Untruable
by Stephen Capen
My dream activity has reared its lovely head. Dreams on the rise.
No wonder in this ancient city, where often the first hint of any encounter with another is the elongated shadow, the first sign someone's approaching. Silhouettes fleeting past windows, muted voices behind doors, the wail of Italian opera, echoing through the air down this endless maze of walkways. Feline sentries secreted into myriad little nooks catching you off guard as you pass. The voices of children come from around a bend---make the turn and there's no one anywhere in sight.
Listen: the muted cacophany that belongs to Venice alone is the symphony of darkness, the musical score to the dark night of the soul.
An image seized me through and through right in the broad daylight of a busycampo, that of the only beggar I've come across since my arrival three days ago. She fascinated me, this haunting figure, a reminder of the poor who are always with us. And that arrival itself! On my first time ever in Venezia, I transversed a night to set the heart pounding.
Aye, my psyche blowing apart notions of the night.
I had left Zurich late in the afternoon aboard a train southbound toward Italy, winding down steeply through the countryside. A surreal journey ensued, through storybook farms and Alpine villages, that evening. A full moon rose up over the peaks, washing the countryside in moonshine, a still life belonging to many centuries past.
I was, at a very late hour, shaken out of my opiated dream when I became the target of a petty shakedown by immigration men at the border, their stern faces appearing on the edge of my dream like pale moons.
The sudden appearance of a uniformed man startled me. To be forced to gather up a compartmentful of papers, photos, and momentos. To be subjected to small questions of a totally meaningless nature, a runup to some chincy grafting by some mug on the graveyard shift. Even at 2 a.m. (he motioned the engineer to move out when it became apparent I wasn't about to grease his palm--luckily the trainman refused), but by a combination of half-feigned ignorance and stupid tourist questions: "Do I get my passport stamped? Do I? Huh? Passport? Stampa my pasaporta?" His bluff failed, and I was grudgingly allowed through the gate at the last minute to climb aboard the already moving train.
I arrived at Venice at three in the morning.
I was met with a sight which lies restless in my memory: a wall of shuttered windows and doors bolted tight, just inches above the swirling black liquid of the canal. An eerie thoroughfare. The disorienting sight of a pool of dark, churning water as, well, Main Street.
A mere backdrop to the sudden realization that bodies lay all about the station and -- for just a beat -- it seemed natural to assume they were all dead, a stark extension of the graveyard atmosphere in this abandoned, sinking city.
The plaintive wailing of a woman filled the train station.
She seemed to be roaming aimlessly from one body to the next, in hopes of finding a lost comrade, some soul, real or imagined, she cried out for. She held a cloth over her mouth, making it impossible to understand her: someone's name, perhaps. She pleaded again and again, peering into the faces of the forms laying about the plaza.
I walked the streets and bridges that night 'til the sun rose, until human life reappeared.
Several days after my arrival, the beggar appeared again in a piazza, with the frail bearing of a woman in her 70's, dragging her bent frame along with her cane, her left foot turned crookedly inward, a kerchief obscuring her face. I was stricken by this sight, but by the time I regained my grip and summoned the courage to approach her, a compulsion really, she'd already disappeared into the throng. So I continued on, looking high and low for her and chastising myself for lacking the courage to engage her and entice her to be photographed. But it was too late.
At the end of a long day, I was paying the bill in a trattoria when she suddenly reappeared, entering into a harsh exchange with a surly woman behind the counter, in which she referred to a "bambino," holding out a shoebox with coins in it, fielding the refusal and exiting. Again, her foot dragged behind her.
She was as excruciatingly bony as only the aged or starving tend to be, hobbling along on her cane because of the deformed foot. But when finally I caught sight of her face I was dumbstruck, for it was beautiful, far younger than I had thought --- ageless, timeless, smiling eternally, despite the pall cast by the woman behind the counter. Again I was compelled to follow her, engage this tortured image of beauty and pain.
I hurriedly gulped my coffee and stepped outside. Unbelievable. She was nowhere in sight. I looked all around the crowded thoroughfare. She couldn't possibly have disappeared so quickly, I thought. Just as well, then, I thought, and abandoned the chase. As I turned to head back to the Hotel Marin I spotted her crossing the bridge to the Piazalle Roma, pulling herself forward on the railing.
I walked quickly, changing lenses on my camera as I went, keeping one eye on her as she proffered her shoebox to passersby, begging for lire, her silhouette a paradox of angles, a body untruable. I approached her, waiting for her request to open the way for my own. She said something I vaguely understood but knew instinctively to be a request for money.
"Io voglio prendere tua fotografia, Senora. Per percere," I asked in shaky Italian. She held out the shoebox with a look that said she wasn't getting the drift, or was ignoring it. I asked once again and stepped back, pulling my camera up. Her face then dissolved into a smile, shy and self-conscious, as if she might bolt out of confusion over the moment, or the way I was gazing at her, like some angel in rags come to redeem my life, as if she would need to flee unexpectedly, as if she herself were on the run.
At first she remained still, her eyes cast downward, the kerchief hiding her face. As I fumbled to make adjustments for light and speed, her head rose slowly, gracefully, above the shame, above her own set of trials. She had endured stalking the maze of Venetian streets daily on a limp, pressing through the hordes of tourists and the crush of everyday business, as she had on the receiving end of her brush with the surly cafe manager. She peered back at the camera like she was allowing me inside her world, past the walls and the suffering, close to the hidden face.
Shaken, I was able to shoot only a single frame, and all too quickly. Something inside screamed at me to flee, that I should never in all decency have asked for this, and that it wasn't her picture I wanted anyway, it was her story, the telling of her tale for hours, days on end, with her family, in her home.
I reached into my pocket for something to buy my way out, ashamed at having instigated the meeting. I gave her a bill, a thousand lire, but she was insistent, moving close to me, blatantly pulling at my hand. Two thousand more I gave her, but she persisted, pleading, now over my weak refusals, a tear rolling down her gaunt cheeks, grabbing my hand again, at last taking it into hers and clasping it softly, and the realization dawned on me that that's what, that's all she had intended.
And then she raised my hand to her lips and kissed it. Once, twice, uttering something softly unintelligible. Blessings, perhaps. Love from a madonna, blowing me all apart. All good intentions I'd been, now shrunken into cynically throwing money at the angel come to redeem me, causing me to spin around and break free, blurting apologies as I backed into the crowd, dashing off across another bridge, off into the maze.
The symphony played that night, echoing through the maze, over the swirling black water, in the muffled voices around the bend that were always gone when you got there. And there were dreams of a madonna and a bambino, and a man who found his courage and could ease their suffering, bring an end to their misery.
As I looked out toward San Marco, a black cat, two stories below the Hotel Marin on a narrow pathway stopped for a moment, scanned his environs, looked up at me, waiting for my answer.
