Pinocchio in Venice

9. THE DEVIL'S FLOUR

"Impossible really," he says, describing for Melampetta the film studio's futile attempts to cast the part of the Blue-Haired Fairy, "like a painter trying to paint the color of air, or a composer reaching for the sound of grace — "

"Yes, or a theologian trying to imagine the taste of manna, which has been likened severally unto angel breath, Orphic eggs, the froth on a virgin's milk, pressed mistletoe, dream jelly, lingam dew, fairy pee, the alchemical Powder of Projection, and the excreta of greenflies on tamarisk leaves. I know what you mean. It's like going after the ineffable with a butterfly net, or trying to catch time in a teaspoon. Or, as the immortal Immaculate Kunt once said, in an attempt to describe by way of the practical reason the odor of sanctity: 'Toe-cheese is only the half of it.' "

"That's right, there are approximations, metaphors, allusions — but nothing close to the real thing." The aged professor emeritus, sipping his coffee and staring out quite blissfully on the little boatyard, blanketed this morning in newly fallen — and falling — snow, muses in this oblique manner upon reality and illusion, pursuing his own themes, as it were, even as the watchdog's salacious appetite for gossip seeks to deflect him from them. The front of the boat yard slopes down from the sheds to the canal like a beach, now completely white except for a few dog tracks and a yellow patch or two, and, though it's no bigger than a Boston back garden, its covelike nature takes him back to California and his once-upon-a-time passage through Filmland, where the two concepts in question — reality, illusion — were truly inseparable: even he could no longer tell them apart, and so he nearly lost his way again. "Finally they gave the role to a blond ingenue who looked like a highschool cheerleader from Iowa dressed up for the junior prom. She wore lipstick and blue eyeshade and plucked her eyebrows. Her complexion was nice, though I happen to know she had pimples back where her swimsuit covered them. And she refused to dye her hair blue, so they put her in a kind of slinky blue nightgown and shortened her name to the Blue Fairy. Instead of living in the forest in the house of the dead, she presumably came from some distant star as an answer to my father's wish — my father, who might have wished for the cheerleader, had he known about such beings, but never for a fairy or even, for that matter, a talking puppet. He always called me his 'little accident.' "

"Ah, povero Pinocchiolino…"

"She even wore one of those painted barrettes from the five-and-ten that were popular at that time, and gauzy wings like a mosquito or a blowfly. But they did me a favor, for it was this outrageous distortion of the truth, this callous misrepresentation of the very being to whom I had dedicated my entire life, that finally shook me out of my… my iniquitous indolence…" It is the indolence, of course, the iniquity, the outrage, that Melampetta has wanted to hear about. That's how it always is, he thinks, sipping his coffee while Melampetta trots to the edge of their little shelter to bark at a lone passerby on the bridge. A lifetime of scholarly diligence, of heroic integrity and self-discipline and an intransigent commitment to the loftiest of ideals, and what people always ask him about is the fun he had when he was naughty

"So this Pimply Blue-Bottomed Fairy, I take it," rumbles the watchdog, stepping back in under the corrugated tin roof and shaking her coat, "was set up as a kind of synthetic milk-fed avatar of the Blessed Virgin, as she's called between theopathic farts at the Pope's table, who granted a pithless old carpenter his wish, in effect, to whelp without having to go through labor pains — ?"

"You could say so, Melampetta. According to the script, she first brought the wood to life, then, after all the entertaining sin-and-redemption rituals, she changed the wood to flesh, more as a part of Geppetto's dream than my own, since the movie suggested I was more or less dead by then, or at the very least hopelessly waterlogged. When I pointed out to the director that I'd been a talking puppet for ages before I'd ever met the Blue-Haired Fairy, he said that was interesting but he couldn't use it…"

He is pleased to be talking about the Fairy, even if this is not

devil's flour exactly the approach he might have chosen, for his mind this raw and blustery Venetian morning is very much upon her. Having thought he'd lost her forever, he has her back again. In a manner of speaking. For he has awakened not only to hot coffee and a roaring fire (friends from the post office have dropped off a few bags of backlogged mail, Melampetta explained cheerfully, feeding the rusty oil drum appropriately through a tattered hole in the side), but also to the heartening news that his luggage has been found, Alidoro having already left for the police station to reclaim it. Soon he will have a fresh change of clothes, his own toothbrush and deodorant and mouthwash, money with which to procure a real hotel room with a real bath, his medicines and hair restoration elixir and linseed oil, his passport and credit cards, his scented handkerchiefs, his certificates and awards, his foot snuggies, and above all, in its manifold forms, his invaluable Mamma papers, the loss of which last night had seemed to him worse than the loss of life itself. The morning, as they say here, truly has gold in its mouth!

Indeed, he was rather surprised to find himself awakening to a new day at all, having supposed last night to be his last, whether as a victim and outcast, as he had feared at first, or, later, as an old companion being prepared lovingly, if humiliatingly, for burial. He had slept so hard he was certain that his sleep had been dreamless, but Melampetta assured him he had wept and laughed aloud more than once during the night, and on one occasion had opened his mouth very wide and from somewhere deep in his stomach had announced very clearly: "We are all dead!" He wasn't even sure, when he came to, if it was the next morning or several days later, or even some other time and place altogether, his arrival in Venice having seemed more nightmarishly unreal to him just at that moment than anything that might have happened in dreams. He reared up and would have cried out, but, bound tightly in the stolen police blanket, and with a fire blazing away somewhere nearby, he was afraid that he might be a prisoner again like the time he was caught and nearly fried by the Green Fisherman, a fear reinforced by the floury dusting of white snow all about.

"Aha! Sleeping Beauty blooms at last!" Melampetta barked out delightedly on seeing him start up in such alarm. "What a rising you make! Like the white goose's son, as the expression goes, beak and all! You've really been sawing wood, compagno, if you don't mind my saying so, you've been sleeping like a little log! Like a top! You were hitting the knots! Caulked off! You were like the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus all rolled into one and stretched out serially! It's nearly noon! You've missed all the news!"

"I never closed my eyes," the old traveler grumbled then, falling back again. He saw he'd been sleeping in sawdust and wood chips, which reminded him, under the influence of Melampetta's terrible puns, of his own mortality. Like a human sleeping in hair and bones. "What day is it? What year?"

"It's the day they found your luggage," she replied. Which sat him up again of course, this time with a shout, his weathered face split with a smile. "It's down at the Questura, and so is Alidoro. He'll be back soon. Now, meanwhile, dear friend, let's establish a few first principles, as the Holy Peripatetics used to call those morning rations of beer and porridge that preceded all their Olympian endeavors." And, tail wagging generously, she brought him over warm bread, coffee, and a thick chunk of unsliced prosciutto that still bore a dog's toothmarks. It was delicious. He was suddenly ravenous. "Lido went out and picked that up for you before he went for the bags, though don't ask where or how, for as they say in the Lord's Prayer, 'Give us each our daily bread, or else by the verminous ballocks of all the cardinals in hell, we'll take it.' Poor old fellow, his tail-stub's really drooping this morning. You were pretty restless, you know, thrashing about, yowling in your sleep, wheezing and snorting — the mangy old eyesore was up all night with you, he's had no sleep at all."

"I'm sorry…"

"At one point you got free of your blanket somehow and stood up, naked as a worm in the winter storm, and rendered a fair approximation of the Sermon on the Mount, blessing the weepers and winegrowers, throwing pearls to the dogs, thank you very much, doing unto thieves and profligates as they would do unto you, honking your nose, turning your cheeks, unfolding your throat, and swearing against oaths and blind men, salting the lilies of the field from your peehole, prophesying against the foundations of the city which you said were of rusty unleavened sand, giving advice on how to stay out of the hands of the carabinieri, Romans, and other footstools of iniquity, plucking logs out of eyes and thistles out of figs and proverbs out of the air like Simon Magus himself conjuring up heresies. And all of it at full split, you were really telling it big! A logomaniac of the first water! Where did you learn to speechify like that?"

"I don't know. I can't recall when I wasn't speaking. I was speaking before I was born…"

"It took both Alidoro and me to wrestle you back into your blanket again, you were really making fire and flames, you were climbing on all the furies, outside yourself, a devil in each hair, as one could say if you had any. You kept screaming something about rusty nails, hairy asses, and the forbidden fruits of firewood — what did you mean by all that?"

"I don't remember…"

"And your mamma, as you called her, was in it, too."

"She always is…" Last night, by the light of the fire, he'd thought the old watchdog quite beautiful. Now, by the harsher light of day, he could see she was a rather stubby and jowly old crossbreed with droopy ears and thick matted hair, mostly white — off-white — with a black Rin-Tin-Tin patch over one eye that made her face look hollowed out on that side. Nevertheless, he felt comfortable around her, he felt she was someone he could open his heart to, so, though he might have preferred to talk about his life as an art critic, philosopher, and theologian, and to discuss with her such topics as his concept of "I-ness," his definition of the soul, and his views on reality and illusion, beauty (the only form of the spiritual we can receive through the senses, as he has often declared), nasology, and the veracity principle, he did not really object now when she led him back, by way of things he had supposedly said in his sleep last night ("You kept crying for her floppies, it was some kind of mad infatuation, you said, and there was something about a missing hard dick…"), to his final crisis with the Blue-Haired Fairy and his sudden flight, a central theme after all of his work-now-once-more-in-progress, to Hollywood. Indeed, he would probably, if he had his computer here already, and if there were an electrical outlet he could trust, be taking notes

"They asked me out there to be an advisor to a film they were making about me, based on one of my early books. I knew better of course, even then the place was notorious for its venal disregard for the truth, but they caught me at a weak moment, and I decided to go. I thought that maybe if I got away from this place, I could get away, finally, from her. From her and all her tombstones. At least long enough to think things out. Get a new perspective. And it did seem different over there somehow…" All those starlets, the auditions, they all wanted to take him home and play with him. There were beach parties and drunken nights by orchid-strewn swimming pools and wild drives to Mexico. They taught him how to mix American cocktails and drink champagne by the slipperful, though it tended to run straight through him, even as a human. They asked him to unzip their evening gowns. He lit their cigarettes for them. They cradled him in their arms and let him suck their pillowy breasts. They used him as a kind of bathtub toy. He was in all the gossip columns. Indeed, only his ignorance of his own anatomy saved him from fatal mistakes out there. He kept trying, at their urging, to put his penis in them, and it wouldn't go. It was more like a limp faucet. "It even looked like a faucet, my putative father's putative sense of puttanaio humor no doubt." The girls all thought it was cute. Only later did it suddenly occur to him… "But then the fights at the studio began…" The scriptwriters and storyboard people changed everything of course. The producers insisted on it. There were reasons: the need for metaphoric coherence and condensation, the temporal and technical limitations of the medium, the metaphysical riddle of the frame itself, the alleged infantilism of the American public, studio contracts with actors and artists, a growing dissatisfaction with Fascist Italy and with theology in general, the tight shooting schedule. "But the main points were there, I felt, even if the Americans did confuse beer and billiards with sin, redemption with technological ingenuity. And if they'd turned my heavy-handed ill-tempered father into a cuddly old feeble-minded saint, well, as I once said about your great-grandsire, Melampetta, the dead are the dead, and the best thing is to leave them in peace. And meanwhile I was the toast of the town, my face, as Jiminy said, on everybody's tongue, I was having too much fun really to argue about anything, doing interviews, judging bathing-beauty contests, turning up at premieres in the arms of the stars, trying to make my faucet work. So I took the money they threw at me, told them the truth whether they wanted to hear it or not, because what else could I do, and otherwise stayed away from the lot. Until it came to the Blue-Haired Fairy. There, finally, was the sticking-point."

"So she found you after all."

"She'd never lost me…" Even if he'd nearly lost himself. She was everywhere now, he'd realized, vast and immediate as the ocean outside his Malibu window or the blue sky overhead. The house he'd returned to after rescuing his father from the belly of the monster fish — her house, though the Talking Cricket claimed he'd got it from the blue-haired goat — had expanded to become the entire universe. He'd been a fool to think he could get away

"Yet last night you said," she says, bringing over his washed underclothes and suit, and helping him out of his cocoon of blanket, "that without you she wouldn't even exist."

"It's our own creations that most possess us," he replies, pleased to be able to quote himself again, and thus, as it were, to clothe in some fashion his naked decrepitude.

"Yes, true, like blind Father Didymus in the demonic grip of the Holy Trinity, or poor old Pope Innocent the Eighth, who, populating Hell for the faithful, found himself nightly in the fiends' amorous clutches, a consequence, I take it, you have not suffered…?"

"Not… not in that sense, no, I have never, so far as I know," he says, choosing his words carefully (his underwear is fresh and crisp, but his suit seems to have shrunk and is pocked, as though in imitation of his diseased flesh, with burn holes), "seen her again. Not since the night I… I became a boy…" He scrubs his itchy nose, holds his suit up to the dull light of the snowy day. "But what — ?"

"Sorry about that. Must have been cheap material, dear friend — old sheep's hair of some kind, I suspect. I put it to dry on the barrel last night and it couldn't take the heat. I don't have much else to — "

"It's all right," he says, feeling very generous this glittery morning. "I've gotten by with less. There was a time when I had nothing better than wallpaper or a beanbag to wear, and stale bread on my head. And anyway I still have the overcoat."

"Yes, well, most of it… But wait!" She raises her snout to the air and sniffs expectantly, then barks: "Here comes Alidoro!"

"Ah, noble friend!" the grateful professor cries, stumbling forward, tears in his eyes, to embrace the great mastiff as he comes lumbering into the boatyard. "You have saved my life — again! And my life's work! How can I ever thank you? How can the world thank you?!" Lido does not immediately return his embrace. His old eyes droop rheumily. What — ? A chill runs through the old scholar. He staggers back. "Is something — ? Were the bags not found? Were they someone else's — ?!"

"No, they're there. They're yours, all right — "

"Well, then, it's time for celebrations! Dinner tonight! At my hotel! With champagne! Cream puffs and panettoni! Tiramisu! Grappa from the last century! We'll have a week of Saturdays! Christmas and Carnival, all at once! For you, Melampetta, those shawls and baubles you've been wanting! For you, Alidoro, my most precious friend, the world!"

"The bags are yours," growls the old mastiff when he's able, "but they're empty."

"Empty — ?"

"Ah," whispers Melampetta softly, tossing some more letters into the fire, "it rains on the arse of the unlucky, even when they are sitting on it…"

"Nothing in them but one sheet of paper."

"One sheet — ?" he squeaks, beginning to choke up. "From all my work, just one sheet? But which — ?" Lido hands it to him. There are three proverbs scrawled on it. Stolen money never bears fruit. The devil's flour is all bran. He who steals his neighbor's cloak ends his life without a shirt. He recognizes them. The last time he'd seen La Volpe and her stupid companion before last night was nearly a century ago. They were ragged then, maimed and destitute, begging out of need, not knavery, though it was only what they deserved, and so, his own conversion by then complete, he'd sent them both to hell: "Addio, mascherine!" he'd laughed, throwing proverbs at them like stones. And these: these were the proverbs. "Scoundrels!" he hisses. He is trembling from head to foot. "Villains! Thieving treacherous fiends! Murderers! ASSASSINS!" He finds himself beating wildly on Alidoro's chest. He clutches his head, which seems about to burst. They can't do this! Not to him! Don't they know who — ? But what — ? What's this — ?! There's nothing on the right side of his head! "My ear! What's happened to my ear — ?!"

