A Thousand Days in Venice Read Online Free Page A

childhood, about when I was young. I think I am the prototype for Everyman. In the films I would be cast as the man who didn’t get the girl.” He is neither sad nor apologetic for his self-image.
    One morning he wants to know, “Can you remember your dreams?”
    â€œYou mean my night dreams?”
    â€œNo. Your daydreams. What you thought you wanted? Who you thought you’d be?” he says.
    â€œOf course I can. I’ve lived many of them. I wanted to have babies. That was my first big one. After they were born, most of my dreams were about them. And when they grew older, I began to dream a little differently. But I really have lived out so many of my dreams. I’m living them now. I remember the ones that went up in smoke. I remember all of them, and I’ve always got new ones rolling around. And you?”
    â€œNo. Not so much. And until now, always less. I grew up thinking that dreaming was a lot like sinning. The discourses of my childhood from priests and teachers, from my father, they were about logic, reason, morality, honor. I wanted to fly airplanes and play the saxophone. I went away to school when I was twelve, and, believe me, living among Jesuits does little to encourage dreaming. When I went home, which wasn’t very often, things were somber there as well. Youth and, especially, adolescence were offensive stages through which almost everyone tried to rush me.”
    He is speaking very quickly, and I keep having to ask him to slow down, to explain this word, that word. I’m still back with the Jesuits and the saxophone while he’s already onto
la mia adolescenza è stata veramente triste e dura
.
    He thinks volume is the solution to my blurred comprehension, and so now he inhales like an aging tenor and his voice swells into thunder. “My father’s wish was that I would be quickly
sistemato
, situated, find a job, find a safe path and stay dutifully on it. Early on I learned to want what he wanted. And with time I accumulated layers and layers of barely transparent bandaging over my eyes, over my dreams.”
    â€œWait,” I plead, flipping pages, trying to find
cerotti
, bandages. “What happened to your eyes? Why were they in bandages?” I want to know.
    â€œNon letteralmente
. Not literally,” he roars. He is impatient. I am a dolt who, after twelve hours of living with an Italian, cannot yet follow the drift of his galloping imagery. He adds a third dimension to bring home his story. He’s on his feet. Pulling his socks up over wrinkled knees, arranging his robe, now he is wrapping a kitchen towel around his eyes, peeking out over its edge. The stranger has combined speed and volume with histrionics. Surely that will do it. He continues. “And with yet more time, the weight of the bandages, their encumbrance, became hardly noticeable. Sometimes I would squint and look out under the gauze to see if I could still catch a glimpse of the old dreams in real light. Sometimes I could see them. Mostly it would be more comfortable to just go back under the bandages. That is, until now,” he says quietly, the show finished.
    Maybe he’s the man who didn’t get the girl unless the girl was Tess of the d’Urbervilles or Anna Karenina. Or, perhaps, Edith Piaf, I think. He’s so deeply sad, I think again. And he always wants to talk about “time.”
    When I ask him why he came racing so quickly across the sea, he tells me he was tired of waiting.
    â€œTired of waiting? You arrived here two days after I came home,” I remind him.
    â€œNo. I mean tired of
waiting
. I understand now about using up my time. Life is this
conto
, account,” said the banker in him. “It’s an unknownquantity of days from which one is permitted to withdraw only one precious one of them at a time. No deposits accepted.” This allegory presents glittering opportunity for more of the stranger’s stage work.