Pinocchio in Venice

1. ENTRANCE

On a winter evening of the year 19-, after arduous travels across two continents and as many centuries, pursued by harsh weather and threatened with worse, an aging emeritus professor from an American university, burdened with illness, jet lag, great misgivings, and an excess of luggage, eases himself and his encumbrances down from his carriage onto a railway platform in what many hold to be the most magical city in the world, experiencing not so much that hot terror which initiates are said to suffer when their eyes first light on an image of eternal beauty, as rather that cold chill that strikes lonely travelers who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Ah," he groans, staring down the long dreary platform, pallidly lit with fluorescent tubing and garish hotel advertisements and empty now but for a handful of returning skiers disappearing through the glass doors at the far end, if those are indeed glass doors and not merely the swirling fog (he is sharing in his decline the martyrdom of poor Santa Lucia for whom this barbarously functional stazione was named), "whatever was I thinking of!"

He has arrived, as do most Italians, through what foreigners, who prefer always to approach this most remarkable of landing places by sea, think of as the city's back door, but, though Italian-born himself, not by choice or custom but by the simple dictates of the deteriorating weather: the airport was fogged in, he has had to land at Milan, where snow was already beginning to fall, then take the train on from there — and in haste lest he be trapped, speeding eastward ahead of the gathering winter storm as though pursued by assassins in coal sacks. The professor, while struggling despairingly through the congestion of Milan with his impossible baggage, had consoled himself with the observation, expressed aloud unfortunately, an embarrassing habit worsening with age, that such a prolongation of the journey would at least provide him more time to adjust to this precipitous return to his native land after so many years abroad and to prepare his mind for entering what was not only, in itself, a universally acknowledged work of art, but also the setting for what he has hoped will be the culmination (just as it was once the springboard) of his own life seen in just those terms: a work of art.

For it was here one day almost a century ago, here on this island then known popularly as the "Island of the Busy Bees," that he, fallen in abject surrender to his own knees, hugged the knees of Virtue herself, and so, but for a forgettable lapse or two (that is to say, he wishes he might be able to forget them: his brief and abortive career in show business, for example, a misadventure which is still almost too painful to recall, even when, as in his latest writings, he has, through excruciating self-examination, transcended it, or sought to), set into motion a life purified of idleness and fantasy and other malignancies of the spirit, a life worthy, he hopes (and in his heart believes), of those knees he once hugged so passionately, wetting them then with tears of gratitude, his infamous nose running with the high fever of what could only be called redemptive grace.

It is this life, as much hers as his, that he is now attempting to celebrate or at least to illuminate in his newest and perhaps (for he has few illusions) final work, a vast autobiographical tapestry in which are woven all the rich, varied strands of his unique personal destiny under the single predominating theme of virtuous love and the lonely ennobling labor that gives it exemplary substance — Existenz, as a great philosopher has called it. Monographs abstracted from this work have already, to general and by now familiar acclaim, been published, but the book's conclusion, like rectitude itself in an earlier unhappier time, continues to elude him. And thus, following in the footsteps of his great exemplar and precursor Saint Petrarch, he has been drawn back to this city, somewhat impetuously if truth be told, yet explicably too, seized as he was by the sudden vivid conviction that only by returning here — to his, as it were, roots — would he find (within himself to be sure, place merely the catalyst) that synthesizing metaphor that might adequately encapsulate the unified whole his life has been, and so provide him his closing chapter. That, together perhaps with a certain restlessness of the spirit, provoked by the alarming symptoms of his onrushing illness: if not now (to wit), when?

It is this opus magnum of his, in all of its physical manifestations (on the hard disk of his portable computer, on two sets of backup diskettes, and on voluminous printout, printout so edited and re-edited — he is nothing if not a perfectionist — as to resemble a medieval manuscript), that is the principal cause of his present distress. He is able to shift it only a foot or so at a time, carrying a portion of it a few steps ahead, returning for the rest in successive trips, advancing down the windblown platform toward the station proper like a crab, and with the mood of one as well, fatigued and headachy and in something of a stupor still from his unrestful doze aboard the overheated train (in reality, the prolongation of the journey accomplished very little). Where are the porters? Perhaps it is too late. He has no idea what time it is. It is dark, but it has been dark all day. Whichever day it's been: he's not even certain about that, so numbingly interminable has this ill-considered journey become. He is accustomed on his travels to being met everywhere by younger faculty, catered to, treated with the deferential esteem due his age and scholarly distinction (only on the New York-Paris leg of his trip did it occur to him, for example, that he has not reserved a hotel room, something he has almost forgotten how to do by himself), and now, though it has been his express desire to guard his solitude and anonymity on this particular occasion, an occasion he thinks of as reverentially sentimental, a voyage into his secret heart of hearts, as they used to say back at the studio in Hollywood, he nevertheless feels somehow betrayed and quite wrongfully neglected, such that when a porter finally does appear, just as he is wrestling his bags and boxes in through the station doors, the professor, tears smarting at the corners of his eyes, blurts out at him: "Where have you been? I don't need you now, you idiot! Go away!"

"As you wish, sir," replies the porter with an obsequious bow (he is wearing the long-beaked bespectacled Carnival mask of the Plague Doctor under his blue "PORTABAGAGLI" cap, a bit of gratuitous symbolism the professor, in the grip of his strange infirmity and with his bags jammed hopelessly in the intractable station doors, could well do without), and he turns and trudges lugubriously away, pushing his empty trolley ahead of him.

The professor stares out across the desolate station, recalling a monograph he wrote early in his career on "The Tyranny of Perspectivism" and realizing with a sinking heart that he cannot even reach, on his own, the exit doors on the other side, much less some distant but as yet unbooked hotel. "Wait!" he calls out, his voice thin with petulance and self-pity (of course, the hotel will have its own boat, this city is not without its conveniences, even for the solitary traveler). The porter turns and cocks his white snout quizzically from behind his humped back. "To the tourist office, please! Come on, fellow, let's not be all night about it!"

"Can't make the step longer than the leg," mutters the porter sulkily, limping back with agonizing and perhaps mocking deliberation. "So don't fly off the hinges, padrone, he who hurries most arrives last, as they say."

"They also say that life's short, but talk's long," snaps the professor irritably as he watches the porter heave his luggage clumsily onto the trolley. "Be careful now, that's a computer — "

"There is time enough for paying and dying," the porter insists, picking up the computer and dropping it. "Ahi! Bad luck! Now you see where all your hurrying has got us! But let it be, dottore, don't make a big story out of it — we must take things as they come, life is not a path through the orchard, as the old proverb goes! Come along now!"

The professor, too exasperated to reply, follows the porter as he shuffles lamely, bent nearly double with the weight of years and heaped-up luggage (the years seem to have settled chiefly in his hindquarters), through the empty station, now echoing hollowly with recorded pop music and the porter's squeaking trolley wheels, toward the yellow tourist bureau sign at the far end. Where he has every intention of reporting the insolent scoundrel. He dropped that computer on purpose! Certain indignities are not, in a civilized world, to be tolerated, even if committed by the infirm. He is not thinking of himself, of course, a poor wretch like any other man, speaking loosely, but rather of that irreplaceable work of art, literature, and social thought of which he has been merely the medium and transmitter, as it were, the porter its temporary custodian — a work of major significance as has already been widely acknowledged, even before its publication, and one deserving of at least a minimum of care and respect. Moreover, if an insurance claim should be necessary, a report will have to have been filed; he has no choice.

But the tourist office is closed — or closing: the woman at the door is just locking up!

"Stop!" the professor cries out, stumbling foward in alarm. "A room — !"

The tourist bureau clerk, startled, drops her key, which clatters to the floor like a coffee spoon. "A room — ?" she gasps huskily, her long auburn curls fluttering in confusion. Then she drops to a squat and fumbles about frantically for the key with one black-gloved hand, blinded by the mask she wears, which seems to have been knocked askew by her sudden movements.

"Allow me, signorina," says the porter, kneeling and poking his long curled snout under her skirts, startling the professor perhaps even more than the squatting clerk, who, when the porter shouts out from beneath her, his voice muffled by the heavy canopy around his ears, "Aha! I have it!" merely echoes wheezily, "You have it?" and lurches clumsily to her feet, stepping on her hem as she does so (there is an audible rip and, as she snatches desperately at the lowering waistband with her left hand, the professor observes that the poor woman is apparently deprived of its companion) and perhaps on the porter as well, who emits a coarse muffled grunt, something about the unclean hinder parts of benighted blockheads, then emerges with his paper nose bent sideways.

There is an awkward moment then with the tourist bureau clerk looking pale and abashed (of course, this is the expression fixed upon her mask, but the professor supposes this to be a true instance of art reflecting the reality beneath the surface) and holding her skirt up with her one hand, thereby having none with which to receive the key that the porter, seemingly unable to straighten up after his long stoop, is painfully holding out to her, and it is a moment, fleetingly rigid as an old photograph (except that all three of them are trembling faintly as though in horror and acknowledgment of that very rigidity), in which the weary voyager suddenly feels, like a cold wind down his back, the terrible vulnerability of his present situation. Perhaps this is, in all its irony, the end, he thinks, perhaps I shall die here, here in this deplorably vulgar hall with its resonant banalities, its aura of meaningless departures. And this thought is not an idle one, not a self-pitying one, but a simple recognition of his failing powers, his overwhelming debilities, among which he must now include, there being no other explanation for the sheer madness of this impulsive journey, the onset of galloping senility. Oh, a fool! A fool! And soon, perhaps even, only steps short of achieving his goal (home, he is thinking, I only wished to come home!), a dead fool

"Don't tell me, cara mia," exclaims the porter suddenly, rearing up and stuffing the key, if it is a key, fiercely down the tourist clerk's frock, "that the office is closed!"

"Ah, yes, that's it!" cries the startled clerk, her curls bouncing off her shoulders as the key plummets into her bosom. "The office is closed! Closed!"

"But surely," insists the porter, "is there nothing available in all of Venice? Not a room to spare? It's the middle of winter and — "

"It's wintertime, you see, and there's nothing available," responds the clerk gruffly, clutching her skirts still, but recovering somewhat her composure. She pauses. She clears her throat, turns her head one way, then the other. "In all of Venice. Not a room to — "

"Yes, yes, I see. Which is no doubt why you were just closing up, you stupid creature," sighs the porter, bobbing his head dolefully, as though the dreadful foreboding that has overtaken the professor might just have gripped him as well.

"Er, I was just closing up," the clerk concludes as though inking in the final period, and for the exhausted traveler it is as if the entire world were closing its doors around him. In his thickening gloom, he finds himself leaning toward his luggage, as though his life were there and he wished once more to embrace it before being separated from it forever. "Because…"

"Ah, well!" exclaims the porter, suddenly perking up and lifting the professor to his feet again. "Un po' di cuore, professore, the devil is not always as ugly as he is painted! Volere č potere, as they say, what you wish shall be yours, for as fortune would have it, I heard only today of one of the great palazzi of our city being converted into a splendid new hotel, especially appointed for gentlemen of culture like yourself."

"Yes! Appointed! Culture!" echoes the tourist bureau clerk, then hobbles back a step or two as though the porter might have kicked her.

"Well, it's not perfect, of course, the renovations are still in progress," the porter says soothingly in his gravelly old voice, peering down at the ancient traveler over his bent nose, "but, given the circumstances, it seems to be a matter of eat the soup or out the window, if you know what I mean, unless you're wanting wet stones tonight for a pillow. And, as the proprietor is a friend of mine, I am certain I can, eh, pull a few strings, if you'll pardon the expression. Tomorrow something better may be found, but for tonight, professore: better an egg…"

"Yes…" Yet the old scholar seems rooted to the spot. This is not hesitation, not doubt — what choice does he have, after all? — but a simple loss of that willed power the porter, in his obliging way, has wished upon him. He feels hollowed out — unstrung, as he might have said in a former time (he shudders to think of it), his limbs loosened by fatigue and deep foreboding. He fears now that that metaphor he has come all this distance to find is to be one not of encapsulation but of erasure, not of summation but of irony and absence. He has envisioned a circle, traveling its circumference as though enacting an oracle, but he now finds himself falling helplessly through the hole in its middle. I have failed her, he thinks. I have failed her after all!

The porter takes his elbow. "All right, signore, don't stand there with your hands in your belt! Let's put the road between our legs. Or a bridge or two, as the case may be! A little need makes the old woman trot, as they say!" They bid arrivederci to the tourist bureau clerk, who for no apparent reason turns and, with great haste, walks straight into a wall. Then, together, they step out, the professor and the porter, into the bitter night. "Courage, dottore! It's just two steps away! Soon you'll be sleeping like the Pope!"

2. MASKED COMPANIONS

The Stazione Santa Lucia is like a gleaming syringe, connected to the industrial mainland by its long trailing railway lines and inserted into the rear end of Venice's Grand Canal, into which it pumps steady infusions of fresh provender and daily draws off the waste. As such (perhaps it is constipation, that hazard of long journeys, that has provoked this metaphor, or just something in the air, but its irreverence brings a thin twisted smile to his chapped lips), it is that tender spot where the ubiquitous technotronic circuit of the World Metropolis physically impinges upon the last outpost of the self-enclosed Renaissance Urbs, as a face might impinge upon a nose, a kind of itchy boundary between everywhere and somewhere, between simultaneity and history, process and stasis, geometry and optics, extension and unity, velocity and object, between product and art. One is ejected through its glass doors as through the famous looking-glass into a vast empty but strangely vibrant space, little more than a hollow echo of the magnificent Piazza at the other end of the Canal, to be sure, severe still in its cool geometry transposed from the other world and stripped of all fantastical ornament, but its edges, lapped at by the city's peculiar magic, are already blurred and mysterious, its lights hazed by a kind of furtive narcissism, its very air corrupted by the pungent odor of the nonfunctional. The corpulent Scalzi with its dingy overworked façade is, inarguably, little more than a morose impertinent shadow of its luminous counterpart at St. Mark's, the latter held by some authorities to be "the central building in the world" (and who is he, in search here of such an anchor, to dispute that? no, no, he accepts everything, everything), and across the Grand Canal, instead of the placid grace and power of the Salute at the other end, there is here only misshapen little San Simeon Piccolo with its outsized portico and squeezed dome — but even these poor creatures are monuments to locus, place-markers, far removed from the current architectural glorification of airports, superhighways, and space flight, and thus a part of the immense integral Self that is this enchanted city, after all, the Scalzi's baroque façade a kind of Carnival mask, both revealing and deceptive, the popping green bubble on San Simeon the Dwarf rising through the fog with the erotic suggestion of a Venetian double entendre.

Below the long arching stone bridge upon which the eminent pilgrim now stands, having paused a moment at the crest to contemplate this crossing, as he thinks of it, into the dark congested but alluring labyrinths of his own soul, his own core, so to speak (and to catch his breath, rest his damaged knees, vent a bit of spleen, unfray his temper; that useless fat-bottomed cretin of a porter has been unable to pull the luggage up the bridge alone, the professor has been obliged to push from behind, and more than once on the way up he caught the wily old villain with only one hand on the trolley), there would ordinarily be, as he knows, even now in the winter, a bustling traffic of water buses, barges, gondolas, private skiffs and motor launches and sleek speedboat taxis, all of them swarming in and out of the busy docks and wharves with their delectable clusters of souvenir stands and news vendors and flower stalls like bees at the hive, loading and unloading goods and people, and circled about all the while by wheeling gulls and fluttering pigeons, a most exemplary spectacle; but now it is night and the Canal is hushed and empty, save for a single light bobbing indistinctly in the cold fog or perhaps at the far side of his failing vision and, in the echoey distance, the audible rumble of a lonely waterbus sidling up to a landing stage. Not that he would have it otherwise. Perhaps it is the art critic in him, but he likes the stillness of the scene before him, its aura of motionless eternity. It comforts him. And the silence, the fog, the gloom excite him. It is as though the city, momentarily hushed by awe, were genuflecting before not him, but the nobility and solemnity of his pilgrimage. Here I am, the city seems to be saying, in all my innocence and beauty. Within my depths lies that final knowledge you seek. Enter me.

"The world is made of stairs. Some people descend them and some climb them," remarks the porter ponderously, breaking the spell. "Unfortunately, sire, we must do both."

"Yes," sighs the professor, tearing himself away from his revery (he has just been overtaken by a vague sweet memory of another time, another arrival, back when real steamers plied these waters, ferrying passengers all the way from the distant mainland where the stagecoaches and donkey carts, caravans and carriages stopped, a delicious time fragrant with friendships pledged from the heart and ripe with the prospect of endless gaiety and supreme clarity, when for a moment everything made sense), aware that the harsh icy wind has crept well inside his camelhair coat and professorial tweeds as though undressing him, preparing him for — for what? He prefers not to think about that. "I told you we should have taken a gondola," he adds crossly.

"In this weather? It is easier to find the sun at midnight, dottore," replies the porter, turning his masked eyes to the skies, which are black and heavy but faintly aglitter with damp reflected light swirling about in the wind. Below the paper snout, a long tongue lolls, seemingly real. The professor leans closer, not trusting his old eyes. "But come along now," exclaims the porter with a hasty slurp, slouching away into the shadows. "Let us pick up the old sticks, as they say, professore, it's just two steps away. You take the front end this time, and I'll — "

"What — ?! I'll do nothing of the kind!" storms the professor, outrage gripping him by the throat yet again. Really, this is too much! Moreover, that reference to old sticks has stung him to the quick. "I'm an old man, and desperately ill — I'm not allowed to lift anything! Do you hear? Are you a porter or are you not a porter? You've been hired for this job, and if you don't fulfill your obligations, I shall be forced to take the appropriate — !"

