Venice Unbound


Paula, sleek, blonde and breezy, moved through the cold, damp loft each day dressed in shades of grey and black, inevitably broken with a touch of white, usually a crisp shirt. Under her left arm, clutched close to her like a tattered teddy bear, was the usual worn leather portfolio. Over her shoulders was a black wool cape, which she left on as a shield against the wet walls of the decaying, water-lapped building.
       This morning she was late. She had painted until 3 a.m., nonstop from the evening before. The surge of creativity that had driven her on through the night had disintegrated after four hours of fitful sleep into irritation and exhaustion. As she reached her table by the window, she cast dark, opaque eyes on the glassy green canal below and for a moment was hypnotized by the shadows that played across its surface. She blinked several times, then turned toward the vast open loft space and shot a look at the art professore. He glared back at her like a grand inquisitor, hands on hips, head tipped to one side and a look of disgust on his face. He said nothing. He never did. He saved his energy for his own precious art.
       Paula's eyes bulged through heavy lids and dark, puffy bags underneath as she looked with disgust past him at the huge canvas scrawled with the art of all six students in this experimental class.
       "Who the hell thought up a group art project," she muttered under her breath. "Each artist is unique. I'm unique. That pompous ass has his art and yet he dares to push us to produce group art."
       She slammed her portfolio across the table, opened it and lined up her colored pencils. Then she squirted purple and green pigment from tubes onto her palette.

       Pale eyes sunk deep in their bony sockets looked hard through the window of the morning train rolling out of Trieste and beginning the climb through the mountains of Italy toward Venice. As the man's thin lips pulled on a cigarette, his fleshlesscheeks hollowed. Between drags, his breathing was shallow, barely noticeable. The smoke trapped behind the thick glass played "Simon says" with the early morning fog free-floating across the Italian foothills.

       Paula was losing control. The familiar burning had started deep in her skull and spread slowly and miserably until her head crackled, on fire. The only way she could stop it was to paint spontaneously or yell and throw things. She didn't want to do
       that now, but the spreading heat was searing the edges of her brain.
       She smutched her brush into her palette and examined the awful face across the room she had painted in the bottom left corner of the huge communal canvas. Everybody in the class had dabbed on it in one place or another at one time or another during the past two weeks. The face was bony and deep-eyed, and looked no better to her than those graffiti skulls that she and the rest of the Avenue D gang had spray-painted all over the Lower East Side before she had turned serious about art--and before the burning in her head had begun. It was that anger-filled graffiti that had drawn the attention of Marenska, a Soho gallery owner who had encouraged her to switch to the High School of Art and Design on the posh, gallery-lined 57th Street in the heart of New York's Bloomingdale country. It was an alien world at first, but eventually became as comfortable as Alphabet City. There she had excelled in fashion design and illustration. And finally, it was Marenska who had financed this Venice excursion. It was to be an experiment in creativity and socialization backed by Soho galleries to explore the kind of art kids in city gangs who painted graffiti could produce together.
       She glanced across at the skull once again and felt hot with rage. She was lucky she had gotten this chance, but she was also furious at the nature of the project. Nicole, her therapist at the clinic, had warned that the stress might be too much. Well, damnit, everything was either too much or too little. Paula pushed the palette and brush aside, tossed the pencils back into her portfolio, closed it, clutched it to her side and headed back toward the door.
       "Mi scusi, Signorina! Where do you think you are going, young lady?" shouted the professore in an arrogant tone and exactingEnglish grammar, with just a touch of Italian accent. "You have no discipline. Do you not realize that is why you are here--to shape your creativity, to learn to create under adverse circumstances . . ."
       His voice echoed off the stone stairwell and disappeared as she twisted through the alleys of Academia. The burning was still there. Perhaps if she kept walking, the damp air would put out the fire.
       The first time it happened, she was eighteen and she had gone into a rage at a couple who smirked at her and made remarks about the way she was dressed. She had just left her job in a boutique in the West Village where she styled the window mannequins. It was also about that time she had begun painting a new kind of graffiti that freed her from the fire in her brain. Aunt Margot, with her Bette Davis eyes that seemed to be a family trait, popping with anger and perhaps a bit of fear, had dragged her by the arm into the Lower East Side Psychiatric Clinic.
       It had taken them years to come up with a diagnosis of borderline personality and even then the best way they could describe her disorder was that it was a no-man's land between sanity and insanity. More clinically, they defined borderline personality as having psychopathological troubles lying on the frontier between neurosis and psychosis. But what did they really know? Could they feel her feelings? This border, that border--Bullshit! She couldn't trust anybody, only herself. She rubbed the base of her skull.
       Margot Pakulas's face materialized before Paula, like the flick of a slide projector--eyes arched, unblinking, cigarette smoke streaming out of her nose and mouth into the late afternoon Venice mist. That feared and beloved face beamed when pleased and scowled miserably when angry, which was often at someone or something, real or imagined. She could hear her voice echoing in her brain.
       "Paula, go down and get me cigarettes." But when there was no milk or bread, she would tell Paula to get it "later or maybe tomorrow. Your father will be coming, by and by, and he'll be dropping off some groceries and money. If he doesn't get here by the end of the week, we'll use some of our food stamps. But only if we have to. They are few and far between and we have to ration them," she would say like a broken record.
       And the rules--Paula had had it with rules. No more, ever. "I never had a mother to love me and spoil me," she whimpered, "only Aunt Margot shouting orders. My mother is dead, dead!" She cried bitterly every time she thought about the loss of that porcelain-like beauty in the old photo album. And my father, she thought, he'd only show up when it suited him and usually brought along trouble and excuses. So, there was always Margot, the storm trooper, ordering her around. The rules suited her and nobody or nothing else.