Melampetta, head ducked, tail curled between her legs, glances

devil's flour sideways at Alidoro as though she might have just eaten a chicken. "Last night," she says meekly, "when we were trying to get you back into your blanket, it… it came off."

"What — ?! My ear — ?!"

"Don't worry, we saved it!"

"You knocked my ear off, you stupid animals — ?! You slobbered all over me, you burned my clothes up, you made me sleep in all this filth, and then, on top of it all, you knocked my ear off — ?!"

"Actually, it sort of fell off by itself…"

"Listen, my friend, you can stay here another night," suggests Alidoro. "The owners won't be back till the snow's gone, and Mela won't mind. Until we can — "

"Here — ?! In this pestilent flyblown dunghill of a kennel? This loathsome flea farm, this squalid, stinking — ?"

"You and Mela can talk. You know, about serious things. Meanwhile I'll go back and see if — "

"Talk?" he screams, his rage exploding. "With this dumb mutt, this illiterate foul-mouthed retard? Listen to her preposterous idiocies another whole night? Are you crazy, you stupid mongrel, I'd rather die!"

Alidoro, who has slumped to his haunches, now lowers his jaws and gazes mournfully up at him from between his paws. "For charity, vecchio — !" he rumbles softly under his breath. Melampetta stares at him a moment as though trying to see through the holes in his suit. There is a brief dreadful silence. Then she lifts her snout, closes her eyes, and commences to howl pathetically.

Oh no. What has he done? What has he said?

"My… my friends! Oh, my friends, forgive me!"

He rushes over, tearfully, to embrace them. Alidoro buries his nose deeper, Melampetta howls all the louder. All over Venice he seems to hear dogs howling. "Oh please! I'm just upset! Can't you see? It's been so hard! I'm an old man! I'm at the very edge, I've nothing left!" He is weeping, sobbing, all his pain concentrated now in Melampetta's terrible howl. "Oh what a wretched fool I've been!" His knees collapse, but Alidoro reaches for him now to steady him with a gentle forepaw. "You're the dearest friends I have in the whole world! Last night was, truly, one of the most beautiful nights of my whole life! Not even the day I got my Ph.D. was as wonderful! It's true! Please, Melampetta! Don't howl like that! I'm so sorry! I love you so!" She releases one more anguished siren, then allows herself to be drawn into his arms. They are all hugging and licking one another now and whimpering and crying. "Oh dear sweet eloquent Melampetta! You're the greatest philosopher I've ever known!" he exclaims, then adds, to stop his nose from twitching: "In all of Venice!" They all laugh at that, and then they cry some more, and hug and kiss and promise always to be true and to help each other and not to say unkind things, and while they're all rubbed up together like that, his other ear comes off.

10. THE THREE KINGDOMS

It is all the old traveler can do, his traveling all but done, to put one benumbed foot in front of the other. It is not just the snow, blowing through the holes in his clothing and down his neck and ankles, it is not just the freezing cold snapping cruelly at his tender nose, or the pain in his elbows and locked-up wooden knees, the arduousness of the trek itself through the treacherously frosted city. It is also despair. Bleak, final, disabling. He no longer has anything left to live for. His conclusive and definitive work, his capolavoro, is gone forever, his life is ended. Why then must the suffering go on? "I have lived long enough," San Petrarca said. Perhaps while wandering these very streets. "If the Stage Director wants to break it off, very well." "We can but keep trying, my friend," Alidoro had insisted gruffly in a temper something between heroism and simple doggedness. "Death must find us alive." And so, without conviction, they have set out, the heartsick professor and the faithful old mastiff, bound for the Questura with the aim of providing the police with a list of the empty luggage's missing contents and perhaps a little monetary encouragement on the side ("Not for nothing is that band of shameless beggars known also as the questua- the Sunday collection plate!" Melampetta had growled good-humoredly, forcing upon him the few rumpled notes she and Lido had somehow scraped together, stuffing them into his pockets along with his ears), but the journey is as futile, he knows, as the larger one which brought him here. Back here, he should say, back here to Acchiappacitrulli, the infamous snare of simpletons, Fools' Trap, city of the shorn, where he himself once played, now plays again, the booby.

"I always thought of this as the Island of the Busy Bees," he had sighed somewhat grievously while they were bundling him up in his scraps and tatters of overcoat, which has the odor this morning of burnt camel dung, and Lido had replied drily: "Well, that's right, and what they're busy at, compagno, is skinning the tourists."

So he has returned, he has discovered, not only to the scene of his triumph, but to the scene of his ignominy as well, the place where all those years ago, in Acchiappacitrulli's Field of Miracles, he buried his gold coins, dreaming of orchards of tinkling money trees. He should have guessed. This infamous city of despotism and duplicity, of avarice and hypocrisy and subterfuge, this "stinking bordello," this wasps' nest of "insatiable cupidity" and "thirst for domination," as Venice's outraged neighbors once declared, this police state with the air of a robber's den, always out after its "quarter and a half-quarter" and "conspiring the ruin of everyone," this fake city built on fake pilings with its fake fronts and fake trompes l'oeil, this capital of licentiousness and murder and omnivorous greed: who else but these lagoon rats would want the tail feathers of a poor gullible pheasant or the hair of a dumb dog? One thing, surely, can be said of all who have come to this island: whether they left wiser, wearier, happier, sadder, enchanted or enlightened, exasperated or exalted, impregnated with beauty or disease or rabid hedonism, they all left poorer. Just as the Blue-Haired Fairy ever, in her profound maternal wisdom, warned him.

Yet it was for her sake he has returned and, though deceived, he can pride himself that on this occasion his intentions at least were nobler: the search, not without considerable personal sacrifice, for the consummation, as it were, of a virtuous life — and yet, and yet, he cautions himself, stumbling along, wasn't that dream of an ultimate life-defining metaphor as mad as the dream of money trees? What was he hoping for this time, another Peace Prize? Beatification? Another review that lauded his wisdom and stylistic mastery, whilst scarcely concealing an annoyed amazement that he was still alive? Another invitation to receive an honorary degree and put his nose on view? As he trudges miserably, step by leaden step, through this city of masks, its very masks masked this morning by the snow blown against its crumbling walls like the white marble faces masking Palladio's pink churches, a dazzlingly sinister mask, today's, as expressionless and macabre as the Venetian bauta worn last night by the hotel proprietor, the alleged hotel proprietor (fakes within fakes, deceptions upon deceptions!), he feels the mockery cast upon his own shabby self-deceptions, the impostures and evasions, grand pretensions, the many masks he's worn — and not least that of flesh itself, now falling from him like dried-up actor's putty. Ah, he was right to come here, after all, old piece of rot-riven firewood that he is, to share his shame with the defrocked sheep and peacocks, the wingless butterflies and combless cocks of Fools' Trap.

As the despondent prodigal shuffles along, "carrying through," as he would say, but just barely, dragging one ill-shod foot laboriously through the snow, then, after a deliberating pause, the other, his patient companion trots back and forth, sniffing this canal railing, lifting his leg on that boutique wall or Carnival poster, nosing around in garbage bags and emptied crates, lapping at cast-off food wrappers and paper cups, as though to pretend that this is the unhurried way he always goes to work. The streets are empty but for a few angry red-faced women under their dark umbrellas, carried like missile shields, a midmorning drunk or two, flurries of wheeling black-faced gulls, the occasional lost tourist. The heavy metal shutters are down on most of the shops, intensifying the city's blank stare (it is this blank stare he has been feeling, this cold shoulder, this icy scorn — there are no reflections today, even the ditchlike canals full of dirty slate-colored water, scummed with snow, are opaque), but from those that are open — a baker, a newsstand, a pasta maker, a toyshop and a cantina, a pizzeria — Alidoro receives and returns greetings, picking up scraps of this and that to nibble on which the professor in his desolation refuses.

Once they've passed out of earshot, Lido fills him in on the politics, in-laws, crimes, calamities, debts, spouses and lovers, foibles, fantasies, and farces of each of the shopkeepers, keeping up a steady rumble of conversation as though to stop the old professor's brain from freezing up. "Started life as a gigolo for the local contessas, that one, helped manage one of their Friends of Venice flood rescue funds, rising as you might say while the Old Queen sank, and then, when his little bird died, he retired into politics for awhile and, after the usual scandals and piracies, ended up in fashion leather, security systems, and the manufacture of decorative window boxes. Careful now, old friend, not too close to the edge there…" Lido talks as well about his career as a police dog, life in Italy between the wars, how the Fascists tore his tail off for some secret he never knew or couldn't recall ("You know me, I can't remember from the nose end of my muzzle to the other…"), his irremediable attachment to this island in spite of his loathing of tourists and his lifelong fear of water ("I always meant to leave, but you can't straighten an old dog's legs my friend, I'll have to draw the hide in this infested overdecorated chamber pot, I'll fodder their boggy eelbeds in the end…"), his hatred of the modern world with its electronically hyped-up homeless transients, all of them nowhere and anywhere at the same time, even when they think they're at home, the humiliations of toothlessness and blindness (the professor, absorbed in his own debilities, hasn't noticed; he notices now: the old fellow navigates largely by nose alone), and life with his "mistresses," as he calls them, women he meets getting arrested, who take him home with them when he gets them off, and who are grateful and treat him well until they get taken back in again.

"They seem to get some comfort out of an old dog. I do what I can for them. Not much, of course, but the cask gives what wine it has, as they say, and at worst I've got this old stub of a tail to get me by when I'm not up to better. Unfortunately, a lot of the old dears have taken a bad fold of late, gone onto the needle, and are dying off now with the plague."

"There's a plague in Venice — ?!"

"There's a plague everywhere."

In between stories, Alidoro, circling round and round in the bristling cold, asks the venerable scholar about his own career, about his books and his honors and his nose, about his prison days and life as a farm worker and getting swallowed by the monster fish ("You know what my father said when I went running up to give him a hug," he flares up, angry about something, though he can't say just what, "he said, 'Oh no, not you again, you little fagot! Even in this putrid fishgut I can't get away!' "), about his reasons for coming back to Venice (he doesn't give them — whatever they were, they were tragically stupid), about his problems with wood-boring weevils and fungal decay, and about America, about the bosses and the range wars, the recent elections ("How is it a country can stand tall, hunker down, sit tight, fly high, show its muscle, tighten its belt, talk through its hat, and fall on its ass, all at the same time?" the old mastiff wants to know), and the gangsters and centerfolds and dog catchers of Chicago.

Even though the professor is aware that his friend is provoking this dialogue as well-meant therapy against the despair which is threatening to halt him in his tracks, he cannot curb his sense of outrage and betrayal that he should be visited by such bitter despair in the first place — or the last place, as it were (and perhaps he even wants the despair, who knows, perhaps it is this that is making him crabby: he's earned it, has he not?), such that when Alidoro asks him: "How did you get so interested in painted pictures anyhow, compagno? I would have thought, wide-awake as you were — ", he cuts him off snappishly with: "Because they don't move. And they don't ask tiresome questions." He groans faintly, regretting the outburst, though Alidoro seems unperturbed by it, maybe even pleased, in that it has carried him another three steps or so. They are trudging past silent black-faced gondolas with silver beaks, now laden with snow as though trying to disguise themselves as squatting gulls. Actors everywhere. Who can you trust? "I'm not a greedy man, Alidoro. I learned early on from my father's pear peels, the pigeon's tares, the circus hay, to be happy with little in this life. I have given up much for that little. And the little I wanted, here at the end, was to finish one last chapter of one last book before I died. But now…"

"Ah well, maybe that's a blessing," grumps the old dog. "Too many words in the world already. Like taking water to the sea."

"Enough words maybe," acknowledges the old scholar with a sigh, "but we still haven't put them together right. That, Alidoro, is our sacred mission."

"Bah!" barks Alidoro. "I shit on sacred missions!" And he squats right where he is in front of a barbershop to make his point.

"That's easy for you to say," replies the professor wryly, gazing blurrily upon the squatting dog. "If I try to make that kind of argument, your friends will want to throw me in jail again."

"To some son, to some — unff! — stepson," Lido grunts cheerfully, then lifts his rear, kicks a foot, and walks away. "Ciao, Mario!"

"Ciao, Lido!" shouts the barber, rushing out to spread sawdust on the turd.

"In Venice, Pinocchio my friend, in case you hadn't noticed, there is always a double standard. It goes with the scenery."

The professor is momentarily transfixed, however, by the mastiffs sawdust-sprinkled turd, sitting upon the glittering white pavement with all the authority of a papal announcement. Or a gilded prophecy. "Mine," he says dismally, his depression creeping over him again, "are coming out that way. There's…"

"Eh?" The dog turns back to nose his turd quizzically.

"That stuff… there's something wrong inside…"

"Mm, the sawdust, you mean… flour of your own bag, was it? Last night I was wondering…"

"The devil's flour…," he sighs, trying to make light of it, but feeling tears prick the corners of his eyes. And standing there staring down upon Alidoro's turd, he feels the pang of his loss penetrate him once again to the very core, releasing afresh all those bitter memories of the more distant past, those times that heartless pair had cheated him, and lied to him, and set fire to the tree he was hiding in, then tried to murder him with knives and ropes. "After that," the abased traveler says, or perhaps adds, not sure whether he's been talking out loud or not, "the villains made me bury my money in the Field of Miracles. They took, then as now, everything I had!"

"Ah, that infamous patch, that pesthole — I'm afraid that's another story, my fr — !" Alidoro begins, but he is suddenly interrupted by a strange spindly fellow who comes leaping out of nowhere, black coat-tails flying, and lands with both feet — SPLAP! — on Lido's snow-frosted turd: "Got you!" he cries, laughing horribly. "Stamping out wisdom!" he shrieks at the postered wall, shaking his fist vehemently at it. Then he whirls abruptly on Pinocchio, startling him with his manic ferocity, and, staring straight through him, screams: "Heads up! Heads up! Here she comes!"

"What — ?!" gasps the old professor, ducking, as the wild-eyed creature flings himself flat out in the turd-stained snow, crying "WAAHH-H-hhh!" Then he springs to his feet again and bellows into the swirling snow: "Go to the devil, you ungrateful cold-assed nanny! You cuntless whore! You endless nightmare! Oh, what madness!" He throws himself at the wall, kicks it, rips off an impasto of overlaid posters and heaves it at the sky, crying out his "Woe! Woe! Woe!", his "Guai! Guai! Guai!" (or maybe it's "Mai! Mai! Mai! — Never! Never! Never!"), and then, declaiming solemnly with a quavering voice, "I shall not leave until I tell you a great truth," the lunatic goes bounding off into the falling snow, the black tatters of his suit fluttering behind him like unpinned ribbons, and, at the far end of the little calletta, disappears into the storm suddenly like a candle snuffed in the wind.

"Poor old fellow," rumbles Alidoro, his rheumy eyes following his nose.

"I–I think I saw him last night," gasps the professor, still doubled over from having ducked, his knees creaking with their trembling. "He was beating his head on a church wall."

