possibly terminal.
Or I may find that it is raining and that the several enormous brown paper bags, full of candles and nests of Tupperware that I had not known I wanted, are fast turning to papier-mâche. The once bright plastic drops out of the sodden bottom into a muddy puddle and I am still half an hour’s walk from home. The shining, the new, the practically free, suddenly feels less alluring; may even start to look like folly.
Self-service
‘Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura che la diritta via era smarrita.’
(‘Midway on life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and found myself alone in a dark wood.’)
T HE GREENGROCER OVER the bridge from whom I buy my fruit and vegetables is fighting a one-man battle for Venice and the values of his Venetian culture. Giuseppe has a prime position on a busy Venetian thoroughfare. Every morning he displays his produce outside his shop:a handsome stack of apples and pears, aubergine, cabbages, artichokes, plums and bananas and leeks. The greengrocer is a sad, decent, angry man.
‘I was a bank manager for twenty years,’ he tells me. ‘I belonged to the ultra left. Then, one day, I turned on the path, to look behind me and I saw that there was no one there. So I thought: better to spend the rest of your life selling fruit and vegetables than this.’
He smiles grimly, baring his nicotine-stained teeth.
As we talk, he glances over my shoulder every so often at the produce displayed outside his shop. Then, suddenly, he shoots past me and out on to the street.
‘NO SELF SERVICE!’ he barks harshly at a drifty blond American girl half submerged by her rucksack, who has picked up a peach and is turning it around to see whether or not it is ripe. She does not understand.
‘No self service!’
‘No?’ she says wonderingly, thinking, it seems, that this irate foreign shopkeeper is telling her that she is not allowed to buy from his gorgeously laden stall. She is clearly confused, but accepting the prohibition as though it had some obscure Alice in Wonderland logic, she drifts away again.
Giuseppe comes back into his shop.
‘I am sorry, Signora,’ he says, apologetic and shaken by his own fury. ‘These people cannot behave in this way. Would you go into someone’s house and finger their food and then just put it down and leave again?’
‘No, of course not,’ I say, because from that point of view his logic is impeccable. ‘But they simply have no idea that picking up the fruit and touching it is unacceptable. That’s what you do where they come from.’
Giuseppe will not understand; cannot understand.
When I go to Giuseppe to buy an avocado or some peaches, he will say:
‘Is it for tonight?’ and I might reply, ‘No, some time over the next few days would be fine.’
And because the fruit I want is still firm, he will sell it to me. If Ineed it that day, he does not sell it to me. I do not need to finger and bruise his peaches – he knows exactly how ripe they are and will tell me. He is always right and he has a relationship with his customers based on trust and his knowledge of what he is selling. To tell them anything except the truth about what they are buying would be to shoot himself in the foot – unhappy shoppers take their custom elsewhere. These are human-scale relationships of mutual convenience that work.
When the foreigners trek past his shop in what Giuseppe sees as a sort of cultural breaking and entering – part of tourism’s systematic rape of his city – he does not, it strikes me, really see them as human. The American girl has floated in from the land of infinite supermarket aisles, where the only non-shopping human beings are the armies of shelf-stackers, who probably know nothing about the produce they are handling. She is no better equipped than Giuseppe to understand another point of view.
One might see this America of uncontrolled and self-spawning consumerism as itself a
Or I may find that it is raining and that the several enormous brown paper bags, full of candles and nests of Tupperware that I had not known I wanted, are fast turning to papier-mâche. The once bright plastic drops out of the sodden bottom into a muddy puddle and I am still half an hour’s walk from home. The shining, the new, the practically free, suddenly feels less alluring; may even start to look like folly.
Self-service
‘Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura che la diritta via era smarrita.’
(‘Midway on life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and found myself alone in a dark wood.’)
T HE GREENGROCER OVER the bridge from whom I buy my fruit and vegetables is fighting a one-man battle for Venice and the values of his Venetian culture. Giuseppe has a prime position on a busy Venetian thoroughfare. Every morning he displays his produce outside his shop:a handsome stack of apples and pears, aubergine, cabbages, artichokes, plums and bananas and leeks. The greengrocer is a sad, decent, angry man.
‘I was a bank manager for twenty years,’ he tells me. ‘I belonged to the ultra left. Then, one day, I turned on the path, to look behind me and I saw that there was no one there. So I thought: better to spend the rest of your life selling fruit and vegetables than this.’
He smiles grimly, baring his nicotine-stained teeth.
As we talk, he glances over my shoulder every so often at the produce displayed outside his shop. Then, suddenly, he shoots past me and out on to the street.
‘NO SELF SERVICE!’ he barks harshly at a drifty blond American girl half submerged by her rucksack, who has picked up a peach and is turning it around to see whether or not it is ripe. She does not understand.
‘No self service!’
‘No?’ she says wonderingly, thinking, it seems, that this irate foreign shopkeeper is telling her that she is not allowed to buy from his gorgeously laden stall. She is clearly confused, but accepting the prohibition as though it had some obscure Alice in Wonderland logic, she drifts away again.
Giuseppe comes back into his shop.
‘I am sorry, Signora,’ he says, apologetic and shaken by his own fury. ‘These people cannot behave in this way. Would you go into someone’s house and finger their food and then just put it down and leave again?’
‘No, of course not,’ I say, because from that point of view his logic is impeccable. ‘But they simply have no idea that picking up the fruit and touching it is unacceptable. That’s what you do where they come from.’
Giuseppe will not understand; cannot understand.
When I go to Giuseppe to buy an avocado or some peaches, he will say:
‘Is it for tonight?’ and I might reply, ‘No, some time over the next few days would be fine.’
And because the fruit I want is still firm, he will sell it to me. If Ineed it that day, he does not sell it to me. I do not need to finger and bruise his peaches – he knows exactly how ripe they are and will tell me. He is always right and he has a relationship with his customers based on trust and his knowledge of what he is selling. To tell them anything except the truth about what they are buying would be to shoot himself in the foot – unhappy shoppers take their custom elsewhere. These are human-scale relationships of mutual convenience that work.
When the foreigners trek past his shop in what Giuseppe sees as a sort of cultural breaking and entering – part of tourism’s systematic rape of his city – he does not, it strikes me, really see them as human. The American girl has floated in from the land of infinite supermarket aisles, where the only non-shopping human beings are the armies of shelf-stackers, who probably know nothing about the produce they are handling. She is no better equipped than Giuseppe to understand another point of view.
One might see this America of uncontrolled and self-spawning consumerism as itself a
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