Uno.

When I was thirteen, we studied the Merchant of Venice in Lit class.  My group was to do a presentation on Venice; it wasn’t a high percentage, so the others largely slacked off – but I stayed up at night flicking through images, repeating the names to myself: carnevale, ponte dei sospiri, serenissima.  The presentation involved me playing a tour guide called Viviana Enrichetta Nicia Isabella Carmelita Enrico, wearing a cheap purple cloak and a huge costume brooch I’d nicked out of my mother’s old jewel box and introducing, in a terrible Italian accent, the sights of Venice to my bewildered class by powerpoint.  It was, like everything I did at the age of thirteen, extremely self-indulgent.  But I knew even then that Venice was sinking; that one day it would no longer be there, and the gods forbid that that day would come before I ever lay eyes on it.

Due.

The first time I lay eyes on Venice, it is grey.  I am suffering from a sore throat, fever, gastroenteritis, deafness in my right ear, and the extreme injustice of having had to pay for a bus ticket to Padova.  I did not and will never go to Padova.  I know nothing about Padova, except that it, like the cake, is a lie.

This is, of course, a terrible start to any sort of holiday.  I should be absolutely miserable, were I not in Venice – Venice, the floating city of my dreams, though it be grey and drizzling slightly – and with a less stoic travelling companion.  This is Bryan, who comes from the same KL junior college as Ying and who I feel is holding up extremely well for somebody who has gone thirty hours without sleep and then had to do a lot of running with a girl he met just this morning at 5am on the Stansted Express platform.  In the course of half a day, we have chased after nearly every major mode of transport.  We have chased buses, trains, and planes.  We have chased vaporetti and the Venetian Island Ferry.  We would probably have had to chase a gondola, were gondolas fast enough to be chased and cheap enough that we could afford one had we caught it.  And then when we finally sat down to catch our breath, we discovered Venetian cover charge and its general inescapability. 

Right now, Bryan and I are wandering the Palazzo Ducale.  It is huge, massively ornate and somewhat wasted on us.  In my fevered state, I am latching on to random things that leap out at me from the ducal blur: the missing arm of the statue on the ceiling, the hypnotic black curls of the wrought-iron lamp in the corridor, the bright rose of a sundress worn by a dark girl in the Council Room.  Her boyfriend has his arm around her and is trying to pull her into the next room; she is resisting, she wants to read the signage over the mantlepiece.  Bryan is saying something about castles, Lichenstein and a mad king.  I hear myself laughing, and I think I can hear the fever in my laugh. 

Somehow we end up in the New Prisons.  I cannot remember if we have crossed the Bridge of Sighs, which is really the only reason why I came into the Palazzo.  The prisons are endless, rows and rows of dark, repetitive cells.  Bryan sits down on a stone urn and instantly falls asleep.  I stumble around taking pictures of the iron lamps and trying to aim pills at my mouth, until he almost topples off the urn and wakes with a start. 

Tre.

“I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry!” Ying is saying.  She is a vision in a new straw cloche trimmed with a navy ribbon, a fresh white blouse and camel shorts.  Bryan and I squint up at her in the fierce Venetian sunset.  My own legs are burning, and I find myself wishing I had thought of shorts. 

We are hustled over more bridges and finally locate the other Malaysians, to whom I am introduced in a haze: Jiawei, who I’ve met before; Fiona, Marcus, Samson.  They are joyous and laissez-faire and they want to walk back to the Piazzale le Roma, on the other end of the island.  Bryan looks at them, aghast, but I think I could survive the walk if only I was fed.

That evening I eat my first Italian vongole.  It is good – all pasta in Venice, as a rule, is good – but not magical.  Perhaps I am too sleepy.  We walk through streets and streets and streets, and then there is a bus which doesn’t leave for ages.  The heat in the bus is intolerable.  The boys get open a window and take turns climbing up to feel the breeze.  I close my eyes and count in Italian, uno due tre quattro.  I count to tredici and then I start again because I can’t remember the Italian for fourteen, uno due tre quattro until the bus finally begins to move and there is a great shout of joy from all the passengers.

Quattro.

Sometime in the night, I am woken by Ying balanced precariously above me, brandishing a plastic bag and inching towards something on the wall beside me.  “What are you doing?” I ask sleepily.

“I’m catching a bug,” explains Ying, brow furrowed with concentration.

Jiawei shouts something about a tarantula.  I decide I really cannot deal with the thought of a tarantula with me in the room right now, so I shut my eyes again.  Ignorance is bliss.

Ying pounces.  “Got it!” she crows.