"Very well," the porter says with that mournful shrug of his, or rather has said somewhere in the middle of this lecture, pushing the trolley dutifully toward the edge of the steps meanwhile, his back bowed and nose bobbing forlornly, the professor realizing too late that his tirade, however justified, has perhaps been impolitic and interrupting it now to stumble weak-kneed toward the trolley in the vain hopes of arresting its further progress, only to see it slip out of the trembling hands of the porter and commence, just beyond his grasp, its catastrophic descent. As he clutches at the tipping trolley, his forward momentum propels him out over the lip of the stairs and into the empty space as though he meant to throw his own fate in with his cascading luggage, but the porter, with a sudden display of unwonted agility and strength, snatches him deftly by his collar and, pulling him back from the very brink, saves his life. "Mustn't throw the handle after the axe," the porter admonishes morosely, still holding the professor suspended above the top step and watching the bags tumbling as if in slow motion to the gleaming pavement far below. "If you can't save the cabbages, at least save the goat."

"I–I'm very grateful," the dangling professor whispers meekly, his heart in his throat where his regrettable rage once was, and receives, as though in reply, a stinging swat from the white cane of a blind bearded monk hurrying by. The monk, seemingly confused by this fresh information at the end of his cane, turns to swish wildly at the professor again, backs off the top step, misses the second, finds only the lip of the third, lands gingerly, cassock flying, on the fifth, his momentum propelling him to the seventh and eighth, where he strikes the one bag that has not tumbled to the bottom, and, his heels soaring gracefully now above his cowled head, completes his descent on all but his feet, yowling all the way down like a baby with colic or a cat in heat. At the bottom, where he seems to have landed on all fours, if he has four, the monk scrambles about in bewildered circles, searching for his cane, then, finding instead the professor's umbrella, rushes away without a backward glance, so to speak, disappearing down one of the dark foggy alleyways, his frantic tapping slowly trailing away into the night.

"Mezza calzetta!" the porter shouts after him. He sets the trembling professor down on his feet at last, twists his finger meaningfully at his blue hat. "That turnip-head lacks a Friday, his stupid little wheels are out of place!" He pauses, seeming to regret his outburst, tipping his head to one side, stooping lower, clasping his hands in his armpits. "Still, a holy man, a happy heart no doubt, and blind as a mole in the bargain, we mustn't hit him with the cross, even if he does lack a bit of salt in his pumpkin. Eh, dottore? No, it takes all kinds, as the saying goes, saints are more famous for feast days than brains, we can't all be blessed with square heads. Come along now," he adds, starting down, planting both feet heavily on each step, "we'd better gather up your wares before the ants carry it all away."

The professor follows the decrepit porter down the steps, keeping close to the stone balustrade, snatching up the bag the monk tripped over when the porter passes it by and dragging it along, too shaken by his recent brush with disaster to feel imposed upon or indignant, his knees weak as water still from the memory of nothing but empty space beneath them, his heart still knocking in his chest. It was not any false attachment to property that led him to that rash and potentially fatal impulse, he knows, but rather a profound unconstrainable feeling of duty toward her, a feeling nothing short of chivalric devotion, at least that was how it felt in the hot rush of the moment, foolish perhaps but genuine and selfless, as though her own survival were somehow bound up in the safety of the contents of his luggage and she herself were about to suffer the shocks and blows of that calamitous fall. And once again, he thinks, picking up his damp, battered bags at the foot of the bridge and loading them onto the trolley, I have failed her. I have brought her here and then, like a false servant, I have deceived and abused her. Metaphorically speaking, of course. "Don't make an illness of it, dottore," as the porter says now, strapping the luggage to the trolley, "everything makes broth, as they say." Yes, he is all too easily carried away by his own turns of phrase. Everything is well packed, after all, his luggage is solid and water-resistant, his computer is nested in polystyrene — all things considered, it was probably the easiest way to get everything down from up there. And even his reckless solicitude, his terrible moment of mortal peril, his pang of remorse afterwards: all this, in the end, will serve him as surely and faithfully as he serves her. "Just two steps away! Volere č potere!"

"E patire," the old traveler adds, where there's a will there's suffering, but only in jest, for in truth his spirits, since he stepped down off the bridge, have been slowly rising. The bitterness that had gripped him in the railway station and then followed him up the Scalzi bridge seems gradually to be melting away, as though his own hard geometry, brought along from America like a kind of shield, or at least a badge of identity, were now being lovingly dissolved in the coiling Venetian fog. As the ancient bent-backed porter takes up the trolley once more and leads him down a narrow passageway overhung with balconies and laundry and dim yellow lamps, he feels something like ecstasy overtaking him, an unfettered, unreasonable joy, unlike anything he has known since childhood. He is here! He is home! The way is tortuous and complicated, and there are more bridges, they must wrestle his baggage up steps again and down, but the effort, far from annoying him or aggravating his fatigue, seems to give him increasing pleasure, as though the deeper they plunge into the shadowy labyrinth, the more replenished are his reserves of energy and strength.

On the crest of one small bridge, he lets out such a sigh of rapture (what is it? the row of little boats snuggled against the wet narrow fondamenta glowing in the dim misty light? that distant bridge, delicate and pale, rising through the wisps of fog? the rosy cast of the light near that wall with all its overlapping shades of faded red and the little, metal fountain near its base, trickling water from a lion's jaw? or just the little bridge itself whereon he stands as at a rostrum or a pulpit, the dark canal water slipping past beneath him like hushed subversive laughter? all! all! and more!) that the porter turns to him in alarm and, staring quizzically at his nose, asks: "Are you all right, professore?"

"Yes, yes! Is it much further?"

"Just two steps away," the old fool says again, as he's been saying all along, and in truth, though he's cold and his feet are wet and his poor knees are killing him, the old professor feels that this long walk has really been no more than "two steps," the porter's figurative evasion being truer than he can possibly know. Indeed, so entrancing has this homecoming been, so sweet this trek (above him now, a shutter creaks in the wind, and, glancing up into the fog, he sees a bearded god gazing benignly down upon him from a door lintel, its stone face whitewashed, or perhaps so decorated by roosting pigeons, and he feels almost as though he were receiving some sort of benediction, greeting, some fraternal signal of recognition), he almost wishes it could go on forever.

When he again finds himself on the same bridge as before, however, gazing at the same boats, the same distant bridge and damp red wall, sees again there the same torn poster flapping in the wind, the same peculiar misspelled graffiti announcing "JUVE! VIVA I BALOCCI!" and — faded but still visible — "ABBASSO LARIN METICA!" some of the magic fades as well. "Haven't we been this way before?"

"You speak, dottore?"

"I say, we seem to be going in circles! We've been on this bridge before!" He wonders now if this is only the second time. One of his elbows suddenly pains him sharply and his feet, he realizes, have gone numb with cold. He can feel his old childhood terror of the dark creeping up on him behind his back. Is this a trap?

"Venice is not like other cities," the porter explains soberly, easing the trolley down off the bridge. "To reach some places you must cross a bridge twice." His voice seems to be disappearing into the night. "Come now, no need to blacken your liver over bagatelles, padrone, we're almost there."

"Two steps away, I suppose?" he shouts scathingly after the porter, then clambers down the bridge and hurries after him, afraid of being left behind. Which way did he go? He can hear the trolley wheels screaking, but the sound seems to be coming from three directions at once.

"Ipso facto!" comes the distant voice, hollow as an echo on water, and as he turns out of a narrow underpass to follow it (why does he feel like something is chasing him? is it that bearded mascaron with his cadaverous veil of bird droppings — ?!), the professor sees the porter standing in front of a dimly lit mansion at the far end of a long stony footway fronting on a dark canal. The devil seems to have managed the last bridge on his own; the professor, even unburdened, can barely drag himself over it. "Move your pegs, professore! We've arrived like cheese on macaroni! The room is yours, but let's not be all night about it!"

The flush of annoyance aroused by this mockery is immediately tempered by his great relief at not having been abandoned after all. Had he really thought he might be? To his discredit, yes. This city, he knows, has other names. "The extent of the step, I'm afraid, is governed geometrically by the length and triangulation of the bodily members in question," he mutters gamely with what good humor his terrible exhaustion still grants him, and, limping creakily up the damp riva toward the dim flickering light, discovers that he has indeed been brought to an old palazzo, not a very beautiful one perhaps, faded and battered and quite homely and plain, with an air not so much of decay as of quiet discouragement, as if it had rather missed its career, its watersteps greasy and green with mold, its doorway blackened as though it might have been gutted by fire, the damp stony hall within lit by nothing more than a pair of plumber's candles, but a real Venetian palazzino for all that, gloomy and stately with characteristic pilasters and arches all over the front of it and stone balconies from end to end. His bags have already been moved inside, where the porter — clearly he has misjudged the old fellow (though he's afraid to guess how much all this personal portage is going to cost him) — awaits him now beside an individual dressed in the city's traditional white bauta mask, black cloak, and three-cornered hat, the two of them matching the dilapidated old palazzo in gloom and stateliness with their ghostly beaked faces and stooped figures. He hadn't expected to see so many masks this long before Carnival, but he has read about the recent enthusiasm for this ancient custom, and, for all its vulgarity and promiscuous connotations, he is secretly pleased, for it recalls for him quite piercingly that long-ago time of his own beginnings, call them that, allegedly innocent yet somehow wicked (what penance he has done for that!), certainly happy, and now under such close scrutiny in his current work-in-progress.

"If you'd care to sign in, please," says the porter, standing before an old wooden table with the two candles on it, and the person in the bauta, the hotel manager no doubt, thrusts an old stick pen with a splayed point at him and repeats this in a rather horrible cavernous voice, befitting the macabre austerity of his costume: "Would you please care to sign in?"

"It's rather cold," the professor remarks, taking up the pen and gazing about. The huge dark hall, which runs the length of the building, opening out onto what is apparently a garden at the rear, is empty save for two boats parked on dollies and this wooden table. There is an intense unmistakable odor of cats and a glutinous damp darkness all about. "Are you sure — ?"

"The rooms upstairs of course are all heated," the porter assures him with an impatient sigh. "Come along now, professore, when you're between the door and the wall, don't try to look for the hair in the egg. You're showing the rope, I know, but a little supper, a glass of wine, and you'll soon be in fine leg!"

"A fine leg!" repeats the hotel manager.

"I'm not hungry," grumbles the professor, taking up the pen, though he's not sure of this, being too tired even to think about it. "I just want to get to bed."

"Ah well, appetite comes with the eating, dottore, as the saying goes. And my friend, not knowing you were coming, has only just put the heat on in your room," he seems to flick a foot out and give the hotel proprietor a kick on the shins, for the bauta mask dips abruptly and there is a grunt from behind it. "It will take a little while for it to warm up."

"I just put the hee-hee-heat on in your room," mewls the hotel manager, hobbling around in a small circle. "It will take a while to, eh, to, eh…"

"Besides," adds the porter, leaning closer to whisper in his ear: "the repast is included in the price of the room." The traveler, however, is staring in some amazement at the hotel manager's missing hand, the stump of which has just bobbed out from under the cloak to thump the table (it now ducks back in again): so many handicapped citizens in this town! Maybe it's the damp weather, all those miserable bridges, the slippery steps… "The war, you see," explains the porter, evidently following his startled gaze. "The Resistance. A national hero! This fellow, I tell you, this fellow has the heart of a Caesar!" The hotel proprietor modestly turns his masked head away, sweeping a candle to the floor with his remaining hand. The porter rocks forward and whispers in the professor's ear with a breath dizzyingly foul: "And the balls of Caesar's wife!" He chortles wheezily, then, straightening up, adds: "But come along now, it's time to go bend the proverbial elbow, professore. The kitchen is not yet in operation here, but there is an arrangement with a little inn just two steps away, where you cannot tell the polenta from Saint John's halo and there is at least as much wine in the wine as water. We will direct you there, but they will be closing soon so we must burn the laps. Animo! Don't worry about your bags, they will be waiting in your room for you when you return."

"Well…" Something is bothering him about all this, but he cannot think what it might be. He almost cannot think at all. He stares at his luggage, spread out in a heap on the cold stone floor like a careless jotting, his umbrella lying at one end like the line at the bottom of a long sum. Ah… "How much for all this? What do I owe you?" He is prepared for the worst, though admittedly, with the securing of his room here, the worst, in truth, is no longer the worst. But the porter merely shrugs, and it is a gesture so deeply iconic it almost brings tears to the professor's eyes. It means nothing, of course. And everything. Only rarely, in one "Little Italy" or another across America, has he seen its like. Perhaps the Plague Doctor's mask with its painted half-smile has intensified it: for it is an act of ultimate submission as well as negotiation, an acceptance, in effect, of mortality itself. There is a profit to be made, but the profit belongs to the act itself, not to the mortal through whose hands it is temporarily passing. The professor also shrugs, a different kind of shrug, one that says: Yes, we understand each other, I am a poor man, my fashionable camelhair coat which has caught your cunning eye notwithstanding, but not so poor that you do not fancy yourself a handsome return at my expense before we both must die. Yes, it is going to be a very daring figure. The professor, anticipating, not without a certain appetite in spite of his desperate weariness, a long ceremonial haggling, counts out a modest sum, fair but admittedly mean, and hands it to the porter.

To his amazement, the porter hands part of it back. "The dottore is too generous," he says. "I take what comes, to be sure, when the horse is given, one must not sound the teeth, but, alas," he sighs regretfully, "there are regulations, and this is more than they allow. I cannot afford to risk, at my age, you will understand…" He ducks his head as though winking behind his mask. "But perhaps the professore will invite us all to a small drop of wine at dinner…"

"Then the room — ?"

"It is nothing," the porter says with a dismissive gesture.

"Nothing," says the hotel manager.

Which means it's going to cost him an arm and a leg — or an eye out of his head, as they say here — but, under the circumstances, it's cheap at twice the price, especially given the miserable condition of these afflicted parts of his. Though he cannot remember when he last ate, he truthfully has no appetite, but he dreads the chill and loneliness of his room and something deep within him — part peasant, part adopted Yankee — rebels against the idea of turning down a free meal. Besides, the thought of a glass of wine greatly appeals to him just now, a little Prosecco maybe or a sparkling Marzemino, a kind of effervescent libation, as it were, to consecrate his heroic return and to invoke a blessing upon his solemn quest. There are wines here from the Euganean Hills and the Friuli, from the Tyrol and the Piave and the Alto Adige, all but unavailable elsewhere in the world, wines he hasn't tasted since childhood — Refoscos and Amarones, Blauburgunders, Franciacortas and young Teroldego Rotalianos with their almondy bitterness, lush Albanas, Pinot Grigios, pale Tokais from Lison, Traminers, and golden Picolits, sweet Ramandolos: their very invocation resounds like a benison in his ancient head. "Well, two steps, then," he says with a crooked smile. "What are we waiting for? While the dog scratches himself, the hare goes free. As the saying goes. Andiamo pure!"

3. THE GAMBERO ROSSO

It has begun to snow. At first just a flake or two like a fleeting dispatch sent from the world he has left behind, vanishing as quickly as glimpsed. Then a steadier fall, gently swirling, touching down, lifting up, touching down again, until the little square, or campo, outside the steamy window of the Gambero Rosso is aglow with a dusting of the purest white. Like a crisp clean sheet of paper, he thinks, and he is struck at the same time by the poignancy of this metaphor from the old days. For paper is no longer a debased surrogate for the stone tablets of old upon which one hammered out imperishable truths, but rather a ceaseless flow, fluttering through the printer like time itself, a medium for truth's restless fluidity, as flesh is for the spirit, and endlessly recyclable. The old professor sits there at the little osteria window, alone now with his reveries and musings, sipping the last of the fine grappa the landlord has offered him (he has forgotten how lovely the people are here, his people after all, to the extent he could be said to have any: how pleased he is to be among them again!) and staring out on the softly settling snow, letting himself be gradually submerged in a sweet melancholic languor. His erstwhile companions, perhaps sensing the onset of this pensive mood, have graciously slipped away for the moment, the porter to guide the blind hotel proprietor back to prepare the professor's lodgings for the night and to move the luggage up before returning for him here. Yes, blind as well as maimed. Upon leaving the hotel to come here, the unfortunate creature walked straight out the door and down the watersteps into the canal. "Now look what you've done! You've got your feet all wet!" the porter had scolded, pulling him out, and the hotel manager had whined: "My feet are all wet!" Which for some reason had made the professor laugh, made them all laugh. Then they had come here together, the ancient traveler in the middle holding both of the hobbling locals up, feeling quite jolly and youthful in spite of himself.

