ATDTDA (20): Getting used to it, thanks, 574-577

[Paul Nightingale]

Continuity between sections means that Dally is the unidentified female who
meets Hunter; however, she isn't named until the last lines of the section
on 577. The opening paragraph names Merle and then Luca as mentors (574);
given the ending of the previous section, the ordering here is significant,
and subsequently Hunter reminds her of Merle, a point in his favour (575).

The section focuses on her transformation, one not too dissimilar to Kit's
since they parted company aboard the Stupendica. On 576 she tells Hunter
that [m]ost folks call me Beppo", a response to his surprise at finding out
she is female, "passing--marvellously--as a rough little street urchin". On
the previous page she has "watched the American girls, breezing along the
Riva without a care ..." etc, "wonder[ing] if she had ever stood a chance of
becoming one of them" (575). Their "straw hats" are juxtaposed to her "red
knit fisherman's cap", a form of disguise that protects her from "all male
attention but the sort directed at boys". Up the page, as she paid careful
attention, "the American girls" were only "pretending to ignore the covetous
gazes of naval officers, guides, and waiters". Her question ("had [she] ever
stood a chance ..." etc) implies its own "covetous [gaze]".

Earlier, she was distanced from the English tourists who reminded her that
she too was an outsider. They were described as "gnats ..., their purpose to
infest the Venetian summer, ... to pass quickly as they must, driven off,
forgotten" (568). Here, "she [has] grown to hate tourists and what she saw
them doing to Venice" (574). And now, such "male attention" as she does
attract is "quickly set straight" (575).

Hunter is not threatening; he might have been rejected for being both male
and English, but isn't. He reminds her of Merle, and encourages her to
expose herself ("Take off that cap ..." etc, 576), but is no sexual
predator. Evidently, his emphasis on the "microcosm of all Venice" (575, a
key passage, given the novel's preoccupation with perspective) is a
rejection of the tourist's consumption of mere surface. He remains in one
place (and will invoke something called "the neutral hour" (577); while
tourists, by way of contrast, are mobile, refusing to settle (eg, "on the
way to better-known landmarks, 574; "every visitor to the city sooner or
later passed through here", 576). They are passing through, delaying a
return to normality; whereas he is "demobilized from a war that nobody knew
about, obscurely damaged, seeking refuge from time". The city
itself--plagued, of course, by pestilential tourists--is described in
broadly similar terms: "The Campanile had collapsed a few years before and
had not yet been rebuilt ..." (575).