A Prism, A Sponge, A Mirror

On lost umbrellas, percolating reality and daily life in Venice

It’s a balmy May evening, and from my open windows, I can hear everything.

I hear the seagulls quarrelling and signalling their presence or just menacing anything that gets close to their babies, who, for their part, emit constant, high-pitched peeps until they learn to fly months later. I hear the old front door of our building opening, the clinking of keys as they are shuffled in my neighbour’s hands and turned in the lock, and then I hear that same door shutting noisily, metal and glass vibrating for a few seconds, their frequency reaching my ear and startling me. I hear him practising on the oboe in his living room, scales and bits of a symphony that I struggle to recognise. I hear people’s conversations as they walk past: a dad with his kid talking about football; a plumber calling a client on his way to their house; the lady downstairs talking to the rubbish collectors, one of the few exchanges she’ll have in a day.

I hear Giorgio, the old guy living across the street, on the second floor like I do, coughing and sneezing; and I hear his wife, whose name I don’t know because no one ever pronounces it – surely not Giorgio, who only seems to cough and sneeze – cussing and yelling and sending him to hell for getting on her nerves with his coughing. I’m glad Giorgio is still around: for a time, this past winter, I thought we’d lost him. I saw the nurses taking him away in a wheelchair and an oxygen mask in January and never saw him come back.

“I hope he didn’t die. I don’t hear him anymore,” I said after a month or so.
“That’s because it’s winter, and we all keep our windows shut.”
“I saw his wife drinking spritz at the bar with another old lady the other day. It’s either she’s happy he’s gone, or he’s fine, and we’ll hear him again soon.”

May brought Giorgio back into my reality, and I’m comforted by his presence.

Venice comes with its degree of closeness, physical and otherwise. You are, at alternate times, a screen and a sponge for other people’s looks, words, worries, struggles, and victories. Life stares at you in the eyes and whispers in your ears: you can let it pass right through you, or you can reflect it like a mirror, or absorb it, or become the prism through which some of this life radiates. Sometimes, you are all these things, and you feel infinite and exhausted.

“He never leaves the house, you know? Plus all this verbal abuse…His only pastime seems to be sitting on a chair watching TV series featuring German Shepherd police dogs. Wouldn’t you feel sorry for him?”
“Empathy will kill you.”

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I can hear the rain as it falls, a few times a day now – a phenomenon we seem ill-equipped for, or at least I am. My feet are constantly wet. I don’t seem to own any pair of shoes suited to this monsoon-like twist that climate change is giving to our late springs. People laugh at me for wearing friulane and ignoring the weather forecast. Truth is, my other options are just as inappropriate. Two days ago I also lost my umbrella. Not that they are all that useful in Venice, particularly when navigating narrow calli crammed with people, but still: in this temperamental weather, they help. Now, I’m subject to the elements until I find a new one.

I’ve lost many umbrellas in this lifetime, most of them in banal ways – either forgotten on public transport or under the table of a café. But the story of how this particular umbrella came and went is different.

It entered my life during a long weekend in Paris in which it rained a lot and I was incredibly miserable, the signs of heartbreak already showing in transparency. I had another umbrella with me at the time, which I had bought in London and matched my other travel gear – particularly, a sturdy, pliable Longchamp weekender in a beautiful shade of ochre. I loved that umbrella; it was one of my most-loved possessions. So, when I realised I had forgotten it at the restaurant in the Quartier Latin after our dinner of crêpe bretonne and rosé, I was devastated. We had walked for twenty minutes by the time I noticed, but I asked and argued that we’d go back to see if we’d still find it. I resented myself for being so forgetful, and I resented him for challenging me on my rescuing attempt. We ran. It was starting to rain again. The umbrella wasn’t there.

“I’m sorry,” said the waiter while lifting the last chairs from the floor so he could mop it. “However, this one was left a few days ago, and no one claimed it. I guess you can have it if you want it.” It was a sturdy-looking umbrella, telescope-style like mine, but black, with a foldable canopy that looked and sounded creeping and crow-like. “Let’s take it,” said the person by my side. “We’ll use it while we’re here.” I hated it. I resisted the sight of it and anything it represented. But in the end, we took it.

The following day, the black umbrella protected us as we walked the Champs-Élysées in a downpour that soaked our bones, as we made our way to a neighbourhood restaurant in an awful state of disregard, stray hairs and leaked mascara, and ate snails and chips and profiteroles before going back to the apartment and biting each other’s heads off for no apparent reason. We went home on separate flights. The umbrella came home with me; folded in a corner, forgotten under a pile of totes, it became the silent witness to my painful bewilderment as I watched this person take me apart during one of the driest summers and autumns in recent history.

