all lurking minotaurs: please form an orderly queue

Just look at that column on the left. This blog is collecting some serious archivage. It’s not a travelogue anymore, it’s in a genre crisis, and don’t start with me on the whole narrative structure debacle. I do it, still, because nothing makes me happier. It’s an ariadne thread that keeps me connected to everything that’s happened and everything I’ve been since I walked through a departure gate at age twenty-five with two people’s tears dripping off my chin. In the plane I scrawled a note: ‘Terrible mistake. Don’t want to become the bright, hard person I will need to be.’ Then I took a pill and slept. My memory of arriving at Heathrow is without sound, like my ears were still trapping bubbles of 10 000-feet air. I can’t believe the accumulation of incident between that day and now—but whenever I sit down to write I find the thread still connected: still unspooling out of my hands at this end, still holding fast at the other. And if that isn’t structure, what is?

ern malley says...

...happy Australia Day.

kat vs the hot tin roof

After I got back from Venice I spent three days cleaning my new apartment. Between my viewing the place in December and coming back to it in January, I found that someone had left a used condom on the kitchen counter—it’s a mystery who it was, because I doubt it was my 85-year-old landlord whom I’ve only ever seen shuffling silently in the stairwell in plaid slippers. I guess it was a young relative whom he asked to go in and clean the place, which they evidently had not done. The verb scopare has two meanings in Italian, and when this anonymous person told old babbo that they’d been ‘sweeping’, we know what they meant by that. Anyway, I bought a bottle of lethal bleach and scrubbed every surface until I had RSI in my scrub muscles. I was happy to do it since I was so in love with the place. Then I celebrated by having a friend over for dinner and a DVD.

The next day, as I was walking home with arms full of newly-purchased tupperware, the landlord’s daughter called and said we had to talk, and could she come over that afternoon. I put out chocolate biscuits on a plate and made tea and felt very queen-of-all-she-surveys (it’s an attic flat and the windows point straight up into empty air, which only intensifies that impression). The daughter came over, declined the tea and biscuits, and was very embarrassed to tell me that I would have to leave. Her father had decided that he didn’t want to let his apartment to a single woman who invited strange people over. He lives two floors below, so he had seen the guy coming up the stairs. ‘I really am mortified, I realise it’s untenable. I don’t know what’s possessed him.’ I told her I’d be out by the end of the month.

When she left I cried a lot, shot a double amaro and ate the entire packet of chocolate biscuits. Then I found I felt strangely relieved. After the Rita incident, I was worried that I was turning into one of those losers whom bad things happen to because they have attitude problems they can’t see, but this kind of twisted luck is out of human hands. And if I have to choose between being a loser and a strumpet, I’ll pick strumpet every time.

So I’ve spent a lively month looking at apartments. I started at the bottom of the market, looking at cheap privately-let places, and it was kind of demoralising. ‘It’s freshly painted,’ said one woman. ‘I’ve played around with colour a bit.’ I surveyed the aggressive marigold walls and agreed that she had. We stepped onto the rubbish-strewn terrace and she pointed at a plate-glass door on the other side of it. ‘And conveniently enough, I live right there, so…’ The rest of her sentence is lost to history since it was covered by the tire-screech of my departing trainer soles in the stairwell.

Finally I caved and went to a real estate agent, prepared to pay the extra month’s rent that they take as their cut just to get a bit of sense out of someone. That’s how, three days ago, I met Costantino, The King of Rentals. His office looked like a bordello, complete with zebra rugs and gilt mirrors. He himself was Burberry-clad, corkscrew-haired and tanned as a flapjack.
‘Tell me what you want, babe, I’ve got it all, I’m the King of Rentals. I’ll find you something fantastic, your worries are over.’
‘Fine. My landlord crazy has kicked me out, and I’m wanting for a new apartment. I’ve seen many of little purgatories with mildew where should be the windows, and I want a thing nicer so I am here.’
‘You’re awesome, you know that? I can tell you’re an intelligent chick. I can think of three places right off the bat, right off the top of my head, that you’re going to go nuts for.’
‘And the other thing, I’m poor. I’m looking for a place nice and affordable.’
‘For you, don’t worry. Special price.’ This is the only English he knows, and in the three days of our acquaintance I have heard it several hundred times. ‘I’m going to find you the place of your dreams. I know everybody in this town and… you don’t understand a damn word I’m saying, do you.’
‘Every last one,’ I lied.

