Bilocations, Chapter Ten: Venice!

I realize that that title is super-lame. Sometimes it's hard. WHAT CAN I SAY? But this IS Venice. The Zombini clan is there. I know sometimes it's sort of hard to keep track of why everyone is where they are in this novel, so I will remind you that they came here because this is where you can get the best-quality trick mirrors for magicians and they want to see if they can find one that will reverse the effect where they doubled some people and now they're two people leading two separate lives. RIGHT. It turns out the Zombinis have Venetian ancestors, including Niccolò dei Zombini, and we get some background on them. Also, here's a good one: "Here, look, Elijah Zombini, master chef, first lasagna south of the Mason-Dixon, used grits instead of ricotta" (570). That sounds unbelievably horrible! Very Pynchonian, though.

So they go to this little islet, Isola degli Specchi ("Island of Mirrors") which, as you might expect, is sometimes visible and sometimes not. They tell the main guy there, Professore Svegli, about the problem. He suggests that it's like a trick where there's a mirror in a cabinet at a forty-five degree angle and to "disappear" you just hide behind it. But now we're going from a two- to a three-dimensional mirror, and people rotate in the fourth dimension. Ergo: "the doubles you report having produced are actually the original subjects themselves, slightly displaced in time" (571). Makes sense! But unfortunately, to solve the problem, you need to get both the doubles back in the box, which seems improbable.

Dally likes it in Venice, so she decides to stay there. Just based on my own travels, my immediate instinct is to wonder how that works, legally. You need some kind of resident visa? I know that the kind of restrictions we have now were not always so, however, so maybe it's irrelevant.

She makes a living there in some vague way, "putting to use the many light-handed and quick-fingered skills and the fast talk that went with them." So magician/card sharp? Perhaps! "Quite soon she had grown to hate tourists and what she saw them doing to Venice, changing it from a real city to a hollow and now and then outright-failed impersonation of itself" (574). So that's Baudrillard 101, of course, but I must say, I have to roll my eyes pretty hard at tourists (you're a TOURIST, Dally! Don't deny it!) getting all judgey about other tourists not doing it right. You JUST GOT HERE. You are not a seasoned Venitian who has any standing!

Anyway, she meets our ol' pal Hunter Penhallow, the Icelandic painter, who was last seen traveling away from the devastated city in some sort of ambiguous time-device. Maybe. "Hunter had somehow fetched up here, demobilized from a war that nobody knew about, obscurely damaged, seeking refuge from time, safely behind the cloaks and masks and thousand-named mists of Venezia" (576). So here he is. He gets Dally to model for him, which always sounds like it HAS to be a way of hitting on her, but the novel clarifies that their relationship is purely platonic.

Winter is coming, and she needs a place to stay; unbeknownst to her, Hunter has connections, so he gets her a room with "the seminotorious Principessa Spongiatosta" (582). So now she lives in a palace. Whoo! Bria Zombini--her oldest half-sister--comes to visit, but the most important other thing in this chapter is that she meets Andrea Tancredi, this anarchist painter whom she's totally hot for, of whom more will be said later. By me. And by the novel.