“Saviour,” I murmur. “Tell me about it in the morning – ” and then I am asleep again.

Cinque.

In the glass factories of Murano, we watch an old man shape a tiny, perfect horse from hot glass.  The glass of Murano fascinates me.  We walk through shelves and shelves of it, perfect orange spirals within clear glass spheres, perfect long-stemmed goblets the colour of cloudy jade, perfect candelabra hung with a thousand perfect glass droplets.  I daren’t breathe; I feel the slightest breath might shatter something.  Bryan, who doesn’t quite feel the same way, is tossing a glass apple worth a hundred euros from hand to hand.  I suppose one is allowed to do that, when one is a ultimate frisbee national champion.  I get him to hold a glass pear for me while I consider buying it for my sister.  My sister hates pears, because the Tenth Doctor did.  I believe it would be funny, but a hundred euros is expensive humour.

In a scrap box I find a pair of round red glass earrings.  Like everything in this shop they are perfect; they are in the scrap box, and still they are thirty euros.  “Oh god,” I moan, “I want these so, so bad.”

“Then get them,” says Bryan nonchalantly, inspecting an array of paperweights.  “These are really heavy,” he says reprovingly to the salesman.

“Of course,” says the salesman, with impeccable Italian inscrutability.  “They are paperweights.”

“Ah,” says Bryan, and begins to toss them absent-mindedly.  The salesman watches him in horror.

“Screw this,” I conclude, and close my fist over the earrings.  “I’m never coming back.”

Seis.

The island of Burano is famous for two things – its lace, and its colourful houses.  The former is extremely expensive, so we indulge in staring at the latter, which at least is blissfully free.

In defiance of my cough, I am eating a pink grapefruit gelato cone.  Gelato is quite possibly the only cheap thing in Italy, land of exorbitant extortion.  We eat it for breakfast, for tea, for supper.  Ying confesses that she goes up to four cones a day.

“That house,” I say, pointing my cone at a faded blue house that looks like it has been stonewashed.  “That’s a denim house.  I like it best.”

Bryan agrees that it is a denim house, and obligingly slows up so I can snap pictures of it.  We then realise with a start that the ferry is leaving, and gulp down our cones so we can race to the pier.

Sei.

A lot of waiting happens in Venice.  Sometimes I think the city itself is founded on waiting; it curls in on itself, maze-like, and keeps travellers suspended in its coils.  You walk and you walk and you get lost, and the maps cease to tell you anything, and then you stop going somewhere and wait for somewhere to come to you.  In the meantime, Venice goes on being Venice and charms you into forgetting you’re waiting for things which will never happen.

Bryan and I are waiting, a la Didi and Gogo, in a square called San Polo.  We have been here for about forty-five minutes.  The others are somewhere between San Polo and the ferrovia; either they are hopelessly lost, or they have forgotten us.  We do not know which is worse.

San Polo is wide and dusty, fenced in by the ancient and beautiful sunwashed buildings that line all the squares of Venice.  There is a water pump in the middle of the square, frequented by small children who run to and from it watering their swelling rubber toys.  I am applying sunblock slowly and carefully, trying to make the bottle last.  Bryan is feeding pigeons with the remnants of a mysterious pastry he bought on Torcello, which proved remarkably unappetising.  This tends to be a rule with Venetian pastry, we will later find.

“They’re going to recognise your face,” I inform Bryan, as the pigeons cluster around his feet.  “They will know you for a sap and follow you forever and they will never leave you alone again.”

“I don’t care,” says Bryan.  “This is giving me great utility.”

A skinny man in a baseball cap wanders up.  “Scusi, questa è la Piazza San Marco?”

We stare up at him.  “No,” I say eventually, “San Polo.”

“Oh.”  The man is crestfallen.  He asks something else, which is beyond me.  “Parla inglese lei?” I try.

“Si, si!” He wants to know where San Marco is.  “That way,” I point.  “In that direction.  Very far.”  We show him our map.  This is depressing for him.  He gets Bryan to take a photograph of him sunk in anguish to his knees in the middle of the square.  I watch in amusement and apply more sunblock. 

“Follow the signs,” I tell him helpfully as he tries to reorient himself.  “There are lots of signs, they all point to San Marco.”  I want to add that it’s pretty idiotproof, but since they had all managed to elude him I feel this might not be too tactful.

“We’re pretty awesome,” concludes Bryan, watching the fellow in question blunder off towards the Rialto.  “We just told an Italian how to find San Marco.”

