But there weren’t three. The smallest palm wasn’t there. Perhaps they’d been lying to me all along and, in fact, there had only been enough money for two — though my father still swears there were three: he says he has a precise memory of it and wouldn’t lie about something like that. Granted. If, then, it wasn’t a lie, and I assigned some kind of symbolic value to the fact that my palm was no longer there, I knew I should be worried about my future. If my palm tree hadn’t taken root, I would never put down roots in Mexico City — that vast asphalt relingo left over or simply missing from the country.
Enea Lombardi (1902–1943)
During the years between that trivial crisis and my first night in Venice, I believed in the kitsch notion that literature could be like a great house, a territory without frontiers that offers shelter to those of us who don’t know how to inhabit any particular place — those of us who prefer to live “Anywhere out of the World,” as Baudelaire called that poem in which he writes that “This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds.” It’s a mystery to me what inner mechanisms make us capable of convincing ourselves that certain metaphors — which some people use lightly, just to illustrate their point or decorate their poems — are applicable to our own lives. Nothing was further from the truth, in my life at least, than the metaphor of literature as a habitable place or permanent dwelling. At best, the books I read were much like certain hotel rooms into which we enter, exhausted, at midnight and from which we are expelled at midday — or vice versa, as had happened to me on this occasion in Venice.
The thought of dying on a bench reading Brodsky was romantic. But books don’t give us a mattress to sleep on, a shower with hot water, or relief from real pain. After thinking things over a little, I decided to phone the only person I knew on the island.
Roberta Mazzini (1842–1899)
Amerigo and I hadn’t seen each other for many years. But you’re welcome to stay with me, he said, just walk toward the fish’s tail, ask for Calle Vecchia, and you’ll be here before you know it. Have you got a map? Yes, I said, and as soon as I’d hung up I began to sleepwalk my way between the suffocating walls of the city, with no idea of where I was going. For a while, I simply followed an elderly English couple, my personal Virgils, who were complaining bitterly because someone had drawn graffiti on one of those walls.
I got lost — again. I had to call Amerigo — again — from another public telephone. If you don’t come and fetch me this instant, I said, I’m going to die — I’m outside the Hotel Escandinavia. I must have sounded very bad, because in a few minutes — Arrivo subito — Amerigo appeared from an alley.
As we began walking toward his house, I asked him about the possibility of seeing a doctor immediately. You’re still a hypochondriac, Luiselli, you don’t look all that ill. He explained that private physicians in Venice were for wealthy tourists and cost a fortune, so the next day we’d put my Italian passport to good use and register me as a resident of the Commune of Venice. Then, we’d organize a medical card and — finally — I could visit Dottor Stefano, his general practitioner on the southeast tip of the island (the fish’s tail). I tried to explain that those things took months, and insisted the pain was unbearable and I was at death’s door. But he replied with a “Never lose hope, Luiselli,” and said this in such a thoroughly Venetian, operatic tone, that I was forced into silence.
The next day I went to the civil registry office with Amerigo. There was no queue and in ten minutes I was given a tax code. Then, we visited an office where we were declared to be living in legal cohabitation — coppia di fatto, they say — so that I could be assigned a postal address. There was no one in that office either, except for three female bureaucrats reading the newspaper. The one who attended us congratulated us on our newly acquired status as a couple and, after stamping two or three forms, said to me: Adesso, sei veneziana. I was still digesting the fact that the kind signora had just told me I was now a Venetian when we arrived at the Ministry of Health, where it took two minutes to get me a medical card. So, in a matter of a couple of hours, I became a part of the Italian tax system, got myself a husband, an address in Venice, and a doctor. And not only that, but I was able to witness an invisible city, probably in danger of extinction: the empty, damp, silent Venice of government offices. If there’s still a Venice worth seeing, it’s in those bureaucratic paradises. Sometime in the late afternoon, I sank into the arms of Dottor Stefano, who cured me with a little yellow pill.
Valeria Luiselli (1983–)
There are writers who invent cities and take possession of entire eras, wielding their pens with the sword-edge of genius: the London of Johnson and Chesterton, the Paris of Rousseau or Baudelaire, Joyce’s Dublin. There are others who, by force of reading, solitude, and tranquil hours, conquer literary territories, philosophical paradigms, impossible spaces: Montaigne’s tower, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s cell, Chateaubriand’s tomb. Others construct stories like extraordinary palaces or desert islands that they then inhabit, like one more character in the warp and weft of their own plot — perhaps Sebald, Bolaño, Pitol, and Vila-Matas are of that ilk. There are a few who, with the patience of a gardener, cultivate the art of the aphorism throughout a whole life and watch it bloom — late, perhaps, but fully — beneath their feet: such is the case of Wittgenstein and an Italo-Argentinian whose name I can never remember. And there are yet others who, dedicated to the arduous task of clearing the weeds from their own language, end up putting down roots in apparently desert plains, which are, in fact, rich in poetic humus: the sun-beaten piles of broken images T. S. Eliot describes in his London Wasteland.
I, who have rather fruitlessly attempted some of those things, now have the joy of being an official resident of one of the most literary of cities, though neither through the blessing of a graceful pen nor the fidelity of the muses. And, worse still, not even through the sweat of my brow and fist, but because of a terrible — although very frequent, hence, unglamorous — ailment of the bladder: the ignoble bacterial cystitis. But in fact, it comforts me to think that if I die before my time, at least I’ll have taken up false permanent residence in the Most Serene Republic of Venice, and will thus be able to fulfil my wish to be buried in some relingo, perhaps not far from Joseph Brodsky, in the commoners’ section of the cemetery of San Michele.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
CHRISTINA MACSWEENEY has an MA in literary translation from the University of East Anglia and specializes in Latin American fiction. Her translations have previously appeared in a variety of online sites and literary magazines. She has also translated Valeria Luiselli’s novel, Faces in the Crowd.