A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena de Blasi

an hour and a half late for my table
.
    Fernando interrupts, “And after dinner did you go to San Marco?”
    â€œYes,” I say.
    I come through the Piazzetta dei Leoncini and look, full-face, into the piazza. A long, broad moonlit ballroom it seems, with the brooding domes of the basilica its portal. The walls are grand arches flounced in white canvas; its floor is stone smoothed by rains and lagoon waters and a thousand years of the strolling, dancing, marching feet of fishermen and courtesans, of white-breasted noblewomen, of old doges and hungry children, of conquerors and of kings. There are a few people walking, a few more sit outside at Quadri. It is from Florian that the music comes. The ensemble plays “Weiner Blut,” and two couples of a certain age dance unselfconsciously. I take a table near them and stay there, sipping American coffee, until there is no one left dancing or sitting or playing a violin. I leave lire on the table so as not to disturb the huddle of waiters taking off their ties and lighting one another’s cigarettes. I am unsure of the way back to the horrid little room over the Sottoportego de le Acque, but it is only a few mistaken turns onto silent
calli
before I find Fiorella’s hotel
.
    One day I ride out to Torcello to walk in the long meadow grasses and rest in the seventh-century dimness of Santa Maria dell’Assunta. I sit under the pergola at Osteria al Ponte del Diavolo to eat risotto with hop shoots, served by a waiter with pomaded hair parted in the middle and a salmon-colored silk cravat
.
    â€œWhere we ate on your first weekend here,” says Fernando.
    I see dozens of churches and the sublime paintings that hide in some of them, never setting foot inside the Accademia or the Correr during that firstvisit. My research of the
bacari,
wine bars, is rather intermittent and spontaneous. As I come across one, I stop in and sip Incrocio Manzoni or a tumbler of Malbec or of Recioto, always with some sort of wonderful
cicheti,
appetizers. I like the barely hard-boiled halves of eggs, their yolks orange and soft and ornamented with a sliver of fresh sardine and the tiny fried octopus dressed in oil, thumbnail-sized artichokes in a garlicky bath. I find it easy, really, to avoid the Venice of which I had been so long diffident. She presents a clear choice between stepping into or away from cliché. Her heart’s blood rushes just beneath her artifice. Just like mine, I think. Venice wants only a little pluck as the price of entry onto her sentimental routes
.
    I don’t know how long he’d been sleeping, why I never noticed the quiet clicking of his snore. Anyway, I was happy for the chance to have heard my story. Carefully I walk him to bed, thinking he is gone for the night, but, once there, he props himself up on his elbows, “Will you tell me
everything
tomorrow night?”
    The stranger has less trouble staying awake for our baths. And early on we find our best talking takes place in the tub. For two people so full of mysteries as we are, there is a spiritual intimacy between us that needs no coaxing. As it was from that first evening in Saint Louis, I’m the bath maker. I pour in handfuls of green tea salts and sandalwood oil, too much foaming pine, and a drop or two of musk. I always make the water too hot, and I’m always submerged among the bubbles and steam when Fernando enters thebathroom. He lights the candles. It takes him a full four minutes to adjust to the water as his pale skin blooms crimson.
“Perché mi fai bollire ogni volta?
Why do you wish to boil me each time?” During one bath time the subject is cruelty. I want to tell him more about my first marriage.
    I open with, “I betrayed my first husband. He was a patient man who waited for me to provide a clear-cut reason so he could leave me. He couldn’t just say, I don’t love you, I don’t want this marriage, or you, or these children. He