       Margot Pakulas sat by the drafty, rain-spattered window and opened her second pack of cigarettes since noon. She felt a tightening in her chest and pulled her sweater close about her. As she lit the first, most pungent one of the pack, and inhaled deeply, she gazed down the four stories to Avenue D. It was strangely quiet. Day and night the neighborhood jumped with activity. But not tonight.
       The orange Coors beer sign in the bar window across the street shone as brightly as ever, but it looked eerie without the crowds of young people streaming in and out, their shouts and the smoke from their cigarettes rising to her window. Her thoughts drifted as she stared at the orange neon--back to Hungary and her escape during the turmoil of the Soviet tanks in the back of a truck with Paula in her arms.
       That girl, her dead sister's only child, was Margot's only reason for living and now Paula had gone back to the Europe that she'd been so eager to take her away from. She missed her, but would never be able to tell her that. She knew if she ever started to tell Paula how she felt about her, it would be like a dam bursting out of control. Paula was not able to handle emotional scenes; and neither was she. She tried never to pry into her activities, fearful that Paula would run away.

       Paula continued snaking through the narrow Venetian alleys in the direction she thought would bring her to Piazza San Marco and the hub of Carnivale. Her mind was still filled with Aunt Margot and her rules--she wouldn't go away. Paula wondered if she even cared at all about her. The only rule about coming in at night as she reached her teens was to be quiet about the house. House! The apartment they lived in was a rat's nest. Margot never ever asked when she'd be back, where she was going, and with whom she'd been. And the rare interest in her schoolwork was limited to fashion design. Margot had lost the tips of her thumb and two fingers while working as a sewing machine operator, the only trade she had developed in Hungary. Now she was on disability and it was hard to make ends meet, to have hope.
       When Paula couldn't stand the misery of their lives together any longer, she'd wander Avenues B, C, and D and pretend she was a reincarnated goddess in prehistoric Europe, wrapped in swirls of silk.
       And when that didn't work, she simply laid waste to everything and everybody in her way. Her most infamous escapade landed her in Bellevue for a fortnight. She had smashed in a coffee shop window on Houston Street and had bloodied (as she intended to) the woman on the other side of the window who had stared at her, shook her head in disgust and aimed her camera at her. She wanted no one pointing a camera lens at her. They might take away a piece of her soul. Besides, the idiot didn't know royalty when she saw it. How dumb. She had been wrapped in silk . . .
       At the hospital there were more shaking heads as the damp red crepe paper was cut from Paula's restrained body. By the time a shrink had been located, Paula was frothing at the mouth and twitching under the restraints. They'd shot her full of Thorazine and her body had revolted at the invasion of the harsh drug.
       Later that night Nicole had come on duty and been assigned to Paula. She let her fantasize, didn't judge her, and in time, gave Paula her first real paints. But Paula still wasn't sure she wanted to look at the anger, depression, and isolation that Nicole said needed to be examined.
       "Hmmm," breathed Paula into the thickening fog with a shiver. "Had she also set up Marenska's interest?" She was so unhappy about the project--knew it was all wrong. Art had been her escape and now they had trapped her and made her paint on the corner of the huge, ugly canvas. The only thing that would come from her brush was a skull-like head, a regression to the level of the gang-graffiti in Alphabet City. There was no freedom in this.

