The Zanzariera

A mosquito net! Jan announced, as if she had just solved a differential equation.
She pulled her long, blonde hair up into a pony-tail with a neat twist of the wrist, fixed
her favourite silver barette into place, and shrugged her shoulders. Its the answer to
all our problems. Trust me.
Filippo looked up from his book and considered her latest proposal. It wasnt that
he didnt trust her judgment, because, as they both knew, she was always right about
these things. It was just that he had no idea where to find one. He hated to see her
disappointed when she set off on one of her rare, but inspired, shopping quests. He
put his book aside and tried to look more optimistic.
How do you say mosquito net in Italian? Where would you go to buy one? I
mean, what kind of store do you think would sell a...what?...a zan - za - ree - AIR - ah ?!
What a great name! A zan-za-ri-e-ra, she repeated, drawing out the zzzs and laughing
at the onomatapoeia.
She was a force of nature to be admired; there was no denying it. He would do his
best to satisfy her needs because he loved her, even if it meant traipsing all over the city
until they both dropped from heat exhaustion. He would do it because he knew that
when she got her mind set on something, she wouldnt give up until she got it. And he
would do it, of course, because he wanted her to be able to sleep at night. That was the
whole point.
It was absurd, he knew, but he felt personally responsible for the black rings
under her eyes that were becoming darker with every sleepless night. The mosquitos in

Venice were the biggest, meanest, most aggressive pests a girl with allergic skin could
ever come up against, she had solemnly assured him, which was saying alot for
someone who grew up in Canada. That, just as absurdly, filled him with an uncertain
sense of pride. At least something was bigger and better in the Old World.
So he snapped his black, leather pouch around his waist, rounded up his
sunglasses and lighter, and gave her a peck on her freckled nose. She couldnt wait for
the hunt to begin.
Where you lead, I will follow, amore mio, he told her galantly, and they headed
out into the square.
The first place she led him was to the little lingerie boutique around the corner,
with its windows stuffed with bras and panties and twenty different kinds of stockings,
with and without garter-belts.
But why there? he asked, embarrassed to go in and preferring to smoke a
cigarette outside while he waited.
Trust me, she repeated. I have a strategy.
But the lady in the lingerie boutique had no idea, and neither did the lady in the
fabric shop, nor the man in the hardware store. They were about to give up
impossible!when Filippo said he needed to buy some cigarettes. Casually mentioning
it to the tobacconists wife as he was payinga miracle!the woman replied that she
had just seen a zanzariera yesterday, a really nice one at that, and cheap, too, on sale
at the shopping center on the mainland.
When they arrived home, triumphantly, four hours later, with the glossy, plastic
package in hand, Jan wanted to celebrate their new find with their flat-mates. Anna
looked up from the couch, but was too absorbed by the Simpsons marathon on

television to pay much attention. Roberto was in the kitchen, surrounded by steaming
pots and couldnt leave his post. Fortunately, Stefano, who had worked as a gravedigger
for the past year and was the most practical of the group, was more enthusiastic. He
offered to lend his expertise to the engineering feat it took to attach the ring to the
ceiling above their bed: it only required some ingenuity, and half a roll of brown packing
tape. The white, billowing gauze now flowed down around their king-size mattress.
The three of them stepped back to admire the romantic, exotic air it lent to the
room. Filippo, lighting a well-deserved cigarette and taking a long, satisfying draw,
surveyed his handiwork from the door.
It looks like a Medusa, Stefano remarked to Filippo, who laughed and nodded.
This baffled Jan. She scrutinized its trailing, diaphanous folds, a puzzled frown
forming on her face. In her English, a Medusa was a mythical she-monster with snakes
for hair that resprouted and multiplied when you cut them down. Her literature
professor had used the Medusa figure in a talk on Freud and the Castration Complex,
she told them, which had really confused the issue in her mind by mixing up the
snakes with penises, since the Medusa was female, while castration anxiety was
supposed to be a male thing, wasnt it? That just made Filippo laugh even harder,
causing Jan some annoyance until he explained that a medusa, in Italian, is a giant,
transparent jelly-fish, that allows itself to be carried along by the sea-currents until it
meets up with its prey, stinging it with a paralyzing jolt. Jan, who had grown up in the
Great Lakes region, had never seen one. Filippo said they were very beautiful as long
they remained at a distance.
Snuggling into bed that night, they baptized the mosquito net Medusa, and Jan
was finally able to sleep at last. It took some getting used to, though. For one thing,