I do not answer, because I am suddenly rushed by a flurry of pigeons, going after the last crumb of mysterious Venetian pastry in the paper bag next to me.  It is Bryan’s turn to be amused.  “I told you so,” I say in despair.

Sette.

“This is the mask of my dreams,” says Ying.

The shop smells of sandalwood and the air is faintly glittery.  The mask in question is on the floor; Ying picks it up reverently and holds it in front of her face for me to see.  It is a faerie mask, powder blue with a high gauzy headdress that arcs away from the forehead like a butterfly’s wing.  It fits her like a second face, like she was a fairy princess stolen to the land of mortals at birth and has only now realised her crown.  This is mask magic.  The shop is heady with the scent of it, sandalwood and plaster and glitter in fresh glue.

“It is also a hundred and forty-six euros,” says Ying sadly, setting it down.  “And my parents will kill me.”

We drift out of the shop and into another one, further down the street and of a lower price range.  There are mask shops in Venice like there are pubs in London, or zichar stalls in Singapore.  “Are you not going to buy a mask?” inquires Ying. 

“Maybe,” I say.  In all honesty, masks do not suit me.  Perhaps it is the skeptical twist at the corner of my mouth below the glittery border.  Ying has the sort of face that looks good in a mask – maybe it’s her features, maybe her bone structure, maybe simply the delight with which she tries them on, like a seven-year-old who’s been given proof that the fairies in her garden are real.  Put a skipping rope in her hand and roses in her hair and she could be Dali’s Alice, the eternal girl-child of Wonderland.

In the new shop, Ying quickly grows enamoured of a mask with a certain flame-shaped cut, but she cannot decide between the red and the orange.  She implores me, the shop assistant, her own reflection for help in the decision.  The assistant favours the orange.  I tell her I prefer the red, which is clearly the more spectacular-looking one – but it is true that there is something about the orange mask.  It is a creamy sort of orange, vaguely peach; also it is the first orange mask we have seen.

“I can’t decide!” wails Ying.  “Should I just buy two?”

“No,” I say.  “Bad idea.”

“I will give you a discount for two,” offers the assistant immediately.  “Thirty-four euros.”

“Don’t encourage her,” I retort.

An unholy light has entered into Ying’s eyes.  “You could buy the other one.”

“Oh,” I say.  “Oh dear.”

“Please, Oli, please.“

“Don’t call me Oli,” I say instinctively.

“I’ll never call you Oli again if you buy the other one!”

“Well – ” I say hesitantly.  “If I were to buy a mask, I’d buy the green one.”

The green of this mask is a splendid emerald green.  It is the green I used to love when I was a little girl, when I first learned my birthstone was the emerald and told everybody who cared to listen.

Ying turns to the assistant.  “Discount for three?”

“Fifty-six,” says the assistant.

“But you gave us seventeen on the other one!” coaxes Ying, “can you not go down to sixteen?”

“Fifty-four.”

“Forty-eight.”

“Fifty-two.  I cannot go any lower!”

“Forty-eight!”

“Fifty.”

“DONE,” declares Ying, and shakes on it.

“Wait,” I say dazedly, “what?”

The shop assistant begins wrapping the three masks.  “I thought the point was that you couldn’t decide between the two,” I venture faintly.

“Yes,” says Ying, “so I am buying both.  One’s a winter mask and the other’s a summer mask.  Also I didn’t go to any museums so technically I’m just redirecting the money I would have spent on tickets.”

“Oh my god,” I say in despair.  I thought Claire was a vicious enabler.  However, I am relatively capable of keeping Claire in check.  Not only had I failed to disenable Ying, she had enabled me.

“Don’t worry,” says Ying happily.  “Next year for our twenty-first birthdays, we can have a masquerade.  I will insist.”

We run into the others as we leave the shop.  “Did you buy the mask in the end?” demands Jiawei.

“I bought two!” cries Ying.  “And I made her buy one too!”

“Er,” I say haphazardly.

Bryan stares at us fatalistically.  “Nice one.”

Otto.

It is true what they say about Italian men.  I swear, I have never been hit on so often in my life.  And I walk through King’s Cross at one in the morning on a regular basis.  It is not so bad while I am travelling with the Malaysians, but once they leave me for Milan, I realise I cannot move five feet without having a pass made at me.  Waiters ask me out for drinks in between taking my plate and bringing my check.  Gondoliers whistle as I crossed the pier and offer ‘free rides’.  A trash collector stops his cart in the middle of the street, calls me ‘bellissima’ and wants to know how long I am in Venice for.  Simultaneously flattered and disturbed, I put it down to cultural reflex and in response invent Quentin.  Quentin is a useful mythology. 