       The hollow-faced man had left the train and was walking with a touch of swagger toward the piazza in front of the stazione. At the edge of the Grand Canal, he boarded a vaporetto and stood atthe stern watching the city disappear behind him. The boat made its round, out to Lido and back, making local stops along the way. He got off near the Ghetto, looked left and right, straight ahead, and then walked slowly, as though absorbing the essence of Venice.

       Paula looked around her. She was confused with her daydreaming. Where in God's name was she? Everything looked familiar, and at the same time foreign. She turned in circles studying her surroundings--five-story tenements draped with clotheslines between windows and lampposts and hanging low with limp shirts and sox.
       Dazed, she followed a stream of tourists piling through the door of a crumbling synagogue and up a narrow, musty staircase. Climbing the stairs behind them, she heard the fat-assed man in front of her snicker, "Hey, look at that gallery up there. That's where the women back home belong. They've pushed a little too far for comfort. Here's where they know their place."
       At the top she found herself under a dark carved ceiling high above her head with the women's gallery circling it. An iron chandelier fitted with white candles hung from its center. She looked over at the man with the big mouth, still billowing platitudes, and seethed, thinking that he was the kind of humanoid who belongs in formaldehyde for posterity to see what a male chauvinist pig of the late twentieth century looked like.
       The fat man's face, still flushed from the climb, broke into a mocking grin. "That's where they belong. We should have more like this back home to keep those loud-mouthed libbers out of the way."
       The burning rushed through Paula's head. "You stupid, fat stud," whispered Paula into his fleshy ear. "Someday you'll reverse your archaic prayer and mourn the day you were born male."
       The grin straightened on his face, and he glared at her with loathing in his eyes.
       She continued, now in a loud voice. "You men are the useless ones in society. All you do is detract from life, destroy it. I wish you'd all drop dead."
       She turned and headed back down the stairs and out to the square. Blinking back tears of anger, hurt, frustration, she muttered obscenities to herself. As she walked the streets of theGhetto, the oldest in Europe, she was at a loss understanding how Jews, the most persecuted of the persecuted, could abuse their own women in the upper room prison of their holy place. There was no logic. There was no logic to oppression. There was no logic to her feelings of repulsion toward men. She didn't trust women either. "I trust only myself," she whispered to the cold water lapping at her feet.

       The late afternoon chill rising from the canal went through her bones. She pulled her black wool cape close about her, and began walking away from the tenements and the synagogue, winding at first along the Grand Canal and then as the wind picked up, into the small alleys. She stopped for a coffee and pastry and to use the toilet. And although hating to ask for directions like an ordinary tourist, she knew she was lost. It was getting dark. She wanted to get to San Marco and the Carnevale, which she envisioned as a festival of living mannequins, painted and draped with supreme imagination. She was grateful for the map the waiter drew on a napkin.
       The swarms of cats that had tagged along with her once she'd left the Ghetto, whining, swishing against her legs and looking up at her with pleading, luminous eyes, had thinned out. She was finally in the thick of shop fronts, many filled with masks. She entered one.

       The man with the mask-like face and cigarette smoldering between his razor-thin lips continued along the canals and bridges of Venice.

       Paula spotted her mask, the face she wanted--bone white with black eyes and lashes, full red lips and a pair of muted green diagonal lines across it from forehead to ear. She placed it against her face and wished she would never have to remove it. The burning in her head eased and was replaced by a pleasant lightheadedness. She walked quickly toward the lights and music. Her cape swung open and flowed behind. San Marco was just ahead.

       The man who needed no mask was approaching San Marco from the west.
       Carnevale was at its peak, Piazza San Marco brimming over with costumes, masks, music, and spirits. Paula and the man approached the frantic street party from opposite sides. When their eyes met, they moved toward each other and arm in arm headed out of the square and into a dim alley the cats had overtaken. Their yellow eyes peered from doorways and their whining rivaled the din of the merrymakers nearby. As she looked back at the dancing wax-like figures, she felt as though she were in slow motion. The music stopped in mid-note and colors paled as though a smoke screen had risen between her and them.
       "Come, this is the short way," said the man.
       "To where?"
       "The gondola!"
       "Oh! So that is why you've come."
       Paula blinked. The conversation was so vague, but she knew she was heading in the right direction. The man rowed the exotic boat smoothly away from the dock. She felt calm as the last flicker of red sank behind the Byzantine city. She was no longer angry with anyone as, under the cover of night, she slipped without a ripple through the last streak of green water.