A Thousand Days in Venice Read Online Free PDF Page A

focaccia; a mocha brownie—it’s all here archived inside your lingerie,” he says tasting the few telltale bits. I laugh until I cry, and he says, “And about those tears. How many times a day do you cry? Will you always be full of
lacrime e bricole
, full of tears and crumbs?” He presses me down into the cool plush of my bed and, when he kisses me, I taste my own tears mixed with the barest traces of ginger.
    â€œWill you always be full of tears and crumbs?” He’s a wise oldman, I think, remembering his question while I watch him sleep. Yes, crumbs are the eternal symbol of my intemperate nibbling, my chest forming a good shelf to collect them. And, too, there’s some constancy about the tears. Quick to cry as I am to smile, who can tell me why? A long-ago something that still rasps inside me. Something in the pith of me. These are not the stinging, weeping, nighttime tears I can still cry from old wounds. “Stand up you who have nothing left of your wounds,” said my friend Misha one evening after a double vodka. After one of his patients shot himself dead with a pearl-handled pistol.
    Much of my crying is for joy and wonder rather than for pain. A trumpet’s wailing, a wind’s warm breath, the chink of a bell on an errant lamb, the smoke from a candle just spent, first light, twilight, firelight. Everyday beauty. I cry for how life intoxicates. And maybe just a little for how swiftly it runs.

    Less than a week passes before I awake one morning with a raging flu. I never get flu. It’s been years since I’ve had even a cold, and so now, exactly now, with this Venetian lying in my rosy silk bed, I am burning with fever, my throat is on fire, and I can’t breathe for the hundred-pound stone on my chest. I’m beginning to cough. I try to remember what I have in the medicine cabinet for comfort, butI know there is only vitamin C and a ten-year-old, oily, unlabeled bottle of Save-the-Baby that I’ve carried about since New York.
    â€œFernando, Fernando,” I croak out from the blistery narrows in my throat. “I think I have a fever.” At this point I do not yet understand that the word, the concept of “fever,” conjures
plague
in the soul of every Italian. I think this phenomenon is a manifestation of medieval memory. Where there is fever, there is sure to be a slow and festering death. He leaps from the bed, repeating “febbre, febbre” and then leaps back into the bed, placing his hands on my forehead and face. He says the word “febbre” at three-second intervals like a mantra. He places his still-hot-from-sleep cheek on my chest and speeds up the mantra. He says my heart is beating very fast and that this is a grave sign. He wants to know the whereabouts of the thermometer, and when I tell him I don’t have one I see, for the first time, Fernando’s face in torment. I ask him if this thermometer-lessness is a deal breaker.
    Not bothering with underwear, he slides on his jeans and pulls a sweater over his head, dressing for a mercy mission. He asks me how to say
termometro
in English, and because its pronounciation is close to the Italian, he can’t differentiate the two. I write it on a Post-it along with “Tylenol and something for flu.” It hurts desperately to laugh, but I laugh anyway. Fernando says hysteria is common in cases like this. He checks his money.
    He has lire and two gold Krugerrands. I tell him the pharmacy takes only dollars, and he throws up his hands, saying how little time there is to waste. He bundles into his jacket, wraps around his muffler, tugs his furry hat into place, and stretches a glove over his left hand, the right-hand one having disappeared into the ether over the Atlantic. Girded for the wars he might face in the forty-degree sunshine during the three-block journey west into Clayton, the Venetian departs. This is to be his very first solo socioeconomic encounter