We crossed and re-crossed the city centre on foot, in taxis and in Costantino’s leather-interior jag, with me rushing back to lessons or tuna sandwich lunches in between. He kept up the banter with a persistence I found quite awe-inspiring. I had little cause or opportunity to respond, and when I did say something it was in limping Italian, which luckily gave the impression that I didn’t understand much. When landlords showed us around places they’d say things like, ‘For a five-month tenancy she can’t expect plates and cups and stuff,’ and my champion Costantino would say, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure,’ and change the subject, and I’d file the information away for arguing about later.

As it turns out I have found three nice places for the same price, all privately advertised, so I don’t think Costantino will be getting any money out of me. However, a new teacher arrived yesterday who doesn’t speak any Italian and on Saturday I took her around with him, looking at places for herself. She liked a little bedsit that I’d seen with him beforehand. It was the place where the guy was carping about providing plates. He told us beforehand,‘I’ll get you a good deal here. Five hundred plus bills.’
‘You joke, King of Rentals,’ I said. ‘It’s very nice, but it is a box for to put in a pair of Nikes.’
‘Yeah, but it’s centralissimo. That’s a good price.’
While Costantino took a phone call, Gill told me to ask the landlord about the price.
‘Ooh. All new fixtures, central location. Say, six hundred all in? Bills included?’
‘That’s too much. Thanks anyway.’
‘Okay, five hundred all in.’
‘ And plates and cups and saucepots and stuff of this genre within the kitchen, I pray.’
‘Okay, no problem.’
Costantino got off the phone and we told him we’d reached an agreement. As we were walking back to the car I asked him what he was going to take as a commission. ‘For you ladies, obviously, special price.’
‘It’s normally a month’s rent, isn’t it?’
‘Industry standard.’
‘Let’s say about the half of this, then. Finally, we negotiated the price while you is chat with the phone.’
‘You’re forte, you know that, Katrina? You’re wasted as a teacher, you should go into business. Then you could have a car like mine.’
‘I can marry with you, and then I would to have your car.’
‘In a heartbeat.’
‘You lack the breathing when you going up the hills anyway, I notice. I marry you, and I to have the sexy jag, and you to go by feet in healthful fashion.’
‘Forte, forte. It’s a deal.’

I called around to Gill's place on Sunday night. She was temporarily billeted with the nice chocolate-loving signora with whom I spent the month of December. All that was left of her was a ‘thank you’ note, a hundred-euro bill and some yoghurts in the fridge. She had told me on Saturday that she was worried about the salary here and was having second thoughts. Apparently she doesn’t mess around. Um, anyone want a teaching gig in Italy? To start tomorrow, preferably, because I’m covering extra lessons. In the mean time I have to choose one of these three apartments I’ve found, and hope in the face of experience that one of them works out okay. At this point, however, I feel I could stop bullets. I like to think that I’m prepared for the worst. If I find myself living in a cardboard box in a carpark, I’ll still be working on keeping my dignity intact. I am that harridan who blatantly has people over for dinner and negotiates in Italian. Don’t mess with me, that’s all I’m saying.

eel stew and a bottle of tears

Christmas and New Year with the Zamboni family in Venice. I ate and ate: eels in the pot; cream of cod; teeny tiny clams in shells as delicate as fingernails. Marina’s big cookbook written all in Venetian dialect. I sat in the kitchen and read out the titles of recipes to her, just to hear her correct me. I love to hear Venetian spoken. It’s kind of somnolent and twangy, more like Portuguese than Italian, and full of x’s and z’s where you don’t expect them.

The proper topic of conversation at meal times is food. Which dishes call for white pepper and which for black. How bad the pasta used to be during the war. The nagging conundrum of farfalle (I’m not the only one who gets annoyed that either the pleated nub in the middle stays undercooked, or else the crimped edges get soggy and collapse). Between meal times, on the other hand, the conversation at casa Zamboni always tends toward the random, and often ends in the consultation of reference books. I walked into the middle of a brisk argument in the lounge room one day, and the first sentence I heard was, “That’s all very well, but I still maintain that phonemics is essentially banal.”