They had met no one en route except for a poor deranged drunk, shouting to himself in an empty campo, lamenting the hammerings he had taken and excoriating a no doubt imaginary untrue lover as though she were present, a deplorable reminder that even here, in the noblest of settings, loathsome disorderly lives are possible, beauty being no proof against asininity. Virtue, he had written (the line is now in Bartlett's) in his pioneering transdisciplinary work, The Transformation of the Beast, a "lucid and powerful prose epic in the tradition of Augustine and Petrarch," as it was widely heralded, standing as a fortress against the false psychologism of the day (there was perhaps in this work a youthful fascination with beastliness rather than its transcendence, since successfully purged, but it remained to this day the most convincing composite image of the Genius-in-History), is sanity. Indeed it would have done the crazy man in the campo no harm, what with all his ravings about untamable beasts and savage natures untouched by kindness and unredeemable evil fates (or fairies, his slurred ramblings were ambiguous), to have read that book before falling victim to his own self-fulfilling prophecies: natures do remain just as they first appear if they are completely mad. However, the poor creature, storming up and down a bridge over and over as though in the forlorn hope, a hope repeatedly renewed even when repeatedly baffled, that it might one time translate him to greater heights — up into one of Tiepolo's sky-high parades perhaps, though nothing so fair was above him now — did succeed in startling the professor as they passed by with what amounted to a demented paraphrase of another of his famous sayings, this one from the book the world best knows him by, The Wretch, his first essay in unabashed autobiography, stark precursor to Mamma, his current work-in-progress. Originally little more than a film treatment, notes for a storyboard, as it were, The Wretch had evolved into a program guide to the completed motion picture, sold in the lobbies, and from there into a comprehensive best-selling assault upon all the heretical modern and eventually postmodern (he was a man ahead of his time) denials of what in a famous coinage he called "I-ness," a masterpiece whose single message (other than learning not to be naughty and helping one's parents when they are sick and poor) was that each man makes himself and thus the world: "Character counts!" "Making makes the made mad!" is what the poor devil cried in his delirium, his voice eerily hollow as though coming from the other world. "Crackers! Curses! Listen to me and go back home!" Then he rushed to a church wall and beat his dark bony head against it, wailing forth his "Woe! Woe! Woe!" ("Guai! Guai! Guai!" — or maybe it was "Cry! Cry! Cry!") and eliciting from the beak-nosed porter in his role as the Plague Doctor the laconic remark: "That's what happens to people who get all their ideas on one side of their head, dottore: it tips their brains over."

He has been introduced here at the Gambero Rosso as un gran signore, and in truth has been treated as such by the beaming host, who seems to be chef, waiter, barkeep, and master of ceremonies all in one, as liberal with his wine as with his chatter, accepting their incongruous lot with that democratic grace and forbearance typical of the people of these islands, so leery of popes and kings alike, even joining them briefly for a plateful of stuffed pig's trotters and a Pinot Bianco from Collio, much recommended and indeed nothing amiss. On entering this simple inn with its yellow painted walls and tattered football posters and plastic wine barrels, he had felt suddenly that he had been here before, not in this particular osteria of course, nothing so mawkishly improbable as that — rather, it recalled for him all those village osterias of his childhood, too long forgotten, this one now their quintessence. What was it? A certain rancidity in the frying oil perhaps, the scrape of the cheap chairs on the wooden floors, the frayed napkins, a sharpness to the Parmesan on the tripe — whatever it was, he was overtaken by a sudden sorrow, and a sudden joy, as though life itself were reaching out for him in one last loving embrace, an embrace in which he feels himself still happily, if wistfully, enfolded.

Unable to sham an appetite which has utterly abandoned him in his weariness and excitement, the professor has nibbled at all the dishes for old times' sake yet eaten little, suffering, as it were, a mental indigestion of memories and anticipations churned up in the language by which he means to capture it all, the individual words springing up and flowering now in his head like golden coins on a magic tree, all atinkle with their manifest profundity and poetry. Zin! zin! zin! they go. I should be taking notes, he thinks. The blind hotel proprietor, likewise, complaining of a "grave indisposition of the gut, as it is called," said he could eat very little, settling in the end for a few modest portions of mullet al pomodoro, grilled cuttlefish, sea bass baked in salt, razor clams, and stuffed crabs, the house specialty, and finishing with sweetbreads and mushrooms, plus a simple risotto with sliced kidneys trifolato, smoked eels, and prawns with chicken gizzards and polenta, all of it consumed noisily from beneath the grim visor of his bauta mask, pressed upon his plate like a pale severed head, his one black-gloved hand left free thereby to clutch his glass, from which he seemed not so much to drink the wine as to snort it.

The porter, contrarily, protesting that the night's exertions had aroused in him a most woeful discomfort in the stomach that closely resembled appetite, declared that he intended to consume at one sitting all that the liberality of il buon dottore had bestowed upon him, down to the last quattrino, speaking in the old way, and in demonstration of this proclamation proceeded to devour monumental quantities of tortellini and cannelloni, penne all'arrabbiata, rich and tangy, spaghetti with salt pork and peppers, heaps of thick chewy gnocchi made from cornmeal, tender pasticcio layered with baked radicchio from Treviso, pickled spleen and cooked tendons (or nervetti, as they call them here, "little nerves," slick and translucent as hospital tubing), bowls of risi e bisi and sliced stuffed esophagus (the professor skipped this one), fennel rolled in cured beef, and breaded meatballs with eggplant alla parmigiana. His doctor unfortunately having put him on a strict regimen (and here the masked porter patted his overflowing hips plaintively), he was denied the pleasures of the fish course, but he was able, in all good conscience, to round off his evening's repast with a dish of calf's liver alla veneziana, wild hare in wine sauce with a homely garnishing of baby cocks, beef brains, pheasants, and veal marrow, a small suckling lamb smothered in kiwi fruit, sage, and toasted almonds, and a kind of fricassee of partridges, rabbits, frogs, lizards, and dried paradise grapes, said to be another famous specialty of the house and particularly recommended for persons on stringent diets. "Ah, that was its own death!" he exclaimed on crunching up the last of the little birds, his gravelly old voice greased now to a mellow rumble. "I'm full as an egg!"

Of course there was an abundance of wine to be had with all this food, for as the porter put it: "You can't build a wall without mortar, professore!" True, true, and, given the hearty generosity of the hotel manager in providing such a feast, even if he himself in his jet-lagged condition was able to enjoy so little of it, how could he refuse them all a few simple bottles, especially since in this respect at least he was able to join in the festivities. Indeed, it was the delicate whisper of a fizzy Cartizze from Valdobbiadene, the soft cheeky blush in a Pinot Grigio from the Veneto, the meaty brusqueness of a young Friulian Refosco, the tangy, faintly sour aroma of a spilled bottle of Venegazzu Riserva as it spread through the tablecloth stiffened with stains (not to mention the evaporation of his own reserve as the wines coursed through his age- and travel-stiffened limbs: good wine makes good blood, as they say here) that most pungently drew him back to the drama of his origins, leaving him now in this delicious metaphysical torpor, blessed as it were with purposeful idleness, at rest in the face of perfection — the very indolence in effect of Paradise itself, wherein self-knowledge is not pursued but intuitively received: seek not and (a belch arises from some deep inner well like a kind of affirmation of the pneuma, and he welcomes it, clothing it in his spirit as it climbs toward the world, hugging it to his heart as he might a child, caressing it at the back of his throat as though to hone its eloquence, releasing if finally with a kind of tender exultation:) — WUURRRP! — and ye shall find

"How's that, signore? You have lost something?"

"Ah! No, I said, I feel fine! Another round, my friend — while we wait!"

Though he shouldn't, of course. Thinking out loud like that, always worse when he's had a couple, but the magic of this moment and this place has him utterly entranced, and he wants to prolong the moment, to reach, if he can, the very dizzying heart of that enchantment. This, this, is what I have come back for, he thinks, sipping the pale grappa with its stalky aroma, its harsh green flavor, faintly reminiscent of winter pears and vanilla, his father's favorite drink. The old man brewed it himself, aging it under the stairs in an old oak barrel black with antiquity, and every week Maestro Ciliegia, as they called him because of his notorious love for grappa and the cherrylike nose it conferred upon him (he can't remember his real name, it doesn't matter), would drop by with a little something for them, some fried pastry or a basket of figs or a few scraps of firewood, and his father would invite him in then for "a drop of riserva," as he called it, dignifying it in that way, Maestro Ciliegia protesting all the way to the barrel. Then they would pull the broken-down table up to the cot and the rickety old chair up to the table, and commence a game of bazzica with cards as soft as empty pockets, or sometimes a chess match with little pegs and splinters only they knew how to identify, Maestro Ciliegia reminding his father each week that if he would only bring the table over to his workshop he would put a new leg on it, his father replying each week that the last time he visited that place he got pregnant, he would rather live with a ruined table than a ruined reputation. There would be more trips to the grappa barrel and sooner or later a piece would seem to move by itself on the chessboard or a card would magically turn up twice in one round, the joking would turn to insults, the words to pokes and punches, and soon the room would be a shambles, both men scratched and bruised, their ears and noses bit, their buttons torn off and their wigs scattered, and then from somewhere under all the rubble, his father would say: "Another drop, Maestro Ciliegia?" "One more spot perhaps before I go."

The Gambero Rosso landlord, yawning, fills his glass once more. Is this a gift or has he just asked for it? In either event, he thanks him, returning his yawn and feeling somewhat abashed. What is happening to him? It is as if the force of his reason and of a discipline which he has practiced since youth has suddenly abandoned him. In his time, it is true, he was young and raw; and, misled by his greenness and his admittedly peculiar identity crisis, he blundered in public. He lumbered about, he stumbled, he exposed himself, he offended against caution and tact. He has written about all this in The Wretch. But he renounced vagabondage and rebellion and idle amusements, and so, through discipline, has acquired that dignity which, as all the world insists, is the innate good and craving of every moral being; it could even be said that his entire development has been a conscious undeviating progression away from the embarrassments of idleness and anarchy, not to mention a few indelicate pratfalls, and toward dignity. Indeed, he is one of the great living exemplars of this universal experience, this passage, as it were, from nature to civilization — from the raw to the cooked, as one young wag has put it — or, as he himself has described it in his current work-on-hard-disk in the chapter "The Voice in the Would-Pile," "from wood to will." And now, suddenly, that voice has returned to haunt him, as though to avenge its long confinement by reclaiming, as his own powers weaken, its mischievous autonomy. Nor is that the worst that has beset him. What is most alarming is that — pain, sorrow, and the door on top, as the porter might say: if it's not one thing, it's another — he is turning back to wood again. It is poking out now at his knees and elbows, he can see it, bleached and twisted and full of rot, maybe even a worm or two. He can also see the osteria landlord standing in front of him with his camelhair coat over his arm and a long piece of paper. He stares up at him quizzically, lowering his sleeves and pantlegs.

"You said something about paying, signore, and to show you the door."

"Ah." His grappa is gone, though he doesn't remember drinking it. His stomach is not turning to wood, it feels like a soft collapsing bag, burbling indelicately now from under his napkin. "Of course." He stands, bumping the table, but luckily there's nothing on it left to spill. He'd rather sit for a while longer, it's quite peaceful here really, but he's too humiliated to admit it. "That's exactly what I said." But he can hardly say even that. Said, he said "said," he heard that part himself, it's still ringing in his mind, but he is not sure about the rest. He is reminded, as he stands there weaving from side to side, of certain particularly odious faculty luncheons of the past. Yes, I could use a digestive walk, he thinks, hoping he is only thinking it. He reaches for the bill, but the landlord seems to be waving it about. He pauses, studying its movements, the patterns (he has always been particularly skillful at discerning patterns), then, with an abrupt lurch that sends his chair flying, snatches it: "Got you!" he laughs. But he can't read it. Must have the wrong glasses on. He asks the landlord to explain it to him. "Just the general principles," he says with a generous wave of his hand. It seems he is paying for all three suppers. The figure is astronomical. Of course all sums expressed in Italian lire are astronomical. You have to take off three or four zeros, he can't remember which. And his hotel bill will be credited, the landlord says. That's his understanding. The landlord removes the requisite banknotes from his wallet, which the professor seems to have given to him for this purpose. There is apparently just enough to cover the bill, which is a good thing because he left his credit cards and traveler's checks back at the hotel. His good friends had not wanted to pay the bill for fear of implying he was not at liberty to have all he wanted to eat and drink, the landlord explains, handing the empty wallet back. It might have been an insult to a gentleman like himself. "I would not have minded the insult," the professor says grandly. He has one arm in a sleeve of the coat but cannot find the other one. The other sleeve, that is. He knows where the arm is. "In fact, it would have given me — bwrrpp! — scusi! — considerable pleasure." He has found the sleeve, but now he has lost the arm. This is because the first arm is in the wrong sleeve, or anyway that is the landlord's interpretation of the dilemma, an interpretation that proves functional if perhaps overly simple, for no sooner is it enunciated than both arms and both sleeves appear in their proper places. Whereupon a certain magic ensues: the professor finds himself, seemingly without transition, out in the snowy campo, all alone, bundled up in his coat and muffler, the Gambero Rosso behind him locked and dark, and such an immaculate silence all about that he can actually hear the snow falling upon other snow.

4. NIGHT OF THE ASSASSINS

He is lost. Lost, frightened, bewildered. And freezing his bark off. Somehow he has left his German fedora with its little bluebird feather in the headband back at the osteria, and his head, bald as an egg and becoming, alas, even balder, went completely numb under its peaked bonnet of snow before he discovered it. He brushed away the snow and wrapped his frozen pate then in his Andean llama-wool scarf, tying it under his chin like an old woman's shawl, and that has left his flimsy chest exposed. Ah, what misery! His calfskin gloves are gone, he knows not where. His twice-imported Italian shoes — he has always joked back in America that he liked to keep both feet in the homeland — have proven useless in this weather, leaving his feet soaked and aching from the cold, the thin leather taking a no doubt terminal beating. He might as well be barefoot. Hadn't someone he once knew died of fatal chilblains of the feet? Forsaking his pride finally and throwing himself upon the charity of his fellow creatures, he has rung a doorbell in a deserted campo, crying out in his despair for help or a warm hat or at least the loan of a city map, only to have a window open up and a bucket of water, or what he hoped was water, be thrown on him as if he were a potted geranium. Others in the square shouted out obscenities from behind darkened windows like a hostile audience from behind the footlights, even threatening to bring the police, and he screamed back at them, calling them all a lot of bloody assassins and murderers, shrieking and squawking in an altogether undignified manner unfortunately, overtaken momentarily by a fit of blind fear and rage. Or perhaps not so momentarily, for his heart still feels caught in the grip of that icy fist as he goes staggering through the white night, up and down the steps of bridges he cannot even see, across barren squares and through frighteningly narrow defiles, pursued by a fierce wind that whips around him from all directions, his spectacles frosted over and his wet clothes crackling now with ice crystals, unable to remember very clearly anymore exactly what he's looking for, even if he could see it should he miraculously come upon it. Something about a blackened doorway. But under the blown snow, all the doors look blackened. He feels utterly abandoned in a world without mercy or even logic. How he wishes he had left the osteria together with his "dear friends," as they liked to flatter themselves, instead of lingering for that last glass of grappa!

Yet how delightful it had seemed at first! He had stood for a moment in the radiant little square in front of the Gambero Rosso, one of those enchanting and forsaken places which lie in the interior of Venice as though within a secret fold, accessible only to intimates, his own interior aglow still from the generous infusions, thinking how right he had been to come back here! Here to this "vast and sumptuous pile," as a famous militarist once called it, this "peopled labyrinth of walls," magical, dazzling, and exquisitely perplexing, this "paradise of exiles!" She who called herself the Serenissima. Only hours before, he had been sitting in his lonely office back at the university at the end of the Christmas break, struggling to come to grips with the realization that his epic tribute to his beloved shepherdess and cynosure, thought concluded, was not. The "final" chapter was not the final chapter, after all. Something was missing. It was, like the stark New England landscape outside his office window, too cold, too intellectual, too abstract. Too empty. In his intransigent pursuit of the truth he had somehow neglected — virtue, truth, and beauty being, in the end (which was where, in the book at least, and in life too no doubt, he was), one and the same — the senses. Whereupon he was suddenly struck by a most remarkable vision, sensuous yet pure, of this very place, which his mentor Petrarch, who had preceded him here as though to show the way, rightly called the "noblest of cities, sole refuge of humanity, peace, justice, and liberty, defended not so much by its waters as by the prudence and wisdom of its citizens," and which appeared to him in that moment in flesh tones as delicious as those of Giorgione or Tiziano. He reached out and, seemingly without transition, by the miracle of flight, here, his hands still outstretched, he was! He felt so happy just then that tears came to his eyes, tears now frozen on his face and pricking him like vicious little thumbtacks, but then warm and titillating as they ran down his cheeks and nose, and as purifying as the snow frosting the delicious little campo, turning the stone cylindrical wellhead in the middle into a kind of large pale lantern. "Ah! Che bel paese!" he cried aloud. If his knees hadn't been hurting him so, he might have knelt down and kissed it.

