Free A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena de Blasi

rationale was unembarrassed by sentiment. With the doctor, he said, he would have a better house. That is, Jeffrey married a house. This thought soothes me. All this aside, I miss my French canopied bed. I want to drink a good wine out of a beautiful glass. I want a candle and a bath. I want to sleep. As we set about clearing a space on the bed, he says once again what he’d said way back in Saint Louis. “You see, there are
un pò di cosette da fare qui
, a few little things to do here.”

    A sickle moon shows in through the tiny, high-set window in the bedroom. I focus on it, trying to quiet myself for sleep. I’m still on the airplane or maybe in the car, on the ferryboat. I have moved through each leg of the day’s odyssey at descending speeds. It’s as though, at some point during the journey from there to here, a lapse of sorts has occurred, a short death, during which one era passed the keys onto the next. Rather than being delivered to the
edges
of a new life, I am already inside it, through the looking glass and center stage. Sensations are untethered. I can’t sleep. How could I sleep? Now it’s me lying here in the Venetian’s bed. Fernando sleeps. His breath is warm, constant on my face. Searching for rhythms? Here is a rhythm I think. Very softly I begin to sing. “I can’t stop loving you.” A lullabye. If it’s so that dreams dreamed just before waking are true, what are dreams dreamed just before sleeping? I fall into half-dreams. Half-true?

6

If I Could Give Venice to You for a Single Hour, It Would Be This Hour
    The scents of coffee and a newly shaven stranger awaken me. He is standing over the bed with a tray on which sit a tiny battered coffeepot, steaming, and cups, spoons, and sugar in a sack. The house terrifies me in the morning light, but he is luminous. We decide to work for two hours, that whatever order we can wrest from the rubble by then will be enough for the first day. By eleven we are racing down the stairs. He wants to ride out to Torcello, where we can talk and rest and be alone, he says. “Why Torcello?” I ask.
    â€œNon lo so esattamente
. I don’t know exactly. Perhaps because that crumble of earth is even older than Venice.” He wants us to begin at the beginning. “Today’s my birthday, our birthday, isn’t it?” he wants to know.
    We settle ourselves on the prow of the vaporetto facing into thewind. It’s neither possible nor necessary to speak out there; we squeeze hands. He kisses my eyelids, and, with flapping seagulls for escort, we glide under a Tiepolo sky through abiding lagoons, past abandoned thimblesful of sand, islets that once were market gardens and sheepfolds. We lurch up against the dock at Canale Borgognoni. Torcello is the ancient mother of Venice, in her lonely yellow leaf. Primitive echoes drift. Here there is a whispering up of secrets:
Take my hand and grow young with me; don’t rush, don’t sleep; be a beginner; light the candles; keep the fire; dare to love someone; tell yourself the truth; stay inside the rapture
.
    It is past two and, with roaring appetite, we take a table under the trees at Ponte del Diavolo, the Devil’s Bridge, to eat wood-roasted lamb, arugula dressed with the lamb’s own charry juices, and heft after heft of good bread. We eat soft mountain cheeses scribbled with chestnut honey. We sit for a long time until only we are there to keep company with the old waiter—the same one who I remember had served me
risotto coi bruscandoli
, risotto with hop shoots, when I first came to Torcello years before. He still wears a salmon-colored silk cravat and a middle part in his pomaded hair. I like this. Amid so many changes, I feel sympathy in these unbroken facts. Beatifically, the waiter folds napkins as we, also beatifically, dawdle over black cherries, plucked one by one, from a bowl of icy water.
    Raised up upon direct order from God to