I lost the sole in Venice. I only noticed it once it was gone several hours after, at the end of my long walk through Castello. I felt the imbalance belatedly, pulled up first one foot and then the other, uncertain of what to expect. There it was, the shorn underside of the right shoe staring back at me, ribbed and ugly.

The insides of running shoes are unpleasant yet interesting – engineered bits of foam and a network of strings attached to each other like a family tree. These kept my feet cushioned and warm and in place. Unattractive but functional.

I have narrow feet, I need to super-tighten my laces, use the very last loop of the webbing. Incase you’ve ever wondered what the point of it is, it keeps narrow feet in check. I’ve already twisted my ankle half a dozen times. I gave up trying to heal it a while ago after the eighth round of physiotherapy yielded little but a false reference at restoration. The last time it cracked itself under my weight it swelled to the size of a golf ball. Better than the tennis ball it engorged to the first time. Now I mostly focus on keeping it safe since the ligament is loose. I hope that perhaps, like life, it does not notice its own brokenness and carries on.

It was the day after Christmas and I was restless. By then I had been haunting and hunting the city streets eleven days already. I’d been to the checklist museums, heard three classical concerts, taken the ubiquitous water taxi around the main islands, eaten a lot of sardine cicchetti, talked to many locals, sat on church pew after church pew, even watched a movie in Italian.

Venice is beautiful, crumbling from age and wisdom. The energy of its lopsided buildings, its charmingly despondent, tourism weary people; its antique decadence created a heaviness which sank to my heels. In Venice you can only ride on water or walk. Riding on water did nothing to dispel the gloom so I walked a lot (even when the aqueous option was faster and/or shorter).

That day I searched the farthest point I could get to from my temporary digs in the city centre, heaved on thick and thicker layers of wool, headed out the door to explore a residential Venice, a Venice unexciting to daytrippers.

On the way I stopped for the twelfth time to admire the bridge Byron made famous for the city’s prisoners walking across it, at the church where Vivaldi was a music teacher, at the massive Biennale site, at a gelato place because I wasn’t cold enough I needed to remind myself I was in northern Italy in the dead of winter (stracciatella, in a cup) and then kept walking and walking until the crowds fell away, the fog magically translucentacized shapes and forms, an old man sat smoking a cigar at a teeny Venetian window, a dog barked somewhere in the bog and my shoes carried me to the end of the island. The desolation hung in the air, crystalline, quiet.

On a bridge leading to the city’s football stadium, I took photos of canvas covered gondolas swooshing in the canals like calm crocodiles. It was just me in the moment, when on any given match day the very same bridge would be throbbing with the footfall of multitudes. A bridge without someone to cross it is a lonely thing. It connects two worlds but becomes useful only with life over it. So I used it. I went past the stadium and onward until what lay beyond was a crisp, cold sheath of water below, evening light percolating through the expanding white of the lagoon. Two hours later I was back, perched at the edge of the bed in my rental, missing an important part of my movement apparatus, examining its fibrous interior. I had packed formal wedges for evenings out. Since Venetians are casual dressers, the only time I wore them was the next morning when I went to shop for a new pair of trainers.

The subsequent days went well, no blisters, no aching ankle. I wrapped up my Venice visit with a PCR test which was a forty-three minute walk one way, in freezing temperatures, for an extortionate amount of Euros. I did not experience another day that empty, devoid of warmth, yet full of such contentment. I also did not find other bridges, other canals, like that day, where bits of my sole lie scattered.

0 comments

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hello! I’m Peri Desai

I’m Peri, welcome to my space. In it you will find stuff that moves me, maddens me, captures my attention, makes me question its truth. You will read what makes me curious, annoyed, energized, joyful, vulnerable.