The Accordionist

Paolo Tessarin crossed the lagoon every morning in the dark.

He lived on Burano, the island of color, the island where the houses were painted in shades so vivid they seemed to be arguing with each other -- canary beside vermilion beside cobalt beside a green that was not verde Venier but was close, was a cousin, was a green that had come from paint rather than glass but that belonged to the same family of lagoon-greens, the greens that the water produced in the minds of the people who lived on it. Burano was forty minutes from Murano by vaporetto, which meant that Paolo's alarm went off at three-fifteen, which meant that he slept six hours on a good night and five on a bad one, which meant that his life was divided into three states: the furnace, the crossing, and the sleep, and the sleep was the shortest of the three.

He had been making the crossing for fifteen years. Five thousand four hundred crossings, approximately, minus the Augusts and the feast days and the eleven days of the acqua alta in 2019 when the vaporetti had stopped running and he had borrowed his cousin's sandolo and rowed -- rowed the flat-bottomed boat across the lagoon in the dark, the oar cutting the water, the water black and high and smelling of everything the flood had dislodged from the city's foundations, the sewage and the sediment and the centuries of debris that Venice sat on and pretended did not exist. He had rowed for an hour and arrived at the furnace at five-thirty, late, an hour late, and Enzo had looked at him and looked at the water on his boots and said nothing, because the water on his boots said everything, said that he had rowed across a flooded lagoon in the dark to reach the furnace, and that was the only credential that mattered.

The vaporetto at three-forty left from the Burano stop at the north end of the island, near the leaning campanile that tilted at an angle that was either charming or alarming depending on your tolerance for structural failure. Paolo walked to the stop in the dark, past the painted houses whose colors were invisible in the absence of light, past the lace shops that were closed, past the fish market that was not yet open, past the small campo where the old men would sit later and talk about the fish that were fewer than they used to be and the tourists that were more. He walked on the fondamenta beside the canal and the water was black and still and the boats were tied and motionless and Burano was asleep.

The vaporetto was the first of the day. It carried four people -- Paolo, a fisherman going to the Lido, a nurse going to the hospital in Venice, and the captain, who was also going to work, whose work was the vaporetto itself, the route, the crossing, the daily delivery of people from one island to another across water that was simultaneously a street and a moat, a connection and a separation. Paolo stood at the bow. He always stood at the bow, facing forward, the wind on his face, the water ahead, the islands appearing and disappearing in the dark as the vaporetto followed its route -- Burano to Mazzorbo, across the wooden bridge, then south through the channel markers, the red and green poles that guided the boats through the shallow lagoon, past Torcello where the basilica sat in its empty campo and the mosaics waited for the morning light, past Sant'Erasmo where the artichoke farmers were already in their fields, past the northern edge of Murano where the lighthouse stood and the fondamenta began and the glass furnaces exhaled their heat into the lagoon fog.

He arrived at Murano at four-twenty. He walked from the vaporetto stop to the furnace -- ten minutes, past the glass shops, past the museum, past the houses where the other workers lived, the houses he could have lived in, the apartments he could have rented, the island he could have moved to years ago to eliminate the forty-minute crossing and gain an hour of sleep. He had not moved. He had stayed on Burano because Burano was his, was the place where his family had lived for three generations, was the island where his mother still lived and his sister still lived and the house he had grown up in still stood, painted the particular shade of blue that his grandfather had chosen in 1961 and that no one had changed because changing the color of a house on Burano was not a decision you made alone, was a negotiation with the neighbors and the tradition and the unwritten code that governed the island's chromatic arrangement, the code that said: the blue house stays blue, the yellow house stays yellow, the red house stays red, and the colors persist because the colors are the identity and the identity is the island.

Paolo's identity was the crossing. Paolo's identity was the forty minutes of water between the island where he slept and the island where he worked, the lagoon that separated his two lives, the water that he crossed twice a day, forward and back, the daily commute that was also a daily voyage, a daily leave-taking and a daily arrival, the rhythm of departure and return that structured his days the way the rotation of the pipe structured the work, the way the beating of the heart structured the body.