"Could have been. But Venice is full of them, my friend, you see them everywhere, bawling and squalling and abusing the masonry. Must be the water. Every campo has one. We call them our Venetian grillini, our little talking crickets, because they're always entertaining us, especially on balmy summer evenings. Days like this, I'm afraid, they don't last long." He sighs and seems to shudder. "Nor will we if we don't soon make bundle and — eh? What's the matter? Did you lose something?"

"No, I–I can't straighten up! I ducked and — "

"Ah! Here, lean on me, old man," says Alidoro, crawling under him. "Now, just relax…" The dog rises slowly, straightening him up. More or less. He is still leaning dangerously like a Venetian campanile, his nose dipping at belt level. "That's better! Don't give up, compagno! Get your soul between your teeth and bite down hard, we have to show a good face to a bad game!"

"It's — it's getting worse, Alidoro! Everything is seizing up!"

"Yes, hmm, but it won't do to stop moving, not in this weather. Hang on to my coat now and follow along as best you can, and I'll tell you about the real gold in the Field of Miracles."

"Real — ?"

"If you'd left your money there, you'd be another Solomon today."

"Like those wretched beggars the Fox and the Cat, you mean," he gasps drily, stumbling along beside his friend, clutching his thick coat with frozen fingers, stiff as sticks.

"Those two," rumbles the mastiff, "must be the world's most unfortunate swindlers. Shortsighted is what they are, and shortchanged is what they got. Better an egg today than a chicken tomorrow was the way La Volpe always figured it, especially when the chicken might be plucked before it was born, so the minute they got an offer, fools that they were, they sold the field off."

"Hmm. It's true, she did tell me that a rich man had bought the field, that was why we had to hurry."

"Yes, a quick turnover, that was always her game, so when the Little Man made her an offer — "

This does straighten him up, with a noise like a squeaky rocker: "What — ?! Who — ?!"

"The Little Man — L'Omino, you know, that little fat guy who ran the donkey factory here, where — "

"Toyland? Here — ? But — ?!"

"That's right. In fact, we just passed the old dockyards where they corralled the little asses before shipping them out — but who am I to be telling you, eh? Anyway, as it turned out, the old Fox outfoxed herself on that one. The Little Man had found out somehow that there was good water running deep below it, so he bought the field and then resold it to petrochemical and electrometallurgical industries and steel plants and oil refineries and made himself a billion. It's called Porto Marghera now, you can see it from the Giudecca Canal. It's what you see in that direction instead of sky. Talk about your miracles! Sucking up all the sweet water sank this sinkhole another half meter into the sea and dried up all the wells."

"But wait! Do you mean to say — ?"

"Oh, I'm not finished, my friend! For when the Little Man died, the Sons of the Little Man — Omino e figli, S.R.L., as they call themselves, the scheming little bastards — filled in the lagoon for more industry and airports and gouged out channels for tankers and that changed the very tides, eroding all the foundations. If you stand still and watch, you can actually see pieces of the city split off and fall into the canals. Some days now the sun turns red and yellow and even green, and all the walls are being eaten as if by invisible maggots. And I'm sure the Sons of the Little Man have more miracles in store for us yet…"

"But wait, Alidoro! Please!" he gasps, tottering under the dizzying impact of this new information. He lets go of his friend's coat. "Do you mean to say that this — this is Playland, too? This is the Land of Toys — ?!"

The old mastiff pauses, peers down at him quizzically. "You didn't recognize it? Hm. You've been away a long time, vecchio mio." So! They were all here, then: the Three Kingdoms, as he has called them in his writings. Not "points on a moral compass" (his sanctimonious phrase) but overlays, a montage, variations on a theme… "Of course, the original operation is pretty much shut down — not much use for donkeys these days. And toys are a dime a dozen, the canals are clogged with them — ecologically, there's nothing worse in this town than another Christmas. Locally, the Sons of L'Omino are into tourist skins now — or Venetian sheepskins, as they're called — along with pederasty, restoration rackets, retirement scams, World Fairs, and the reinvention of Carnival. That's how the Little Man got started, you know: nothing more than a seedy Carnival sideshow down on the Riva degli Schiavoni in the old days. The landing place is still called the Street of the Donkey Cart, it's just behind the Piazza." Yes, this was Fools' Trap with its Campo dei Miracoli, this was the Island of the Busy Bees, and this was also Toyland — Pleasure Island, as they called it in the movie, and not so wrong at that. He had thought when he first visited those places he was seeing the world. But he was simply turning around in circles. On a moving stage. It was the world that was seeing him… "There are a few other landmarks — the Canal of the Virgins, the Fondamenta of the Converts, the House of the Incurables, where they put the transformations that didn't quite come off, the Streets of the Hoof and the Chains and so on, a couple of theaters, some old graffiti here and there — but the Sons of the Little Man, imitating the old doges and their gangs, are mostly international merchant bankers now, their deceptions and rapacities hidden away in corporate computers."

And yet, he thinks, the numbness in his feet having spread to his chest, is it really such a surprise? To what extent all these years, he must ask himself, has he truly believed in the physical separation of the Three Kingdoms because he wanted to? It was convenient, after all. His "psychogenetic geography," as he called it, to general acclaim — and he has liked the acclaim, liked being the famous professor and revered emeritus, whose exemplary pilgrimage moved the world. Would he have given all that up for so small a thing as the truth? He staggers, his knees sagging under the weight of his plummeting spirit. He squints up at the next bridge they must mount with a certain horror. He seems to see three bridges, piled on one another like a cartful of plague victims. Ah. No. Can't

"You remember Eugenio, that ragazzo you laid out with your math book the day they sent me chasing after you — ?"

"It — it wasn't me — !" he whispers faintly.

"He's running the show now. You should've killed him."

He stops. He can go no further. It's as though these revelations have peeled more of his skin away, exposing him yet more ruthlessly to the petrifying cold. He can hear the wood cracking and splintering in his limbs with each step. "Alidoro, my dear friend, I–I…" In his pockets, his hands are frozen like claws around ears now as hard as golden coins. And for some time now, he has been feeling something like loose marbles at his waistband. He shudders, and they rattle about down there. The dog gazes over at him from the foot of the bridge with his rheumy eyes. "Alidoro," he says, his chattering teeth clacking like wooden spoons, "I think I just froze my nipples off."

11. ART AND THE SPIRIT

The monster fish that swallowed Jonah, sucking him up as a raw egg is sucked, was a pious creature devoted to virtue and orthodoxy, a kind of blubbery angel, conjured up by a God who liked to flesh out his metaphors. He — or she, the anatomy is uncertain, "belly" perhaps a euphemism — kept the runaway prophet dutifully in his or her belly or whatever for three days and three nights, long enough for Jonah to get a poem written and promise to do as he was told, and then, with a kind of abject courtesy, vomited him up, if that is not also a euphemism, on dry land. This is what Bordone's dark stormy picture, sitting like a mummy-brown bruise on the stone wall near the front entrance, is trying to show: Jonah disgorged like the metaphor's tenor emerging gratefully from its vehicle. He has often tried to see his own experience in the same light. In his now-lost Mamma chapter, "The Undigested Truth," for example, he has compared his brawling, boozing, recalcitrant father with the wicked Ninevites whom Jonah was reluctant to exhort, and from whom the prophet felt even more estranged once he'd saved them, has asked whether it was really truancy that landed Jonah in the fish's entrails, or whether God, like the Blue-Haired Fairy in her goat suit, might not somehow have lured the prophet into his crisis for reasons of pedagogy, and has indicated thereby how both his and Jonah's maritime adventures, often interpreted symbolically in Christian terms of baptism and rebirth, or else Judaic ones of exile and return (in Hollywood, quite literally: the raw and the cooked), might be understood more accurately — and more profoundly perhaps — as violent forms of occupational therapy. They were also living demonstrations of vocation's fount in the viscera: only he and Jonah — and perhaps poor Saint Sebastian up there, standing like a twisted tree with an arrow through his — could fully understand what a gut feeling really is.

Unfortunately, his own fish was not so decorous and accommodating as Jonah's. Attila was a decrepit, foul-smelling, asthmatic old tub of lard who slept heavily, snorting and eructating all night with his mouth open, airing his adenoids. Crawling out through his gorge was not so much dangerous as it was merely nauseating. His old man, he discovered, had been in and out many times. Old Geppetto had adjusted to the life and come to like it, brewing up his own lethal grappa in the fish's digestive juices, devising recipes for the tons of stuff the monster sucked up, one of his favorites being a cold porridge made out of mashed cuttlefish, live sea slugs, and walrus dung, and dressing up grandly in the uniforms of drowned sea captains. As far as he was concerned, he'd never had it so good. As a hobby, he'd taken up pornographic and religious scrimshaw, with which he decorated his chambers, ampler than any he'd ever known before. The place stank, but so had every other place he'd lived in. He'd fashioned playing cards out of bleached sea wrack, dice and pipes out of conches, smoked cured kelp. He'd developed, as though in imitation of his monstrous host, an Oriental pleasure in the swallowing of whitebait and polliwogs live to feel them tickle his throat as they died going down — that's what the old buzzard was doing when he discovered him in there and ran to give him a hug, getting in return a faceful of spat-up live fish and a smack on his tender nose. Mostly, though, his father just sat around hallucinating on his evil brew. It was this grappa that steeled his heart, as it stole his mind, and made him refuse to budge. He thought he'd never get the besotted wretch out of there. When he tried to plead with him, his father turned nasty, walloping him with an oar handle if he came too close and threatening to set him alight and smoke his herrings with him.

"This shit is magic, finocchio mio! It's the only magic I've ever known!"

"But what about me, babbino mio? Your little talking — "

"You, you little spunk, you sap, you sucker, you nutless wonder! You twist of tinder fungus! You're a thorn in my side! a splinter in my eye! a sprit up my ass! You stick in my craw! One step closer, knothole, and I'll make toothpicks out of you!"

Finally he had to pretend to go along with him, throw a party, tell stories, get him blind drunk and carry him out through the snoring fish on his back, the old stew by now completely demented and raving at the top of his voice about the snakes in Saint Peter's green beard and the treachery of stars and fink pigeons and about being impaled on the devil's nose, which he envisioned apparently as appearing miraculously on the Virgin's shiny cerulean and enigmatically uncleft behind, the poor brute having tried desperately at the last minute, when he realized what was happening, to drink up his entire production before having to abandon it forever. When he woke up in the Fairy's cottage three days later, he thought he'd died and it was the Second Coming. In fact, he never quite got this idea out of his crazed old head after, and insisted on being called San 'Petto ever after.

Maybe he should have just left the old ingrate in there. But already, unredeemed woodenhead though he still was, he had started reading his many trials as edifying metaphors, the didactic strategies of his blue-haired preceptress, and in their light he knew he had to bring his babbo out with him. Their light, with significance, has lit all his actions, without it his life would have been as dark and cold as this poor martyred church of a twice-martyred saint wherein, huddled in his tattered coat, shawled by his scarf, his ears in his pockets and his nipples at his belt, the old scholar sits, waiting for his friend Alidoro's return, frozen to the core and unsure even of his next minute — yet he can no longer say for certain whether the source of that imperiously guiding light was, all these years, without him or within. Did God, to put it another way, truly have plans for the Ninevites — they were spared, after all, nothing happened at all as Jonah said it would — or did Jonah, despairing of his own mortal condition, find himself invoking both God's plans and his own trials in reply, not to a luminous command from tempestuous skies, but to some inner storm of his own, his own career-engendering transformational wet dream, so to speak? A mystery frightening to ponder

Paolo Veronese, whose church this is, having claimed it in the end with his very bones (his funerary bust gazes sternly down from the wall behind his painted organ upon its sickly visitor, shivering in his pitiable rags, and admonishes him with its straight classic nose, its unpocked flesh, its handsomely draped breast, its noble and contented demeanor, looking much like the benign host of some great and sumptuous feast, from which the visitor, though he may ogle, is forever excluded), toys with this problem of the light's source in his central altar painting, in which Saint Sebastian's pierced groin is vividly lit up, but his tormented face is cast in shadow by the thick cloud at the Virgin's feet. She hovers just above him with the infant Jesus as though in someone else's vision, stealing the scene, as it were bathed in a golden Technicolor light not quite real and attended by angels fussing about like dressers, while the saint, his view obstructed (and looking a bit fearful that, what with all his other problems, something awesome might be about to fall on him), turns black with death and doubt.

Though it speaks in some ways to the abused traveler's embittered mood, this is not the classical Venetian Sebastiano. Veronese, as usual, has taken liberties. Traditionally the martyr is shown standing contented as a wooden post, bathed in golden light himself, and stuffed with arrows as though he might be sprouting them like twigs, an image that, while often ridiculed, once touched the professor deeply, especially as painted by his beloved Giovanni Bellini. The image — "a piercing of eternity's veil," as he called it — led him into his early Venetian monographs on traumatic transfiguration and on toys as instruments, simultaneously, of death and wisdom, and eventually lay at the heart of his controversial theoretical work, Art and the Spirit, the central theme of which was the absorption (the punctured flesh) of Becoming, fate, action, multiformity, naughtiness, discord, theatricality, bad temper, extrinsicality, evil companions, carpentry, negation, ignominy, and ultimately Art itself (the wooden arrows) by Being, will, repose, unity, obedience, peace, the eternal image, aplomb, intrinsicality, saints, teaching, affirmation, beatification, and all in the end by the transcendent Spirit (the languid gaze).

That languid gaze, he felt, had something to do with the mysterious shimmering light of Venice, a light that, paradoxically, seemed permanently to fix before the eye the very flux that excluded all fixity, patterns and archetypes emerging from the watery atmosphere like Platonic ideas materializing in the fog of Becoming, and so spellbinding the gazer in a process that more or less mirrored that of the moviegoer lost conversely to seeming life in the flickering sequence of lifeless film frames, movement there emerging from fixity, the viewer's rapt gaze seduced, not by eternal Ideas, but by illusory angels cast up by the enchantment of "persistence of vision," as they called it. And as he called it, too, when speaking of the Venetian masters, borrowing from the then-disreputable cinema industry, another revolutionary and controversial — "mischievous," as his adversaries bitterly remarked — critical act. The illusory, that is to say, was, for the great Venetian painters, what was real. Change was changeless, Becoming was Being. For them, "persistence" of vision was active, not passive: they saw through. Theirs was the art of the intense but reposeful acceptance of the turbulent wonderful.

This ground-breaking work, dismissed at the time as the "malicious prank of an irredeemable parricide," was to be sure an audacious frontal assault (though never, in obedience to the Blue-Haired Fairy's precepts, disrespectful to his elders) upon the established dogma of the day, a dogma that reduced Venetian painting to mindless decoration, mere theater sets for cultic spectacle, as it were, "unperplexed by naturalism, religious mysticism, philosophical theories" and "exempt from the stress of thought and sentiment," as the paterfamilias of aestheticians put it, but, disturbing as his youthful iconoclasm was, it turned out to be less controversial than the book's many alleged parallels with his own life story. In those long-ago days of faith still in progress and pragmatism, personality was seen as a hindrance to "pure science," and "spirit" of course was a dirty word, "I" anathema. He was accused of feeding, with works of art, "the great maw of a monstrous ego." His theories were ridiculed as "thin laminations, scarcely concealing a deep-rooted psychosis." "The confused work of a split personality," another said. "Dr. Pinenut cannot see the forest for the tree."

