Notebook ripped open on Wed-nesday, May the 17th, 2006, at Caffe Florian on the Piazza San Marco, the sun beating down like jungle tom-toms, the light so bright it burns your retinas, the coffee criminally overpriced, the pigeons pooping all over the place, three orchestras trying to upstage each other, everyone photographing everyone else, lines at the Basilica, ancient loot sitting in museums, frescoes fading, the city slowly sinking.
I love Venice because it’s a dream of madmen. Only the truly mad are capable of grandeur. Everyone else knows it can’t be done, so they go home and do something smaller.
Also, there are no cars in Venice, and there are many, many cats. Lions on monuments, walls and gates, symbols of the city; house cats everywhere else. This afternoon at the Accademia there was a cat wailing in protest at being transported by its humans in a carrier. On my way back to the hotel I saw some English ladies cooing over a cat in a shop. It was a big tabby, a brawler by the looks of him. I went inside to take his picture and he put his paws on my knee and began to rearrange my kneecap. “Anacleto!” his human scolded him.
I booked a room at the Albergo Ateneo near La Fenice, the opera house. The room, though tiny, has brocade wallpaper, chandeliers and a gilt headboard. The shower, washstand, bidet and toilet are lined up in the bathroom, which is about two feet wide and 10 feet long. The front desk clerk looks like a composite of all the members of Duran Duran circa 1986. San Marco is two minutes away, across a series of bridges and alleys. The clientele, as observed in the breakfast room this morning, consists of middle-aged French and German couples.
I had planned to spend three nights in Venice, but correctly estimated that my budget couldn’t handle it. So I got a room for two nights, only to find that my flight from Trieste to Rome is earlier than the first train from Venice to Trieste. The last bus to Trieste airport leaves at 22:30, which means I have to be on the 19:40 train to Trieste, which means I have to be on the vaporetto (their boat-bus) by 18:30, and out of the hotel by 18:15. In short, I will have a seven-hour wait at Trieste airport. So much for my brilliant planning.
Venice is always clothed in tourists; I’ve never seen it quiet and uncongested. This morning I went out before 7 a.m. to see the city before it was invaded. San Marco was almost eerie, like the aftermath of a bombardment. The only people out were street cleaners, deliverymen, and a group of Chinese tourists who would probably be up early anywhere. Florian’s bandstand was desolate, every table unoccupied, and only a few pigeons patrolled the square. Unobstructed views of everything. It was possible to imagine that everyone had fled, escaping an invasion, and I was the only one left. Like the man in the Twilight Zone episode who gets trapped in a library after a nuclear holocaust, except that I always bring a spare pair of glasses.
I took the first vaporetto from San Marco, which was empty but for some suits heading for “the mainland” and a woman with a beautiful dog who stared up at her with soulful eyes. On the return trip the vaporetto was packed with people who’d arrived on the early train. I walked from the Rialto back to the hotel, and in 10 minutes I was having breakfast. In Venice maps are useless, so your feet remember the way.
At 21:19 I was in the train station in Trieste. I crossed the street to the bus station and everything was closed. There was an old couple on a bench — in guidebook Italian I asked about the airport bus, and the man said it was through that door. I could buy a ticket from the driver. This is my second time in Trieste, and it feels like an abandoned frontier town. I was joined by some other people, including a guy who looked like a junkie, and a mother and her young son who was carrying a Batman knapsack twice his size. I suddenly remembered how I always used to be the last kid to be picked up from school. By the time my mother arrived, my homework would be done and I’d be reading some library book.
The driver was a beefy man who looked like a heavyset Hugh Laurie. He smilingly counted the handful of coins I paid him with. He sang along to all the pop songs on the radio, and later he ordered the guy who looked like a junkie to get off the bus. All the passengers seemed to know him. There can’t be that many people in Trieste-Gorizia-Monfalcone.
It’s midnight, and seven hours before boarding. I am hanging out in an empty airport in the middle of nowhere, which used to be the port of the Austro-Hungarian empire, then part of Yugoslavia, and is now the tip of Italy. It is not Hong Kong airport, that’s for sure. The snack bar is a vending machine, and there is no Louis Vuitton store.
There was one other passenger camping out at the airport. Indian, I think — he walked up to me and asked if I was Indian, I said no, and we never spoke again. By silent agreement we divided the place in two — he stayed in the arrivals area and I in the departures. I stretched out on a bench in front of the police station, surely the safest spot in the airport, unless the cops themselves had a showdown. I could hear them having a loud, possibly violent argument inside their office. The bench wasn’t too bad and my stuffed toy leopard Guga made a good pillow, but the metal was cold even if I had on three layers of clothes. I must’ve slept 30 minutes in four hours. The rest of the time I read Mary McCarthy’s The Stones of Florence and checked my watch. I wasn’t scared or lonely, though I felt like a homeless person living in a terminal. At 5 a.m. all the lights came on and the staff began to arrive. I checked my suitcase, then I had a coffee and brioche at the bar. The hardest part was not losing consciousness while waiting for the 7:10 flight to Rome. The moment I strapped myself into the seat I was asleep.
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