the opening didnt have a zipper or ties, so you had to be careful that the two borders
overlapped, laying flat on top of each other, and were tucked securely under the
mattress. Otherwise, a movement of Filippos feet while he was sleeping would open up
a gap. The first couple of nights, Jan was bitten awake at dawn, opening her tired eyes
to see a yawning chasm at the foot of the bed. Then, during the day, when they used
the bed for studying and lounging, the net had to be pulled up. That meant a
bothersome chore every evening, pulling down and coaxing the fragile fabric into place,
making sure that there were no openings for the beasts, as Jan had taken to calling
them, to slip in.
They were becoming more cunning. She had personally watched one learning
actually learning!to infiltrate itself between the two layers of the opening one night
while Filippo snored peacefully by her side. She told him the next morning that they
couldnt be normal mosquitos because they had begun to demonstrate abnormal
intelligence.
For his part, but he didnt tell her this, the netting was making it hard for him to
breathe. He had suffered terribly from asthma when he was a child and the closed,
static space inside the mosquito netting seemed to densify the heavy, humid air of the
Venetian summer. They lay awake for hours, at first, Filippo willing the pores of the
netting to open up and let some extra air in for his lungs, while Jan tracked the buzzing
of the frustrated insects in the dark as they continued, obsessively, to hit up against its
transparent walls. They were there, perched on its lacy surface, excited by the odour of
her skin and outraged that her blood was being denied to them. At least, that was how
she thought of them. It was difficult to adjust to the idea that she was safe and that
they couldnt get in, with their maddening, persistent buzzing in her ears. It was a

week before she was able to forget about them, but when she did, it was as if they had
never existed.
Soon after, some friends of Filippos unexpectedly left the city for good, passing
their apartment on to him. Jan literally jump for joy at the news. They moved into
their new place as soon as the paperwork could be signed. Stefano and Roberto helped
them load the endless boxes of books and clothes onto the hand cart that Anna had
managed to borrow from the pizzeria where she worked on weekends. Jan supervised
the packing operations and took care of the clean-up, while Filippo heroically made
four trips that scorching July day, up and down the bridges. He kept his hands tucked
in his pockets, hoping that Jan wouldnt notice his painful blisters, while she tied the
bungy cord around the handles and arranged the boxes into place for their last trip.
They said goodbye to their former flat-mates, just as the sun was going down, and
set off on the final voyage. Jan insisted on carrying the awkward mass of netting on its
big plastic ring, herself, under her arm, along with a heavy suitcase and a couple of
shopping bags. She was afraid it would be damaged in the move. Filippo tried to
suggest that perhaps they wouldnt need it anymore, seeing as their new apartment was
further away from the canals and there were no standing puddles in the garden outside
their bedroom window, as there had been in their old apartment. Jan wasnt
convinced.
So the next morning, he grappled with its formless mass once again, precariously
teetering on his toes on top of the mattress as he taped the ring to the ceiling, this time
without Stefanos expert help. She would be so delighted to see the zanzariera
hanging in place when she came home from work, he thought. And in fact, she clapped
her hands and kissed him, only later noting that he had placed it too far off to the

right, making it hard to close properly all around the bed. Neither of them felt like
taking it down and putting it up again, so it remained where it was.
When Filippo left for the month of August to work in his hometown, she started
experimenting with new ways of arranging the material, pulling it up sharply behind
the headboard andthis was the great discovery, the big innovationusing
clothespins, she was able to create ample head space and an easy-to-close opening at
the side of the bed. All the more frustrating, then, to wake up covered in those itchy,
swelling sores the next day. She began to survey the interior every night before turning
off the light, trying to understand where they were hiding, or how they were getting in.
That was when she noticed what looked exactly like a flea, but which couldnt be,
because it had wings and flew away when she poked at it as it was placidly making its
way through the net.
Then there were the little, round black flies that seemed to breed and teem out of
the drain in the bathroom floor. They didnt bite, but she killed as many as she could
anyway, before taking her showers, swatting them with a rolled up fashion magazine
that she stored behind the water-heater above the toilet.
One sweltering afternoon, having nothing else to do on her vacation, she decided
to clean out the entrance hall where they stacked their shoes and boots, mops and
brooms, and plastic water bottles for recycling. It hadnt seemed like such a daunting
task at first: just a matter of sweeping out the fine dust that continuously fell from the
decaying plastered walls, and putting some order into the things that were stored there.
But when she picked up one of the bricks stacked in the corner, something small and
furtive moved, and then something else, causing her to step back with a muffled shriek.