He arrived at the furnace at four-thirty. He was never late. He had been late once, fifteen years ago, in his first week, and Enzo had looked at him with the look that Enzo used for lateness, which was not anger and not disappointment but something more effective than both, which was indifference -- the look of a man who had noted the lateness and had already moved on, had already begun the work without the late person, had already demonstrated that the furnace did not wait, that the glass did not care about the vaporetto schedule, that the tradition did not accommodate the lagoon. Paolo had never been late again.

He entered the furnace and the heat met him and he felt the transition -- from the seventeen-degree air of the lagoon morning to the forty-degree ambient heat of the workspace to the hundred-degree zone near the marver to the five-hundred-degree radiance near the glory hole to the twelve-hundred-degree face of the bocca. The transition was a journey within a journey, a second crossing, the crossing from the water world to the fire world, from the cold to the hot, from the island of color to the island of heat.

His role was second servente. Below Marco, above Tomaso. His duties were specific -- the filigrana canes, the soffietta, the secondary tools, the support that supported the support. If Marco was the right hand of the maestro, Paolo was the left -- the hand that did the work that the right hand was too occupied to do, the hand that prepared what the right hand would use, the hand that was always one step behind the work and one step ahead of the need.

He prepared the filigrana canes. This was his morning task, his ritual, his contribution to the day's work before the day's work began. He took the lattimo rods from the storeroom -- white glass rods, opaque, the milk-white glass that had been made the day before and cooled overnight -- and arranged them on the marver in the pattern that the day's production required. For the tumblers, twelve rods in a circle, evenly spaced. For the vases, eighteen rods in a tighter circle, the filigrana denser, the threads closer together. For the chandelier -- no filigrana, the chandelier was verde Venier and cobalt, no white threads, the design specified solid color. But the production work needed filigrana, and the filigrana needed Paolo, and Paolo needed the twenty minutes of quiet arrangement that the cane preparation gave him, the meditative task, the laying out of white rods on steel surface, the geometry of the pattern, the precision that was not the maestro's precision but the servente's, the precision of preparation rather than execution.

He was a quiet man. People said this about him the way they said the lagoon was wet or the furnace was hot -- as a statement of the obvious, a fact so self-evident that stating it was almost redundant. Paolo was quiet. He did not speak unless spoken to. He did not offer opinions. He did not argue or debate or discuss. He nodded. He worked. He anticipated. He prepared the canes and operated the soffietta and carried pieces to the annealing oven and cleaned his station and went home and crossed the lagoon and ate dinner and played the accordion.

The accordion was the other life. The accordion was the sound that the furnace could not make, the music that the glass could not produce, the expression that the heat did not permit. The furnace was ninety decibels of continuous roar. The accordion was whatever Paolo needed it to be -- a lament on a November evening when the fog sat on the lagoon and the water was invisible and the world contracted to the sound of the bellows and the reeds, a tarantella on a summer night when the tourists wandered the fondamenta and stopped to listen and dropped coins in a hat that Paolo did not put out because he did not play for coins, he played for the air, he played because the accordion breathed the way the blowpipe breathed, the bellows expanding and contracting the way the lungs expanded and contracted, the air entering the instrument and being shaped by the reeds into sound the way the air entering the pipe was shaped by the glass into form.

The accordion was a breath instrument. This was the connection that Paolo did not speak about, that he had never articulated to anyone, that lived in his body rather than his mind. The accordion breathed. The glassblowing pipe breathed. Both required the management of air -- the control of pressure, the timing of the breath, the understanding that the air was not an abstraction but a substance, a material, a thing with weight and force and the capacity to shape. Paolo's hands on the accordion keys performed a different kind of shaping than his hands at the furnace, but the shaping came from the same understanding, the same bodily knowledge of air and pressure and the forms that air could create when it was directed through a narrow opening into a space that responded.

He did not play at the furnace. He had never played at the furnace. The furnace and the accordion occupied different compartments of his life, different registers of his body, and the boundary between them was the lagoon, the forty minutes of water that separated the island of fire from the island of music, the crossing that was the transition, the daily passage from one self to the other.

But the two selves informed each other. The steadiness that made him a good servente -- the ability to hold the soffietta at the correct angle for five minutes without wavering, the ability to direct a stream of air precisely where it needed to go, the ability to support a process without disrupting it -- this steadiness also made him a good accordionist, gave him the control of the bellows, the even pressure, the sustained notes that other players could not sustain because their arms tired or their attention wandered. And the musicality that made him a good accordionist -- the sense of timing, the feeling for rhythm, the understanding that silence was as important as sound -- this musicality also made him a good servente, gave him the timing of the furnace, the rhythm of the work, the sense of when to act and when to wait, when to blow and when to be still.