He had easily discovered the route back to the hotel and set off, expecting at every turn to meet the bent back and broken beak of his lugubrious guide, returning for him, and meanwhile enjoying his digestive walk, as he thought of it, rejoicing in the luminous spectacle of Venice in the snow and laying plans for the morrow when he might encounter once again — in the flesh, as it were, the unblighted flesh — his old friends Giambellino and Giorgione, Titian and Tintoretto, Carpaccio, Lotto, Veronese, and all the rest. For it was with them it all began. Once all the other beginnings were over, that is. Now he is better known for intellectual works of a tougher order such as Sacred Sins or Art and the Spirit, his devastating indictment of theatricality and amateurism in the plastic arts, but it was through the great masters of the Venetian school that his scholarly career, then as an art critic and historian, originally — as they say in the Other World — "took off" (here only the pigeons would understand such an expression, and they would not mean the same thing by it), with his seminal studies on illusionism, transfiguration, and the motif of the ass in Venetian paintings of the life of Christ.

He was first drawn to the study of art, being self-taught in this as in all subjects, by a painting on the wall of his father's little room under the stairs. His father was a poor man, unable to afford even a fireplace or a kettle, so he had painted one, or had had one painted, on the wall, with a fire lit under the kettle that looked just like a real fire, a cloud of steam coming out of it that looked just like real steam, and a kettle lid so convincing he nearly splintered his fingers trying to take it off before he discovered the illusion. Locked in often by his loving but, it must be said, ill-tempered father, and with little more to eat than pear cores and his own hat, he had ample time to study this trompe l'oeil, learning something therefrom about the function of appetite in scholarship (he has often argued that more interesting than the things that are studied by mankind is the infinite catalogue of things that are not), the implications of the wall (surfaces are not passive!), and the power of raw color upon the imagination: he found, on bitter days, he could actually warm himself by that painted fire, and indeed, even now, it might comfort him and still the rising panic in his heart.

For he does not want to die. Not yet. Not with just one more chapter to go. But the choice may not be his. He is nearing exhaustion. He no longer knows if he is walking or crawling. He cannot feel his hands and feet. The snow is everywhere, in his face, down his back, inside him as well as out — snow and the deep night, for the world is weirdly white and pitch black at the same time, just as his mind has gone blank and his spirits horribly dark. Somehow he has made a wrong turn. Probably more than one. He climbed that last bridge, expecting to see the old palazzo and its charred doorway, all warmly lit up and waiting for him, but it was the wrong bridge. He retraced his steps, but soon they disappeared under the fresh snow. He tried to find his way back to the Gambero Rosso, but the fold had closed. So his search became more random, more frenzied. His knees began to give way. Passages beckoned that, like his father's trompe l'oeil, were not ones, and he smacked his face on them. Or they let him in, then dead-ended in mazelike traps occupied by prides of mad squalling cats. He hobbled painfully over slippery bridges that led only to locked and darkened doors. He cried out for help, got doused, reviled.

Now he wants to stop but he cannot, he is too afraid. It is as though he is running not toward something, but from it. If he bumps into something, he jumps back as though struck; if he stumbles toward the edge of a canal yawning out of the swirling white night below him, he feels pushed. All the old childhood traumas have returned and he recalls with renewed terror that night in the woods when he was set upon by murderers who chased him, caught him, knifed him, hung him, a night that has haunted him all his life and haunts him now, driving him through this befuddling network of alleyways and squares like the pursued heroines in gothic movies. Except that he lacks the heroines' youthful strength. When he was just a little sliver, as his father liked to call him, he used to be able to run all day like a hare before hunters, to zip up and down trees, scale cliffs, leap hedgerows at a single bound — indeed, on that "Night of the Assassins," as it has come to be called, he delayed his capture by leaping a wide canal of filthy water the color of a cold cappuccino just like these, his would-be killers falling in — patatunfete! — when they tried to follow — but now, far from leaping one of these wretched ditches, he cannot even pull himself over their bridges. He can barely walk. He is feeling, oddly, seasick. His head is pounding. He is beginning to turn in smaller and smaller circles.

But wait! What was that — ? Something behind him? He stops dead in his tracks, stooped over, his knees knocking, sour breath tearing from his ancient ill-made lungs, afraid to turn around and look. All about him there is a deep hush, almost as though the whole island were frozen up, holding its breath, he can hear nothing but his own desperate snorting and the tormented creaking of his knees — and then suddenly a terrible flutter as of a thousand assassins comes roaring up out of the night, swooping down over him and away, and he screams and nearly jumps out of his skin, what's left of it. As his scream dies away, he can hear them, or it, circling back, so, terror reviving him — this is real! — he takes off down a narrow calletta, praying only that the little alley doesn't end in watersteps. Whatever it is that's after him — just a bevy of desperate pigeons caught out in the snow, he tells himself, but he doesn't believe it, pigeons aren't that stupid, for this kind of stupidity it takes a Ph.D. - chases him right down it, he can hear it, or them, bearing down on him, bellowing mightily, or maybe cursing (it sometimes sounds like belching), wings slapping and scraping the crumbly old brick walls, sending loose chips raining down, rattling the drawn wooden shutters, jostling flowerpots out of window boxes — no wonder this place looks so beat-up!

He emerges, dangerously, into an open square, no place to hide, the huge wings paddling away overhead — but in the nick of time he spies a low underpass, and he ducks down it. He can hear his pursuer roar with alarm ("Vaffanculo!" he seems to hear the beast cry) before slamming into the walls and bringing down chimney pots and roof tiles in its frantic climb. The sottoportico, shorter than he might have hoped, leads him to another clumsy bridge, the bridge to a riva edging a canal full of docked boats sheeted with white snow, the riva to more streets and side streets past metal-shuttered shops and snow-topped heaps of garbage bags, the streets to other bridges and courtyards and passageways and squares, while, just above and behind him, the pounding wings bear down relentlessly, his assailant losing him and finding him in all these mazy turnings, as though it might be a game it's playing, like a cat toying with a trapped mouse. The old professor is not exactly running, but he's not walking either, it would be hard to say what he's doing, but he's picking them up and putting them down, all four of his wasted limbs at once and not in any special order, his head ducked for fear of having it snatched away, his torso bouncing along erratically like unwieldy luggage.

But then he finds himself again in an open campo, probably one he has been in before, and though his mind is racing down the next alleyway, his body is on its knees. It just does not want to go any farther. He crawls dutifully ahead, carrying through in the old way, holding fast, hauling his resistant carcass through the snow like a dull plow, a thing heavier even than his abusive old father was the night he had to wrench the old brute, hallucinating wildly on grappa he had made from seaweed, fish eyes, and ship wreckage, and fermented in his erstwhile host's digestive juices, a grappa too good, he kept blubbering insistently, to leave behind, out of the giant fish's belly. Which is where he is again, swallowed up as one sucks up an oyster and waiting to be digested, only now his daddy's not here and there's no escape. He can hear his assassin flapping fiercely in the wind above him, circling round as though, at last, to pounce. Well, let it, whatever it is, come. He curls up against the wall. It is not the wall of the painted fire and steaming kettle, but it will have to do. He can go no further. His opus magnum will remain unfinished. Our worst fears, he thinks, are always justified. He is going to "sleep like the Pope" all right, but not the present one. Above him, what looks for all the world like a flying lion is thrashing about in the snowstorm, roaring lustily and batting the snow away from its eyes with its massive paws. But it may be his own dizziness, his poor sight, his indigestion which delivers to him this vision. "PAX TIBI — wurrp! — EXCREMENTUM MEUS!" the fiendish creature bawls: "Hic! — REQUIESCET CORPUS TUUM!" and, its great ghostly wings churning up the snowy air theatrically, it circles a bell tower once to commence its murderous descent.

But then something quite unexpected happens. The winged monster dips and swerves erratically as though confused or blinded by the snow and (are its eyes crossed?) heads straight for the bell tower — or else the bell tower, which has been floating treacherously in and out of the whirling snow, sways suddenly and leans into the storm; from the stricken traveler's position in the nauseous pit of the orchestra, so to speak, it is hard to tell. The lion lifts its paws and spreads its wings, but too late: there is a thunderous earth-shaking ear-splitting clangor, followed by a frantic scattering of astonished pigeons, fleeing groggily from they know not what, the light fall of stone teeth and feathers upon the little campo, and a series of mighty reverberations that sound and resound through the frosty night as though a giant cymbal has been struck, a throbbing metallic clamor that seems to set all the bells in Venice ringing.

Behind the repercussions rippling out into the night, the professor can hear, up in the campanile where the din was launched, a great moaning and puling and thick-tongued cursing in the Venetian dialect: ''You turd! Rotto in culo! Oh! Ah! I'm dying! You head of a prick! I piss in your mother's cunt! Oh, my head! My ears! Shut up, will you, sfiga di cazzo? By the leprous cock of Saint Mark, you asshole of God, I'll have you melted down and turned into souvenir gondolas! Where are my teeth — ?! Oh, you whore! I come on you, you sack of shit, on you and all your dead!" And then, head in its paws, tail adroop, the pale beast goes flapping off sorely into the night, growling its oaths and imprecations, disappearing into the blowing snow and the fading tintinnabulation of tolling bells.

Left alone, the abandoned wayfarer, huddled miserably against the wall, accepts this melancholy tolling as his own knell. To be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully is more than simple endurance, he knows, it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph, but he also knows such triumphs are now beyond him. He just wants to cry. There are always endings, but there are not always conclusions. If you're out of candles, as his father used to say with a tired shrug, enh, you'll go to bed in the dark. These simple truths come to him, along with all the memories. But what is it he remembers? His own life or the film of it, the legends? This life of his: it has been like a kind of dream — but who was the dreamer? He cannot think. His brain is frozen. He tries to remember his own famous dream, the one that made him what he is today, that might warm him up; but all that comes to him there under his helmet of iced scarf is what he saw that awesome day when she spread her knees as though to reveal to him his fate. Ah, dear lady, and where are you now? He looks up, hoping for another miracle, even another flying lion, company at least. But there's only a ghastly white all around him as in the house of the dead. Except for the wall itself: a flaking ochre red softly reminiscent of the Trecento masters like Paolo Veneziano. It encourages him that he can remember Paolo Veneziano. I'm not dead yet, he thinks, or perhaps says, his cheeks pressed against the wall, I can still remember Paolo… Paolo What's-his-name. What was I thinking about? Already gone. Over his head, he sees now, there is something written. It seems to say "JESU." He's a sucker for words, he'll read anything, afraid of missing something if he doesn't. Might be a message, a final message (all my life, he thinks, I've been waiting for a message). He clutches at the snow-rimmed bricks of the wall, dragging himself up. Not "JESU," but "JUVE." And, yes, he brushes away the snow, here's the "VIVA," written like two birds in flight, their wings crossed in happy omen, and next to it the other one: "ABBASSO LARIN METICA!" — "Down with Larin Metica!" "Viva abbasso!" he cries. He laughs. He knows where he is now. He's almost there!

He scrapes the crust of ice and snow off his glasses, glances round. Right! There's the bridge, there's the narrow underpass! The joints of his knees are locked up, frozen solid, he has to totter ahead stiff-legged, rocking from side to side, his eyes watering, his nose running: but, yes, through here and turn right — and there it is! The long fondamenta, now a ghostly white and daintily pricked out with cat tracks, the stately palazzo rising through the eddies of swirling snow, the blackened doorway! He scrambles over the last bridge, more or less on all fours, volere č potere, his mind thawing now with glowing anticipations of pillows and eiderdowns and his own flannel nightshirt, his liniments and antacids (his stomach, he realizes, is in a ferocious turmoil), his computer, his books, his Mamma (he will find that climactic metaphor, maybe in fact he has already found it!), his earplugs and blindfold and sleeping pills and his hot water bottle. The thought of a hot water bottle alone propels him down the last stretch from the bridge to the door.

But it is all dark, the door is locked, they have given up on him! "I'm here! I'm here!" he cries into the howling wind. He bangs on the door. He is so weak he can almost not hear it himself. There should be a doorbell somewhere, but he cannot find it. He rattles the rusted wrought-iron grills at the windows, shaking the snow off them, shouting through the broken glass. "My friends! Open up!" He can hear cats prowling around, yowling, chasing one another. Overhead, the windows are all shuttered or broken. "Wake up! I'm here!" He wants to throw something at the windows, but all he can find is a plastic cat dish. "Help! Help!" he screams. They cannot leave him out here! He has already paid! There is one pane left whole in the window just above his head: he flings his watch through it. There is a soft splintering tinkle and the cats stop yowling for a moment, then start up again. He is beginning to cry. He thinks he might be going crazy. He is still screaming, but there are no words now, he sounds like one of the cats. He is getting sick. His screams have become groans. His insides seem to be exploding and collapsing at the same time. He must squat somewhere, and quick. He could use the canal but he is afraid of falling in. There is a walled garden, he tries the gate, it is locked. No time for alternatives. He presses into the shallow sill of the gate, under a wild rough tangle of overhanging thornbrush and dead vines, fumbles feverishly with his trousers, ripping them down as far as his knees. But his coat is in the way. Struggling with it (he is already too late, much too late), he falls facefirst into the snow. He rises to his knees and elbows, can rise no further. Behind his ears, there are terrible eruptions. He feels like he is dying. Like the time when he was sick and lame and tethered, heart broken, to a stinking stable. Only now no one would want him, he is not even worth flaying. "I'm sorry!" he weeps, pulling his coattails over his head. "I'm so sorry…"

And so it is that il gran signore, the distinguished emeritus professor from abroad, the world-renowned art historian and critic, social anthropologist, moral philosopher, and theological gadfly, the returning pilgrim, lionized author of The Wretch, Blue Repose, Politics of the Soul, The Transformation of the Beast, Astringent Truth, and other classics of Western letters, native son, galantuomo, and universally beloved exemplar of industry, veracity, and civility, not a child of his times, but the child of his times, is discovered on this, the night of his glorious homecoming, head buried and ancient fulminating arse high, when the police come cruising up in three sleek sky-blue motor launches, spotlights glaring, and arrest him ("What are you doing there on the ground?!" they cry) for indecent exposure, disturbing the peace, suspected terrorist activities, polluting the environment, and attempting to enter a public building without official written permission. "Avanti, you rascal! And step lively! Or so much the worse for you!"

5. ALIDORO'S RESCUE

Oh, he knows about the vagaries and terrors of the law. For years now he has lived a life of the utmost propriety, decent and law-abiding, crossing the street only when the light was green, avoiding swindlers and idlers and evil companions, speaking the truth with unflagging courage, and contributing annually to the policemen's ball. But it has not always been so. Once he got his own father sent to prison with a mere tantrum, then received a bit of his own back when, as the victim of an infamous fraud, he'd appealed to a judge for justice and got hauled off to jail instead ("This poor devil has been robbed of four gold pieces," the senile old ape told the police guards; "seize him therefore and put him immediately in prison!"), there to spend four of the worst months of his life, months of harsh deprivation, loneliness, and brutal abuse. In those lamentable days, all his worst crimes went unpunished, he's the first to admit that, yet when he tried to give help, for example, to his dear friend Eugenio, cruelly struck down by their own classmates, he was again dragged away as the main suspect in the case, and by police no more threatening than these. Oh, be sure of it, he knows full well the danger he's in! The abuse he suffered in prison was meted out by fellow prisoners and guards alike, he got it from both bells, as they say, they hated him on all sides of the law. His very existence seemed an affront to them, who and what he was, as though he demeaned them somehow merely by being in their midst, it was a kind of racism. In their merciless loathing, they used him as a nutcracker and knocked splinters off him for toothpicks and stuffed lighted matches up his rectum, hoping to get rid of him once and for all and toast their bread and sausages over him at the same time. And if anything, this lot tonight is even more violent, more heavily armed. Yet he can't stop himself. He has his father's pride and temper. And now, alas, his father's age, and then some. Long ago, when they'd tried to arrest him for Eugenio's injuries, he was able to run away, belly to the ground, so fast he stirred a dust storm; now he couldn't beat that old snail who took a week to serve him breakfast, there's no running left in him. Just helpless fury and terror and bitter indignation, his mind is literally reeling with it.

But how they've toyed with him, provoked him, how they've mocked and taunted him! "A stinking joss stick," they've called him, and "a twisted little twig," "shit with ears," and "a purulent polecat with a beanful of crickets." He's screamed back at them, threatening them with lawsuits and high-level investigations and public denunciations and even popular uprisings: "When the world hears what you've done — !" Which has not been easy, of course, with his pants around his knees and full of the ghastly ruins of his night at the Gambero Rosso. "Foo! What a puzzone!" the officers exclaimed when they first grabbed him. "Someone get a lid on that pot!" "But that's my hotel!" he shrieked then. "I've already paid! My bags are in there! My manuscript — ! My precious Mamma — !" "The disgusting old thing wants his mamma!" they laughed, pulling his pants up as they wrestled him toward their patrol boats, but failing to wipe him, leaving him feeling hot and sticky and chilled to the bone, so to speak, all at once. He was still blustering, so they picked him up by the scruff to watch him kick. They dropped him to watch him sprawl. They threw snow in his face to listen to him splutter. They tossed him from one to another in the glaring spotlights, shouting out vulgar jokes and proverbs about excreta and old age. They've threatened him with a hiding. They've threatened to take him out to the prison at Santa Marta and throw him in with their current catch of Red Brigade terrorists: "They'll know how to cook him!" They've rolled him in the snow. "You fools!" he blusters, spitting snow. "Don't worry, old man! It's always a consolation to fry in company!" they laugh and dangle him on high.