He could not entirely deny these charges. He was himself a product, after all, of his father's rude art and a transfigured spirit; the title had not come to him by accident. The quest for the abiding forms within life's ceaseless mutations was his quest, had been since he burnt his feet off; he too, rejecting all theatricality, sought repose in the capricious turbulence — freedom, as it were, from story. Even his decision to study the Venetians had to do with his own origins. If the beginnings of Venetian painting, as that same father figure of the priesthood who had dismissed Venetian art as "a space of color on the wall" argued, "link themselves to the last, stiff, half-barbaric splendors of Byzantine decoration," how could he help, pagan lump of talking wood that he once was, but be drawn to these magicians of the transitional? No, his reply to all these accusations in his germinal "Go with the Grain" manifesto was: "All great scholarship is a transcendent form of autobiography!" "It-ness," he declared (this was the first time he was to use the concept later to be made world-famous in The Wretch), "contains I-ness!" The victory was his. Even physics would never be the same again.

Oh, she would have been proud of him, she who had launched his great quest with her little Parable of the Two Houses, here on this very island, all those many years ago. He'd been cast up by a storm and was begging at the edge of town when she found him. She offered him a supper of bread, cauliflower, and liquor-filled sweets in exchange for carrying a jug of water home for her. He'd last seen her as a little girl, and moreover presumed her dead, so he didn't recognize this woman, old enough to be his mother, until she took her shawl off and he saw her blue hair. Whereupon he threw himself at her feet and, sobbing uncontrollably, hugged her knees. "Oh, why can't we go home again, Fairy?" he wept. "Why can't we go back to the little white house in the woods?" Her knees spread a bit in his impassioned embrace, and the fragrant warmth between them drew him in under her skirts. He wasn't sure he should be in here, but in his simple puppetish way he thought perhaps she didn't notice. He felt terribly sleepy, and yet terribly awake, his eyes open but filled with tears.

"Let me tell you a story, my little illiterate woodenknob," she said above his tented head, "about the pretty little white house and the nasty little brown house — do you see them there?" He rubbed his eyes and running nose against her stocking tops and peered blearily down her long white thighs. Yes, there was the dense blue forest, there the valley, and there (he drew closer) the little house, just hidden away, more pink than white really, and gleaming like alabaster. But the other — ? "A little lower…" She pushed on his head, sinking him deeper between the thighs, until he saw it: dark and primitive, more like a cave than a house, a dank and airless place ringed about by indigo weeds, dreary as a tomb. She pushed his nose in it. "That is the house of laziness and disobedience and vagrancy," she said. "Little boys who don't go to school and so can only follow their noses come here, thinking it's the circus, and disappear forever." He was suffocating and thought he might be disappearing, too. She let him out but, even as he gasped for breath, stuffed his nose into the little white house: "And here is the house for good little boys who study and work hard and do as they are told. Here, life is rosy and sweet, and they can play in the garden and come and go as they please. Isn't that much better?"

"Yes, Mamma!" he said, and it was better, but he was still having trouble breathing. He tried to back out but he was clamped in her thighs.

"Don't be idle!" she scolded, and she gave him a spank on his wooden bottom that drove him in deeper. "Look around! Idleness is a dreadful disease, of which one should be cured immediately in childhood; if not, one never gets over it."

What he saw when he looked around was a glistening little snail peeking out under the eaves. "What are you doing there, with your nose in the door?" she asked, laughing. Or someone did, he wasn't sure, he was confused, and thought he might be about to faint.

"I odly wadt to stop beigg a puppet and becubb a little boy," he wept. "Wod't you help be, little sdail?"

"And will you ever tell a lie again?"

"Ndo!" he cried desperately and, alarmingly, his nose began to grow again as it had done the last time he'd been in the little white house when the Fairy was still just a girl. That time she'd unloosed on him a thousand prickly woodpeckers to peck it all away, a pecking he still sometimes felt out beyond his face like a nervous tingle as Il Gattino once told him he still felt his missing paw.

"Oh!" the Fairy gasped, giggling and wriggling about so, she seemed this time to be trying to break his nose off at the root. "A lie about lying, that's the worst kind, you naughty boy!" And then she began to spank him for real. No more playful smacks, she really let him have it.

When she finally let him out, he was too weak to argue: he promised that he would mend his ways and study till his eyes fell out and always be good and tell the truth and be the consolation of his aged father. "How nice," the fairy sighed vaguely. He was lying flat out on the floor with his little wet red nose in the air and the Fairy was sprawled spraddle-legged in the chair above him. He looked up at her dear sweet face, hoping she might be smiling down upon him, and then he saw it, the image that would haunt him for the rest of his life: the languid gaze.

Ah, Fairy! He can see it now! Not literally of course, not in here — no such languor on the face of Veronese's pinned Sebastian, nor in his other altar paintings of the twice-martyred saint either. The gaze is gone, most of the arrows as well, being used apparently to cross all the double-S initials of the saint which, looking like pairs of skewered serpents, decorate the church like a kind of company logo. Veronese's Sebastian is a man of action, a warrior, a politician of sorts who plays to the galleries, striking operatic poses (why didn't he get muscles like that, the old professor wants to know, sunk in his misery; why, when he put on flesh, did he still have to look like a spindly unstrung puppet, no bigger than a pennyworth of cheese, a veritable insult to the rules of human proportion — where was the heroic frame, the hairy chest, where — someone has a lot to answer for! — were the powerful thighs?), a kind of professional athlete who is used to pain, who has trained for it in effect and now receives the arrow like a gold medal. Still, for all the theatrics, the hedonism and decorative frivolity (this artist once likened his vocation to that of "poets and jesters"), there is something restful about Veronese, it is as though the languid gaze might have passed from painted to painter, invading the entire canvas, and the colors, flowing from that languor, are as soft and lush as old tapestry and vaguely warm him, much as the painting on his father's wall used to do.

He is, after all, even should this prove to be his final hour, exactly where his heart, in such extremity, would have placed him: back in one of those fine Italian Renaissance churches which he once proclaimed to be the acme and paragon of Western art, its glory and (because its moment was forever past, Western art now nothing more than, like scrimshaw, a decorated fossil) also its tragedy. His throat is raw and tickling him as if he were swallowing some of his father's live whitebait, his eyes keep watering up, his chest is rattling, and everything below that is still numb, but his eyes can still discern beauty, his fingers have come unlocked from his thawed ears, and his nose has begun to relax and hang from his face in the usual way. If anything, it is now a bit hot, at least at the tip. In his pockets, along with his ears and the rumpled money Melampetta and Alidoro gave him, he has found some bread and a wet sack of fresh mozzarella that Lido must have tucked there when they said goodbye, and he nibbles gratefully at these offerings now.

It was Lido who led him out of the snow and into this old church, like himself a crumbling ruin succumbing to the Venetian climate, faded and damp and veiled with mildew and tarnish, telling him to wait here until he returned. "I should at least be able to get your watch back, touch iron," the old mastiff growled gently after the professor had given him a shortlist of essentials from the bags' missing contents. "One of those thieving cunts must have snatched it last night." When he tried to give Lido his money back, however, the dog shook his shaggy old head and said: "Keep it, compagno. It's not much, but it might buy a warm hat or a hot meal. Besides, I don't have any pockets…" Which made him start to cry again — "I love you, Alidoro! You're the only real friend I have!" he sobbed into the mastiffs rancid coat, apologizing once again for all the stupid things he'd said this morning in the boat yard, but the venerable dog just lapped his nape tenderly and said: "Eh, vecchio, I've already forgotten, I told you I have a rotten memory. Now don't go away…"

Which was a joke. He can't even walk. When Alidoro left, he turned stiffly and, out of an old habit, started to genuflect. Or maybe something just gave way. Whatever, he went all the way down, knocking the marble floor crisply — ka-POK! — with his crippled knees. When he tried to straighten up, there was a cracking, splitting sound in his haunches that he felt all the way to the back of his neck. He had to crawl on all fours to a bench and pull himself up on it, still doubled over like a groveling penitent, an inconsolable mourner (oh, he was repentant, he was desolate beyond repair, his Mamma gone, twice — thrice — over, his life gone with it: Oh non mi fate piů piangere! he wept, hoping that the echoes he heard, bouncing up off the checkered marble floor, were only in his imagination), unable to see anything for awhile through his tears but his shoes down between his knees. Boredom alone, in the end, drove the old art scholar's head up. The rest, unfortunately, has not chosen to follow. Though he's not yet as stiff as the Bishop of Cyprus stretched out up there on his marble tomb, he still can't unbend his knees or elbows, his back has locked itself into a fair imitation of a Venetian footbridge, and his backside on the hard wooden bench has now gone to sleep along with the rest of his nether parts. Overhead on the organ doors, Jesus is healing lepers and cripples at some spa or other. Relatively, they all look in pretty good shape.

Look on the bright side, he admonishes himself, beginning to wheeze. No more deadlines. No more bibliographical evidence to amass. No more words. Up on the Nuns' Choir, there are representations of saints holding what he takes to be the instruments of their martyrdom. Some of them are holding books. He can appreciate this. A kind of plague, reading them maybe even worse than writing them, and no end to it. The terrible martyrdom of the ever-rolling stone. Saint Pinocchio. He and his father, a new heavenly host. And now think of it, for the first time in his long life, he does not have a book to write. That martyrdom at least is over. He is free at last. Which is probably just what they told poor Sebastian when they stripped his armor off him. "Free, my tortured chiappie!" he seems to be yelling, as they stuff him, up there beside the altar, into his second death. Trouble is, as martyrdoms go, the first was better than the second. This one hurts more and the compensations are more obscure. And this time: this time, no one's watching.

"Oh my Ga-ahd!" exclaims a loud nasal American voice, blowing in behind him. The professor makes a movement which to his own inner eye is that of shrinking down in his seat, though it may be invisible to others, as the intruder, stamping her feet and shaking herself audibly, comes blustering down the aisle. "Lookit this! Brrr! What a creepshow, man! Everybody's dead in here!"

12. IN THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD

"Gee-whillikers, prof, I feel really flattered to — pjfft! POP! — be able to talk with you all alone like this about art and life and beauty and all that great stuff, I'm so excited, it's like first day in class!" his former student gushes, squeezing his hands inside her sweater. It does not feel like flesh in there so much as a powdery cloud, like the materialization of his own flushed confusion. "You never know," his father used to rumble drunkenly, wiping the drool from his grizzled chops and tipping his yellow wig forward over his eyebrows, "in this world, boyo, anything can happen." It was about all the wisdom the old lout had: In questo mondo i casi sono tanti, so save your pear peels, they might come in handy. It had prepared the venerable professor for many of life's surprises, but it had not prepared him for this. Perhaps only Hollywood could have prepared him for this. "Everybody in class was crazy about you, you know. 'The beak's unique,' we used to say around campus. 'The Nose Knows!' "

"I–I-I — !" he gasps. He feels, in such transport, like a fish out of water, his gills flapping wildly. His chest is shaken by violent spasms, which he is trying desperately to suppress. But his hands feel so wonderful he wants to cry.

"We called you 'The Happy Honker,' you coulda had any girl you wanted — and probably at least half the guys as well. And what a dresser! A real zoot snoot, as we used to say, no disrespect intended — and speaking of which, your snoot, I mean, snuggle it down here, too, teach. Goodness sakes, but it's a mess! Is that an acorn growing out the side of it? You poor dear man!" She puts an arm around him and hugs him to her bosom, which is alive and tremulous and fragrant as a Tuscan summer. Or an Iowa cornfield. Cape Cod in August. He doesn't even know where he is for a dizzying moment. He grabs hold so as not to fall, then nearly faints again to think of what he's clutching. "What you need, professor, is to let me take you back to my room and give you a good hot bath!"

"Oh, I can't — !" he squeaks, but his voice is smothered in fluffy blue angora. He tries to lift his head up, but she pushes it back down again. "I'm waiting for a frie — mwmpff!" She lays one hand soothingly against his nose, settling it into the warm hollow between her breasts, stroking it gently. It's as though it were made for it, like a violin case for its own particular instrument. Even resistance feels good

What he'd felt when she first came storming in, disturbing his revery (his head had slumped again to his chest, for all she knew he might have been praying, had she no shame?), was more like outrage and repugnance and bitter vexation: To have traveled so far, to have suffered so much, and now, at the very end — ! She'd swaggered brazenly through the place like she owned it, blowing bubbles with her noisomely scented chewing gum, hooting and snorting and loudly decrying the very sobriety that gave the church its celebrated beauty ("Stone corpses and little babies holding skulls — and lookit that skinny dude with the facefuzz — ffpupp! squit! SMACK! — hanging there like bagged game! Whoo, by his color I'd say he's not only dead meat, he's gone off!"), a sturdy middle-American blonde in a red plastic windbreaker, blue jeans, and white cowboy boots. Luckily, she seemed not to see him, and he sank lower in the pew. "And lookit the cute little butt on John-boy the Baptist there, and — hey, whoa, am I right? Has the Holy Virgin got her thumb up her kid's wazoo? Prodding his little poop-shoot?! His itty-bitsy bumbo?! Yippee! What a diablerie! Or are these supposed to be the — ffpLUP! — good guys? Murder!"

She brushed the snow out of her blond hair with hands ringed and braceleted in cheap costume jewelry, and, her windbreaker rustling, leaned over the altar railing. Her tight jeans seemed almost to squeak as they filled up, the worn seams spreading, her honey-colored hair clinging in snow-dampened rings about her neck and temples. "Ouch! Bi-zzang! Right in his appendectomy scar! Musta missed his little dickydoo by a whisper! Well, what did it matter, what good's that old gap-stopper gonna — splurpp! snap! — do him now anyway, right? I mean, that sucker's had it! And, yikes, what're they trying to do to that guy, give him an enema? Weird!" She peeked into the side altars, stared up at the organ, gave the Veronese bust a high five, read the tomb inscription in the floor below it while blowing a huge rosy bubble. "I don't know," she sighed, sucking up the gum before it popped and turning around, "but it sure looks like a lotta heavy S and M to me, whips and bondage and dead bodies and all that, with some child porn thrown in for the kinkos — whadda you think, professor?"

He was thinking — had been — that she was an unspeakably rude and vulgar young loudmouth, but he was so startled by her addressing him directly like that, all he could do was raise his chin an inch and break into a wheezing cough. Under her windbreaker, he saw, she was wearing a gaudy blue angora sweater, still sparkling frothily with snow. She smiled, pushed out another enormous pink bubble. This one did pop, sticking to her nose and chin. She plucked it away with her fingers, looking cross-eyed at it, poked it back in, smiled again, chewing vigorously with her mouth open. She had even white teeth, the sort invented by American orthodontists, wide lips painted cherry red. "You are Professor Pinenut, aren't you? I recognized you by the… by your…"

"Ah! Yes…," he coughed, shrinking abjectly into his miserable rags. He squinted up at her past his ducked and shame-enflamed nose. "But… Miss — ?"