Waiter #1: Here is your check, singaporiana.  Also, maybe you will wait for me afterwards, there is a firework show on at San Marco and maybe we can go together?
Me: Er, no, sorry, I have to go back to the hotel.  My boyfriend Quentin has gastric flu and I should check on him.
Waiter #1: Ah, pity. San Marco is very nice tonight.  (leaves)
Me: (puts down money)
Waiter #2: (comes to collect bill) Grazie, signorina.  By the way, I have an extra bottle of wine, would you like to join me with the -
Me: No thank you, sorry.  Quentin -
Waiter #2: Ah yes, the boyfriend.  Capisce, prego.
Me: (pained smile)

The aforementioned hotel where I am staying with the inexistent and permanently stricken Quentin is the Ai Due Leoncini, which is in the sestiere right at the edge of the island.  It has a beautiful little courtyard and old, creaking fans.  I share a bathroom with four other residents I never see; the bathroom is not as clean as I would like, but I have OCD so I suppose it is clean enough by average human standards.  In any case it is a nice sort of bathroom, black and white - though with a shower that drains like the sewers of Venice. 

The walls are very thin.  At night I can hear the people living in the house behind the hotel talking, almost as if they are in the room with me.  This would annoy me very much if they did not have the most beautiful voices in the world.  I know enough Italian to parse that they are discussing Johnny Depp’s filmography; the woman laughs, and she has a laugh like a movie star.  Her voice is rich and low and the words come out lilting and rolling like sweet dark honey, I listen in the dark and I repeat what she says to myself, putting in all the lilts, all the curls of the tongue, and suddenly I realise that more than anything else in the world I want to learn Italian.

Nove.

There are no photos allowed on the island cemetery of San Michele.  I understand the rule is made out of respect to the families of the dead, but I want so, so badly to take at least one picture because it is the most beautiful cemetery I have ever been in, recinta after recinta of bright, dusty flowers on ancient graves, fading quietly in the white Italian heat.

I walk slowly down the avenues between grave plots, counting footfalls, reading names.  Great stone crosses.  Veiled women in pale marble, reaching out from wall niches.  Towering war memorials.  Tiny fountains.  Photographs of old men and women, of families, of girls who died when they were seventeen.  Dearly Beloved.  Death be not proud.   Pots of plastic roses. The dark silence of cypresses.

It is so hot.  I take out my Japanese teal parasol.  The old people tottering amidst the grave with their walking sticks and watering cans eye me suspiciously – I cannot possibly have any relatives here, me with my youth and my Asian skin.  I am a tourist looking at their dead.  A little dizzy from the heat and their hostility, I sit down on a bench in the shade of the cypresses.

An old man walks past, mysteriously immaculate in his white Sunday suit.  He points at my parasol and says something – presumably that it is a good parasol.  I smile and rack my brains for how to explain it is Japanese.  He doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Italian.  We both point at the sun and agree through some fervent nodding and throwing around of caldo and sole that it is very hot today.  He bids me good day and strolls on.

I take myself off to search for the famous graves.  I find Diaghilev’s, which is hung with pairs of fraying ballet shoes, and the Stravinsky graves.  Igor Stravinsky has more flowers and offerings, but somebody has arranged little pebbles in the shape of a heart on Vera’s headstone. 

I cannot find the grave of Ezra Pound, which I really wanted to see.  I search all through the Protestant graveyard, peering at crumbling headstones, tripping apologetically over grave markers to get a closer glimpse at the fading names on each.  No luck.  I sit on the steps of one of the locked family crypts and drink some water.  I’m not sure what I would do at the grave of Ezra Pound, if I found it.  I suppose I would tell my tutor, who specialised in Pound when he was my age and doing Moderns II.  We were talking about the Cantos and I said I liked them very much, and also the Garden and the Balcony, and he said: “Pound is brilliant.  Also, a Fascist.”  And then I start thinking about that Regina Spektor song, Ezra Pound sat upon my bed, asked me which books as of late I’d read, asked me if I’d read his own, and whether I could spare a pound of flesh to cover his bare bones?

“Well, Ezra,” I say out loud, “I’ve been here ages, looking, and I suppose it wasn’t meant to be.”  Talking out loud in a cemetery is strange; talking out loud to yourself doubly so.  It is not like talking to yourself anywhere else in the world, because the dead are listening. 

I leave the recinta, turning at the exit to look back at the rows and rows of silent tombstones with love carved into them, every letter, every scrape of the chisel.  For love is strong as death, and jealousy as cruel as the grave.

Dieci.