Until, two days ago, it died a gruesome and absurd death in front of hundreds of puzzled eyes. I was waiting to board my flight and had kept it open until the very last second to protect myself from a classic English rain. I climbed the ladder and entered the aircraft while trying to close and collapse it but it resisted my efforts and just wouldn’t give in. It refused to be tamed. I looked at the flight assistant and, as calmly as I could, said: “I don’t know what to do with it. It won’t close.” He looked at me in exasperation, grabbed it and tried to force it shut, but the umbrella wound’t oblige him, either. The first rows of passengers lifted their eyes and began to follow the unfolding of this strange scene. “Can you come back here and, well, maybe try and break it so we can bin it?” He said, pointing to the area where they’d handle duty-free stuff and refreshments. I followed him and, as soon as I was shielded from people’s stares, I started to snap the stiff junctions of the still-open umbrella, one at a time, and then stomp on top of the uncollapsed handle until I heard it crack. A shiver ran along my back at the sound of metal breaking like a bone. The flight assistant picked up the wrecked object and crammed it into a tall trash bin before jamming it back into the built-in fixtures and going about his tasks.

“I’m very sorry. That has never happened to me.”
“It’s a first for me, too. Anyway, go take your seat, please.”

I sat down and took a deep breadth as the plane began to move with the carcass of my black, crow-like umbrella stuffed in its belly – an object that the ancient Romans, who studied the trajectories of birds to predict the future, would have deemed malevolent at first glance. I looked out the window and softened my gaze over the foam-like clouds, and smiled at the thought of reality being generous in offering a sense of meaning when the time comes.

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“I ask a lot out of reality. I interrogate it incessantly. And still, reality can’t be sought; it can only emerge. I try to ask my questions as I see it emerge all around me,” said the director. She was in town for a special screening of her new documentary and I was interviewing her for a project I had been working on on the female gaze in cinema.

“Would you like a pastry?” She said, pointing at a tray of mixed sweets on the kitchen table.
“Thank you, I’m not really into sweet things.”
“Oh, lucky you. I had three and now I can barely stand up. Is it raining outside?”
“Unfortunately, it is.”
“I hope someone will come in this weather. Will you come to see the movie?”
I hadn’t planned to, I was really aching for some time alone, but I also felt sorry for her, and so I said that I would. The movie lasted for over two hours. At the end, there was a Q&A, but I sneaked out before she could see me.

“I liked the movie very much,” I told her in an email in which I also sent her the first draft of her edited interview. It was true. I also told her that, because the movie talked about her father, it made me think of my relationship with my own ageing father, and how I wished I had more time, and more patience. I wrote that our exchange made me reflect on how I, too, tend to have an inquisitive attitude towards reality. What does it mean? I surprise myself wondering. Reality touches my senses and enters my sphere of consciousness and all I want to know is the meaning of what I’m hearing and seeing and touching. Is there any meaning, any cause and effect, in the water splashing, the light reflecting on the asphalt, or my legs moving?

I noticed in recent times that, when my thoughts can travel at the speed of my walking body as opposed to the speed of an internet connection, some meaning is revealed in a deeper way for the simple fact that better questions are asked. Reality percolates from under the surface of meaninglessness. I can see things more clearly. And notice, again and again, how Venice is a city full of meaning. A place in which reality bubbles up abundantly if you are ready to catch it and drink it. Venice found me when my questions had been going unanswered for months, maybe years, and I was living in a vacuum of meaning – un vuoto di senso, as Ferrante wrote at some point in their Neapolitan novels. Today, when I don’t know what I’m thinking, I just have to show up and start walking and wait for the abundance of reality that’s around me to emerge, sometimes gently, sometimes in violent eruptions.

This past week was full of violent eruptions.

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“How was the ceremony?” my friend asked me after I returned from London.
“I honestly found it terrifying.”
“What, why?”
“An entire cohort of students specialising in –– as in, getting their masters in –– things like asset management and real estate profit.”
“So you got your slice of reality check.”
“All going to feed the lines of the international financial capital villains seconds after they have returned their gowns.”
“And making money themselves.”
“I reject this form of individualism.”
“As if studying classic literature isn’t a bit self-centred.”
“Isn’t the whole point of education to create a community of sentient human beings and citizens?”
“You didn’t get the memo. The whole point of education is to become appetising for the job market, and the carrot that’s dangled in front of us is of a marginal profit share if you play by the rules.”
“Fine. But terrifying.”
“A degree in Renaissance painting is a tad mad, too, don’t you think?”
“Not at all. I applaud their integrity.”
“Yeah, and also, it’d be nice if they’d get a job after they come out of school. I think the most successful ones these days make memes on Instagram.”
“Speaking of which, I went to the National Gallery. There were paintings that are just perfect for that.”
“What else did you do?”
“Had a bit of a moment with my umbrella.”

I told her the story as we drank white wine and ate stamp-sized tramezzini at a book launch about gardens that was meant to be held in the garden of a palazzo but, alas, it was raining. I gave it a slightly comedic spin, which it had, in a way. And as I delivered the punchline, and thought of this ridiculous end, and heard people laugh, I felt the warm balm of catharsis pouring over me as the memories moved from the sidelines of consciousness to the centre, before exiting my body and dissolving into a clearing Venetian sky.

The light was golden and blue and, suddenly, I didn’t want to go home, I wanted to hear more, be a prism and a sponge and a mirror for more. I was, all of a sudden, very hungry.

“Shall we have one last one in Santa Maria Formosa and then call it a night?”
”Yes. One last one. And a polpetta di baccalà.”