thinking it was the efforts of the Zambonis that generated my luck. Good will is electric.

I'm having trouble with this post, but everything will change again when I fly to Paris tonight, so I'll tell you what I can.

venice
Names. Way of the Hundred Stars. Street of the Dead. The Broad Road of Proverbs. Bridge of the Beautiful Women. There are tiny squares in Venice with names so long you can't even say them in the time it takes to cross from side to side.

Gondoliers between jobs kick a football around a sun-baked piazza. People carry bottles to a marble well and fill them with the good, cold water from deep underground.

Men selling knock-off handbags spread out their wares on bedsheets in the street. A scout yells from the top of a bridge, and they bundle up their stuff, a dozen Louis Vuittons looped over each arm, and scatter. The police arrive a minute later.

A vaporetto glides along a brimming canal in the evening, its passengers reading newspapers or staring blankly out the window, looking like tired people on a bus anywhere.

Ravel's Bolero rings through the backstreets, sounding unlike any man-made music, as if it's emerging from the marble itself. I turn a corner and find three men playing on crystal glasses filled to different levels, and on panpipes made of the glass tubes of fluorescent lights. I have to clap my hands over my mouth to keep from shouting with laughter, and the solemn, big nosed pipe player makes eyes at me.

lagoon
I take a vaporetto out across the lagoon to see the islands. I pass an island full of cypresses, walled all around with apricot brick--the cemetery. Boys set their dinghies against the swell and gun the outboards, sending the prows shooting into the air. A lobster-coloured man driving a freight boat takes his hands off the wheel to yawn and stretch lazily, as if he were in his loungeroom. A yacht sails by, reminding me of Flavio, in his nautical striped tee-shirt, correcting his navigational charts. I love those strange, inverted maps. The land is an undifferentiated yellow, and the sea is a mass of lines and figures indicating depth, markings for buoys and coral reefs and no-fishing zones. The first time I saw one, I had the uncomfortable sensation of seeing Australia, the place which has contained most of my life, as an inconveniently large blob of stuff you can't sail through.

On the island of Murano, water taxi drivers play cards under a tree. The glass-blowers in their workshops stare balefully at the tourists behind the railing, or work on unconcerned, turning out vases and lampshades, flicking their spent cigarettes into the furnace. On Burano, kids fish from the path that runs around the island's edge, and a man in singlet and thongs dabs ineffectually at his boat with a stiff old paintbrush dipped in Yves Klein blue. All the buildings on the island are painted in gelato colours--mirtillo, pistachio, fragola, limone. It should be tooth-achingly naff, but I love it with the unreasonable affection I have for everything in Venice. Burano has its own leaning tower, a bell tower with a spire on top. It looks like someone has stuck a pencil into all that gelato, and it's started to tilt as the stuff melts in the sun. The tower's bells still ring, you can hear them all around the island, you can hear them across the lagoon from the vaporetto that's taking you home.