Venice in winter. Wrapped around in rags of fog. The tiny, straight-backed old ladies in their furs and their stilettos, showing a few inches of vulnerable stockinged ankle in between. The poor futile gondoliers, yodelling out their sales pitches to exactly no-one. The Calder mobile in the Guggenheim—how a few cantilevered wafers of steel swinging in space can be so beautiful, so beautiful, you just want to get on an intertemporal telephone and tell the artist, bless you. The place names that I never get sick of: Peron Hotel? Cross Tit Bridge, head straight down Drunken Tinker Street and take a left at the Devil’s Square. You can’t miss it.

I go to a quarter of Venice that’s known for having very few tourists. I establish myself smugly in a little coffee bar to watch the theatre of Venetian daily life unfold. An Australian comes in and asks for a post box. An American dragging a huge bag of dirty laundry tries to change a twenty euro note into one euro coins and is rebuffed. A humungous French family bundle in, distribute themselves around three tables and order hot chocolates. ‘Excuse me,’ says the mother. ‘Do you have a… ummm…’ She mimes stirring a teaspoon in a cup.
‘A teaspoon,’ the waiter says. Cuchiaino.
‘Yes, cocaine.'
‘Teaspoon.’
‘Cocaine.’
‘Teeeeaspoon.’
‘Cocaaaaaaine.’
‘Whatever you say, lady. Your cocaine.’
‘Tiens,’ the woman turns to her husband. ‘Bit by bit, one improves one’s Italian.’

Realistically, the only locals I'm likely to meet here are Flavio and Sara’s friends. Piero, who speaks in entertaining and utterly impenetrable monologues, and always has a new entrepreneurial scheme on the go: last time I saw him, he had just bought half a pig. The price was irresistable, but having acquired it, he wasn’t sure what to do with it. He was looking at giving it to a prosciutto maker to get it cured, and then sell it in pieces to his friends—but he couldn’t bear to charge his friends what it was really worth, as slabs of prosciutto go, so he wasn’t sure how he was going to make a profit on it in the end. Alessandro, a real estate wunderkind, who’s got a velvet coat and a fine, calm brow and a dramatic ovoid of glossy hair that does the heart good to see. His girlfriend Adriana, with an epic mane of her own, who spent the new year in London trying to enact all her Neapolitan new year rituals on foreign turf. ‘You take a big bottle and you fill it with water. It stands for all the tears you’ve cried in the past year. You throw it out a window and smash it, and that’s all your suffering over and done with. Trouble was, it was all lawn. The English are mad for lawn, aren’t they? Took me ages to find a single rock in that garden, and then…’ She mimes narrow-eyed concentration and lobs an invisible bottle: ‘...Poum!’ That sounds like an encouraging omen, I say. She takes my arm. ‘Katrina, I’ve suffered so much. No more. This year is going to be my year.’

That gave me pause. How much suffering, exactly, is so much? How much will be asked of us? On the phone to a friend halfway around the world, he tells me his city’s been so transformed by vulgar new commercial developments that it doesn’t feel like his home anymore. All his favourite streets and buildings—the places that had been quietly, without fuss, holding his personal history in trust for him—have been disfigured beyond recognition. And I say, isn’t it funny how all the sanctuaries get taken away from us—how we keep losing things that we had assumed were ours to keep. Maybe the point, if there is a point to it, is that we are divested one by one of all our external refuges until we’re left with only ourselves. Not so that we can say, ‘it’s me against the world’: rather, that we turn finally to our internal resources, and from these, we start to make our own world.

It's not inconsiderable, the things human beings can make out of apparently nothing. Take Venice: some centuries ago, a band of exiles, chased off their fertile ancestral lands by war, arrived at the edge of a godforsaken marsh. I can see them standing there, with the mud sucking at their boots and the mosquitoes whining in their ears, gazing across the mirrored surface at a bleak little cluster of seagull beshitten islands, clicking their tongues, and saying, 'Alright. It's got potential.'