Yesterday's Weather by Anne Enright Page A

She chased a black-and-white church all the way into the Grand Canal and nearly walked into the water, so convinced she was that the church should be there. When she found it, somewhere quite different, the cool white-and-black marble had been overlaid with baroque gold. When did that happen? she said.
    She had not been happy in Venice. The last time she was here the city had accused her of not being in love; or of being in love in some wrong or wrong-headed way. So here she was with Tim, making amends.
    He insisted on using a map. Elaine said that if he didn’t bother with the map, then they wouldn’t get lost, because it didn’t matter where they went, it was all beautiful and all the same. Or all awful, maybe. After dinner, they ended up walking the periphery in the dark. There was a puzzle of streets to the left of them and, to the right, the open waters of the lagoon with real waves, just like the real sea. They walked a hopeful semicircle until the causeway came into view, then they cut back into the ghetto. They came across a fiesta in a small square, with trestle tables and bunting, accordion music and jugs of wine. The real people of Venice sat and laughed under a home-made banner for the Communist Party. They did not see the tourists pushing their way through the square, in the way that they did not see the pigeons at their feet.
    Elaine lay in the hotel room, which was cheap for Venice, but which had, even so, a slightly tatty chandelier. It also had damp. She read the guidebook. It said that during the time of the Doges the prostitutes had to wear their underwear on the outside. Another guidebook said that they had to wear their clothes inside out. There was a problem of translation here – the prostitutes had to wear their inside clothes on the outside. They had to wear their hearts on their sleeves, they had towear their wombs in a prolapse – not that that would be much use. She thought of wearing her bra outside her T-shirt, just here in the room, as a conversation piece, as a precursor to some vaguely syphilitic Venetian sex. But she just lay there until Tim came back, which he did, with a pistachio-flavoured ice cream to cheer her up. And because it was Venice, she had her period, so his penis was stained with the brown blood of it, marinating half the night, until he suddenly woke and went over to the wash-hand basin on the wall.
    She thought that it was the cuttlefish in its dark ink that had brought it on. Or perhaps it was the canal, running black outside the restaurant door.
    4.
    In Mexico, they booked a beach hut from an old man who had lost the fingers of his right hand. He waved the stubs at them and mimed hauling in nets over the side of a boat.
    ‘Fiss,’ he said. ‘Fiss.’
    They swam all day or hung in hammocks and tried to forget their diarrhoea. The coast road was full of crazy pick-ups with kids hanging off the back, but at dusk the people sank back into the forest and there was nothing left, except for a rare murmuring under the trees. The locals did not seem to shout much, or even speak. When they ate, their plates and spoons made no clatter.
    Zipolite, the next beach up, was full of tourist trash who slept on the sand with their surfboards tied to their wrists; older types too, hippies and junkies who were madder than his great-aunt Louise.
    One of them sat on the sand nearby as they were having dinner. He looked about seventy years old. A beach-bum, afflicted by sores – they were infected mosquito bites, or needle marks, perhaps. He stretched out his legs and looked in horror at the scabs, his face puzzling and straining, as though he expected maggots to crawl out of them. Then he attacked one with his nails, tearing at the skin.
    It put them off their food.
    Tim said he might have come down to dodge the draft.
    They looked at him. History, there on the beach. Elaine said he looked more like a prisoner of war – the last GI, the one who couldn’t go home.
    They paid the bill,