LETTER FROM VENICE
585
Credit, that equalizer, is now available. In a shop few tourists will
ever see, filled like a deep freeze with TV's and gadgets, an ornamental
telephone, antique style, sells for eighty thousand lire. That's one
hundred and thirty dollars, American. Cheaper decorator models sell
for as little as thirty-five dollars. Does it seem a lot of money?
Signora,
it's only four twenty a month.
A big-screen TV will cost her just double
that.
A young friend of mine, a Venetian, who came up after the war
the hard way, now runs a cafe with modern paintings by his friends
on the walls.
It
is a family enterprise. Hard work is now paying off.
We sat in the garden discussing how much and how little Venice has
changed. Some things had not. Some things never would. We sat a
moment silent, and then he told me he would like to tell me something
I would not believe. And what was that? He had just bought a car.
A new car, the very latest thing in a Fiat. Did he think
I
would find
that strange? I asked. But I didn't understand, he said.
It
was not
merely that he had bought this car: he had paid for this car, on the
spot, with a check. He had written out a check for one million five
hundred thousand lire, and signed it. Imagine? No, he knew I could
not imagine that. No American could. We all had too much money to
understand that.
I had never signed a check for a million lire, but I knew what
it was to shoot the works. And for a car. To shoot the works. Something
of this spirit is in the air. Not just this young man. This was not the
carefree gesture of a lucky fellow, but one that had an entire family
behind it-ten years of frugal living and saving go into the sum. Why a
car?
He tells me it will help bring the family together. There are folks
in the country. His father and mother are no longer young. The good
life is an easier life. But the spring of this action lies elsewhere, in the
dream of which the car is the symbol, and the climate of the time that
inspires men to shoot the works.
To keep a car in Venice is like keeping a boat somewhere else-–
the shooting does not stop with the purchase price. Space in the new
city garage will cost most owners as much as their apartments. But
like a good perplexed American, my friend smiles and shrugs. What
the hell! Money is only money. One only lives once.
These sentiments, like the cigarettes he smokes, the jazz he likes,
the drinks he makes, are all imported from the young country. The
brave new world, of which Europe is the parent, is now the parent of
what is new in Europe. The positions are reversed. The current flows
the other way.
It
is why the tourist, even in Venice, will feel a puzzling