One of them reaches into his pocket to pluck out his billfold with two fingers and says: "Empty. Some American, looks like. The little prigger must've snatched it." And, seething, stamping his feet in space, he storms right back at him: "That's my wallet, you imbecile! I'm an American professor, an emeritus professor, do you hear me? Everybody knows me! This is an outrage! An atrocity! An — oh! Ah!" He's choking now, gasping, he wonders if he's having a heart attack. They set him down, standing around laughing with hands on hips, kicking his feet out from under him whenever he tries to stand. "It's a — I'm — I've been — ! Stop! You can't — ! I know the Pope!" He is shrieking, bawling, his nose is inflamed (he doesn't know the Pope), he's completely out of control. He can't help it. His masterpiece! All he's worked for all his life — "Please — !" It's like when his father was beating him and he was crying for it to stop. Hugging the old man's knees as the strop came down. "You must open up! For pity's sake! You must let me — !"

"Here, here, you scummy old tart, stop that!" The young gendarme whose knees he's grabbed swats him across the noggin with his leather gloves and boots him away, while the others make sport about this, saying not to be hasty, it's the best offer any of them has had all night. The professor howls and fumes and crawls about in the tumbling snow and bright lights, demanding, pleading, explaining, chastising, but it's as though the language has lost its referents and is only good for the noise it makes. "My computer! My life! My entire career — !" "Ha ha! Don't give us that to drink, you miserable little blister!" they jeer. "You pezzo di puzzo! You piece of garbage! You shrunken scrotum! You stinking smoke salesman! You gangrenous turd!" They seem to be having a great time. "Look at that beak! Last time I saw one like that it was being used as a billiard stick!" "And bald as a cueball on top of it, the little freak's a whole game in himself." "Idiots!" he screams. "Scoundrels!" "But not a very amusing game…" "Delinquenti!" "To tell the truth, the little asswipe is starting to get up my nose." "Assassini!" "Basta! Enough and period! Someone go wake Lido up! Let him have a gnaw on this old tramp! If there's less of him, there might be less noise!"

"Get up here, Lido! We got a live one for you!"

"Or almost live!"

One of the police launches sloshes about in the water as a huge ugly mastiff rises from it, growling throatily, so evil and monstrous in his appearance that even the hysterical scholar is momentarily silenced by awe. It's like some kind of hideous apparition, like a creature long dead rising grotesquely from the Venetian lagoon, pale and deadly, and the very sight of the dreadful thing makes the old professor's knees rattle. If he hadn't already emptied his bowels, he would probably be doing so now. "You're in bad waters now," an officer mutters sinisterly in his ear. "Lido hates presumptuous shitters like you."

"Some he eats straightaway," murmurs another as the beast slouches ashore, "some he promises."

"Eh, Lido, what do you think? One bite or two?"

"The little testa di cazzo even claims to be a professor! That should whet your appetite!"

"He certainly stinks like one! Dress him for the party, Lido!"

"Give him a little holy reason!"

He can feel the mastiffs hot breath on him. But the growling has stopped. The brute is sniffing him curiously, gazing blearily at him through muddy old eyes, drool spooling from his drooping lips. The professor can see that the old fellow is nearly toothless.

"What's this, Lido? We catch you a filthy off-season tourist and you're not even going to chew off a leg or two?"

"He says his name is Pinenut, Lido! Professor Pinenut! Ha ha! There's a tidbit for you!"

"Pinocchio — ? Does my nose tell me true, is it really you?"

"Alidoro — ?!"

"Ah, Pinocchio! My old friend!" cries the dog, his voice phlegmy with age and deep emotion. He throws his paws around him, laps him on the face and behind the ears, his stub of a tail wagging. Alidoro's coat is mildewy and flyblown, almost suffocatingly rank, but the professor hugs it to him like the sweetest balm, burying his face in it and weeping like a baby. "What has happened, my friend? What has brought you to this miserable state?"

"If you only knew!" the aged traveler wails. "This infernal — sob — night! I'll never — ! The misfortunes that have — boo boo! — rained down on — !"

"The little stronzo was waking up the whole neighborhood, Lido, making a bloody nuisance of himself with his drunken racket — then he tried to break into this old abandoned mansion here. We caught him with his — "

"Keep your mouth out of this, goose-brain! You're breaking my pockets!" Alidoro roars. "Can't you see I'm speaking with this gentleman?" He tugs the professor's coat collar up around his ears, licks his frozen pate with a warm tongue, then wipes it gently with a big soft paw, covers it with a few tufts of hair, torn from his own breast. "So, my friend…"

"It was terrible, Alidoro!" he sobs. "Just imagine! The airport was fogged in and I had to take the train from Milan and it was overheated, I don't even know what time it was! I had no hotel reservation and the tourist office was closing and the woman dropped the spoon. I mean the key. But the porter had a friend so he brought me here, it was just two steps away, and they were dressed up for Carnival. Only the room wasn't heated, so we had supper in the Gambero Rosso, it was included in the price, but I got lost. The snow — I couldn't see! My old eyes — I nearly died! Someone threw water on me and I got chased by a lion who flew into a belltower! Then I saw the viva abbasso and I came here but it was dark. I was getting sick. I threw my watch — ! All my bags — choke! — my computer! My floppies! Oh, Alidoro! My life's work — !" He's not sure if any of this is comprehensible. He doesn't understand it himself, he's crying like a cut vine, it's all just streaming out of him, words, tears, terrors, the lot, as Alidoro hugs him close. "In there-! Everything's in there — !"

"Gentlemen," says the dog, "this is a dear friend of mine. We once saved each other's lives. We are like bread and cheese, friends by the skin, do you understand? He is the most truthful person I have ever known. I'm sure he is all he says he is. You should believe everything he says."

"He says he knows the Pope."

"Well, almost everything." Alidoro raises his heavy snout and sniffs, then leaves the professor and goes to nose about the blackened doorway of the old palazzo. "Now, I think we should open up, gentlemen. There's something decidedly foxy on the air."

"La Volpe — ?!"

"Very nasty, whatever it is. Hop to it now!"

One of the policemen fumbles with a big ring of keys. "It gives me a hell of a fright to go in here at night," shudders another, and a third laughs nervously: "Afraid of ghosts?" "A ghost — you know, that woman who died here in the fire." "Fire?" "That's just a legend," says the policeman with the keys, as he pushes the door open. "Beam one of those spotlights in here!" "Whew, when was the last time this pesthole was opened up?" "They say she was waiting for the return of a beloved brother or son who had abandoned her and that maybe in sorrow she set the fire herself. The place hasn't been used since." "Except by cats. It stinks worse than the old man in here!"

"The woman," gasps the old professor, startled by the tale, his voice reduced now after all the hysterics to a hoarse whisper, "did she have… did she have blue hair?"

"Blue hair!" they laugh. "Whoever heard of such a thing!"

"Well, like you can see, Lido. The old ruin's as bald as your pal's conk."

"There's still a kind of smoky smell in this place. Like she's still burning or something. Let's get out of here — !"

"Wait a minute! What's this over here? Someone shine a light!"

"It's a watch! Do you recognize this, old man?"

"Yes, it's mine." This is not going to turn out well. The truth is beginning to sink in. And the story of the woman dying by fire has left him feeling frightened and confused. He knows about fire. He once burned his own feet off. He thought he was going to have to walk through life on his knees. Fire is his greatest fear.

"Did they steal your watch?" rumbles Alidoro, peering up from the shadows where he's been sniffing around.

"No. I threw it through a window. To wake them up."

"To wake who up?"

"His friend the Pope, no doubt. Lido, your mate's got his head in a sack of shit! He's a raving lunatic!"

"Let's take him to the Questura and lock him up. This place makes my blood freeze!"

"Really, Lido, come on, this is a complete waste of time. There's nothing else here except catshit and an old umbrella."

"Yes, that's mine, too. The umbrella, I mean."

"Aha! Did you throw that through the window, too, you daft old geezer?"

"No…" But there is something confusing about this, too. When he burned his feet off, they felt as if they belonged to somebody else. Which is how his head is beginning to feel now… "There was a blind monk — "

"A blind monk — ! Madonna! What next — ?!"

"He's gone from God's grace, this one, Lido! He's completely pazzo!"

"Maybe," sighs Alidoro, nosing at a piece of candle wax. "But they were here, just the same."

"You mean — ?"

"I mean, gentlemen," rumbles Alidoro, stepping into the light from the doorway and rising to his full height, "that this distinguished visitor — and, indeed, more than a visitor, this native son returned here to his beloved homeland — has been the innocent and very nearly tragic victim of two of our city's most notorious felons. They have lured him here to this lonely site under false pretenses, no doubt playing upon his natural sympathies for the maimed and the infirm, for my friend is famous for his good heart, and here have robbed him of all his earthly goods. He's been sent for a walk, as they say in the trade, taken for a ride, put in the sack, he's been shorn, fiddled, landed, and gaffed. He's been worked like farm butter, boys, he's been had on toast. He's taken a crab and left his feathers in it, lost both lye and soap, do you follow? He was the pigeon, the pup, the one in the middle — am I right, my friend?"

"Yes! That's true, when we went to the Gambero Rosso, they made me walk between — "

"Then, having separated him from his possessions, they abandoned him to the elements — and on a night such as this! Gentlemen! The charge is not murder, not yet, but it might as well be! No hand was raised against him, true, but it was quite enough to lock all the doors. No hand, gentlemen, except your own!"

"Come on, mate, we were only doing our duty…"

"You're no shinbone of a saint yourself, Lido!"

"I know, I know, no one's paws itch for an occasional turn of tourist-bashing more than mine, you know that, boys, I'm not pulling your ear, I'm not hitting you with a paternale, I wouldn't think of it! All I'm saying is, you've done a duck here, this gentleman is not who or what he might seem, and you owe him an apology and a little courteous attention. I know him as a comrade, lads, I know his life, death, and miracles, as the expression goes, and believe me, he's good pasta, this one, a grand fellow and brave. When you're in over your head and it's drink or drown, when the fat hits the fire and the shit the fan, this is the man, speaking loosely, you want by your side! When Nature made him, as that old hound Ariosto Furioso once said, she broke the mold!"

"Yeah? Well, she might have waited at least until she was finished!"

"I'm not talking now just to give breath to my mouth, my friends! A serious crime has been committed here tonight! It's not just the theft of his luggage, you know me, I don't give a cabbage's fart for private property — it's the theft of his dignity! His honor! You can't restore that to him, you sadistic coglioni, but at the very least you should be trying to bring a little justice to bear! You should be trying to find the thieves and get those bags back!"

"All right, all right, we'll look for them, Lido — but do us the favor, enough of this cacca — !"

"And may I remind you, gentlemen, that you have been trying to clap those two rogues in a gattabuia since the last century? You and your fathers have always complained that they were too wily, you could never get the goods on them. Well, my boys, here's your chance, here's your case! In flagrante, ironclad, with ribbons and bows! If you grasp it by the hair, you'll be national heroes! In fact, come to think of it, it's probably worth a little reward to me and my — "

"But no, Lido! Falla finita! As far as we're concerned it's better to lose the little shit-machine than to find him, so if he's a chum of yours, do as you please with him, it doesn't do us hot or cold. But don't try to pass the plate, you old mutt, it won't go down! You're not getting the centesimo of a whore out of us!"

"Well, all right," says Alidoro with what might be a trace of a grin. "Give us a ride then." He puts a paw around the professor and leads him toward one of the launches. "Come along now, compagno, you've suffered enough. It's time to draw in the oars."

6. THE PHILOSOPHICAL WATCHDOG

The benumbed wayfarer lies, swaddled in newspapers, blankets, and old rags like a wizened parody of the Christ child from a rigid Trecento nativity, on a bed of wood chips and sawdust under the umbrella of a corrugated tin roof, his back against an overturned gondola, his bundled feet pointed toward an old rusty barrel in which a fire is being stoked by the boatyard's watchdog, Melampetta. "Come Monday, they'll give me a rogue's thumping for letting thieves steal the firewood," she growls, "but cosě va il mondo, as the philosopher said, if it wasn't the poet — destiny's not to be tampered with unless the Party takes a hand in it, and the Party's hand nowadays is in its pants. So, nothing to do but face whatever comes with a good heart and stout buttocks, and if the evil beggars get carried away, the devil take them, I'll piss on their sandwiches." "That's letting them off easy," Alidoro rumbles from out on the lip of the old dock, where he is rummaging through a snowy heap of broken tiles and glass, bricks, rusted pipes, old paint tins and plastic bags, chain links, bottles, gas cans, and stiff old socks for any burnable bits of wood, rag, and paper. "You should piss in their wine, Mela, hit the tyrannical swillpots where it most hurts." "The wine they drink, cazzo mio, piss improves it, they'd be beating me for the profit in it," she replies. " 'When the masters drink pee and call it claret, the wretched of the earth must grin and bear it; but when the masters drink claret and call it pee, then hang the bastards from the nearest tree!' I think it was either Pliny or the blessed Apuleius who said that, or else it was Saint John of the Apocalypse."

"She's a quarrelsome old bitch, who fancies herself something of an argufier and a heavy thinker, she's got a mouth like a brass band, as they say, and a cunt like a mailbag, but she's a good compagna for all that, and I believe she will not shut us out on a night like this," Alidoro had explained on the way over, a way that was, in the end, too long for the collapsing traveler. Almost too tired and ill to know what he was doing, he had signed a general denunciation of the thieves, the police offering to fill in all the names, surnames, descriptions, alleged villainies, and formal criminal and civil charges back at the Questura, then he and Alidoro had hitched a ride in one of the patrol boats, Alidoro stealing a blanket as they got under way and stuffing it under the professor's coat, pretending to be buttoning him up. En route (and, yes, the railway station was just two steps away from the fraudulent hotel, that charlatan had taken him in circles: the police, annoyingly amused, promised to add this to his list of complaints), the old mastiff was the forbearant butt of a lot of more or less friendly banter about all his presumed mistresses, one or more of whom they were apparently about to visit, so the professor was alarmed to learn, when they were dropped off at the San Barnaba traghetto stop and the police had roared away, that the poor brute was broke and homeless ("I'm on the straw, old friend," he apologized with a woeful gaze, snow drifting down around his ears, "you've caught me between head and neck, to put it plain, I'm flat, I'm dry, I've neither bone nor bed. The last woman who, more in pity than in passion, took me in was on the prod and caught the plague from one of the fiendish instruments, sad to say, so I've been bedding down on my wits, what's left of them, ever since…"), and that their best hope was an old gondola repair yard at the backside of the island where he knew the watchdog.

So Alidoro wrapped the professor up in the blanket they had stolen off the patrol boat ("How did you recognize me?" he asked, and the old mastiff, cope-and-cowling him, replied: "You're the only one I've ever known, my friend, who gave off the smell of holm-oak." "So you've noticed then…" "Noticed — ?") and they set off to come here, Alidoro plodding heavily ahead through the snow, the professor, hungover and weak-kneed, staggering along behind, afraid only of dying alone. What had been a partial misgiving back in America, a faint doubt as to the advisability of his expedition, had now become a bitter conviction that his own nature was somehow fatally betraying him. That dignity which has taken him nearly a century to cultivate and sustain had vanished in an instant, as though his very pursuit of a meaningful life were itself depriving him of it. He once stated quite plainly in some remote place (in his published lectures, perhaps, on "The Curse of Irony"?) that nearly everything great which comes into being does so in spite of something — in spite of sorrow or suffering, poverty, destitution, physical weakness, depravity, metamorphosis, the plague, being born a puppet — but he has never really considered the lingering power of that spite…

"What's that noise?" Alidoro had paused to ask. They were in a dark narrow street. The old dog sniffed the air, squinted blearily about him. "Sounds like an old rusty sign, swinging in the wind…" The ancient professor emeritus slumped, creaking, against a shop window. "It's — it's my knees," he gasped. "Something awful is happening, Alidoro! I'm — I'm turning back to wood again!" He felt tears pricking his eyes again and trickling down his nose. He'd never told anyone before, not even a doctor. "And this weather — sob! — the joints are seizing up. I'm so ashamed…" The shop, if his eyes did not deceive him, sold wooden puzzles. Such a gratuitous irony, which might have once offended him, now, in his deplorable humiliation, made his heart ache. "I don't think I can… go any farther." "Poor old fellow," Alidoro said then with a deep rumbling sigh, and he hoisted him up and carried him the rest of the way here on his broad bony back.

The old mastiff reenters their shelter now, rump first, dragging in a weathered beach chair, its torn canvas seat wrapped around a load of firewood. He has rigged up a green plastic tarpaulin on the windward side of the projecting tin roof to keep out the blowing snow, built short walls out of overturned gondolas on the two lee sides, the fourth wall provided by the rustic repair shed, then feathered their nest with sawdust, newspapers, and wood chips. "Here's a few more arguments for your fire, you old Jesuitical tart," he pants now, hauling the firewood up to the barrel, and the watchdog barks back: "Those aren't arguments, buttbrain, those are the a priori and assumptive conditions- axiomatic, absolute, and apodictical — of the argument, which hasn't even heated up enough yet to make your piss sizzle, so before you open your yap to answer back, just keep in mind I've only started on the As, there's at least twenty-seven or twenty-eight more letters to go, if I remember rightly, and the soup's not on yet." Alidoro winks drily down at the professor and shakes the snow off his coat. "With all that hard thinking you do, Mela, I'm surprised your rectum doesn't fall out."

