Violin Lessons by Arnold Zable

Author:Arnold Zable
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000, HIS054000, BIO000000
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2012-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

A Chorus of Feet

It wakes me at dawn, the steady rhythm, the percussive beat. It can be heard as I stir from my sleep. It rises from the streets with the aroma of coffee, the clinking of cups, the clash of cutlery and plates. I unfasten the shutters, look out over the rooftops and glimpse the canal at the end of a side street.

The early sun is seeping in, lighting a table strewn with a laptop and notebooks: the tools of my trade. I descend the stairs, stop at the ground-floor café, order a coffee and drink it standing at the crowded counter among Venetians who down their espressos in one hit. When I am done, I join them as they hurry out.

On the pavements I jostle with the crowd. A woman flings open the shutters and pounds the bedding on the windowsill. Romanian musicians, a fiddler and an accordionist, carry their instruments in search of a busking place. A plump middle-aged woman saunters over a canal bridge. She wears red stilettos, a black mini-skirt and a low-cut red blouse. She strides through the streets, her head held high, her back straight.

Commuters are waiting at canal stations, boarding vaporettos, hailing water taxis and spilling off gangways into streets and piazzas. Goods are being delivered in handcarts and trolleys and on barges and motorised boats. One boat transports a miniature forest of bonsai trees. A second is loaded with winged angels and haloed shepherds bound for the cemetery island of San Michele. A boatman stands at the stern, one hand on the tiller while the other holds a mobile phone to his ear. His workmate lounges on a cushioned wheelbarrow, legs dangling over the sides beside mounds of gravel and cement.

The absence of cars is a leveller, and the city a democracy of feet. I now know that the music I have become a part of is the tread of Venetians on their way to work. The rhythm evokes memories of journeys I have made to Venice over the years and my first approach by boat, a voyage that I owe to a chance encounter in 1974 in Eilat, a Red Sea port.

In the first weeks I had worked as a dishwasher in the kitchen of a beachside resort. My domain was a small space, about two metres wide and three metres in length. I cleaned the machine each morning in readiness for the waiters’ assault. They rushed by with the breakfast dishes, and slapped them down on the bench. Mid-morning I wheeled out the garbage. The desert heat slapped my face. Flies crawled over the refuse; the smell of rotting food choked the air.

The kitchen was a hellhole. Tempers were frayed. Cooks squabbled. Fights erupted. During one lunch break, a waiter flew at me without warning, punching and clawing until he was dragged away by workmates. ‘Don’t worry,’ they assured me. ‘He runs amok from time to time. Don’t look him in the eye and all will be fine.’

I left the kitchen to work on the building sites.

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