"Call me Bluebell," she said gaily, coming over, "the Underlying Principal of my graduating class, as they said in the yearbook, that's me, dumb as they come and gobsa fun!" As she moved, she seemed almost to bounce. Or maybe it was his blurred vision. Perhaps I have a fever, he thought, his eyes wobbling. "I was a student way back when in your famous Art Principles 101 — Pinenut's Arse Pimples, as we called it — oh, I don't expect you to remember me, prof, those huge freshman cores, you know, a thousand and one faces, and no one in the whole auditorium giving diddly-eff-you-pee about anything except maybe sneaking in some shut-eye or passing a joint, you were a saint to put up with us." She planted her soft behind on the back of the pew in front, her spangled and fringed white boot propped on the bench beside him. "We were awful. You called us the living dead."

"I did — ?"

"Oh, we deserved it! I sure did, I was rotten student, I admit it, I sat through all your lectures — the ones I came to, I mean — doing my nails. But, hey, at least I was doing something artistic, right? You used to call on me sometimes when I was fluttering my hands about and blowing my nails dry, and my answers were so stupid, you used to say you admired the absolute purity of my mind which clearly no idea had as yet penetrated. Boy, the nicknames I got called after that!"

"Oh yes…" But he didn't remember. He tried to recall the fluttering hands. Right then they were crossed on her breast, as though to emphasize her sincerity, as she leaned toward him, making her jeans squeak again. The nails were painted luminescent orange. To go with the blue sweater.

"But some things I never forgot, prof. You really helped me, you know, you changed my life!" She reached into her mouth, pulled out a long glistening ribbon of gum like a frog's tongue, rolled it up, and, turning back to the altarpieces, stuffed it back in her cheeks again. "I can see now, for example, how all these — schloopp! — paintings are really like moving pictures. Nothing stands still, so art, to be truthful, has got to move, too, right? It's why you said you — yoomm! sploop! SPAP! — always loved the movies. And theater — "

"No, I never…"

"I mean, 'images of eternity,' 'shadows of the divine perfection,' all that's just — ffplOP! — bullpoop, isn't it, Professor Pinenut? Like you always said!"

"I–I don't think you were, eh, listening very carefully…"

"And I can see now what you meant about churches being nothing more than fancy repertory theaters — I mean, just look around! — it's a place where you just expect something wild to happen — !"

"I said nothing of the kind — !" he rasped faintly, coughing and snorting. He felt infuriated by these stupid travesties of his deepest convictions, but at some remove, far behind his sinuses, which had filled up painfully, making his head bob heavily on his feeble neck.

"All the bejeweled props and snazzy sets, the stage doors and costumes and all the music and magical stuff — I mean, what actor wouldn't go apeshit for the priest's gig, it's a real headliner, isn't it, it's got everything but dancing girls! And what with the whole amazing tonk dolled up in all colors of the rainbow, these glitzy dollar signs all over the joint, kissing putti in the front row, and those big chromos up there like crazy movie posters — what's a masterpiece but just a high-class ad, a billboard for the bigots, like you always said, right, prof?"

"Oh, please — !" he squawked, racked by a rattling cough.

"Jeepers, professor! Are you okay?" She slid in beside him then, took his hand. "Hey, you're looking like a whoopee cushion that's lost its whoopee! What's happened to all your fancy threads?!"

"I–I have suffered a — wheeze! — great misfortune… Now, please, Miss, go — "

"And you're so cold! Here, tuck your hands in here and get them warm!"

"What are you doing — ?!" he yelped. "I — rurff! hawff! — I don't — ! Kaff! I never — !" But she had grabbed them both, stuffed them inside her sweater, it was already done. One of his hands was still clutched around an ear. He hopes she didn't notice. If it were still on his head, it would be burning with shame. In fact it feels a bit warm under his fingers right now. If that's his ear. Not much flesh left on his fingertips, can't be sure of anything any more. Not much in his head either, his faculties hardening, his memory turning to dust: who was this student? All the dense airless lecture halls of his endlessly protracted career have blurred into one, his innumerable pupils into a vast shapeless, faceless mass. Waiting outside his office door. Waiting to have their little strings pulled. Day after day. That was life, what he knew of it. Closed now, that door. Forever. He nestles his nose deeper into the soft fleece, wondering, vaguely, if he might have missed something… Well, and even if he did, what did it matter? I casi sono tanti…

"You know that Mary up there hanging out over the skewered saint, the one on the cloud holding up her little puppet," she says suddenly, so startling him that he sets everything jiggling around beneath his nose. "Hey! Be nice now, professor," she murmurs admonishingly through the scarf tied round his pate, and gives him a playful little smack on his behind. Which, to his joy, he feels. "Well, you used to show us a lot of pictures like that in class. And what I noticed is that the Virgin is always sad." She hugs him closer. He is still, in his mind, protesting, but his body has completely surrendered. And the therapy is working: there is feeling now, quite wondrously, even to the tips of his toes. "I know what that's supposed to mean, that she has that faraway look because she foresees her little boy's tragic future, and that spoils the fun, but I think that's just dumb guys talking. What I see in that look is a disappointed mother." Even the tickle in his throat and the wheezing convulsions of his chest have faded away. He feels so grateful he wants to kiss something. "It's like, I don't know, it's like having a perfect son is not enough…" She sighs, and her breasts lift and fall around his nose like animated powder puffs. "Is that what you think?"

"Yes," he lies. He is too happy to argue. The gratitude wells up behind his eyes like the onset of a delicious sneeze. Before his eye, the open one, the tender blue hummock swells invitingly. Che bella! He lifts a finger under the sweater to touch the pointy part. "Exactly…!"

"Is — is something the matter, professor?" she asks in alarm.

"What — ?!" he cries in panic, jerking his finger back and rearing his head up. It takes him a moment to remember where he is. "The matter — ?!"

"Your nose! It seems to be — !"

"Ah, it's — it's a cold!" he mutters confusedly, his eyes watering. He turns his head away in embarrassment, pulls his hands back, hides his nose in his sleeve. "I'm sorry! Nasty thing, don't want you to catch it…"

She seems to be giggling behind him, but he can't be certain, and he's too ashamed to look. He ducks his head. What was he thinking — exposing himself — in his condition — and if she saw the rest — ! He is wheezing again, his chest racked anew by a fit of coughing. "You sure you don't want to come home with me?" she asks, rising from the pew, her jaws snapping at the gum once more. "I could put an extra blanket on — "

"No! A friend! I have to wait!" he gasps between the painful spasms, keeping his offending part tucked between his knees.

"Well, can't blame a girl for — fllupp! POP! — trying. It was terrif seeing you again, prof. You're really something else!" And — "Peace!" — she is gone.

"Wait — !" he whispers and, twisting round, catches just a glimpse of her tightly denimed posteriors disappearing provocatively out the door. "B-Bluebell — ? Miss — ?!" Too late. He has lost her, lost her forever! Of course, he cautions himself, turning back, shriveling once more into his terrible debilities, it's no catastrophe, insolent uncouth creature that she is, frivolous and disrespectful, no, good riddance, his final hours can be better spent without suffering yet another gum-popping American barbarian, her cockiness exceeded only by her ignorance, though she is not completely stupid, it must be said, brash, garrulous, but also fresh and winsome in her boorish way, blasphemous to be sure, impudent, a shamelessly wanton creature no doubt, but warm-hearted (he knows, he has been there), generous, compassionate, and willing to learn, yes, he could teach her, he has already changed her life, has he not, she said so, the soil is prepared, as it were, it's never too late — and think of it! a hot bath! What does he want to do, go back to that stinking boat yard? He finds he has already staggered to his feet. In the painting behind the altar, if his beclouded eyes do not deceive him, the Virgin Mary has opened her bodice to give baby Jesus and all the cherubs and angels crowding round a suck and is peering down now past her hiked skirts at Saint Sebastian, struggling in agony against his bonds beneath her but his eyes to heaven. And then (is something dripping on his face — ?! what is she doing — ?!) the holy martyr's nose begins to grow! Straight up! Oh my God! Even before the arrow in the saint's groin starts to twang obscenely, the old professor is out of his pew and scrambling stiff-kneed up the aisle. "Miss — !" he croaks. "WAIT FOR ME — !"

"What — ?! Is the old sinner going to chase after that poor bambina, that little chick in the tow with milk at her mouth still?" comes an indignant voice, quavering eerily, from behind the organ. "Is he defiling my tomb and sanctuary with thoughts of pederasty? Has the wretch no dignity? Has he no shame?"

"Beware of men who make public profession of virtue but behave like perfect scoundrels!" thunders a hollow voice above him on the left: the Bishop of Cyprus, he sees with horror, is sitting straight up, rigid and stony-eyed, blood dripping from the corners of his mouth as though he might have bit the host with his teeth. "It just goes to prove that a naughty person retains his evil character even if his outward appearance is altered!" And — crash! — he falls back onto his stone bier again.

"Let me give you some advice!" trumpets a voice from above, and others pick up the theme: "I want to give you some advice!" "Give you advice!" "Advice!" "Advice!" The entire church, as he struggles up the aisle (nothing's working right, it was his old babbo who taught him how to walk, he could use another lesson now), echoes and resounds with clamorous counsel: "Do not go for things bald-headed, woodenpate! Old codgers who, in an excess of passion, rush into affairs without precaution, rush blindly into their own destruction!" "Regrets are useless, booby, once the damage is done!"

"Stop it! Stop it!" he squawks, wheezing and snorting. He would clap his hands over his ears if he still had any ears and if he didn't need both hands for forward progress. The rose and white marble squares of the checkered floor seem to be on springs, rising and falling erratically, making him climb over some and out of others. Some drop away completely to reveal heaps of bones and moldering bishop's hats far below, forcing him to circle around, grasping pews and benches which are also on the move, sliding apart and then together again with great clashing noises like monstrous gates. "Woe to those blockheads whose minds are so beclouded by monkey business that they do not perceive the dangers that beset them!" cry the lugubrious voices, which seem to be coming from another world. Terrible odors, like hung game going off, rise up from the yawning chasms opening up in the floor. "Woe to those wicked ragamuffins who run away from their homeland! They will never do any good in this world!" "Woe to those who do not wait for their friends!" "They will repent bitterly!" "They will lose the bone of their neck!" "They will pay through the NOSE!" From the ceiling above, where Esther and her uncle Mordecai are subverting the reign of Xerxes, forestalling one massacre and launching another, come wild whinnies and a glittery blitz, as he fights his way over the undulating floor and through the crashing gates, of brightly gilded horse turds. Splat! SPLAT! they fall, bursting around him like thrown pies. "Eh, big shot! Pezzo grosso!" "Mister Nobel Laureate!" "Where do you think you are going?" Books are thrown at him from the Nuns' Choir, skulls rattle underfoot like bowling balls, arrows fly, the hanging brass lamps swing, clinking and clanking like muffled bells, the organ doors flap, the martyred saint screams in his reduplicated pain, masonry rains down, the whole church seems to be splitting and cracking and threatening him with destruction! "Eh, furfante! Vagabondo! Ragazzaccio!" Splut! Crash! Ka-pok! "Come back! Come back, you little ninny!"

As he drags himself past the font of holy water near the door, the tumult now fading behind him, the carved Christ's halo falls off and, ringing like a coin, rolls around on the stone floor in front of him. "I say, pick that up for me, would you, Pinenut old man? That's a good chap! I can't seem to move my arms." As, still on his hands and knees, he snatches at it, the hung Christ dips a bit lower and, chin at his navel, adds in a whisper: "You know, from one woodenhead to another, old boy, let me give you a little useful advice — "

"No!" he screams, staggering to his feet. "Why is everybody always trying to give me advice?!" And he flings the halo into the suddenly stilled and dusty church: it sails like a Frisbee straight to the front where, in the deep hush, it blasts away a jar of pink and yellow carnations, startling an old bespectacled nun dusting the altar. She squeaks like a mouse caught in a trap and drops her feather duster, crossing herself in terror. As he turns to flee, the talking Christ is counseling him to "calm down, let things take their own course, dear fellow, let the water run along its own slope, as we say," whereupon, as though cued, the font tips over, threatening to inundate the church — he splashes through the flood and out the door, a fresh chorus of "Let me give you some advice!" ringing in his aching head like canned laughter.

13. THE TALKING CRICKET

He's caged. As he ought to be. As Jiminy once said: You buttered your bread, now sleep in it. People passing by glance at him, stuffed there, shivering and sniveling, in the metal rubbish basket, and cast upon him weary expressions of pity mixed with undisguised loathing and contempt. They dump garbage on him, hang lost mittens on his nose. No more than he deserves. No more! Rushing baldheaded into this bizarre adventure, blind to dangers, deaf to advice, he has, just as all those madhouse voices prophesied, lost his neck bone in this one and all else besides. A lifetime of virtue, of self-conquest and in-spite-of's, an heroic career of the most rigid discipline and soberest endeavor, with all its books, honors, degrees, and endowed chairs, is no protection against the wild whims of senectitude, extremity's giddy last-minute bravado. Ah, Bluebell, Bluebell, you silly wise-cracking dumb-blonde murderess! he thinks, hruffing and hawffing and sucking up cold strangulated breaths that may well be his last. What have you done to me now?

All around him, even as his own devastated trash-bagged limbs petrify, he can hear through his wheezing a fluttering, pattering, pounding, and swishing, as the city, shaking itself, crawls out from under its strange white blanket to reinstate its restless habits of scurry and exchange. The storm is letting up. Shutters are grinding open. There are choruses of "Ciao!" "Ciao!" and bursts of laughter, the trampling of booted feet. Nearby, in the middle of this broad open campo, the wooden news kiosk has opened up, spreading its wings like a traveling puppet show, delivery boys are rolling heavy blue and green metal carts past the red benches, and the tarpaulins over the greengrocer stalls are being flung back, pitching clouds of snow into the glittery air. At the far end, a musical group of some sort seems to be setting up at the foot of a truncated bell tower with snow-frosted shrubs growing out the top, the only evidence remaining of whatever church once gave its name to this square. He hears the loose clang of cymbals being unpacked and a squeal like that of an overblown fife when a loudspeaker is plugged in. Crowds are gathering, mostly students with bookbags, housewives pushing strollers. The windows of cafés are steaming up, taunting him with the offer of hot coffee and grappa which he cannot, from his wire crib, alas, even though he has the cash for it, accept. As though to taunt him, on a door within reach of his failing sight, someone has spray-painted: "Only liberty is necessary; everything else is only important." Snow is being swept from shop entrances, sawdust spread. Not far away, as he knows, men in bright-colored slickers are scraping clean the bridges, shoveling the snow and ice into the canals to be flushed to the sea. Earlier, two of them, laughing, lifted him over one of the bridges when he'd been brought to a standstill halfway up, his knees refusing to bend enough to get his toe up past the next step.

"Ha Ha! Che brutta figura! Poor little cock's lost all his feathers!" exclaimed one.

"He's so light," laughed the other, "it's more like the feathers have lost their cock!"

