Free A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena de Blasi Page A

the bishop of Altinum Torcello’s Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta is a bedizened shrine to a Byzantine king. Inside its great cavern, the air feels charged, haunted, holy. A great elongated and shadowy Virgin of Byzantium holding Christ looks out, pitiless, from the conch of the apse. A country church with no parish. I ask a monk in brown robes about the hours when mass is said. He brushes past me and floats beyond a tapestry-draped door, my Italian too rustic to earn his response, perhaps. Outside, I run my hand across the marble throne smoothed by a million hands before mine, since the time when Attila sat there, orchestrating doom among the wind-whipped weeds. I want to sleep out there in that meadow, to rest in its prickly grasses and memories. I want to sleep where the first Venetians slept, sixth-century fugitive fishermen and shepherds in search of peace and freedom. From here, the apartment and its medieval patina seem a small business.
    To return to the Lido to rest and change seems a waste of time, we say, and so we debark from the boat at San Marco. Since I have packed my purse like an overnight bag, the ladies’ room at the Monaco will be my dressing room. More than once have its aqua and peachy chintz comforts provided me succor. As I sit before the mirror, I somehow think of New York, of 488 Madison Avenue and Herman Associates, how I trundled into the city from upstate four days each week to write ad copy and “learn the business.” TheHermans would love that I’ve come across the sea to marry the stranger. They would take credit for having long ago stirred my sense of adventure. After all, it was they who sent me off to present an ad campaign to the government of Haiti just weeks after Baby Doc fled.
    I remember the two men wearing greasy jeans and wide smiles who accompanied me across an airstrip to a graffitied van and drove, wordless and pell-mell, through what were the most sorrowful scenes of human desperation and the most heart-stopping vistas of natural beauty I have ever seen. Later that first evening, I lay in my hotel bed under a canopy of patched mosquito netting, breathing in the thick, sweet air, listening to the drums. Just as in the movies. Except where is that man from Interpol, the one with the silver hair and a white dinner jacket, who should be slipping into my room just about now, enlisting me as accomplice in a night’s treachery?
    I saw no other American or European woman the week I was in Haiti, the other New York agencies having dispatched fresh-faced boys upholstered in dark blue. An officer of the police force was also a member of the tourism committee. Kind enough to rest his automatic weapon on the table, he sat next to me. My hand brushed the leather strap of it each time I picked up a piece of paper. I began my pitch nervously but gained strength, momentum even, and returned to New York with the account.
    Sitting here now, in front of this mirror, I remember racing from the Madison Avenue office most evenings after work to sit for a few moments in front of another mirror, one in the ladies’ room at Bendel’s. A dose of civility before boarding the five-fifty-seven up-line to Poughkeepsie, collecting the children, cooking, supping, homework, baths, the extended tucking-in ceremonies. “Mom, I know exactly who I want to be for Halloween,” Erich would say every night, beginning in July.
    â€œGood night, old man. Good night, little girl.” So long ago. Not so long ago. What am I doing here without them? Why didn’t all this happen fifteen or twenty years ago? Now I wash my face, change my shoes, trade my black linen shirt for a billowy white voile one. I put pearls in my ears. It is eventide in Venice and the sweet stranger loves pearls, so I add a necklace of them. Opium.
    The forever barman at the Monaco is Paolo, dear Paolo, who had stuffed newspaper into my wet boots eight months before, when I’d missed my first rendezvous