“We’re lucky we got to see it while it still looks like this,” she said. “A part of me can’t even believe they built this city. A world on top of the water.”
“I read an article about it on the plane,” Nina said. “They actually dug wooden stakes into the mud and clay under the water, and then built wooden platforms on top of the stakes, and then stone platforms on top of that, and then finally the buildings themselves.”
“But the wood didn’t rot?” Maura asked.
“The wood they used was water-resistant, and since it was underwater and not exposed to the air, it never decayed,” Nina said. “It’s been standing for all these centuries.”
Though the streets occasionally smelled like a fishing port, the city was bewitching, unlike any other place they had seen. The colorful pastel buildings, whose Gothic arches melted into the scintillating water, and the rows of gondolas out front, bobbing in wait, looked exactly the way they appeared on postcards and in daydreams.
Particularly amusing were the curious faces they encountered around every corner. Sculptures perched on rooftops, figures painted in ceiling frescoes, facades adorned with small busts, even doorknobs carved in the shape of heads—everywhere they went in the city, the eyes of saints and artists peered back at them.
Once, Maura almost jumped at the sight of a dozen painted faces staring at her through haunting, empty eyes from the window of a small shop.
Nina followed her inside, where every inch of the walls and ceiling was covered with traditional Venetian masks, hundreds of porcelain visages, each with their own personalities. There was the jester, with his fool’s cap and bells. The ominous plague doctor, with his lengthy beak. There were masks in every color of the artist’s palette. Some had ribbons and feathers and intricate gold leafing. Others wore pained expressions or mischievous grins. Maura stepped closer to admire a white mask adorned with delicate music notes.
A woman soon emerged from the shop’s back room, one arm leaning on a mahogany cane, and nodded at Nina and Maura. Her dark, wavy hair, bestrewn with strands of gray, was twisted into a loose bun, and she wore her red-rimmed glasses like a necklace.
“Ciao,” she said. “Where are you visiting from?”
“New York,” Nina answered.
“Ah, the Big Apple,” the woman said with a laugh. Her English sounded well practiced, if heavily accented. “Do you know about the history of our masks?”
Both Nina and Maura shook their heads.
“Well, everybody knows that we wear masks during the famous Carnival, but there was also a time before, when the people of Venezia wore masks ogni giorno, every day. Not only for celebrations.”
With her free hand, the woman gestured to the world outside the window. “If you were just outside walking on the street, you could wear a mask, and nobody would know who you were.”
“It sounds very . . . freeing,” said Maura.
“Freedom. Sì.” The woman said solemnly. “In Venezia, the old social classes were very strict. But with the mask, you could be . . . anyone. Man, woman, rich, poor. It’s a bit like your New York, yes? You go there to be anyone you want.”
Nina nodded in agreement. “Then why did people stop wearing them?”
“Well, what’s the word . . . anonymous? Sì. Being anonymous has a price. You feel like you can do anything. You drink, you cheat, you gamble . . .”
The woman tipped her head back toward the ceiling, smiling at the rows of endless faces gazing down upon her. “At least we kept the Carnival.”
Maura wanted to pick out a mask to hang in their apartment, and Nina modeled a handful of different options before her, each more flamboyant than the last. It was almost shocking how every mask rendered her unrecognizable, and Maura found herself thinking about what the shop owner had said, about the freedom that masks afforded the wearer. The sense of invincibility. Perhaps that was how long-stringers felt, she realized.
And although their time in Italy had been beautiful thus far, a distraction from life back at home, Maura couldn’t help but wonder about the chance to don a mask, to become someone new temporarily, someone with a different string. To feel that relief, that peace, for one day.
Maura watched the shop owner daintily lift a mask off Nina’s face. “What happened here in Italy when the boxes came?” she suddenly asked. “Did most people look?”
The woman nodded, like she had been expecting the question.
“Some did, but I think most did not. My sister, she is very traditional Catholic. She did not look, because she says she will go whenever God calls her back. And I did not look because . . . I am happy with my life.” The woman shrugged. “I hear of these Americans, they say the strings have made them think again about their lives. How do you say, their . . .”