That was his last bridge. Before that, how many, he doesn't know. He was in a kind of delirium. Fever probably. What's left of his flesh must be literally burning itself away. It was cold when he staggered out of the bedlam of that august temple gone suddenly berserk, colder than he'd remembered, and snow was being whipped about still in the sharp wind, obscuring the high bridge in front of the church, only meters away, his first obstacle, but he was on fire with terror, desire, and the hot flush of his infirmity, and the bitterness of the weather seemed only to invigorate him. Up the bridge he went and down, escaping and pursuing at the same time, hobbling to be sure, cracking and splintering and creaking with the cold, hacking and snorting, half blind, but on the move, his withered limbs at times outflung, tossed convulsively awry, to the casual onlooker appearing no doubt a bit whimsical and unstrung, but still clattering resolutely on down the narrow calle on the other side, feeling indeed like something of an athlete, a centenarian version of that spunky youngster who could leap ditches and hedgerows at a single bound, now with each lurching step making about as much progress laterally as forward perhaps, and having to improvise rather desperately at corners and bridges, but feeling that same exhilaration of the blood, that delicious conflict of pain and pleasure that characterizes a race well run, and keeping in mind all the while his noble goal — he will teach her! she will become his last great project! his pupil, his protégé, perhaps even his secretary, biographer, curator, and literary executrix! — as well as the more compelling images of a hot bath, a warm bed, clean sheets, and a pillowy blue hollow wherein to tuck his frostbitten nose.

Which was what, having no other guide, he had had to trust on that mad chase, following wherever it might lead, sniffing the crisp air for traces of her powdery warmth, her slept-in jeans, the tang of bubble gum and nail polish — and, at the crest of a short arching bridge, he was rewarded suddenly by a glimpse of azure blue, a distant flicker of startling color within the white blur, vanishing as quickly as seen, but which could only have been her sweater (had she taken off her windbreaker? was it a signal? a tease? was she walking backwards? he couldn't stop to think about this), and thereafter he seemed to see it more often, on a bridge, at the edge of a riva or the end of a little calle, fleeting and elusive as his famous last chapter, there and not there, yet drawing him on, though he couldn't be sure he saw it, saw anything for that matter, his vision, never the best, now hazed by icy tears and sweat and the crazy pounding of his heart in his temples and sinuses. So absorbed was he with the object of his pursuit that, as had often happened in the middle of books he was writing, he failed to notice the weariness, the physical and emotional exhaustion, that was rapidly overtaking him, overtaking him once and for all, his mind racing far ahead, abandoning his body, leaving it to drag along behind as best it could until it stopped. Which, inevitably, it did. Halfway up a bridge. He, who was very much afraid of the ridiculous, was then, with fearful ridicule, lifted laughingly to the other side. And stood for a time just where he was deposited, intent only on not adding to his indignity by falling over. It was not easy. Had anyone so much as sneezed nearby, it would have toppled him. And, straining thus to stay upright, he inadvertently pushed out a tiny gust of flatulence which escaped him like the shrill little peep of a wooden whistle.

"Ho! Thou wert a beautiful thought, and softly bodied forth!" declaimed a voice that seemed to come from the brick wall above him.

"Who is it that speaks so eloquently?"

"Not who is it, but what? It looks like a holdover from the last plague!"

"Or else something the boss might have had for lunch! Porca Madonna! If I had a stomach, I'd be throwing up!"

He was standing, he saw through his frozen tears, in front of a maskmaker's workshop, its entrance and windows lined with the painted faces of mythical creatures, wild animals, goblins and fairies, jesters, plague victims, suns and moons, bautas and moretas, death's heads, goddesses, chinless rustics, and bearded nobles. "Whatever it is, it's got more holes in it than a piece of cheese!" declared one of them, the pale pink-cheeked sun perhaps, a somber white-bearded Bacchus replying majestically: "Maybe it's a flute." "You mean, dearie," cooed an angel with cherry-red lips, "you don't know whether you should eat it or blow it — ?" The ancient scholar, feeling now the full weight of his folly, wished desperately to escape these japes, but could not, his father's infamous joke — "What brought you here, Geppetto my friend?" "My legs!" — no longer a joke. "If I had a body like that," scoffed a freckled face with a red hood and golden braids, "I'd sell it for a pegboard!" "If you had a body, cara mia," whispered a ghostly voice from behind an expressionless white mask with large hollow eyes, "you'd sell it for anything!" From behind the window, he could see, he was being watched by a glowering figure with a wild black beard like a scribble of India ink, making hasty sketches on a pad. "But what's that lump between his shoulders with the pump handle on it?" the empty snout of a camel posted in the doorway wanted to know, and: "Look from what pulpit comes the sermon!" jeered a grinning noseless skull.

Then suddenly they all fell silent. Even the distant scraping of shovels stopped and the wind died down. Nothing could be heard but the water in the canals, far away, timidly lapping wood and stone. "Who was it," thundered a deep ogrish voice from overhead, the very sound of which set the masks rattling on the wall with terror, "laid this turd at my doorway?" It was the maskmaker with his apron of black beard, smeared with paint and plaster, his roaring mouth big enough to bake buns in, and eyes so reddened by grappa they seemed to be lit from behind by a fire deep in his skull. "Who has made this inhuman mess?"

"It's — it's not my fault!" the old professor wheezed, indignant even in his indignity, bold even in his abject dismay.

"What? What — ?! It speaks?" bellowed the black-bearded giant, leaning closer and baring his horrible smoke-stained teeth. "Talking turds have been outlawed in Venice! Is this the work of a rival seeking to discredit me? Is this — what you say — dirty tricks?"

"Believe me, my — "

"Enough! Basta cosě!" roared the maskmaker, snatching him up by the scruff. "There's only one place for rubbish like you!" And holding him aloft with one mighty fist, from which the unhappy pilgrim dangled limp as a skinned eel, the bearded giant strode into the nearby campo and, much to the amusement of the passersby — "Ciao, Mangiano! What's this? One of your rejects?" "Madonna! What an obscenity!" — thrust him, up to his armpits, into this plastic-lined wastebin.

Where, with the filling up of the campo, he has become the popular target of insults and horseplay. Mothers show him off to bundled toddlers to make them laugh; little boys, when they're not chasing bedraggled and dying pigeons, pelt him with snowballs; teenagers with ghetto blasters hugged to their ears flip their cigarette butts at him. He is crowned with fruit peels, pink sports pages, and rancid boxes from fast-food joints, christened with the dregs from supermarket wine cartons. "Piů in alto che se va," the musicians are singing raucously and tunelessly at the other end of the square while testing out their equipment, "piů el culse mostra!" The higher one climbs, the more he exposes his behind: a sentiment so apposite to the old emeritus professor's present humiliation, he might suspect them of malice had they not been entertaining the passing crowds with all manner of rude scatological lyrics since they began setting up. To add mockery to the damage, pigeons use him as a perch and public restroom, which causes one of the musicians drifting by, a swarthy snubnosed character looking more like a thief than an entertainer, to remark loudly and histrionically that "Every beautiful rose — " he lingers over this image to draw the guffaws, his plastic features twisted into a set painful smile, his hands flowering about the old bespackled professor's head, "- eventually becomes an assmop!" And the others in the campo gleefully pick up the refrain: "Un strassacul! Un strassacul!" The caged visitor, ever an emotional, even irascible defender of his own dignity when driven to it, would object, or would at least chase the pigeons off, but he is utterly and catastrophically undone, overcome by exhaustion and racked with pain and fever and a blinding cold in the head, suffering now, he knows, that final apathy of limb that marks, against his choosing, the end of the cold staggering race which he's, willy-nilly, losing… or however that old doggerel goes

"It's the oldest truth under the sun: life is a race that can't be won…"

Something like that. And moreover, the abuse is warranted, is it not? — a fit judgment upon his perfidious heart, his capricious and ultimately fatal betrayal of Her and thence of himself, a betrayal that no doubt began back in America with his decision (if it was a decision — ? it's all like a dream he can no longer recall) to return to this sinking Queen, this treacherous sea Cybele "as changeable as a nervous woman," this "most unreal of cities, half legend, half snare for strangers," this home of the counterfeit and the fickle heart, this infamous Acchiappacitrulli. The zany jester is mincing about, miming the crippled antics of an old fool, wheezing and snorting and tossing out his jibes on the comical debilities of the aged ("When one grows old," he croaks, wobbling about knock-kneed with his rear stuck out, his back bowed, and his toes turned in, "he loses his renown! His legs go flabby and his stockings fall down!"), his mocking parodies in the Venetian dialect about "this heartless city of nervous strangers and old queens" and "untimely fetal decisions" ("Ay, ay!" the fool cries with a quavering voice, pulling his shabby felt hat down over his ears, "I can't think, I've got this damnable bone in my head!"), but he does not even approach the true depths of disgrace into which the old wayfarer knows he has fallen. Up at the foot of the cutoff bell tower, the other musicians, augmented now by electronic keyboard and guitar, harmonica, and a set of traps (over their heads, on the scaffolding of cloth and boards, there's a sign painted every color of the rainbow, but the colors run together and he can't read it — no doubt yet another obscenity), are singing, to the same tune as before, if such hoarse shouting can be called a tune, can be called singing: "El tempo, el culo e i siori, / I fa quel che i vol lori!" — Time, one's arse, and the moneyed few, / All do just what they want to do! — and they might as well be singing about "el tempo, el culo e i professori." When some within the jeering crowd pretend to come to his aid — "Now, now, remember that in this world, we must be kind to all such unfortunate creatures, that we ourselves may be treated kindly in our time of need — this poor old grillino, he really can't help it, you know!" — their patronizing remarks enrage him more than the abuse. No, no! he wants to tell them. I can help it, you idiots! But I'm a villain to the core! Believe me! A brute! An ass!

"Ha ha! Che parlare da bestia! Give him a hand, everybody! In fact, give him two, he needs them!"

But it's true! It's true! A fraud! A turncoat without even a coat to turn! I'm a vile unprincipled scoundrel through and through!

"He may have a small mind, ladies and gentlemen, but he knows it from corner to corner!"

Yet how can it have happened? A century of prudence and sobriety and effortful mastery blown away in a day, less than a day, vanished into the flux as though it never existed, leaving him not only the ludicrous dupe of charlatans, robbed of his every possession, arrested and humiliated by the authorities, stripped of his clothing as of his pride, indeed of his very humanity, enfeebled with illness and deprived even of his ears and nipples — "Lai, lai," the grimacing clown is crooning sourly to the rhythm of a child's taunt, "co se xe veci se xe buzarai! Ay, ay! Hugger-mugger! To be old is to be buggered!" — but now, having abandoned his only true friend in the world in mad pursuit of a vaporous fantasy, a true ignis fatuus, a most foolish fire, he is hopelessly paralyzed as well, frozen, lost, confused by fever and hunger, left to die in a trash bag, taunted by cretins and crushed by his own shame, and all because of a vulgar American coed with a soft blue sweater

"Oho!" cries the jester, leaping into the air and clicking his heels. "So that's the rock you've split your decrepit buns on, old man! Ha ha! Rispettabile pubblico! Here is where the donkey has fallen!"

He seems, alas, to have been talking out loud again. He doesn't know for how long, but fears the worst. It's almost as though he's forgotten how not to. Crowds of people, scarfed and booted, have gathered around, laughing and applauding and stamping their feet in the snow, whooping the prancing buffoon through his mocking routines — now, hobbling and cackling wildly, he is chasing all the young girls in the audience, making them squeal and clutch tight their coats and skirts. The venerable scholar has become, he sees through bitter tears, seeing little else, the very fool of fools. Butts' butt. But what, being four-fifths buried in refuse already and the rest soon to follow, does it matter? Oh, bambina mia, you little blue-jeaned and cowboy-booted barbarian, you twangy gum-popping red-white-and-blue siren! You have been my death!

"Well, at least your life has not been in vain for nothing!" the comedian exclaims with insolent bravado, as though egged on by the raucous crowd. He seems brash as a child yet ancient at the same time, his features beardless yet furrowed with grimaces and depravity, marred by warts and pockmarks and an enflamed carbuncular growth on his forehead, and with two deep wrinkles standing arrogantly, harshly, almost savagely between his bushy brows, like something out of a repressed nightmare. "Hee ha! Isn't it wonderful!" he brays, launching a little bowlegged dance around the wastebin, the professor shrinking into his trash bag and solacing himself with the thought, which in his feverish misery he only half believes, that at least — surely — nothing worse can happen to him now. "Tutti quanti semo mati / Per quel buso che semo nati!'' the clown warbles out in a squeaky falsetto, rolling his eyes roguishly as he hops about. "It's crazy how we're all inflamed / By that little hole from which we came!"

But why is he surprised? For didn't the Blue-Haired Fairy warn him? "Puppets never grow up," she said, wagging her finger at him all those years ago. "They are born puppets, live puppets, die puppets!"

"Yes, well, dummy, that's show business! But do you mean to say — ?!"

What a terrible oracle! He'd thought she was presenting him with an alternative, a moral choice; she'd merely been pronouncing sentence upon him!

"Hey now, here's a song and it isn't long: 'He who doesn't die in the cradle, / Will suffer for it sooner or later!' Hah! Who says there are no poets in Venice? Yes, at the end of the day, we're all just clay, give or take a sliver or two — we all bough down to the curse of events, you can't stave it off, speaking figuratively! So nothing to do, cavalieri e dame, but show a little spunk, as we say in the charade trade, brace up and stick it out as best you can, and let the chips fall where they may! But now tell me, old man," the entertainer murmurs, peering closer, the frown between his sunken eyes deepening, "what did you mean when you said — ye gods! Am I dreaming or…?" And — ka-POK! — he butts him suddenly in the head.

O babbo mio! I am dying! There is loud laughter and shouting all around him, but the old traveler can hear it only intermittently through the reverberant clangor in his hammered head. What is this insane monster doing — ?! "Oh please!" he wheezes, but this time no one hears him. "Help — !"

"It might be…," muses the clown, leaning back, and then — WHAACK! — bangs heads again, hammering him brutally with the very knob of his carbuncle.

"Abi! o povero me!" yelps the professor, whimpering in the old style, his head reeling, his eyes losing their focus. "Ih!… ih!… ih!…" And the jester cries: "It COULD be…"

And then, even before the next blow comes, the distant memory returns and the old scholar recognizes his adversary — not an adversary at all of course but once his most beloved friend — a memory repressed to be sure, but not of a nightmare: rather of what was perhaps — before the glory of being human, that is, and all that shameful past was put behind him — the happiest night of his life! Pa-KLOCKK!

"It IS! It IS! Pinocchio! It's PINOCCHIO!"

"Arlecchino!" he gasps, his eyes still spinning around in his ringing head. Did he used to do this for fun? "My-my friend! Ow! Oh! It's you!"

"Pulcinella! Pantalone!" Arlecchino shouts across the campo, leaping up and down like a mechanical frog. "It's Pinocchio! Colombina! Our dear brother Pinocchio is here! Flaminia! Brighella! Capitano!"

"What — ?!" cry the musicians of the rock band, dropping their instruments with an amplified clatter and bounding down off the stage. "Pinocchio — ?! Can it be — ?!"

And he is suddenly engulfed in a great commotion as they swoop down upon him, everyone kissing him and hugging him and giving him friendly head-butts and pinches and all talking at once — "It is! It is really he!" "It's our brother Pinocchio!" "Evviva Pinocchio!" "Lift him out of his hamper there!" "Who has done this to him?" "Oh dear Pinocchio! Come to the arms of your wooden brothers!" "Give us a kiss, love!" "Easy! The damp seems to have got to him!" "Why have you been tormenting him so, Arlecchino? Our own brother!" "He saved your life!" "I didn't recognize him, he's been smeared with all this funny makeup!" "That's human flesh, you imbecile!" "Pinocchio, how did it happen?" "Why did you leave us?" "It's been so long!" "Careful, Brighella, don't drop him!" — and, trailing a litter of paper bags, old vaporetto tickets, and unspooled cassette tapes, he is lifted out of the trash basket, hoisted upon their shoulders, and paraded triumphantly around the campo, the puppets recovering their instruments and striking up a gay-spirited circus march quite unlike the pounding headachy noises they were making before. As they pass by the stage, the professor sees above it the psychedelically painted canvas he could not read before: GRAN TEATRO DEI BURATTINI. "That's us!" cries Pulcinella below his left buttock. "Welcome, dear Pinocchio, to the Great Puppet Show Vegetal Punk Rock Band!"

