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VENETIAN CANDY
How long will our bewildered heirs marooned in possessions not theirs puzzle at disposing of these three cunning feignings of hard candy in glass— the striped little pillowlike mock-sweets, the flared end-twists as of transparent paper? No clue will be attached, no trace of the sunny day of their purchase, at a glittering shop a few doors up from Harry’s Bar, a disappointing place for all its testaments from Hemingway. The Grand Canal was also aglitter while the lesser canals lay in the shade like snakes, flicking wet tongues and gliding to green rendezvous. The immaculate salesgirl, in her aloof Italian succulence, sized us up, a middle-aged American couple, as unserious shoppers who, still half jet-lagged, would cling to their lire in the face of any enchanted vase or ethereal wineglass that might shatter in the luggage going home. Yet we wanted something, something small .... This? No ... How much is ten thousand? Dizzy, at last we decided. She wrapped the three glass candies, the cheapest items in the shop, with a showy care worthy of crown jewels—tissue, tape, and tissue again sprang up beneath her blood-red fingernails, plus a jack-in-the-box-shaped paper bag adorned with harlequin lozenges, sad though she surely was, on her feet waiting all day for a wild rich Arab, a compulsive Japanese. Grazie, signor ... grazie, signora ... ciao. Nor will our thing-weary heirs decipher the little repair, the reattached triangle of glass from the paper-imitating end-twist, its mending a labor of love in the cellar, by winter light, by the man of the house, mixing transparent epoxy and rigging a clever small clamp as if to keep intact the time that we, alive, had spent in the feathery bed at the Europa e Regina.