Venice by Ange Mlinko

Author:Ange Mlinko
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

PART III

VENICITIS

The comic journals laughed at the pale, languishing victims of “Adriaticism,” “Florencitis,” and “Venicitis.”

—Francis Steegmuller, Flaubert and Madame Bovary

THE ELEGANCE OF PELICANS

Along the fishing pier that dashes into the Gulf at Naples

on legs like a stop-motion photograph of a runner

multiplied at speed, lace-making waves swishing at his ankles,

three pelicans lunged at a blowfish that managed to

unhook itself from a lure, and adding feat to feat,

bewildered the ravenous birds by puffing itself up

so that the pelican that caught it startled; another took it up,

only to drop it instantly, and with half of Naples

looking on, cheering, the third gave it a try, and met defeat.

As they disported, thwarted, the blowfish like a rubber

ball allowed itself to be passed and dribbled from one to

another until, finagling its own interception at the ankles

of its opponents, it shrank, and sank among the barnacles.

This story, from the correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop,

is rather like the incident related in Mozart’s Journey to

Prague, about two boating parties in the Bay of Naples.

Only one of them was stocked with girls. A rudder

pointed right at them, and a basket at their feet

stocked with oranges suggested a defense. Playfully, fête

galante style, the girls pelted the boys’ ankles

with flying oranges, and athwart a slender rider

of the waves pitching, yawing, and rearing up,

each pulled off a volley for the passeggiata of Naples,

with great finesse and mirth, hand-to-

hand across the gunwales. There was a band, too,

playing saltarelli and canzoni against the buffet

of oranges, the flashing azure of the Bay of Naples,

which lifted the lace hems at the girls’ ankles

as it rocked them. When the boys climbed up

into their boat, one took the prettiest, and rid her

of her cad. (A sail unfurled, depicting Cupid.) A reader,

accounting for the change in sensibility across two

centuries, might still conclude they don’t add up.

But between the feat of the blowfish and the feat

of the suitors on the wavelets, a chime as of anklets

is my cue to keep skimming pages for more of Naples.

Like an underground runner of wild fruit, Naples

creeps up to your feet, bursting through the soil

to clap you by the ankles and start flowering!

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