This was how they'd got in here, the two of them scrapping like strays, it was a kind of code between them, as though recognition depended on insult and invective, affection upon rhetorical display. On the way, rocking between Alidoro's shoulder blades in his stolen wool blanket like a withered seed pod, the old scholar had drifted off momentarily, dreaming of the little Tuscan village by the sea where he was born, with its one main street running from home to school and crossed by another leading to… to…? He couldn't remember, but what he found when he turned down it was a little cottage as white as snow, or perhaps white with snow, except for its blackened doorway, where he was met by some junior faculty, blocking his entrance, to whom, when they suggested that with all due respect they desired to hang the distinguished visitor from the nearest oak tree, he was obliged to explain that he could not accept their offer at this time because he was still teaching at one of the East Coast I.V.'s, so named, he pointed out, because of their innovative method of education by intravenous feeding. They seemed to admire this insight, if that's what it was, an insight, and not an encyclopedia entry he'd been paid to provide, nodding their heads solemnly in unison, and they went on to ask him (though by now he might have been hanging, for the north wind seemed to be blowing and whistling, and he was swinging back and forth like a bell clapper on a wedding day), if, in his renowned wisdom, he might be able to elucidate a mysterious inscription on the back of a famous work of art attributed to one Paolo Venereo, or Venerato (a portrait of a cross-eyed yellow-haired Pope whose fat round face was dripping like candlewax), which read: "ABBASSO LARIN METICA." He understood the inscription instantly, and in fact was startled by the lucidity of his perception, but when he was jolted awake suddenly by Alidoro shouting out something about a black fart ("Melampeto!" he had bellowed — only later did the professor understand that this was a rude play on the watchdog's name), he found he could no longer remember what the perception was. Nor, for a moment, could he even remember where he was, he thought he might be on a ship at sea, bundled up in a deck chair or lashed to the mast, certainly he was feeling seasick -

"Melamputtana! Open the door, you ungrateful diabolectical sesquipedalian windbag, and let me in!"

"Aha! Is that you, Alidildo, you shameless eudemonist ass-licking retard? Everything I've got you to thank for I have to scratch! Let you in? Don't make the chickens laugh! You can go suck the Pope's infallible hind tit, as attested to by Zoroaster and the sibylline Teresa of Avila, for all I care! Addio, Alido! My regards to your worms and chancres!"

"Hold on, drooping-drains, don't put on airs, on you they smell like the farts of the dead! Remember who you're talking to! Your asster will be a whole lot sorer if you don't drag your vile syphilline cunt-flaps over here and open this gate up! Do you hear me, twaddle-twat? We're freezing our nuts off out here!"

"Oh, I do remember who I'm talking to, Alidolce, my sweet little bum-gut. I'm afraid your theoretical nuts were harvested years ago, if you feel something down there, it's probably just boils on the ass, for which cold compresses are highly recommended, vide Aesculapius' Principles of Mycology, and as for threats of violence, remember who you're talking to, you preposterous old humbug! I could split your hollow toothless skull quicker than Saint Thomas could split a hair from the Virgin's hemorrhoidal behind in four, in or out of the catechism! No, you can sing all you want, squat-for-brains, you're just pounding water in your mortar, as Leucippus of blessed memory once said to William of Ockham over an epagogic pot of aglioli, there's no room at the inn nor in this shithole either, and that's conclusive, absolute, categorical, and a fortiori finito in spades! So go spread your filthy pox among your misses of the opiates, fuckface! Arrivederci! Ciao!"

"I think she's weakening," Alidoro muttered then over his shoulder, and the professor, alarmed at all this vicious howling and barking, gasped: "Is this the right way to go about it — ?" The storm had worsened, he could hardly see for the swirling snow — it was as though he were being pushed out of the world at full blow.

"Patience, old friend, it's part of the dance. For her all these citations, enthymemes, postulates, and premises are like a warm nose on her clit, the wormy old gabbler won't spread without them."

"Who've you got out there with you, you fatuous lump of clotted dookie? Are you on a sleigh ride with another of your cuntless junkies?"

"An aged compatriot, Melampieta, who is, I'm afraid, more there than here. I have carried him all this way on my back, not knowing what else to do, I tell you, mona mia, with my heart in my forepaws, if you have no pity for me tonight, so be it and amen, a fartiari o'fuckem and spayed, I've weathered worse — but please take in my poor friend Pinocchio. If you don't, I won't know where to hit my — "

"Pinocchio — ?!" There was a clattering and slapping of locks and bolts and the scraping of the gates against the flagstones. "Davvero? In flesh and bones — ? But he must be — !"

"As you can see…"

"Ah, the poor little cock! I can hardly believe it! Why didn't you say so in the first place, you tedious fleabitten hothead, instead of standing out there and showing off for all the neighbors? Get in here and stop yapping like the damned fool mentioned by Saint Peter in his Epistle to the Cartesians, the one who claimed his farts were prayers and so got theophanically dumped on by what in effect he'd prayed for! Pinocchio, esteemed friend and comrade, you are welcome, for as Julianus the Chaldean once wrote in an oracle, Whoso shitteth not on the dead earneth access forevermore to the privies of the living, or sterling sentiments to that effect, and if this walking mange-farm had only announced you promptly, you would not have had to suffer such prolonged exposure to the seventy-some provisionally acknowledged elements, as well as all those not known but suspected, such as sewer gas and monads. In our family, if one can call such a bastardly plague of debauched egg-suckers a family, it has not been forgotten how you honored our great-grandsire Melampo with your eloquent silence when the poor beast, too dead to speak for himself, stood accused — and by a ruling class of lickerish unprincipled graspers born and spit — of the theft of his own meager sustenance. To wit, the odd chicken or two he'd been hired to guard. Some said that great-granddad was bent, others that he was an old prole ahead of his time, and a martyr to causes as yet unformulated, but your mute testimony shut all their pustulous faces and left the old sonofabitch to lie in peace at the bottom of whatever stinking well they dumped him in. You earned thereby our eternal gratitude, though you'll probably get somewhat less than that, memory being the garbagey stewpot of doodoo that it is, and certainly your presence, which, if I may say so in passing, seems a mite fragrant, honors my poor hovel. So come along now, good sir — and easy, Alidodo, you blundering beffardo! You must transport the gentleman with the same cunning tenderness with which God's chosen ass is said to have borne the gravid Virgin so as not to tear her gossamery maidenhead, the frangibility of which was likened by Thomas the Rhymer unto that of crisp silk, and whose rupture would have detheologized the Western World, catastrophically orphaning us all. Come, come! I'll put a fire on!"

And thus it was that the exhausted pilgrim found shelter at last, swathed in the woolen blanket, the first thing he has stolen since those fateful grapes that landed him in the late Melampo's terrible brass-studded collar all those decades ago, and nested in sawdust and woodchips, his natural element — being, that is, the son of a carpenter. Melampetta immediately set to mothering him, digging a warm hole for him, feeling his pulse and touching his forehead with her dry nose, tucking rags and papers around him, stirring up a smoldering fire in a rusty oil drum, ignoring his protests and brewing him up some kind of pottage, scolding Alidoro for not taking proper care of him and directing the old dog in the construction of their little shelter against the winter storm, quoting various authors on the subjects of architecture, calefaction, climatology as related to nuclear accidents and flea sprays, and the general unpredictability of fate. "One never knows," she sighs, gazing down on him in wonder, "what might happen in this curious world," which is something his father might have said, though she attributes it to Alexander the Great at the time of his circumcision.

"The Great Dane, no doubt," growls Alidoro drily, smashing up the beach chair to add to the pile of firewood. "What good does it do to put up all these walls? It's windier inside here than out!"

"Sarcasm and parody," sighs Melampetta, "the final recourse of the mental defective. You can see, sir, what I've had to suffer all my life in this sunken and benighted haunt of farts and lechers. How I envy you your life in the real world!"

In spite of all he's had to eat and drink, the soup — which Melampetta, as she tips it down him, compares to the curative "hand of a saint, such as that of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the Thaumaturge of the West, for example, or six-fingered Simon Magus, or Hermes Trismegistus who once lanced a boil with a mere spoonful of puree of mashed peas" — does indeed taste good, soothing lips, tongue, throat, and belly in its healing passage. The fire is crackling away in the old barrel now, turning it a glowing translucent red in spots and casting a soporific dance of light against the corrugated roof overhead. He is warm and sleepy and his bed of sawdust and wood chips is cozy and sentimentally familiar, for in such did he sleep as an urchin in a corner of his father's workshop. Alidoro, with a gaping yawn, has settled down beside him, jaws on paws. Everywhere there is a deep and heavy silence like a down quilt being laid over him. But

"I–I can't sleep. I'm sorry — it's my… my clothes…"

"Are they too tight, comrade? I thought you'd be warmer…"

"No, they…"

"He shat in them," Alidoro explains.

"Ah, well, why didn't you say so? All the time I thought this was your contribution to the unsavory atmosphere, old gutter-guts, ambulant orchard of dungballs and dingleberries that you are. Don't you know, as demonstrated by our spiritual but restless father Marx in the full blush of his prickly Grundrisse, that he who lies down in his own shit wakes up a sight for psoriasis? So what are you waiting for? We've had to listen to your drivel all night, let's put it to some practical use. For, as Jesus once preached to Mary Magdalene whilst she was anointing his bum, thereby freeing herself from at least seven nasty boogers: 'Blessed are the arse-wipers, Maggie, for they shall behold the Eye of God!' So let's make with the holy water, drizzle-chops, out with the tongue and into the pasta, as they say, for one must taste sorrow to appreciate happiness, and, once the bib's on, one might as well lick the plate clean!"

"All my life," the old professor whispers abashedly as Alidoro rises with a weary grunt and commences to peel the blanket away, "I have searched for meaning and dignity, striving to be true to… to her vision of me." He shudders, though not from the cold. He is anticipating their horror at what they are about to find. "But I have been so… so lonely…"

"Her — ?" mutters the old mastiff, tugging his shoes off him.

He hesitates. He feels emptied out, shrunken, and more vulnerable and exposed than at any time since that half-remembered day when he first took rude shape under his father's knife and chisel. It is as though his insides and outsides were changing places, leaving his heart quite literally on his sleeve, and much worse besides, yet another bitter pill. "The… the Blue-Haired Fairy," he gasps, flushed with shame.

"Tell us about it," murmurs Melampetta soothingly, unbuttoning his clothes. "Make a clean breast of it, if you'll pardon the expression, empty the sack, let it all hang out, flat-footed, hair down, and no bones. Let it fly, sir. Trot it out. Spit the toad, as Saint Tryphone of Bythinia once said to the demon-possessed daughter of Emperor Gordianus, thereby bringing on the most awesome eructation and setting the bells to ringing." She licks him gently behind the ear. "Tell us about your life, old gentleman. Tell us about the Blue-Haired Fairy…"

7. A STRANGE BIRTH

"Men, if lucky," he is quoting himself now, dredging up from what's left (not much) of his enfeebled memory this seminal line from his current work-in-progress, or once in progress, now perhaps arrested and lost forever, for he could never, not even with a final massive exertion of his notorious will, reconstruct the whole of it, not even with the magical assistance of that enigmatic creature upon whose intervention his own quotidian progress, also perhaps about to be arrested forever, has depended throughout his long career, a career and a dependency he has just, in his gathering (and altogether agreeable) stupor, been elucidating, or trying to, and which, by means of this allusive proposition which lies at the heart of the Mamma papers (if he can remember it), he is now attempting to sum up, "are graced in their lifetime by one intense insight that changes everything. Mine was the discovery that the Blue-Haired Fairy was pretending not to be dead, but to be alive, that in fact it was not she who had given me a place in the world, you see, but I who had called her into being. Grasping this seeming paradox altered my life forever…"

"Seeming — ?" growls Alidoro indignantly, lapping his thighs, while Melampetta licks at his right nipple. "If Mela and me aren't the real thing, old comrade, then you've beshit yourself with zabaglione!"

"Oh, I do love paradoxes," Melampetta murmurs between strokes of her long wet tongue. It feels like oiled ebony paper, gently applied. She moves into the thoracic cavity now, pushing provocatively at his knobby sternum, then works her way slowly down the hollow between his ribs past his diaphragm toward what others, having one of the things, would call their navel. "It's like being in heat in a hailstorm, a kind of — slurp! slop! — ungratifiable arousal, as though the point of it all were not larking or litters but — thlupp! — mere longing itself. I believe it was Saint Catherine of the Festering Stigmata who wrote in one of her — sklorrp! — letters with respect to her peculiar inconvenience of having to menstruate out of a rip in her left — tbwerpl shloop! — side that paradox was like a half-laid egg, speaking theologically of course, as the pious lady was always wont to — ffrup! flawp! — do, even when the curse was on her and — sluck! — bespattering her farthingales." She pauses to lick at her own coat a moment as though to wipe her tongue there, before returning to his abdomen, now tingling with the chill of her evaporating saliva. Alidoro, having nosed his thighs apart, is pressing toward his knees, panting heavily. "But this is a strange birth indeed," adds Melampetta. "A son pregnant with his own mother!"

"It's not easy to explain," the bared wayfarer sighs, gazing up at the corrugated tin roof, where still the flames' light dances as though to tease away the distance between reality and illusion, not to mention that between (he yawns) sleeping and waking.

"Nor to believe," harrumphs Alidoro. "Though I once had a cousin who fucked his own grandmother and so fathered his mother's half-sister who in turn — "

"Ow — !"

"Sorry, slip of the tongue," apologizes the old mastiff. "I think I touched wood."

"Yes, ah… it's tenderest just at those places where it's… it's pulling away…"

There are these moments of sudden pain when the edges are lapped (Melampetta has earlier sent an excruciating shock up from his elbow when she peeled his tailored shirt away), but they are only momentary deflections from the immense peace that has been settling upon the ancient scholar since he put it in the piazza, as they say here, and surrendered his body and its terrible truths, until now his solitary burden, concealed from all the world, to the intimate attentions of his two friends. "Come now," Melampetta had urged him when embarrassment momentarily stiffened his limbs and made him shiver, "there's no shyness in shit, as the saying goes, a saying straight from the Textus Receptus, otherwise known loosely as the Beshitta, it speaks volumes where farts do but slyly pretend, and now we must answer frankly with tongues of our own, keeping in mind that God so loved a clean behind that, having given his only begotten faeces, as they say in French, he invented the downy angels for bumfodder as humble examples for us all. So come along now, dear friend, you'll soon feel like a newborn babe. Off with those old rags, it's time for the divine services, for complines and eucharists, for libations, oblations, and ablutions, oralsons and lickanies, for leccaturas from the book of life — "

"They aren't rags!" he protested in his foolish confusion, clinging to his jacket hem as it was pulled away. "That's a seven-hundred-dollar suit from Savile Row!"

"Mmm," grumbled Alidoro, tugging his trousers down. "Smells like it, too."

"He said 'savio,' you suppurating imbecile, not 'sulfurco'!" Melampetta scolded. "Now give me those things, I'll put them to soak."

As she trotted out into the snow and down the beachlike slope to the water, the old professor, stripped to his shorts and socks, the wisps of cold wind leaking into their shelter making the frayed nerves at the edge of his skin tingle, literally pricking him on the living edge, closed his eyes and whispered miserably: "I feel like such a wretched ass, old friend. Sick, as my body is, I am far more sick at heart. You should have let them take me away."

"Better a live donkey, partigiano, mio partigiano, than a dead doctor," replied the mastiff, peeling his socks off with his ruined gums. "What my tinpot employers lack in subtlety, they compensate for in diligence."

"What does it matter?" he erupted crankily. "Listen to me. For nearly a century, I have lived an exemplary life. There have been trials, temptations, torments, but I have won through. I have earned the respect of the entire world. I am living proof of the power of redemption through education, endeavor's paragon, candor's big name. Do you understand? I have received not one Nobel, but two. I am a household word. I am the ornament of metaphors, the pith of aphorisms, what's liked in similes — in some languages, Alidoro, a very verb! My father would be proud of me, the Blue-Haired Fairy would! And now…" He shuddered as his shorts were pulled down. "Now I have lost everything. Even my pride."

"Ah, look at the poor old fellow, it's enough to make the stones weep," sighed Melampetta, having quietly returned, bringing with her the ashy odor of fresh snow. "He's thin as a nail, he's lost all his hair except whatever that is that's sprouting there on his feet, and he looks like he's wearing the tatters of old wallpaper where his hide should be. Even his nose has gone limp. What a scene he makes! Enough to make the jaded scuff in the galleries lose their suppers! And he's still no bigger than a piece of cheese, just a lick and a smell, you could stuff him in a matchbox if it weren't for the nose."

"In small casks, Melata, good wine."

"Yes, Alidote, if, alas, the cask is tight. But why is he sniveling like that?"

"He's embarrassed."

"Now, now, my pet, no need for that. It's not modesty that answers the call of nature, remember. And we dogs are great ass-lickers, as our comrades are all too quick to point out, we have a special aptitude for it. Not for nothing are we known as man's beast friend, his licking lackey. So, as Origen once said, whilst castrating himself in devotional zeal in the company of Saint John the Theophagist, 'When in a kennel, my peckish old bellybag, one must do as the curs do — the country you go to, as our epistles say, the custom you find — so, take eat, Zan Juan, these are my original ballocks, do this in mnemonics of me, good fork that you are, and buon appetito!' "

"Speaking of such matters, old friend," muttered Alidoro then, poking around in his thighs, "what happened to your own affair? There's nothing down here but a peehole."

