Eat, Pray, Love

The whole town is peeling and fading like those suites of rooms that once-rich families will
barricade away in the backs of their mansions when it gets too expensive to keep the main-
tenance up and it’s easier to just nail the doors shut and forget about the dying treasures on
the other side—this is Venice. Greasy streams of Adriatic backwash nudge up against the
long-suffering foundations of these buildings, testing the endurance of this fourteenth-century
science fair experiment—Hey, what if we built a city that sits in water all the time?
Venice is spooky under its grainy November skies. The city creaks and sways like a fish-
ing pier. Despite Linda’s initial confidence that we can govern this town, we get lost every day,
and most especially at night, taking wrong turns toward dark corners that dead-end danger-
ously and directly into canal water. One foggy night, we pass an old building that seems to ac-
tually be groaning in pain. “Not to worry,” chirps Linda. “That’s just Satan’s hungry maw.” I
teach her my favorite Italian word—attraversiamo (“let’s cross over”)—and we backtrack
nervously out of there.
The beautiful young Venetian woman who owns the restaurant near where we are staying
is miserable with her fate. She hates Venice. She swears that everyone who lives in Venice
regards it as a tomb. She’d fallen in love once with a Sardinian artist, who’d promised her an-
other world of light and sun, but had left her, instead, with three children and no choice but to
return to Venice and run the family restaurant. She is my age but looks even older than I do,
and I can’t imagine the kind of man who could do that to a woman so attractive. (“He was
powerful,” she says, “and I died of love in his shadow.”) Venice is conservative. The woman
has had some affairs here, maybe even with some married men, but it always ends in sorrow.
The neighbors talk about her. People stop speaking when she walks into the room. Her moth-
er begs her to wear a wedding ring just for appearances—saying, Darling, this is not Rome,
where you can live as scandalously as you like. Every morning when Linda and I come for
breakfast and ask our sorrowful young/old Venetian proprietress about the weather report for
the day, she cocks the fingers of her right hand like a gun, puts it to her temple, and says,
“More rain.”
Yet I don’t get depressed here. I can cope with, and even somehow enjoy, the sinking
melancholy of Venice, just for a few days. Somewhere in me I am able to recognize that this
is not my melancholy; this is the city’s own indigenous melancholy, and I am healthy enough
these days to be able to feel the difference between me and it. This is a sign, I cannot help
but think, of healing, of the coagulation of my self. There were a few years there, lost in bor-
derless despair, when I used to experience all the world’s sadness as my own. Everything
sad leaked through me and left damp traces behind.
Anyhow, it’s hard to be depressed with Linda babbling beside me, trying to get me to buy
a giant purple fur hat, and asking of the lousy dinner we ate one night, “Are these called Mrs.