Scott Stavrou's Blog

Finally I started talking some sense into myself. I gave up on missing the girl. I missed the pursuit, missed the feeling of missing her, even. But knew that dreams of what might have been have a limited lifespan in man. I worked and wandered aimlessly. Even when I stared at the back of every red-headed crop of female hair in any crowd, I reminded myself that I was only wandering aimlessly.

One day the gravity of nice weather and Venice’s early springtime crowds drew me to the Piazza San Marco, Europe’s sitting room, as Napoleon had called it before he took it for himself and then traded it to the Austro-Hungarians as easily as you might trade Marvin Gardens for Park Place.

In Venice, if you didn’t know where you were going, you usually ended up in the Piazza and since that was always true, maybe it was always where you were going.

That was when I came across her sitting down on the stones in front of the Basilica San Marco, leaning against the brick foundation of the campanile. It was a Thursday, I think, it must have been the week before Easter.

She was wearing the same black velvet hat and clutching an empty sketch pad, just staring off into space and she didn’t see me walk up. I circled behind her and put my hands over her eyes and said: “Guess who,” and when I did, I could feel she was crying, just quietly sitting there with tears pooling in her eyes and I got her teardrops on my fingers and suddenly felt horribly invasive.

I thought maybe it was some somber stirring of the artistic soul, perhaps the beauty of the place, the Piazza and the people and the setting, had all overcome her and I felt bad for ruining an aesthetic moment. The inscrutable inner-being of an elusive woman is beguiling enough and added with a dose of artistic leanings and sensitivity I was not indoctrinated in, I was all too aware of my unsuitability for the moment I faced. I was not informed or enlightened enough about art or beauty and the shapeliness of her soul. No matter how badly I wished for the key that would unlock all these things, I remained an outsider. I didn’t know what I was dealing with, really. I navigated unfamiliar terrain, though I had been here before.

She sniffled and just said, “I was wondering when you’d find me.”

“I was beginning to think never,” I added, wistfully as I could. “What’s wrong?” I asked. She didn’t say anything, so I went with my instincts, which seemed feeble and wrong, but alas, were all I had.

“Is it just that it’s all too beautiful, too hard to put on paper?” I asked.

“No, it’s not that. Not that at all. It’s just the opposite. Just that the world’s so awful, so terribly sad, that sometimes I can’t stand it.”

I sat down next to her.

“It can’t be that bad,” I said, not knowing if it was, or what to say at all.

“You have no idea.”

“Listen, why don’t we go over to Harry’s Bar and you can tell me all about it. Your name and the whole story. They say you can get everything at Harry’s. Even happiness.”

At Harry’s there was always an interesting mélange of people that was at least diverting. The Bellinis were highly overpriced but the bar always well-populated with a heady mix of tourist trap day-trippers, the aristocratic social set of Venice, and the occasional international jet-setter, all equally treated by the aloof tuxedoed waiters.

Seemed everyone hoped for a slice of happiness to be served up, though technically speaking it was not listed on the menu.

Rumor had it that Tom and Nicole had recently had a rousing argument there before their divorce. I didn’t believe the rumors but it set me to thinking about how many famous couples of today and yesteryear had ended badly. In modern myth-making Hollywood it was no surprise, nor in history and literature. Romeo and Juliet. Antony and Cleopatra. Samson and Delilah. Bogart and Bacall. Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. Heathcliff and Catherine. Were there any famous couples to draw on who had been blessed with happy endings? Was the risk of delving deeply into another person’s soul worth the odds?

What good was a place like Harry’s, wherever it was, if you could get anything in the world there, even happiness, but if things never worked out in the end? What kind of happiness was that? What good were endings at all? Maybe, I thought, it’s a matter of deciding to end things before they get bad, before you mess them up, of making life stop so you could hold onto the goodness before the real world reached down and plucked it out of your hands like a capricious conjurer performing the same old trick. Everything ends badly, otherwise it wouldn’t end, right? Maybe the trick was just not to have an ending at all. Or wiser still, to never even begin and neutralize the whole dangerous process before it started, to stay forever far from the show. By forgoing the magic you might insulate yourself from injury.

“I don’t feel like being around people,” she said.

“Do you want me to leave?” I asked, hoping with all my being that the answer would be no, thinking that maybe this incomprehensible magic was all there was.

She started crying more and I watched her shoulders tremble with the effort.

“No, no. No, it’s all right. Just let me sit here. Sit here with me, Mark,” she said through small soundless sobs.

Eager for access, I sat down, getting as close to her as I could, pining for proximity. We sat there silently on the cold stones of the Piazza.

“Perhaps we should introduce ourselves again,” I said, not wanting to let more moments in her presence pass without being privy to at least her name. It seemed cruelly unfair that she knew mine and I didn’t know hers.