"I don't know, it fell out one day. I didn't notice. It may have got sent out with the laundry."

"El desparŕ xe sempre castrŕ," murmured Melampetta, licking at it speculatively as though sampling an antipasto: "The destitute lose their balls to boot. But not to worry, for as La Volpe said after she sold her tail for a fly swatter: 'Who gives a fig, there's that much less acreage for the planting of whelks and buboes, may I soon be shut of the rest of it, speaking figuratively of course.' "

"You're touching a painful key, Mela, when you bring her up. It was those two old codgers who did him out tonight."

"What — ?! Again?! But wasn't it you, dear Pinocchio, who bit the old Cat's paw off? You must have recognized them!"

"Well, they looked familiar. But then, with my eyes, who doesn't?" For a moment, he felt the abuse of it again, the indignity, and the bile rose in his throat. He felt stupid, outraged, humiliated, frightened, crazed, and embittered all over again and all at the same time. What would they say back at the university if they could see him now, lying here in a shabby boatyard, stripped of all his earthly goods, letting two old mongrels lick his devastated peehole? It infuriated him and shamed him, but what could he do about it, he was powerless. And, besides, it was beginning to feel good. "Anyway, that was in the last century."

"True. One forgets the power of such a life to seem coetaneous and omnifical, speaking in the grand manner, like Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, for example, who once said, or was said to have said, while declaiming upon the angels in much the same highbrow pantological style, bless his gray-green heart, that the reason the little atemporal beasts were sexless was because if they ever started fucking each other eternity itself might find itself in the family way, a superfetation, as he called it in the classical tongue — at which he, whoever he was, was clearly no slouch — a superfetation that could well make twins of the Apocalypse, leaving God biting his own tail, so to speak, if he had one, and if he didn't, well, we're back where we started, like the universe itself in its tedious mechanical turnings, less acreage for buboes and all that." All this, though largely incomprehensible, was quite soothing, especially accompanied as it was by the soft warm strokes of the two tongues, gently bathing his body, poking into this crevice and that, unknotting the tight strings of muscle, swabbing away the foul incrustations, husking him, as it were, desquamating him (ah, the words, the words!), and he felt himself slowly slipping toward what that same Dionysius, so masked, called, if he remembered correctly, "the darkness of unknowing." Whence all truth. "But tell us," Melampetta was whispering in his ear, the one she was licking with a tongue almost eellike now in its subtle acquatics, "tell us about the Blue-Haired Fairy."

And so he did, starting from the beginning ("It all began," he began), when, one terrifying night, running from murderers, he came upon a snow white house set in the deep dark woods and, knocking frantically with feet, fists, and head, aroused a little girl with sea-blue hair and a waxen white face who would have been quite beautiful had she not been completely dead. She couldn't open her eyes, much less the door, so the two assassins caught him and, after shattering a couple of knives on his hardwood torso, hung him from an oak tree, where, after crying for his daddy, he died. "I still have nightmares about it," he told them, succumbing gradually to the rhythm of their lapping tongues. "I was up there for hours, blowing about like a bell-less clapper, till at last my neck broke and my joints locked up and my nose went stiff. And all the while that dead girl was watching me with her eyes closed, don't ask me how I know this, but it's true." Eventually, eyes wide open and grinning like old Maestro Ciliegia on a toot, she staged an elaborate rescue with a bunch of circus animals and some crazy doctors (he has a vivid memory of waking briefly inside an airy coach padded with canary feathers and lined with if whipped cream and custard, and thinking, in his unredeemed puppetish way, that Heaven was a sticky place that made him queasy, and he hoped they'd let him out soon), but why, he wondered, even as he described it for his friends, praising the Fairy for her ingenuity and her amazing remedies ("She brought me back to life again!"), did she wait so long?

Well, of course, she was just a little girl. This was the happy time. She was as capricious as he. They played doctors together, jokes on one another, house. They took rides on her birds and animals. She let him poke his nose in her long blue hair. He showed her how he could kick his own head, front, back, or sideways. She laughed at the wooden knock it made and showed him how she could turn her head all the way around seven times in the same direction without getting a crick in her neck; he managed only three before feeling all twisted up inside, but deliciously dizzy when he unwound. It was the most fun he ever had in his life, not even Toyland or Hollywood came close. She wanted him to stay and be her little brother, she even said she'd fetch his father, which somehow pleased him and displeased him at the same time. But it was too good to last. His trials, as it turned out, had just begun. He was dragged off to Fools' Trap by the Fox and the Cat to bury his money in the Field of Miracles, and then years went by, or what were probably years. He was still a puppet then and didn't know much about time. Except that it had something to do with beginnings and endings, this he found out when, after innumerable misadventures, he finally made his way back to where her cottage had been and found nothing but a tombstone with an inscription saying that the little girl with the azure hair had "died of sorrow on being abandoned by her little brother Pinocchio." "It nearly broke my heart. I tried to tear my wooden hair out. That was before I had real hair, of course. Now that's gone, too. I was so proud of it. Hair made me feel so human. But it all fell out. First, from my head, then from my chest and armpits, and… and on down…" Only on his feet is something still growing, and that probably isn't hair. Nor are they really, at root, his own feet.

The Fairy wasn't dead, of course. She who had taught him never to lie had lied, and not for the first or last time. Yet he accepted that. All part of his personal via crucis as he lightheartedly called it, though never in print. And, in a sense, she had died, for he never saw her as a little girl again. When next they met, here on the Island of the Busy Bees, she was suddenly old enough to be his mother, while he was still just a puny puppet. He didn't understand this. She pretended it was some kind of magic. Maybe it was, but he hated to get left behind. When he recognized her, he knelt and hugged her knees, and she gave him a glimpse of a possible future, more than one: he had to choose. Though his motives might have been mixed (there was something heady about having his nose there between her big tender knees), he chose boyhood, which meant he had to pass his examinations at school. But his classmates, hating him for the square peg he was, lured him to the beach and tried, as they put it, to knock his block off. Someone threw his own arithmetic book at him: it missed and struck down poor Eugenio, and the police came and arrested him for the crime. "That was when I met you, Alidoro. You chased me when I ran away."

"Yeah, we really tore up the landscape! When I was a pup, they trained me by making me chase a stick. I must've got carried away by your smell and lost my compass, nearly lost my life when you took to the water. I forgot I didn't know how to swim. Never did get the hang of it…"

"Wait a minute," said Melampetta, licking the hairless hollow of his armpit, "let me get this straight — "

"Careful! My ribs — !"

"Yes, I see. Some exhibit, you are, old fellow! You're like one of those mythical inside-out creatures mentioned by Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia in his postural studies of metempsychotics. They could use you as a foldout in an anatomy book. But, listen, do you mean to say that this fairy with the weird locks who liked to keep a magical menagerie and play spooky games with little boys — "

"Puppets…"

"Yes, well, like turning houses into tombstones and playing dead and conjuring up pallbearers and corpses and other such ectoplastic doodlings — do you mean to say that she gave all this up to pack school lunches and do the laundry, pick up toys and give baths — ?"

"Actually, she oiled me down…"

"She abandoned fairyhood to be a mamma — ?!"

"Well, my mamma. It seemed to be something she had to do. Though later of course she changed into a goat."

"A goat…"

"Yes. With blue fleece. That's how I knew it was her."

"Madonna! And udders hanging down the size of a theosophist's behind, no doubt?"

"She stood on a white rock in the middle of the sea trying to stop me from getting sucked up into the maw of the monster fish. Or maybe leading me into it, I couldn't be sure. It was the last time I saw her. Alive, that is…"

"She died? Again?!"

"Well, she just became… something else." How could he explain this? That, in effect, she became the house he lived in, the social order he embraced, even, in a sense, the universe itself at its most ineffable, its most profound… "But before that, I found out she was dying in hospital, too poor to buy a crust of bread. I sent her all my money. Everything I had. And with that she came to me at last… sort of… It was in a dream…" He was feeling very dreamy right now. Alidoro was tonguing vigorously the insides of his thighs as though to urge them back to youth again, while Melampetta was sliding up and down between hip and armpit with long soothing strokes, carefully circling the sore spots, making him feel almost like a ship at sea, awash in an airy foam. "It was… beautiful…"

"I don't know," sighed Melampetta. "All this melancholical hello and goodbye, all this gruesome hide-and-seek over an open grave, tombstones popping up like mushrooms — it sounds to me like either she was trying to cork up your ass with a motherlode of guilt, my dear Pinocchio, or else she had a terrific scam going."

"I know. That's how it seemed to me at times. And I haven't told you everything, either." He offered the old watchdog a replying sigh, and mostly in gratitude, for her tongue seemed to have spread out and was lapping him all over now like a warm wet towel. "Whenever I was a bad boy, for example, she seemed to go limp and cold and fall down with her eyes rolled back. It was really scary!"

"Oci bisi, paradisi…," snorted Alidoro from between his thighs. "Remember that one, Mela? 'Gray eyes, paradise…' "

" 'Black eyes, hot romance…' "

" 'Blue eyes make you fall in love…' "

" 'White eyes make you shit your pants!' I know, I know — but how many times will it work? Once? Twice? This babau, this bugaboo, must have pulled her routine as often as she brushed her fangs. If I may say so, it seems to have taken you forever to eat the leaf, my friend!"

"I was a slow learner, Melampetta, as the world knows. But I'd suffered a lot of births and rebirths myself, I was used to the idea. I was a very lively piece of wood, you know, before the man I called my father — my primum mobile, as you might describe him — turned me into a puppet. Then the assassins hung me and the Fairy brought me back to life again. After that I became a dancing donkey and, when the fish ate all my donkey flesh away, I was reborn a puppet from the corpse, though naturally I'd hoped for something better."

"A dancing donkey! Do tell — !"

"Later, my father and I were delivered together from the belly of the monster fish, if that's what it was. Finally I died as a puppet and was reborn a boy. And now… well, you can see, it might not be over yet…"

"The 'miracle,' as a tourist here once defined it in a fine piece of Christian idiotology, 'of reborn ingenuousness,' a wonderful thing in principle no doubt, but you're like some kind of wind-up demonstration model. Round and round you go! Still I'm surprised you didn't get fed up finally with all this crazy vampire's pernicious horse-plop and just plant hut and puppets, if you'll pardon the expression, and walk out! Why didn't you send her to get fried?"

"Oh, I did grow to resent it, to resent her, Melampetta, I did walk out. I was a good boy, after all, obedient, hard-working, studious, truthful — but then what? I'd done everything I was supposed to do, I'd become a famous scholar and exemplary citizen, the whole world loved me, I felt I deserved to have a little fun. But whenever I let myself go a little, I'd see her tomb again: 'Here lies who died because…' I couldn't get rid of it, it was worse than athlete's foot, and it ruined everything. Why did I want a boy's body in the first place, I began to wonder, if I couldn't use it? So I tried to run away again. This time to Hollywood — "

"Ah, Hollywood!" rumbled Melampetta, moving eagerly toward his nipple, which she circled playfully with her tongue. "Here comes the good part!"

"Not so good as all that," he replied, flushing with shame. "I suffered a kind of relapse out there, I even became a bit… reckless…" His heart gave a little regretful leap under his breast which Melampetta was swabbing, and his nose began to itch in admonishment. "I became something of an ass again, another sort of… well… Until one day…" And he told them then about his revelation, his sudden quite stunning perception that the Blue-Haired Fairy was not alive and pretending sometimes to be dead, but was truly dead, only pretending sometimes, when he helped her, to be alive. "It was not she who had given me a place in the world, you see, but I who had called her into being!" This explained the way she first appeared to him, her sinking spells, her desperate messages: goodness, she was trying to tell him, could die in the world. It was not an absolute, not a given, but something that got re-created from day to day, from moment to moment, by living and dying men. Either they kept it alive or it disappeared. Maybe even forever. "It gave me a mission. Her power was really my power, I had but to exercise it. 'I-ness,' I called it in a famous essay: the magical force of good character. My virtue, I felt, my decency, my civility, my faithfulness, might save the world!"

"Oh my…!" Both tongues were sloshing around in his groin now. "Aren't we the little Redeemer!"

"Or if I couldn't manage that," he has added, somewhat abashedly, "there were always the tombstones waiting to be done…"

"Whew, I haven't had such a workout since my last litter, bless their long-forgotten little hearts!" Melampetta exclaims now, panting heavily. "I think I have some idea now how John the Baptist felt, coming up for air amid the repentant multitudes after loosening all their laces, as he liked to put it: 'You have to swallow the toad,' said he, speaking about knowledge, of course, that bitter pill, 'to shit pearls'! Or as Jesus himself, that notorious pearl-pooper, once declared, shouting out over the screams of the rich man he was trying to thread through the eye of a needle, this not being one of his better numbers: 'Hey, compagni, you can't suck an egg without making a hole!' So don't hide your recklessness and edifying relapses under a bushel, my venerable friend, don't skip over the beastly bits — the seen, as they say in Hollywood, separates us from what we long to see! Let's hear about the donkey days!"

"Ah, the donkey days…! It's been so long, I can barely…"

"That's right, barely and baldly, it's the naked truth we want, the unvarnished reality! Veritas in puris naturalibus — !"

"Scusa, Melampiccante, old suck, but I think this side's about done…"

"What? Oh yes, Alindotto, you're right, it's time to turn the spit and baste the other one — be careful, though, the little duck's as brittle as croccante and flaking like puff pastry!" They straighten his legs and tuck his arms in, then gently ease him over: "That's it — like folding an omelette!" Melampetta urges, her sudden rash of culinary metaphors no doubt betraying the effort to work up an appetite for the awesome feast she is about to face. He shudders to think of the spectacle he must now, in his procumbent attitude, present to his friends' eyes — and other senses ("He's shivering, Lido, go put some more wood on the fire!") — but at the same time, while being rolled, he's caught a glimpse of the snow falling thickly through the night sky outside their humble shelter, and it is as though the magical glow it seems to cast upon everything has fallen upon him as well, for he feels suddenly an intense flush of warmth penetrating his entire body: this is what it is like (the fire is crackling, the two dogs are nuzzling his thighs apart) to be among true friends! He had nearly forgotten. Junior faculty may be attentive, but rarely like this. "Aha, I think we've reached the font, Alidrofobo, you faithful old blister," Melampetta mutters (there is a cold nose poking at his rectum, perhaps more than one), "that which Aristotle the Wise termed in his treatise on The Classification of Dejecta the effervescent cause. We are at the source, the wellspring, the root, the core — or what the divine Duns Scrotum, confronted with the preserved contents of the Virgin's placenta, called in his nausea 'the very stone of the scandal,' the ultima realitas entis. We are, insomma, if I am not mistaken, at the drippings. So, will you taste the soup please?"

"My pleasure," grunts the old mastiff with gruff simplicity, "it just does for me."

"Mmm. Al dente. Though maybe we've let him lie in the sawdust too long."

"Careful. Shoulder blades look a bit dodgy…"

"Yes, I see." She laps around one, stroking his neck and the back of his bald pate with her broad stroke ("The hairs of your head are indeed numbered, comrade," she murmurs in his ear, "and the number is zero!"), and slides her velvety tongue down his crenellated spine, pushing at the knots, stiffens her tongue to prod at the small of his back, then slips on down the crack to the gap between his thighs like a skier on a downhill run, curls up around one thigh, and, as though congratulating herself or getting her wind back, laps generously at his near cheek. As she does so, he has a dim fleeting recollection of being combed and curried, back when he was still a performing donkey and being readied for a show, an experience so comforting it nearly reconciled him to his unnatural life, a life indeed more like a dream than waking life, and so all but lost now to his living memory… "You know, I can understand humans wanting to tart themselves up a bit," Melampetta pants. "I mean, I wouldn't mind a little lace shawl or some beads myself, if ever some whoreson should offer me such baubles — naked we're only cute for a day and after that we need all the help we can get. But why people leave all their other orifices gaping, then cover their assholes up in this cumbersome tailoring is beyond me."

"Huh. Some philosopher you are, Melone mia. It's a great attraction to flies, that's why. Maybe you need to lose your tail like the rest of us here, there seems to be something too abstract about your fundamental principles."

"The Blue-Haired Fairy told me," the professor mumbles softly into the blanket under his chin (what he remembers is the day he gained a tail, that day of the transformation: he was laughing, he and his dear friend Lampwick, they were so happy and having so much fun, and then suddenly there was a seizure in his chest and for a moment he couldn't breathe, and then the laughter became… something else…), "that little boys who do not wipe themselves properly not only grow leeks and cabbages back there and so become the village laughingstocks, they also lure rats into their beds at night and get bit in the behind with the plague." He sighs as a great soft tongue lathers a hip as though kneading pasta. Though the middle time is mostly gone, he can also remember the day he got changed back again, the day his new owner tried to drown him so as to make a drumhead of his hide, and instead the fish ate away his donkey flesh. It tickled more than hurt. It was liberating. Exciting even. Sensuous. It seemed to free him of a great weight. It was like the time the Blue-Haired Fairy sent a thousand woodpeckers to peck at his nose. It was like spring after a long dim winter. It was like… now… "She used to take me to the cemetery and show me the tombstones of all the little dirty-bottomed boys…" He yawns. As their tongues swab and massage his ancient hinderparts, he can feel the sleep that has been avoiding him since he left America steal over him like the caress of the Fairy's blue tresses. "Sometimes…"

"Yes…?"