She had heard about, but had never seen, a Venetian scorpion before. It was
about three inches long, an inch-and-a-half across, and had two crescent-shaped
pincers, exactly like a crab, only the creature was a pale, sandy brown colour. Jan had
never been afraid of spiders. It was a matter of pride for her when she was a little girl at
summer camp, when the nasty boys used to torment her and her girlfriends by
throwing captured spiders in their faces, or sticking them down their T-shirts. At first,
she had pretended that they didnt scare her so that the boys would leave her alone;
and then, with time, she had actually gotten to like spiders and admire their spinning
arts, especially after reading Charlottes Web, in Grade Four.
But this thing didnt look like a spider at all. It looked like a pale, squashed
lobster that had climbed out of the lagoon and evolved into a land creature. Its body
was long and lithe, like a serpent, not round and plump like a spider. On the phone
that evening, when she told Filippo what had happened, he laughed and tried to calm
her.
They arent fatal, amore mio. Not like the ones in the Sahara! You mustnt be
alarmed.
But are they poisonous, do they bite, what happens to you...?
It wasnt particularly reassuring to her when he replied that, yes, of course they
were poisonous and did bite, but they wouldnt kill you, for heavens sake! That didnt
give her much comfort at all, considering what had happened. When she had struck it
with the broom, attempting to sweep it into the alleyway and out of the entrance hall,
she had thought that it had gone. A minute later, though, she had felt something
tickling her heel, and there it was, nestled in the curve of her Birkenstock sandal. That
was when she had felt a dry, hard nausea rising up from her belly, and kicking off the

sandal, began to strike it over and over again with the broom until the creature lay
mushed, in pieces, scattered about the dusty cobblestones. She was breathing hard,
but she didnt feel hysterical. She felt grim, like a soldier after winning a bloody battle.
It didnt finish there. As she continued to pull out the bricks, cleaning off their
webs one by one, she found a silverfish nest; the lone cricket that Filippo had tried to
capture some time before in the bathroom; and a number of unidentified crawling
creatures of real beauty, she had to admit to herself. They were caterpillar-ish, but with
long, flowing, hairlike antennas around their entire perimeter. She killed them all.
That night, when closing herself carefully inside the mosquito net, adjusting the
clothespins and drawing the fabric tightly under the mattress, she realized that she
finally felt protected. The scorpions and the silverfish had been eliminated. The
mosquitos presence no longer bothered her. Filippo had seen a documentary on
television a few days before and had described to her, during one of their nightly
telephone conversations, the way that mosquitos navigate.
They see the shape of the molecules given off by your odour, he had explained.
It is as if they had a radar sensing system inside them. When the shape of the
molecules fits the pattern they are built to perceive, they go towards it. They are like
tiny machines. It has nothing to do with intelligence. You just have the kind of
molecules that they adore, amore mio!
At about two in the morning, she was woken up by a strong fluttering sound in
her ears. She opened her eyes to see giant, moth-like insects, battering against the
inside of the net, trying to get out. Filippo, inexplicably, lay sleeping beside her, and
she tried to wake him up, not frightened, just excited by the fact that when she struck
the moths with the back of her magazine, they gave off bright, electric-blue impulses in

the dark. It was all very beautiful. She began to kill one, then another, then another,
until the flashing blue sparks were no more.
The frightening part came later. As she turned to lay her head back down on the
pillow, she saw a regiment of new creatures lining up at the bottom periphery of the
net, lifting it up and entering in, moving machine-like towards her. They had cats
skulls and their spines hung down from their fleshless heads, each vertabra clearly
visible from the yellow glow that they were giving off.
Jan knew that these were extra-terrestrials. They were already inside the net.
There was nothing she could do to protect herself. She screamed and began to shake
Filippo. He didnt wake up, but she did, and the creatures disappeared into the
darkness.
When Filippo came back from his month on the mainland, he was surprised to
see that the zanzariera was no longer hanging over the bed. He assumed that Jan had
decided it wasnt necessary anymore, and had stored it away in some cupboard until
the following summer. He never mentioned it to her, and she never explained where it
had gone. He was relieved, in any case, that he would be able to sleep again in the
open air. Besides, as they both knew, she was always right about these things.