“It’s a joke,” Lena says. “Fourteenth-century Walt Disney that the tourists think is High Art.” Richard looks over the café railing at the queue of people waiting for the vaporetto: children with black satchels going to school by boat, women with net bags crossing the canal for morning errands, tourists laden with suitcases headed to the train. Across the canal, the wall of palaces appears one-dimensional, the facades a pastiche of colored patches of peeling paint, water lapping over the doorsteps, like a huge movie set behind which no one expects to find bathrooms and kitchens and couches and rugs. Despite Lena’s disdain, Richard feels the elation that the city has always induced in him. At times, walking through the narrow cobbled streets, he has had the sensation of stepping into a wrinkle in time, as though he might turn a corner and be lifted backward eight hundred years or outward into another reality where pigeons sing and gondolas fly through the air. Lena raises her index finger to beckon the waiter.
