Venice triptych
Boarding the vaporetto, a sharply dressed man gives the rolling suitcase a savage kick, then another. Dick, from beneath his yellow plastic poncho, mumbles the American. La Serenissima, the color of rainwater, whose only citizen is the brown labrador retriever resting calmly on the boat steps. The rest of us, tourist and resident, belong to the same bitter district, and must shuffle our feet to the same slow roll of the boat.
2
The mirrors set out on the table are not for seeing yourself but for studying the ceiling. To look up, we peer down into glass at Old Testament transmutations: bones made flesh, sick made well, water and food from rock and sky—auspicious tales for Tintoretto’s plague-ravaged city. The stories are divine but the focus here is human form and gesture, each painting’s fable wheeling around an arm or foot or head. We put away the mirrors and walk along the walls, which are covered in New Testament scenes to resound with the Old ones. At the gift shop, I buy a postcard of The Last Supper to send to my mom, finding its chessboard floor and cramped perspective more interesting than the usual who's who, but I never get around to mailing it. Later, she tells me that we’ve been there before, that she had taken us to see the Tintorettos when we were young. I have no memory of it at all. The transmission, it turns out, was mine to receive, having already, long ago, been sent.
3
Ciao! from the second floor, ciao! Where minutes earlier an orange butterfly had alighted on the wall, an old woman appears, beaming and waving from the window. Ciao! she calls down to a huddle of tourists as they float past on a gondola. They wave back warily right before they pass out of sight. A rowdy table of four Italians responds instead: Ciao, signora! Ciao! The streetcorner goes raucous with greeting and laughter and the barmen start rearranging tables, waiting for me to leave. My departure stalls in the late afternoon light like the butterfly on the wall, which is painted white and umber and stencilled with black lettering, set with deep green shutters, most serene... Ciao! Ciao! Ciao! Everyone is practically singing. The word becomes a memory of wallpaint, a window through which my impression of the day passes through the day itself. Ciao! We all fall silent. The signora has disappeared, and so have I.
ben tapeworm