Prior to arrival, we spoke...Venice and I. I confessed that much had filled these ears - jovial praise, enchantment, worship. She was an illusionary city, borrowing days from the Adriatic. Quite alluring, I admitted. She quickly flapped a hand in my direction in a vacant attempt to discover modesty. Vacant because her glare told a different story. "Let your eyes judge for themselves, I lean on nothing."
And she remained true to those words...
The morning I rode in, the sky was only clouds. Rain fell on the tinted black windows of the bus, broke like a thousand sad diamonds as we rode from the mainland into the islands of her anatomy.
I walked the streetless city, across its bridges and through its squares. Wandering, forever it seemed...through a labyrinth the likes I had never seen or thought to imagine. All I could think - the gondolas, the birds in San Marco, San Marco, hideous and enchanting Carnivale masks, puppets born of nightmares only my brother could understand - from what dream was this place distantly drawn? I found myself in a state that could not have been pulled without the dreary spectacle of these skies...loafing now, half my senses robbed from the bottle of red I drank two hours prior.
It was after 3 walking hours when I turned a corner to face San Giorgio Maggiore, alone. It sat across the canal from San Marco...and it was in that moment she spoke silent...
The gray of the sky broke to a glow, but only directly over this grand chapel. And it couldn't have been seen, not the way I was seeing it, from any other vantage in Venice. Selective rays began to strobe down, separate the sky into a thousand layers and textures...as if an angel or equivalent reached down, peeled back the stubborn shroud for an audience of one.
I can't say how long it was before a boisterous tour group turned the corner, broke my trance. When I turned back, the drabness stood...as if it were all drawn by a hopeful mind.
No...that wasn't the case. I know.
...
Yesterday, waking to the same rains, I folded. 20 minutes from Venice, I posted up in my room. Read the back half of Runaway Jury, dove fairly deep into Lunar Park. Somewhere between, I slept for an hour. At another juncture, I picked a fight with a front desk attendant who claimed there was NOTHING to eat within any reasonable distance and that the next bus to Venice wasn't coming through until 630. Fuck everyone.
I started walking...the direction opposite of Venice, likely for spite and barely sustained by the single banana I had eaten at 8 that morning. By the time my shoes were soaked, I found a place. It was across from a makeshift yet wholly legit casino in the middle of what looked to be Tuscola, Illinois...farm country. Middle of nowhere. I was looking for something authentic...
When I stepped inside and didn't speak Italian, they looked at me like I had a dick growing from my forehead. Certainly, this was the place. I sat down with a bottle of red and blew it out with perfect spaghetti bolognese followed by a house special speck and pepper pizza they wrapped into a monster cigar and finished with shaved Parmesan and fine herbs. Hands down, the best meal I've had since hitting foreign road. Nothing comes distantly close.
I walked out, drunk. A constant state of self reflection does very little for tolerance, I've found. I walked into the casino and out, proud, before heading home with plans of a good sleep.
When my fragile Australian roommate came home at 1, I was still awake. The entire night, I laid in a half slumber, reciting free verse original novels in my sleep(he roused me twice to inform.) When I did sleep, I dreamed of being pulled into a murky lake by a re-occurring beady eyed corpse. This happened 3 times. I can remember, clearly...as I imagine my roommate did...because each time, I woke up kicking covers, rails, the top bunk, screaming like a lunatic in some distant Italian dialect before collecting myself in the middle of the cramped room with an attempted calming laugh that every time, came out sinister. Feet away, he lay like a rock...likely crying and soaked in his own urine. Clearly, he was reverting back to childhood tactics - don't move, not even a twitch...all the bad men will go away.
Oh, how I wish we were only having fun with fiction.
...
When daylight broke through our window, I got up, packed and left. Roomie didn't stir. He stung me, actually, failing to offer goodbye. And walking away from the cabin, I swore I heard the lock turn a third revolution...
For luck, perhaps.
