Venice diary, entry 5 of 5
Venice, a last morning, mid-August.
The heat was already in the stones by eight, and I left the room with the shutters half-open behind me, the way you do when you mean to come back and also know you won’t, not for a long time. My case was packed. The train was at noon. That gave me the morning, and I decided to spend it getting to the far side of the Grand Canal the way the Venetians do, not over the Rialto Bridge with everyone else, but on the traghetto.
You find them if you know to look: a wooden pole, a scrap of a sign, a gondola that isn’t dressed up for anyone. The one at Santa Sofia was loading when I came down the calle, and the gondolier lifted his chin at me as if to say, coming or not? So I hurried the last few steps, took his hand, and stepped down into the boat while it shifted beneath me. It always shifts more than you expect. I caught the shoulder of the woman beside me and apologized. She laughed and said something about the tide, and then we were pushing off.
You cross standing. That’s the thing nobody tells you the first time. There are no seats. You brace your feet, keep your knees loose and trust the man with the oar. A schoolboy near the bow had it down cold, hands in his pockets, riding the wobble as if it were nothing. I found my balance on the second lurch and let the linen of my dress stop sticking to me in the little wind the crossing made.
Halfway over, the light did what it does on that water in the morning, and my hand went to the camera on its strap before I’d thought about it. But you cannot work a camera and stay upright in a moving gondola, not without a hand for each, and the woman beside me was still there to be knocked into. I let it hang. Some mornings the picture is just yours. We slid past a delivery barge stacked with crates of melon, the boatman singing to no one in particular, and I decided the barge was the better photograph anyway. I never took that one either.
The Pescaria came up quickly, all market sheds and the smell of fish and ice and the cut ends of herbs. I paid my coins, took the gondolier’s hand again on the way up onto the fondamenta, and went looking for the fruit seller I’d bought from twice already that week. His stall was down. A square of cardboard was taped to the shutter: chiuso per ferie. Gone for the holiday, like half the city in August, off somewhere cooler while the rest of us sweated in the calli.
So I bought from the woman two stalls along instead, a paper bag of the small flat peaches that only seem to exist here in summer, and ate one at the edge of the market with the juice going everywhere and the vaporetti grinding past. She’d slipped an extra into the bag. Per il viaggio, she said when I told her I was leaving. For the journey. I put that one away for the train.
I walked back over the bridge after all, because now I had time and peaches to finish, and because from the top of the Rialto you can see both banks at once, the whole bright, working reach of the Grand Canal going about its Tuesday. The traghetto was crossing again below me, full of strangers standing and trusting the man with the oar.
I watched until it reached the other side.
Then I went to find my case.
The peach for the journey held until Padua.
This is the last of five entries from my August week in Venice. The full practical guide lives in Victoria’s complete guide to Venice.