When I told Lisian that I was going to Venice, she had only one response: “GO TO THE GUGGENHEIM.”  And so I have obediently walked across the island to Accademia and located the Palazzo Venier along the canal.  The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is in a pretty white mansion at the tip of Accademia, it has a hedge strung with neon letters and a pair of white marble intestines and a wishing tree, and as I walk through the rhinestone-studded wire gate into the sculpture garden I know already that I will love this place.

My relationship with modern art is an uneasy one; see, for instance, my violent reaction to the Saatchi Gallery.  But there are some pieces of modern art that will reach out and unhook something in me and then I find myself loving them so, so hard without even knowing why – because it is modern art, and the rule of modern art is that it is inexplicable.   I love the disturbing Woman With Her Throat Cut and Magritte’s Empire of Light and the Dali Birth of Liquid, but my favourite is the Yves Tanguy The Sun In Its Jewel Case.  Maybe just because of the title, which is maybe the prettiest thing I’ve heard all week.

In the garden there is a trick box of glass and mirrors; you walk around it, and sometimes when you expect to see yourself you look right through the box, and sometimes when you expect to see the other side, your self appears instead.  I walk around and around the box, enjoying how surprised I look each time I am ambushed by my face, and then I hang a wish on the wishing tree and go out to sit on Peggy Guggenheim’s pier, sharing it with American tourists and great red Modernist plastic slices.

Undici.

The best thing to do in Venice, as anyone who has been will tell you, is to get lost.  It is not the Piazza San Marco or the Rialto or the gondolas, it is walking through the tiny streets that exist on no map and taking all the strange and beautiful things they bring you. 

What I have found today is a vintage jumble sale in a little square somewhere in Zattere.  For no reason, there is a huge golden atom in a corner of the square and a striped green deckchair in the opposite corner, and in between all these stalls selling antique dishes and glass earrings and lace fans.  Neither the gold atom nor the deckchair seem to belong to anyone, so I take pictures of the former and commandeer the latter when I have bought the necessary gelato of the hour (stracciatella, which is a very fancy way of saying vanilla chocolate chip). 

Sitting in the deckchair that is not mine and licking up stracciatella, I realise suddenly that I am very happy.  I cannot remember the last time I was so purely happy – maybe the time I went to Shanghai and Hong Kong with my family, because that was the last time I went anywhere on vacation where I brought nothing with me I had to think about, not work or exams or complicated emotions of any kind.  And, oh god, I am so happy.  I want to wrap up the moment and hide it in a corner of my heart where it will never be shaken loose.  I think back to this morning, to the graves in the Isola di San Michele, and I think that I do not want to die, I have so much behind me and so much to go back to, if I died right now it would be such a pity, such a waste.  My life is an incredible, incredible thing, and I want so much to keep living it that it actually hurts.

I finish the last fragment of cone, and all at once every bell in every bell tower of Venice sings out in cacophony, ringing out the hour.

Dodici.

On my last day, I get up early to watch Venice set up.  I get my cappuccino and sit with my baggage at the edge of the water as the streets start to fill with people, as the vendors roll in and start unpacking and hanging up their masks.  The sun rises, with a hard fierce glint to it like a jewel, and I put on my new sunhat with the cream ribbon as the pavement starts to get hot.

“Would you come back with me?” Ying asked two days ago, when I was shelling vongole and she was trying to eat nero di seppia without getting squid ink on her lips and failing.  She saw that I was maybe the only one who loved Venice as much as she did; the others had seemed happier in Rome, or were looking forward to Florence, or in any case did not seem quite as entranced by the glittering masks and mystical alleyways and omnipresent water as she and I did.  By now I can navigate Venice without a map, and I know she would be so envious that I have been around long enough to be able to do this.

I would come back.  There are sights I still haven’t seen; I missed the Rialto market, I didn’t go to every museum, I haven’t been to any bars and obviously I never took the gondola.  But suppose I had – I would still come back.  People told me Venice was over-rated; I came expecting over-rated and was delighted with what I found.

I finish my cappuccino, pick up my bags and prepare for the trek to the Piazzale le Roma, where I will buy a ticket to the airport in Italian just because I can.  The scent of a dozen different coffee blends hits the air, and in window after window the masks follow me with the knowing gaze of their empty eyeholes. 

Tredici.

Once upon a time there was a little girl in a cheap purple cloak pinned with her mother’s brooch, with a silly accent and a ridiculous name.  This is what happened to that little girl: she grew up, and she went to Venice.  And it was real.  And it was beautiful.  Sometimes dreams do come true.