For some reason, I had started to call her Monet in my mind, it seeming a good name for an artist even if Claude had been a man, but I wasn’t sure if she would like that. They were a mysterious sort, women and artists. Would have been nice if I’d been right with my guess, but I doubted it. Though I had every confidence that I could have learned wonderful things from a girl who might have been named Monet.

She wasn’t taking the bait and I guess it was a pretty meager offering, but I stood there patiently waiting for some sort of bite or sign, alert lest my red and white bobber dip underwater.

A flock — were they flocks, I knew crows were a murder — of noisy pigeons scuttled ferociously across the stones in the middle of the piazza.

In the center of the Piazza, two kids stood holding clumps of pigeon feed in their hands and the ugly, dirty birds, all gray and white and black, swooshed down from the sky and lighted just long enough to peck some food out of their hands and make the kids giggle gleefully and run off screaming, scaring the pigeons, until the kids and the pigeons got brave enough to try it again. Proud parents stood by snapping pictures of their adorable brats feeding the foul fowl. A larger and lovelier lone white seagull without a flock or a name circled the square slice of the sky above the Piazza, floating above everything, arrogantly disinterested in the goings on below. Perhaps like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, he was honing his soaring skills or maybe working on his target acquisition ability.

In previous and perhaps crueler centuries, corpses had been hung or buried head first in the stones of the Piazza. Now orchestra music wafted, waves lapped from the shortened shore over by the Piazzetta and everyone had video cameras for their Aunt Marjorie back home to be bored by their trip, so painstakingly chronicled on digital tape technology. How did they turn numbers into pictures anyway? How indeed did the intricately chiseled facets of the crystal clear scene before me get reduced to a banal series of binary numbers?

“Look, no offense. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But I don’t feel like talking, okay? Let’s just sit, can we do that?” she said.

She put down the empty sketchpad and I moved closer to her on the ground and leaned up against the clock tower campanile and feebly put my arm around her.

What do you do when a beautiful woman is crying and you like her so much, maybe you could love her, but you don’t know her name, probably it isn’t Monet, you don’t know anything about her, except the first time you saw her she was stunning and smiling and happy and it was raining and your heart had skipped a beat when your lips touched, and the next time you saw her she was sitting there crying her eyes out in the afternoon sun of the Piazza in the spring and well, you just have no idea what to do, and I didn’t.

Many people had cried in the Piazza, that I knew, even though I didn’t know her or their names. The stones of that Piazza had before been well soaked with tears, of that there was no doubt, salty water of any kind was no stranger to those stones.

So we sat there and she leaned her head on my shoulder and she cried and I would have done anything in the world for her right then, just about anything, only there was nothing to do for her. I could have been wrong. Perhaps there was everything I could have done for her, perhaps I could have somehow reached into her soul and stirred forth the beauty and the grace I’d seen before in her single-dimpled smile, perhaps I could have dragged her out of her depression and offered her a life preserver. Perhaps the right words or deeds would have made all the difference in both our lives. Only I did not know what they were, those mysterious right words and deeds, that again, as they had before, remained elusive to me.

I felt as if I’d been woefully miscast in a badly written, unfinished melodrama and it was opening night, only I did not know my lines, nor did the writer. I didn’t even have the goddamned cast of characters right. And there was no director, only me and the teary eyes of the sad, beautiful girl with no name, sitting there on the sprawling stone stage of the Piazza San Marco.

That’s the thing with life, there’s no dress rehearsal, no preparation to ready you for the performance, no time to fix the things you’re not good at, no director in the wings to guide you, no Cyrano in the bushes whispering perfect phrases to you. By the time you discover you don’t know the right lines, the right words, the performance is coming to a close and there’s only this, this one long performance that ends so quickly, where everyone strolls through it striving to learn or pretend to know how to act. And before you know it, you’re afraid the play is going to end and you don’t know how or don’t understand but all of it probably must mean something. So you wait for Godot. Or you speak in prose. Or, not knowing your lines, sit and say nothing, stifled by an inadequate preparation for all that life might have given you.

So I sat there some more and shared an unknown sadness in the beautiful Piazza with a girl whose name I didn’t know and whose sadness I didn’t understand and not understanding made it all the more melancholy. I put my arm tighter around her shoulders, feeling only that she possessed more gravity than me, that her sadness possessed more weight than my happiness, but perhaps it is always so. I knew only that I was more drawn down to her level of mood and feeling than her up to mine. And it was sad and beautiful, all at the same time, and the pigeons strutted and cawed, and I thought for a bit about all the people who had shared moments of such despair amidst the old stones and shining basilica that made it one of the world’s most beautiful places.

If you were going to be sad, there were few better places to do it. What I remember most is that we were sad there together with our heavy hearts almost touching yet still so far away and I could feel the coldness of the stones through my pants and the warm wetness of her tears on my neck.

https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Venice-...Losing Venice