14. GRAN TEATRO DEI BURATTINI

"I want you stick to me, Pinocchio," Arlecchino rasps fiercely from beneath his stiff upper lip as he drags him off the back of the stage and down into the terrified crowds, "like shit to a shovel!"

"But my knees! I can't even — !"

"Don't argue, friend! This is serious!"

Just like a puppet. Doesn't understand the limits and hazards of human flesh. Il Dottore, as his fellow musicians now call him, knows it's serious. He can smell the bonfires. He can hear the screams. He knows what happened to the last Dottore. He's frightened, too. But he still can't move. Shifting his body is like moving a refrigerator or a heavy log: he has to tip it from side to side, rock it forward all in one piece, every inch costs him almost unbearable pain and effort. And at the same time he's so frail, the tiniest jolt sends him spinning off in another direction, making him feel like one of those airy little balls in a whirling lottery basket, a walking (speaking loosely) paradox. So, inevitably, they are separated, shit and shovel. The metaphor was all too apt. Shit always gets left behind. He can hear Arlecchino shouting for him through the awesome pack-up, but the shouts grow more and more distant. He tries to shout back, but he keeps wheezing and coughing instead. The smoke is getting in his eyes and tearing at his throat, aggravating the itching there. He is being stepped on, elbowed, crushed between frantic bodies, kneed and pushed, they can't see him down here. He longs for the relative safety of the rubbish bin. Though those too, he can see, are being tipped over and flattened by the panicky mob. He strikes out for the awning of a greengrocer's stall, hoping for a refuge there, but it disappears before he can reach it. "Striking out" is perhaps not quite the expression: most of the time his feet are not even touching the ground. But he manages to stay afloat in the human flood, one of his more conventional talents, even if he remains somewhat below the surface.

The last Dottore, he's been told, was taken apart stick by stick. The band's been outlawed, its members condemned, they're on the run, and the Dottore, too fat to run, got caught. The carabinieri were trying to get him to talk which was of course like inviting the hare to run, as Pulcinella put it, only they could not understand his garbled Latin, whoever could, so finally they had to torture him to stop him talking. Even as he was edifying his captors with his celebrated at iam gravi lecture about the wounded Queen and her raw sausages, they snapped the old philosophaster's limbs in two, split up the chunkier bits with hammer and chisel, then, with his own strings, tied all the pieces up in his big hat and shipped the lot off to Murano glassblowers for kindling. "But now you can be our new Dottore!" Flaminia exclaimed gleefully, meaning no irony at all, as they propped him up in front of the electronic keyboard, the newest member of the Gran Teatro dei Burattini Vegetal Punk Rock Band. "But I'm no musician!" he protested. "Neither are we!" they laughed. "Look! It's easy! Just hit this! Now this!" Arlecchino guided his hands and from the stiff poke of his fingers, frozen into gnarled little claws, vast sounds suddenly rocked the campo. "Now just keep repeating that!" The others picked up their instruments and gathered around him on the stage, improvising raucously upon his little phrase (which sounded suspiciously to him like "When You Wish Upon a Star"), electric guitars and theorbos, harmonicas, tambourines, flutes, lutes, and a set of amplified drums responding thunderingly to the touch of the virtuoso Burattini. Pi-pi-pi! they went. Zum-zum-zum! They made the whole square shake and tremble. It was fun, in a dizzying and anarchical sort of way, like the old days in Mangiafoco's mercurial puppet theater, and their friendship, however bruised he was by it, warmed his feeble heart.

The dizziness he suffered in their midst was not so much from the loud music or the smothering attention or even the fever which no doubt grips him still, but from all the head-butts he'd endured by which they'd first, ecstatically, recognized him. Indeed, down here in the desperate press and jostle of the fleeing multitudes, his head is still ringing from those blows, making it difficult for him to maintain any sense of direction, little good it would do him if he could. He sees the four public security police drag Corallina away, hears her screaming, but a moment later he cannot be sure whether she's in front of him or behind him. Arlecchino's fading shouts have seemed to spiral around him like a ball on a stretching string, almost as though the campo were expanding and he were being screwed deep into its tangled center. When Captain Spavento comes creeping by on all fours between the legs of the crowd, having just crept abjectly past in the opposite direction, the professor can no longer be sure, in his throbbing vertigo, that these are two separate events.

"Long live our brother Pinocchio!" they'd all cried on discovering him and the hugging and pinching and head-thumping had begun, everyone had a turn, he couldn't even speak it hurt so, he could only weep, and then they wept, too, but for joy, as they supposed he did, and kissed him some more and pinched him even harder as though to try to pluck him clean and banged heads again and crushed him with their wild loving hugs. And, in truth, for all the pain, he was happy, delirious even, it was as if, as they transported him out of the trash bag and onto their shoulders and paraded him through the snowswept square and up to the makeshift bandstand, he'd been suddenly and miraculously rescued, not merely from a lonely ignominious death, but from a whole lifetime of misguided exile and isolation, it was as if this was what he had come back for, this place, these friends, it was as if, as if a hundred years had never happened…!

"Remember the party that night? We danced till dawn!"

"Dancing wasn't the half of it! We all stripped and swapped parts and got our strings in a delicious tangle! Then Arlecchino stole Mangiafoco's swazzle and started playing it through his bumhole!"

"If it was his bumhole — might have been anybody's, things were pretty mixed up by then!"

"Listen, Pinocchio had just saved my can from the fire, the least I could do was sing through it!"

"As Arlecchino said at the time, he was thanking Pinocchio from the bottom of his heart and from the heart of his bottom!"

"I remember!"

"What a blast!"

"Then Rosaura challenged everybody to a pelvis-cracking contest with her polished cherry pudendum, and ended up splitting Colombina's mound and breaking Lelio's little thing off, not that he ever had any use for it!"

"She called it hardass cunny-conkers!"

"It never healed, I've still got a crack there!"

"It was a crazy night!"

"I was so happy…!"

"That party is a legend now!"

"But when was it? I don't remember it!"

"You weren't there, Flaminia. Must have been a century ago, maybe two."

"You were still just a gleam in old Mangiafoco's chisel!"

"And Rosaura," he asked then, craning his head about above the sea of faces, "where is Rosaura?"

"Ah, poor Rosaura, bless her wormy little knothole, has gone the way of all wood, I'm afraid, all except for her hardwood hotbox which Pierotto here inherited for a head when his old one got damp rot and fell apart!"

"It's made him a bit strange, but he's got a new lazzo with a chamber pot and a monocle you wouldn't believe!"

"But there are plenty of others here, you old rogue! Here, meet Corallina and Lisetta and Diamantina…!" They lowered him into the arms of these gay soubrettes with their bright-colored skirts and aprons tucked into leather leggings, their purple and magenta butch cuts, and safety-pin earrings through their wooden ears. "Evviva Pinocchio!" they laughed and they kissed him again and pinched and squeezed him and, just for fun, knocked heads some more.

"But why did you go away, Pinocchio? We were having so much fun! Why did you leave us when you said you loved us so?"

"Well, I — ow! — my father — "

"Loved us? Loved us?" roared Capitano Spavento del Vall'Inferno, rearing up then in sudden choler, his plumes quivering and waxed moustaches bristling. "He loved us as the wolf loves the sheep! As the whip loves the donkey! As the woodman loves the tree! No, no, let us say bread to the bread and bugger-my-ass to bugger-my-ass! This abominable imitation of humanity, this vile hodgepodge, this double-dealing French-leave-taking skin artist deserted us!"

"Ahhh!" gasped the three servant girls in unison and, tossing him in the air, shrank away as though from a bad odor. He would have crashed disastrously to the stage floor had not Arlecchino and Colombina deftly caught him, Colombina whispering behind what had once been his ear: "Is it true you left us because of a woman, dear Pinocchio? A painted woman with a mysterious past…?"

"She wasn't exactly painted — !" he wheezed in dazed dismay.

"Ho ho! Beating about the bush, were you, you old gully-raker?" laughed Brighella, winking slyly. "Nothing like splitting whiskers for splitting friends!"

"It wasn't a woman, it was fame he was after," declared Pulcinella. "We weren't hot enough for the little showboat! He wanted to be the big pimple, not some second stringer out in the sticks! He wanted to be a star!"

"No, no: money! It was money made the donkey trot, it always is!" argued Pantalone, thrusting his pointed beard in the air like an accusing finger. "There was the passing of a purse, his palm was greased, I heard the insidious chink of gold! Money taken, friends forsaken — !"

"But — but it wasn't any of that, I just didn't want to be a — !"

"O blind counsels of the guilty! O vice, ever cowardly!" cried the Capitano, still in high dudgeon. "We took the little sapling in as our trusted friend and brother, but it was a viper we found at our bosoms, a copper-hearted two-timing turntail as treacherous as a deathwatch beetle!" He snapped his sword from its sheath and whirled it about menacingly, strutting up and down the cramped stage. "O evil, of evils most evil! There is no worse pestilence than a familiar foe! Such perfidy makes me snuff pepper, and when I'm aroused the seas duck under for cover, mountains shrink into the earth like iced ballocks, the sun is afraid to show its face, and even the mighty gods shit themselves in terror, so look out below! Down with your breaches of faith! Out with your double-jointed hybrid treachery! Avast! Avaunt! Oyez! Attento! The greatest achievement of a general is to smite the foe and chop the whoreson into little specks and slivers, so let me have at him! Don't hold me back! My heart detests him as the gates of hell!"

As Captain Spavento del Vall'Inferno, still brandishing his sword, whirled around and charged in his direction, the professor turned anxiously to the others for help, but they all seemed to be applauding the spectacle, or else grabbing up their musical instruments as though to use them for weapons themselves. Their painted faces and hard wooden smiles alarmed him, and he felt a sudden intense nostalgia for his old library carrel back at the university. "Wait! You don't understand — !" he gasped, but no one was listening. Arlecchino's and Colombina's grips tightened like shackles.

"Hasten with the sword," brayed the Capitano, bearing down upon him in full regalia and waving the others to follow, "bring weapons, climb the walls; the enemy is at hand — IHAH!"

Even as the old scholar ducked, Arlecchino heaved him up as though to ward the blow off himself. The effect, however, was to make everyone fall back, even the startled Captain, who dropped his sword and nearly fell off the stage, scrambling to pick it up again. "Look at him!" Arlecchino cried, holding him up by the scruff of his tattered coat and waggling him about. "Do you think he'd do this on purpose?!"

There was laughter and some rude whistling and murmurs of "It's true! what a calamity!" and "Povera bestia!" and when the Captain, recovering somewhat, started huffing and puffing again about collapsing the Hemispheres, shattering the Poles, sending heads rolling around the world like billiard balls, and, with his flaming sword inherited from Xerxes, Romulus, Caesar, and the Blind Doge, bringing on the final devastation, Lisetta took his sword away from him and swatted him on the behind with it until he cried. "Vergogna!" she scolded, as he crawled about on all fours, boohooing. "Keep your tongue, rotto in culo, and keep your friends, slander slanders itself! Chi pissa contro vento pisses on his own pants!"

"Remember that a wretched man, as a wise compatriot once said," continued Arlecchino solemnly, still dangling him on high like one of the cats of Venice, "is a holy thing, and vice versa, da cima a fondo, and to be without a friend is to be like a body without a soul, that is to say, a turd without a fragrance — nor is friendship to be bought at a fair, at least not at an honest price, except sometimes in a raffle, and even then, as they say, old friends are still the best bargain if they are not so old they are dead and beginning to smell. Pesce, oglio, e amico vecchio, we would all be wise to remember that famous old Venetian recipe, the secret of which is fresh basil, sturgeon eggs, a forgiving palate, and funghi porcini, when in season, as friendship always is of course if you have the liver for it. Yes, compagni, old wood, as they used to say in the old days, days so old they were never new, except on the Feast Day of poor little Saint Agnes, whose martyred maidenhead, preserved in a silver noggin, once rivaled the eyeballs of Santa Lucia as an object of veneration amongst our countrymen and made old days young again — old wood, they used to say, as I say now, burns brightest, old linens wash whitest, old friendships cling tightest, and old arses spread widest, so watch where you sit for it is a difficult thing to replace true friends who have been inadvertently flattened, may they rest in peace, or in pieces, as the case may be."

With this sobering reminder of mortality, the entire company of the Great Puppet Show Punk Rock Band, weeping and laughing all at the same time, crowded around him once more, kissing him and smacking heads and embracing him in their crunching hugs, even Captain Spavento, who swore eternal fealty to his brother Pinocchio, adding that if eternity were not enough, he would personally take Time by the throat and squeeze a whole new set of tenses out of the cowardly stronzo. They pressed him, peeking in his pants, for tales of his travels and transformations, and told him of their own troubles, the banning of the band by the Little Man gang, now running the city and cynically calling themselves "socialists," and the terrible persecution of their brothers and sisters that has followed. The Dottore, he learned, was not the only victim: the lovers Ortensia, Florindo, Lindoro, and Lavinia had been dismembered by the authorities and used for the making of grocers' crates, clothespins, and bird cages, though their heads were rumored to have been stolen by the mask-maker Mangiafoco, bastard descendant of the old fire-eating puppet master. The troupe's instruments had been smashed, their spare parts, props, and costumes confiscated. And poor Frittellino had been burned at the stake, the stake being his own master Tartaglia, or what was left of him: a few bent sticks, blue-rimmed spectacles, and a fading stutter. But Pulcinella did some backflips and headstands to show he was as spry as ever, Corallina tossed her skirts up to display her freshly varnished walnut behind, and Brighella reminded them all that "Hey, Father Goldoni was made to eat shit in this town, why should we expect truffles?"

By now, a fair-sized crowd had gathered at this end of the snowy campo, drawn by the novelty of vegepunk rock, university students mostly by the look of them (he gazed out as upon a lecture hall, suffering a momentary twinge of longing and bittersweet regret, or maybe it was only a heart attack, who knew what he'd lose next, but if she was out there, he couldn't see her), dressed in blue jeans and thick sweaters, heavy boots and seamen's caps, and growing impatient in the biting cold. "We want the music! We want the music!" they chanted, stamping their feet, and the puppets, conscious as always about how they were "coming down the strings," as they liked to put it, snatched up their instruments and began improvising an original number with the old professor himself, in his new role as deputy Dottore, at the keyboard. Though he seemed to recognize the melody he was pounding out, the words, barked in the Venetian dialect, were new to him, something about the world being half for sale, half to be pawned, and all to be laughed at, maybe they were making it up as they went along. The crowd seemed to love it, hooting and whistling and singing along: "Lčzi, scrivi e tiente a mente, chi no sgrifa no ga gnente!" they whooped, jumping up and down. "Read, write, and never doubt it: If you don't steal it, you'll do without it!" It was fun in a hypnotic and irresponsible sort of way, it was like drunkenness, like jumping, over and over, through a ring at the circus, and the old traveler, in spite of himself (for it was also somehow frightening, even his unwonted delight frightened him), found himself, eagerly, without thinking, wishing it could just go on like this: "Now that we're all together, let's stay together!" he cried, meaning it with all his heart, though they probably couldn't hear him, they were making a terrible racket — or, rather, somebody was: the Burattini, he saw now, had dropped their instruments and were staring grimly out upon the campo, he was hammering away all by himself, his hollow unaccompanied notes resoundingly challenged now by what seemed to be a great confluence of marching brass bands, arriving simultaneously from all directions like prancing caravans, beating out tattoos and blowing clamorous fanfares, joining in, as he mistakenly thought at the moment, in the fun.