"Sometimes my life seems more like it's been… ah!…!" It reaches deep into his inner core, suffusing him with a powerful satisfaction, and a great leavening of his spirit, as if he were being freed from some wretched imprisonment. Well, life itself, he thinks, I'm probably dying. They know this. They're preparing me. It's wonderful. It is like a magical transportation, like the intimate and golden repose of a Bellini, like a Hollywood ending. Never has he known such peace since the day he first became a boy… "It's been almost like a… like a movie…"

8. THE MOVIE OF HIS LIFE

"It looks like you've indeed got that little something extra," is how Melampetta describes it in fond remembrance of the old fan magazines (they have just been discussing the big bang theory of the Hollywood star system with its dire implications, as Melampetta put it, of entropic twinkle), but what she is referring to is the clump of matted hair her excavating tongue has uncovered between his anus and the ridged seam of his backbone. "It's all coiled up here like the runout trailer from an old reel of film. Has it been there all the time?"

"When my father made me, all the hair was painted on," he explains, though he wonders if this is indeed an explanation, or more like a proposition — what his old friend Alidoro might call (and perhaps did, having just spat irritably and, muttering that "the old sporcaccione's barf is worse than his blight," wandered off on his own, leaving the ancient traveler and the faithful watchdog alone here on this sandy shore that slopes down to the sea, or else to a swimming pool) a "suppurating pustulate." What he has really wanted to say in reply to her question is, "Well, yes… but no…," but he has been unable (the very effort seems to have pushed the boat shed some distance up the slope away from them into a circle of unmanned booms and cameras) to find the words for it.

But it's as though she understands anyway (she has meanwhile spooled the hair out from under the end of his spine so that it fans out over his cheeks and thighs all the way to the back of his knees), for she says: "Ah yes, I see, your skin is, after all, as one might have supposed, nothing more than a cheap veneer," and proceeds to lather his whole body at once, ferreting out vast hidden thickets of clotted hair: on his head, in his ears and armpits, down his back and legs, on his belly, chest, and chin, between his fingers, thighs, and toes. No wonder he's been feeling so inhibited! Out it comes! "This explains your infatuation with paradox," she howls.

"It's not an infatuation!" he screams, as though in pain, but really just to be heard, for she sits alone by his blanket now, far down the sunny slope below him, her head cocked archetypally, still as a plaster casting. Or perhaps that is a plaster casting. He in his elegant new pelt, which unfortunately is already attracting flies and ticks, is back up under the corrugated roof of the boat shed, where, as he was about to explain to Melampetta, they are making a movie of his life. "A new treatment," he says aloud, and seems to hear Alidoro laugh at that, or else the porter, that villain, though he, or she, is not to be seen, nor is anyone. The shed, for the purpose, has been fitted out like a sort of manger with heaps of straw, painted cutout animals, an imitation fire flickering in an old brazier. ("That's where I burned my feet off," he explains to Melampetta, or would have were she still beside him), white cotton on the roof, and Christmas presents secreted about like Easter eggs, but, though light streams spiritually through the broken rafters in imitation of, or homage to, the great Tintoretto, or perhaps dear old Veronese, the general appearance is one of artifice and desolation, the manger, suffused with barnyard odors and missing two of its four walls, uninhabited within except for a cheaply made wooden stick-figure lying in the straw and, without, surrounded by silhouetted camera gear looking about as reassuring as grave markers. It is as though those responsible have stopped in here only long enough to drop the little creature and hasten on, leaving behind nothing more personal than a yellow wig and a broken water jug.

"My mother died in the fire," the little wooden figure reminds him as they step out through the jaws of the smoldering doorway into the blazing but frigid sun, and, remembering, tears come to his eyes again, though whether of sorrow or exasperation, he can't be sure. He is, as it were, if he understands the storyline correctly, carrying himself on his back, having been awarded the role of the ass in recognition of his abundant hairiness and his recent achievements in the school metaphysics and polka examinations. Or at least this is, though its source forgotten, his understanding, an understanding beclouded somewhat by his uncertainty as to where they are supposed to be going and by the numbing pressure inside his head, a pressure he recognizes from previous experience as the donkey's stupid brain weighing heavily upon his own, a weight he had, in the intervening near-century, all but forgotten. "It doesn't matter where we are going," the little creature on his back tells him as if answering a question he might actually have asked, "what's important is to stay inside the frame."

"Hee haw," he replies, meaning: Is that all there is, then, this monotonous dynamics of inclusion and extrusion, of presence and absence (of pretense and abscess, he is thinking, or perhaps the little wooden man, mocking him, is saying this), this timid seizure of shadows, this insensible shying from the edge, and what the wooden man responds is:

"The public, oh holy ass, is never wrong."

Ah well, the public, he brays in reply, struggling against donkey-brain takeover (sometimes, he remembers now, this happened to him in his real donkey days, a kind of sudden slippage, or displacement, as if from one room into another, a synaptic leap not easily reversible, each brain aware of the other only as the mattress and the pea could be said to be aware of each other in that story of the fastidious princess, an alarming though not altogether unpleasant metastasis provoked, often as not, by the erecting of that outsized dangle between his legs, which is back, he is amused to note, slapping his thighs animatedly as he plods along under his chattering burden, the topic from the saddle now being the Renaissance use of the ass motif as a prototypical theophanic icon: the reluctant gait a trigger of passionate spiritual response, the upright ears emblems of devotion and orthodoxy, and the haunches, radiant as halos, more emotionally reverberant than angels' wings — one of the portentous themes of his own brazen youth, he is quick to recognize), the public — the public is always dying on you!

"Ah, where would we be," sighs the man on his back, who has been growing heavier and heavier with the weight of his discourse, "without the script?" And, as though to pursue the inquiry, he flings it away from him, the sheets scattering and tumbling in the air like sinners at the Last Judgment. Though they have made little enough actual progress (the boat shed, he feels certain, is still nearby), they have maintained the illusion of it by passing — or being passed by — revolving stages with painted backdrops representing the scenes of his childhood: the Tuscan village where his carpenter father lived, his fairy mother's cottage in the woods, the city of paupers known as Fools' Trap where all who came there lost their hair and plumage and other valued parts, the infamous Toyland, though here labeled "Pleasure Island" and looking a bit dated, even the little hill and coastal towns he toured as a marionette and dancing donkey, all gleaming and decorous as the backgrounds in a Bellini altarpiece. Now, however, they have arrived, by way of a gated and treeless city on an arid plain, desolate as a Western ghost town (a film set, of course: watching cameras no doubt lurk, unseen, behind the ruined walls), at a massive marble rock, white as candle wax and rearing ominously into the intense azure sky above them like one of Paolo Veneziano's primitive crags. Has he been here before? Alas, unlike the scenes on the revolving backdrops, this one has not been tagged. Gone, it's all gone. Or going. He can't remember yesterday. He shouldn't have thrown away the script. "What's the point," he cries bitterly, "of all these strenuous accumulations, if we only, in the — "

"Don't," groans the withering beast between his legs, limping now as it labors up the impossible rise, "give away… the ending…!"

At the summit, he is met (the fatally lamed donkey has crumbled away, turning to dust beneath him like a doused witch, he has had to scrabble up the last sheer face, hand over hand, alone) by a bearded ape in the scarlet robes of an opera buffa judge who, excoriating him for arriving so late ("But my poor knees-!" he protests, unheard over the strings of the studio orchestra), condemns him in an aria not unlike a love song ("The Picture That Could Change Your Life" is its title) to be rolled in flour and crucified.

He turns to address the gathered multitudes ("Blessed are they who turn the other omelette!" he cries), but snarling gendarmes swarm over him, strip him of his imported finery, lather him up with flour paste, and dress him for the party in his tattered old suit of flowered wallpaper, with a silver sash bedizened with bright ribbons bound round his waist and white camellias tied to his ears. Children are invited up from the audience to hammer the nails in, some of whom he recognizes as old schoolchums, who take pleasure in reviling him in the old style, calling him a stick-in-the-mud, pencil-peter, and a woodenhead, pulling his nose, covering his paper suit with graffiti ("HOORAY FOR TOYS!" they scrawl, "DOWN WITH ARITHMETIC!"), and tying strings to his hands and feet to make him dance, as though he were still a puppet and without the dignity of flesh and history. This is what it means, he realizes in his suffering, to be, of anything, incarnate. The children are clumsy and impatient, driving nails in randomly, some crooked, others only halfway, sometimes missing the nails altogether and hammering his flesh, and complaining all the while about the hardness of his bones and the wood, solid holly, of the cross beneath, which keep bending the nails and making their little hands sting.

Finally, a charge against him bearing the inscription "THE STAR OF THE DANCE" is nailed over his head and, to the accompaniment of fifes and drums, the cross is levered erect into the posthole prepared for it, the very hole, he sees, that he once dug in the Field of Miracles to plant the gold coins as seed for his magical money tree, he now rising as his own fruit, as it were, all of this taking place in exquisitely painful slow motion (there are so many nails in him, he hardly sags at all) as though they were overcranking the scene for erotic effect. "Rispettabile pubblico, cavalieri e dame!" bellows a voice from below: "Your attention, please!" He feels dizzyingly high, almost face to face with the sun itself, yellow as a patty of polenta there in the brilliant blue sky blanketing him. "Oh babbo mio-!" he whimpers as though cued. "Direct from the burning mountains and savage highways of wildest America, we bring you now in living color, speaking loosely, our feature attraction, in a performance more thrilling than the deeds of man, more beautiful than the love of woman, more terrifying than the dreams of children- " the children hoot and holler delightedly at this and heave their hammers at him, "- the final stirring episode in the Passion of Pinocchio! You will see before your eyes the farewell dance of the world's most notorious bad boy, this improbable son of an impotent carpenter and a virgin fairy, baptized by a chamber pot and circumcised by woodpeckers, part flesh, part spirit, and a legend in his own lifetime! Right this way!"

"Looks like this time you have, to make a phrase, barked up the wrong tree, dottore," remarks, amid all the burlesque whistling and cheering, a sour voice at his side: it is La Volpe, still in her porter's costume — he has been hung in the middle, he discovers, between her and her blind Gattino, now cackling on his other side with senile laughter. "You got the short stick, as one might say, you're out on a limb — you are, in a word, up the pole!"

"Up the pole!" wheezes the Cat, covering his mouth with the stub of his right foreleg: he hangs by one paw only, an empty black glove nailed up on the other side. "In a… in a…?"

"Word."

"Word! Hee hee hee!"

"You two seem cheerful enough," gasps the butt of their badinage in his transfixed pain, beginning to worry that the movie of his life might suddenly have turned into a documentary.

"Enh," shrugs the Fox, as best, in her own pinned state, she can shrug, "you get used to everything in this world, professore, familiarity breeds consent, as the saying goes, though I do miss being able, what with all my blebs and buboes, to scratch my tormented old arse. If perhaps you have a hand free — "

"Don't even listen to those bandits, Pinocchio!" warns a voice at his back. He twists around to seek out the source, but there is no one back there, just empty space, blue, vast, and inscrutable. "If you lend those scoundrels a hand, they'll steal it!"

"Cross words," grumbles La Volpe sardonically, resolving the puzzle.

"Words!" repeats Il Gatto, sniggering hysterically into his empty cuff.

"Avoid evil companions, my boy, or you'll be sorry!"

"How could I be sorrier than I already am?" he groans, his wounds stretching as, losing strength, he slumps lower.

"You could be," replies the cross with a tremulous sigh, "like me."

"Ah well. As to that, there was a time when — "

"I know, I know, they send us dossiers, resumes, we get the publicity handouts. You're a famous case, a model for us all, you've — if you'll pardon the expression — crossed over. This is a big honor for me, I know that, I've got the star of the dance, top billing, I shouldn't complain. But do you remember what it was like before? Do you remember how it felt to be a piece of talking wood?"

So long ago. A time of darkness. He was innocent then. And innocence, as his long life has taught him, is a form of naughtiness. Yet… "I had… no pain… no fear… I was free…"

"Free to get used for a chair leg or a clapboard! Free to soak, rot, and burn! Free to get chopped, hacked, whittled, split, and pulped! Hey, look at me! A tree made out of a tree! A joke! They gave me arms, I can't use them. Am I mad? Hell, I'm cross as two sticks, that's what the children say, but I don't know what 'mad' is, I don't know 'cross.' 'Pain,' you say, 'fear': it all sounds like magic to me — or it would, if I knew what magic was. I even envy that old Fox over there with her itches and scratches — I say, 'her,' but what do I know, right? I don't know 'knowing'! While you, you've had a life! You've had everything!"

"You don't know. Men's lives are short and stupid."

"Stupid? You tell me stupid? What's two and two, you ask. I don't know. I don't know what's two! But you know, you're smart, you've got brains, whatever they are. You've got — I don't know, I can only imagine — which is difficult, I don't even have an imagination — but what? You've got charm, right? Dignity. Serenity. You've got — correct me if I'm wrong — hauteur, glamour, class, talent — how'm I doing? — dash and daring. And tenderness. Smoothness. Authority. Have I got the picture?"

"Well, I guess so — but how did you — ?"

"I read it on a movie poster."

"You did?"

"You caught me. I'm lying. I can't read. I'm dumb as a stump, I'm thick as a plank, I'll never make my mark, or any other. Oh, I wasn't born yesterday, but that's just it. I wasn't born at all. Not like you, Mr. Star of the Dance! And I can't take steps to do anything about it, I can't keep my nose to the grindstone or listen to reason or kick the problem around, so what chance have I got? I'd be down in the mouth about it if I had a mouth. I can't even put my foot in it. I can't show my hand or beat around the bush or face the music. I don't even know where it is, the music, I mean, or the bush either, I'm too stupid. If I had a heart, I'd be wearing it on my sleeve, if I had a sleeve. So what have I got? A routine. A lumber number. A dumb show, a curtain dropper, an act with nails, halfway between a hanky twister and a creepie. But I'm a pro, a reliable standby, an understud, a support who never lets you down, I'm an old hand who hasn't even got one. People like to wear me on their chests. I'm vaguely sexy. I have a good silhouette. I stick out, as you might say. And I stick it out. I'm solid, I'm always there. And we're not talking lifetimes here, are we, we're not talking mere centuries — you remember!" But maybe he doesn't. The old boy seems to be hanging lower, his head drooping as if sniffing his armpits. "But you know what?" he whispers down his nape. "I like the blood! I soak it up! I can't get enough of it! I think: this must be what 'tasting's' like. Am I right? This must be 'appetite.' I like the writhing and the sweat: it oils me up. And I like the crowds!"

"Why are you telling me all this?" gasps the dying figure pinned to his crossbeam. The wretch seems to have gotten thicker and hairier, as though death were filling him up and leaking out in coarse filaments at all the pores. Below, he can feel a tail curling around his upright where the feet are nailed. There is a bad smell. "We were such good friends! We had such wonderful adventures! I showed you how I could pee longer than anybody. We used to make bets with the other boys. You showed me how your nose could grow…"

"What — ?! Lampwick? Is it you — ?!" The miserable creature lifts its long ears feebly, then drops them again. "Oh no!" He tries to throw his arms around his long-lost friend, but he cannot move them. "Lampwick!"

"And now… you're leaving me… hee haw!… to die alone…"

"I'm not leaving you, Lampwick! I'm here! I'll stay human! I promise!" But even as he protests, he can feel the place where they've nailed the charge twitch and stretch. A darkness is spreading everywhere like the darkness of unknowing. The sun seems to be falling from the sky. "Don't die, Lampwick! Don't die — !"

"Goodbye, Pinocchio…!"

"No — !" He struggles against the rigidity of his wooden arms to embrace the dying donkey, no matter what the consequences. All his heart is in it. He has a heart. He has always had a heart. And now he is straining it to the breaking point. He can feel the creaking and bending, the terrible splintering within. "Lampwick — ?" And then the sky seems to tear like a curtain, there is a great roar (it is in his own throat), and he awakes to find himself grappling through his twisted blanket with Alidoro, his nose buried in the old mastiff's filthy coat, and bawling like a lost lamb.

"There, there," soothes Alidoro, breathing sleepily down his neck. He peels away the tangled blanket, then wraps him up again.

"It was Lampwick! He was dying! I could have saved him, but — !"

"It was a nightmare," says Alidoro gently, easing him back into the wood chips next to Melampetta, who watches him drowsily with one half-cocked eye. "It's all right, old friend. Nothing you can do now…"

"No, I mean," he mumbles tearfully, curling up inside the blanket, his shoulders aching still from his recent struggle, "I could have saved him when he… when he died the first time…" Gripped by this painful truth, unassuaged by all the intervening decades, the old professor snuggles down between his two companions, closes his eyes once more and, with the kind of diligence he once applied to scholarship and basket weaving, chooses to dream that, while his colleagues sit behind him on the stage, gravely exhibiting their noses, he is giving a ceremonial address to the American Academy of Arts and Letters on the uses, proper and improper, of somatic metaphor, a dream which is, he recognizes, even as he embraces it, a dream of, a surrender to, oblivion