Yawn

Perhaps the ultimate luxury of living in Venice is the ability to turn one’s back on the city’s beauty – to close the doors and stay in. It’s like owning a prime lot on the Grand Canal and not building a palazzo on it with an obnoxiously showy façade, but instead – a garden. (Only four landlords have had the bronze to do that). My garden – no, not my garden, my hosts’ garden – does not face the canal. It is in the back of the house, and not too large, maybe half an acre in all. Typically of Venetian gardens, it is surrounded by a tall wall – 3 meters high – topped with strategically placed bits of broken glass and three crumbling stone urns. There are several trees, some bushes gone wild, and three chipped statues, of which one is overturned. If you look up, you will see a new yorkian kind of view: a small patch of blue sky at the end of a canyon of rooftops of the other tall palazzi which crowd in all around.

Luxuriously, I spent the day in the garden today, reading an Egyptian novel. If it weren’t in French, a language I know poorly and wish to improve I probably would not have gotten as far as I have. The Egyptians of 1966 seemed to me no different from the Indians of 2006: sex-starved single men, living under the thumbs of mom and dad, striking pathetic cool poses and perorating knowingly about matters about which they know little and even that generally incorrectly. But I enjoy reading French and made it as far as chapter four, in which the prospective female love interest (you can tell this from a mile off, novels are so damn predictable) has been described. She is a modern Egyptian woman, American University educated, a journalist whose radical articles in leading press have been causing much stir. That sounded vaguely interesting for a moment (even if radicals tend to bore me) until I was told that she was – twenty five!

Oh, come on.

I suppose one has to be no more than twenty five to play the role of Juliet, but then one can’t possibly be a highly regarded radical journalist in a third world country with patriarchal values. And besides, twenty five year old women are goats: all they know is come si fa – and not even come si fa bene. (As a man says in an American movie about his much younger girlfriend: “She likes to sc**. She ain’t no good at it, but she likes it.”)

And a radical article written by a twenty five year old is good for only one thing – but only if the paper is not too rough.