The Glassblower of Murano - Marina Fiorato [10]
I am Alice. These are directions designed by the Cheshire Cat.
Her image of life through the Looking Glass became even stronger, when, as the sun began to set, she decided she really had better try to reach San Marco. But as she attempted to follow the signs, they enticed her farther and farther away, leaving her at last at the white arch of the Rialto.
Nora stopped for a restorative coffee under the bridge. She watched the tourists swarm across, anxious for news like the merchants of old, clutching guidebooks and copies of Shakespeare. She mentally removed herself from these crowds.
I am no tourist. I am here to stay, to live.
Her life was packed up and held in storage crates in the unlovely shipyards of nearby Mestre, waiting on the mainland, paid up for a month - the time she had given herself to get an apartment and a work permit.
She watched the vaporetti chug by, and thought of her father. As a crowded boat stopped at the Rialto fermata she watched a young man in the customary blue overalls leap to the dock, coil the tow rope and pull the boat into its mooring with the ease of long practice.
My father.
The idea was alien to her. The idea of her mother doing anything so free as coming here and falling both in love and pregnant, was also alien to her. She turned her thoughts from her mother. She did not want to acknowledge that she had been there first. She wanted this to be her odyssey. `I'm not my mother,' she said aloud. Instantly, the waiter was at her elbow, with a friendly questioning air. She shook her head, smiling; paid, tipped, and left.
This time, she borrowed her strategy from the Red Queen of the Looking Glass. She went the opposite way from that instructed by the San Marco signs, and soon, sure enough, found herself entering what Napoleon had termed, inadequately, `the finest drawing room in Europe'.
The sun was lowering, the shadows enormous. The Campanile loomed over the square like the giant gnomon of a sundial; the loggias housed elongated arcs of light. Nora gazed aghast at the opulent bronzed domes of the Basilica - such decoration, such grandeur, a trove of treasure looted from the east. Here Rome and Constantinople had mated to bring forth this strange and wondrous humpedbacked beast, an entirely new creature, a dragon of coils and spurs to guard her city. And, in contrast, the exquisite wedding cake of the Doge's Palace, serene and homogenous, iced with a filigree of white stone. Only here would the Orologio, a clock made for giants, where golden beasts of the zodiac roamed across its face instead of numbers, seem fitting and in keeping. Nora felt as if she needed to sit down. Her head was spinning. She opened her guidebook, but the words made no sense - they swam before her eyes, the black and white facts an irrelevance when faced with this technicolour splendour. Besides, she had set herself apart from the tourists at the Rialto and had no wish to return to their number, guidebook glued to hand, eyes flicking from page to monument like an inept newscaster struggling between script and camera.
Why did no one warn me about this?
She had been told for years to come here by friends, art tutors, even by her mother. No one could believe she had never been before, as an artist, as a half-Venetian. But her coffee by the Rialto had given her a moment of clarity. She knew she had not been before because of her mother. Elinor had had the Venetian adventure, and been cruelly hurt. The Serenissima had thrown her back, found her wanting. Nora had not wanted to come here and make comparisons, find echoes of that story, stand in her mother's shoes. She had wanted to make her own discoveries of Italy - Florence, Ravenna, Urbino. All those champions of Venice amongst her friends had told her that it was the one place in the world that lived up to the hype. They had all told her.
But those she charged with her ill-preparedness were the artists, the writers.
Canaletto, why did you not adequately