Chiara had heard him play once. Three years ago, in summer, she had walked past his house on Burano -- she had gone to Burano for something, she could not remember what, an errand, a visit, and she had heard the accordion coming through an open window, and she had stopped on the fondamenta and listened. The piece was something she did not recognize -- not a folk song, not a standard, something personal, something composed, something that came from Paolo's hands and Paolo's bellows and the particular relationship between the two that was unique to Paolo, that could not be replicated, that was as distinctive as a glassblower's hand on the pipe.

She had stood on the fondamenta and listened for ten minutes. She had not told Paolo that she had heard him. She had returned to Murano on the vaporetto and had not mentioned it, had kept the knowledge to herself, had held it the way she held the verde Venier formula -- privately, bodily, in the place where the important things lived, below language, below discussion, in the silence that was not empty but full.

The next morning at the furnace, she had looked at Paolo differently. Not with new respect -- she had always respected him, had always valued his steadiness, his reliability, his fifteen years of crossings and his five thousand canes and his forty-minute commute that he never complained about. But with new understanding. She had understood, standing on the fondamenta listening to the accordion, that Paolo's quietness was not the absence of expression but the presence of a different kind of expression, an expression that happened in music rather than words, in sound rather than speech, in the bellows of an accordion on a summer evening rather than the roar of a furnace on a winter morning.

He was, she understood, not quiet at all. He was loud in a different register, fluent in a different language, expressive in a medium that the furnace could not accommodate. The furnace was too noisy for the accordion. The glass was too demanding for the music. So Paolo kept them separate, crossed the lagoon twice a day, lived two lives, breathed through two instruments, and the crossing was the silence between them, the rest between the notes, the pause between the breaths.

Now, in the furnace, on a morning in late April, Paolo prepared the filigrana canes for the day's tumblers. He laid the lattimo rods on the marver -- twelve white lines on gray steel, the pattern that would become the threads inside the glass, the white that would spiral through the clear, the decoration that would make the tumbler more than a cylinder of glass, would make it a filigrana tumbler, a Fornace Venier tumbler, a piece that carried within it the ancient technique that had made Murano famous five centuries ago.

He worked in silence. Around him the furnace roared and Marco prepared the pontil and Tomaso soaked the blocks and Giulia stood by the marver watching and Chiara checked the crucible and the morning assembled itself in the order it always assembled, the hierarchy of the work, the arrangement of bodies around the fire, the choreography that had been rehearsed for years and was performed now without direction, without instruction, each person finding their position the way the glass found its shape, naturally, through the physics of the situation, through the forces that acted upon them and through them and between them.

Paolo finished the canes. He stepped back. He waited.

Waiting was the servente's art. Waiting was the capacity to be still while the world moved, to be ready while the world prepared, to hold the potential for action in the body without releasing it, the way a coiled spring held the potential for extension without extending, the way a loaded bellows held the potential for sound without sounding. Paolo waited and the waiting was not passive but active, was not empty but full, the waiting of a man who knew that his moment would come -- the soffietta would be needed, the cane would be required, the piece would need carrying -- and that when the moment came he would meet it, would step forward, would perform the action that the moment required, and then he would step back and wait again.

The morning light entered through the high windows. The vaporetto horn sounded in the canal -- the seven o'clock from Fondamente Nove, the tourist boat, the boat that brought the people who would walk the fondamenta and look at the glass in the windows and not know that behind the walls a man who played the accordion on summer evenings was standing in twelve hundred degrees of heat, holding a pair of filigrana canes, waiting for the maestro to gather, waiting for the glass to need what he had prepared, waiting with the patience of a man who crossed the lagoon every morning in the dark and who would cross it again tonight and who would sit in his kitchen on Burano and take the accordion from its case and open the bellows and play, and the playing would be the other work, the other art, the other breathing, the sound that the furnace could not make but that the furnace had taught him to make, the music that came from the same hands that held the soffietta, the same lungs that breathed the same air, the same body that crossed the same water, forward and back, forward and back, the crossing that was the rhythm, the tide that was the tempo, the lagoon that was the rest between the notes.