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.'