"Vaffan — ?!"

"Ahi! la pula!"

"The questurini!"

"It's a bust!"

"La madama!"

"And they've brought in the civil guards!"

"Those fist-fuckers!"

"And not only — !"

"Look over there!"

"The public security police! The carabinieri!"

"The highway cops!"

"And who's that greasy little dog's cock under the toyshop awning, the one with the whipsaw directing everything — ?"

"L'Omino!"

"We're fucked — !"

"I hear motor boats!"

"The maritime patrol!"

"Look! Even the sanitation cops! The border guards!"

"Lido always gives us a warning! Where is he today?"

"The ecclesiastical police!"

"The vaporetto inspectors!"

"They've pulled out every prick in the province!"

"And they're all armed!"

In they paraded, hundreds and hundreds of them, long winding ribbons of vivid color, banded and braided, caped and cockaded, some in lance caps, others in shakos, tricornes, berets and busbies, their weapons gleaming, their shiny boots — notched, bossed, spurred, tufted, waxed, or gaitered — cracking snappily like ricocheting gunshots against the paving stones of the narrow passageways leading into the crowded campo. The Dottore-designate was still thumping away dutifully at the keyboard, grinning out half blindly on this resplendent spectacle, when Arlecchino grabbed his wrist.

"The show's over, my friend! We're hitting the road!"

"What — ?! But I — !"

"It's too late!" Pantalone cried. "They've encircled the campo!"

"They've blocked all the exits!"

"What'll we do — ?!"

"The pompieri! They're building fires!"

"Listen! Helicopters!"

"Tear gas!"

"Come on!" Arlecchino rasped, and suddenly, like the metaphorical shoveled shit, he was out of his seat and flying into the turbulent crowds.

"Help!!"

"Run!"

"ASSASSINI!"

And now he has lost Arlecchino, he's alone in a mad crush of terrorized rock fans and puppets, trampling each other in their desperate search for an exit, it's worse than registration day back at the university. Helpless and confused and crippled with illness, the old professor is getting dragged along by the throngs, swept back and forth in waves as they flee from one police charge or another. There are bludgeonings, screams, the grind of buzz saws, howled insults, the exploding of tear gas canisters. Fires have been built, manned by the fire brigade, and, horribly, in one of them, he sees the pretty face of Flaminia melting. One moment he is jammed up against a flaking wall by a teeming mass, the next he finds himself sprawling, alone, as though he were suddenly the center from which all have fled, by the battered marble base of an ancient wellhead. Towering above him are two tall carabinieri, thin as nails, with cocked hats, drawn rifles, and flowing black capes, lined with blood red velvet.

"Is this one?"

"Hard to tell. Old bum, looks like."

"Let's throw him on, see if he burns."

"Oh, please!" he blubbers with what life he has left. "I'm not one of them! Can't you see? Sob! It's all a terrible mistake! I don't even know how to play a piano!"

"A likely story."

"A bad tool in any case. I say, throw him on the fire."

"No! Please! Have mercy on an old man!" he bawls as they reach down for him. "I'm afraid of fire — !"

"Si, signori Cavalieri! Have pity!" someone cries nearby.

"Cavalieri — ?! There are no cavalieri here, fool!"

"Signori Commendatori, then!" Through his tears the professor can see that it is Pulcinella in his loose white shift and sugarloaf hat. He seems to have popped out from under the iron lid of the well. "Have mercy on the old gentleman, Commendatori!"

"Commendatori — ! Are you making fun of us, you turd?"

"Your Excellencies!" Pulcinella bows deeply, his rear in the air, his beaked nose at his toes. From this exaggeratedly abject position he winks soberly at the downed scholar and, while clucking like a chicken to mask his whisper, urges sotto voce: "Run, Pinocchio! Run!"

"Aha! I recognize you!" cries one of the carabinieri, grabbing the puppet by the scruff and hauling him to his feet. "You're one of those terrorist musicians!"

"Off to the fire with you, pricknose!"

"Wait — !" gasps the professor, rising, with difficulty, to his knees.

"Yes, wait!" echoes Pulcinella from under his raised beak. "My shoes!"

"What — ?"

"The laces! I'll never burn with loose laces, gentlemen, I'll piss right through them and put the fire out!" he exclaims and, freeing his arms, stoops as though to tie them. The carabinieri reach down to collar him again, and he grabs an ankle of each to throw them down and run away: an old lazzo from the Commedia days. Only this time it doesn't work. Pulcinella grunts and strains, but he cannot raise either foot so much as a hair's breadth off the paving stones. "Made a frittata out of that one, I guess," he shrugs, as they lift him by his hump, his long arms dangling limply at his sides, "but that's how it goes in show business, Your Excellencies, no point in crying over spent milk, as they say, what's done has a head, so farewell, dear public! Your faithful servant Pulcinella is off to get his heart coddled and his buns toasted!"

"Stop! You can't do that — !" the old professor protests, but before he can even unlock his old knees and clamber to his feet, another policeman, dressed like a Cuirassier of the Guard in a steel helmet with brass ornaments and a black horsehair plume, a double-breasted blue tunic with silver buttons and red piping, the red cuffs and standing collar embroidered in silver wire, a sky blue sash with sky blue tassels hanging from the hip, silver epaulettes with silver bullion fringes, white breeches, and black jackboots, and carrying a rifle with a fixed bayonet, arrives and claims jurisdiction over the prisoner, asserting the divine right of kings.

"Kings? What kings? We have no kings, you fool!"

"The divine right of fools, then!" rejoins the Cuirassier and lays hold of Pulcinella to drag him away. "He who takes, has!" he laughs, a dry roguish laugh that can belong only to the band's lead guitar Brighella. "Possession, as the belly said to the nose, masters, is nine tenths of the law!"

"That still leaves one tenth!" the carabinieri reply, snatching at the slippered feet just disappearing into the roiling mob, whereupon a terrible tug-of-war begins with Pulcinella's body, Brighella at the head end, the carabinieri at the feet, Pulcinella whooping and yelping pathetically, sounding more like a chicken now than ever. Suddenly, the legs snap off at the groin, there's a frightful howl, the carabinieri tumble backwards into the crowd, tangled up in their capes, and the puppets vanish.

The professor knows he should do the same, but he is rooted to the spot. The crowds have shrunk back, he is suddenly all alone at the wellhead, center stage, the carabinieri, in a crimson rage, scrambling to their feet again, their sharp teeth bared, Pulcinella's sundered legs gripped in their fists like clubs — !

"Pinocchio! At last!"

"Arlecchino — ! But you shouldn't have come back! They're setting fire — !"

"Tell me about it later, my friend! We have to split before these shits do the splitting for us! Come on — !"

15. A GONDOLA RIDE

Once, many years ago, in one of his less genteel embodiments, he had been sold for a few farthings to a bungling rustic who wanted to make a drum for the village band out of his hide. The lout tied a rope to a hind leg and a stone to his neck and kicked him into the water, then sat back with a pipe waiting for him to drown. Instead, a shoal of fish came along and ate him right out of his predicament. It was a strange sensation. Dragged down by the stone and donkey weight, he had sunk to the bottom, feeling all the while as though his body wanted to rise from within. Then, suddenly, there was this thrilling pain, a delicious nibbling away at his entire being, he has never felt anything quite like it before or since, not even what the starlets did with him in Hollywood came close, though he always had hopes, and his body, his new one, as though trying to express its exhilaration, popped like a seed from its old encrustations and floated exuberantly to the surface.

This time it is different. There is, as before, that same eery feeling of wanting to rise from inside even while the outer body, weighted down with coat and suit and flesh and shoes, steadily sinks, but this time there are no fish, nothing living at all so far as he can see, which isn't far, it's like trying to peer through cold bean soup down here in this quagmire of twigs and wattle upon which, improbably, an empire arose, nothing but curdled garbage, thin twists of opaque plastic, children's ruined copybooks and old sanitary napkins, lottery stubs, the occasional drowned cat, and otherwise just shapeless streamers of coagulated muck that wind around his limbs and grease his face as though to smear away that expression of joy and surprise painted there only a moment before by the unexpected sight of that which he has been, with such awesome consequences, seeking. Ah, with what fugitive, mad, passionate hopes did he go clattering ludicrously down that fatal underpass, his preposterous movements inspired by the demon whose peculiar pleasure it is to trample human reason and dignity underfoot, even when so finely nurtured and honed as his own, his giddy mind in abject travail, his senses so focused on the object of his quest that only now, deep in the fallen Queen's murky bowels and sinking fast, can he hear the cries he could not hear then.

That he has been able to complete this humiliating fall, out of the frying pan and into the pot, so to speak, is thanks only to Arlecchino, who came to his rescue back in the campo, popping theatrically out of the turbulent crowd, felt hat pulled down over his pinpoint eyes as though he were trying to hide inside it, just as the two carabinieri struggled to their feet and, wielding Pulcinella's broken-off legs like truncheons, turned, enraged, on the transfixed professor. "Hey, looking for you, old man," his brave friend laughed, "has been like trying to find a pearl in a hailstorm! Quick! Hop on my back! A cavalluccio!"

"Hop — ?! I can't even — !"

Whereupon Arlecchino backed into him, reached down, and grabbed him behind the knees, and they were off, galloping clumsily over the icy stone flagging, the tall thin carabinieri in hot pursuit. "Hold it! Stop those two! They're dangerous criminals!"

He could feel bits and pieces flaking off as they jounced along, escape was costing him dearly, he knew, but Arlecchino was quick and cunning, leaping benches and wellheads, dodging in and out of the crowds, he had a thousand tricks, and it was working, they seemed to be losing their two pursuers, the pounding of their boots fading, their angry shouts gradually getting swallowed up in the larger uproar of the smoke-filled campo. He tried to tell Arlecchino as they galloped along how grateful he was and how much he loved him, and also about poor Corallina and Pulcinella and Flaminia and all the rest, but all he could do was wheeze and snort, his head bobbing loosely, his chest slapping Arlecchino's wooden back, popping the wind from his antique lungs. "Oh dehea-hea-hea-hear Har-Har-Harle — !"

And then, through his tears, like a miracle, he saw it: a flash of blue! That blue! "Stop! STO-HOP — !"

"What — what is it?" Arlecchino panted, staggering to a halt. The puppet's knees seemed to buckle and he set the professor down for a moment.

"I thought I saw — !"

"Whew, this used to be — gasp! — easier, old friend! I must be drying out!"

"Yes! Down there!" They were at the mouth of a dark passage through the middle of a building, the Sotoportego de l'Uva, he saw from the smudged sign above it, the Underpass of the Grape, and, at the far end of it, there she was, just drifting by as though in an angelic vision, her blond hair glistening with melted snowflakes, a fat pink bubble quivering between her puckered lips, and, jutting out from her unzipped plastic windbreaker, clad in soft blue angora and bouncing gently, those wondrous appendages which, for one magical moment that he desperately longed to reenact, had thawed him out this morning to the very tips of his being. "Bluebell! Miss — ! WAIT — !"

"Pinocchio! Where are you going — ?! Come back! We're not out of the woods yet, friend! We have to — yow!!"

"Hah! Got you, you impertinent little punk!"

"Pinocchio! Help me — !"

"Hey, look at the dummy's outfit! We've nailed the one the boss wanted!"

"You're screwed now, knobhead!"

"Ho ho! We're going to burn your wormy ass!"

"Pinocchio! Help!" Arlecchino was crying. "Salvami dalla morte! I DON'T WANT TO DIE — !"

But, lost in his mad trance, he was already halfway down the passageway, all this was far behind him, he was moving as he had not moved since he first staggered out of San Sebastiano, only now there was hope, real hope. This movement was not exactly running, nor even walking, it was more like some kind of goofy unhinged dance, the sort his drug-addled students used to dance a generation ago, his pelvis flying every which way and his arms and head moving more than his feet did. He caromed off the narrow walls, blackened with soot and wet moss, clattered into stacks of empty fruit crates, slapped through garbage, bounced off downpipes and stairwells, but he did make progress, slowly picking up forward momentum, his eyes fixed, no matter which direction the rest of him was momentarily aimed, on the opening at the far end, though she could no longer be seen there. "Miss! Please! It's Professor Pinenut! That bath — ! I've changed my mind — !"

It turned out, however, there was no little street running alongside the canal at the other end of the underpass as one might have assumed, just watersteps leading down into the cold coffee-colored water below. Luckily, he saw this in time to start backpedaling, call it that. Unluckily, the steps were covered with ice and snow and there was an evil green slime below that, and so, for a moment, after an experience not unlike that, he supposed with a fleeting but bitter irony, of being pitched from a slick shovel, the venerable scholar and aesthete, former rock star, and erstwhile cavalier servente found himself hovering in midair, still backpedaling frantically, those partial misgivings he had felt since returning to this city now become a sore distress, a positive misery, his most cherished convictions vanished like the pavement beneath his feet, his dreams of truth, virtue, perfection, and a hot bath now just derisive memories. Alas, he thought, nothing blunts the edge of a noble, robust mind more quickly and more thoroughly than the sharp and bitter corrosion of knowledge. Then — patatunfete! — in he went.

And so, as though arriving at the final destination on that ticket purchased so impulsively back in America, he has come at the end to the beginning, to the very foundations of this mysterious enterprise and of his own as well: back to the slimy ooze and the ancient bits of wood, driven deep, holding the whole apparition up. "La strada č pericolosa," a creature once warned him, long ago on that fateful Night of the Assassins. "It is dangerous out on the road! Turn back!" Yet, though it has been brought home to him, now as then, that the failure to take such advice is, in the world's judgment, a capital offense (even as he struggles upward against his heavy clothing, his toes forebodingly touch mud), and though it may be true, as he has so often been told, that those who, in an excess of passion, rush into things without precaution rush into their own destruction, a sensible person never embarking on an enterprise (all the advice taken through the years is now passing before his drowning eyes as though it were his life) until he can see his way clear to the end of it, what is one to do, he asks petulantly, his wind giving out, his heart beating wildly in his chest, with failing eyesight? Stay at home? Faint heart and all that, remember! Better faint than defunto, fool! When will you ever learn? But I have learned, he rages, arguing thus with himself while trying to claw his way to the surface, which is not far above him, but the sludge is too thick and he is too weak: even as he kicks at the mire below him, his feet sink into it. I have done nothing but learn! It's not enough to learn — ! He is still managing to hold his breath, he was always good at this, the girls in Hollywood used to throw him in the pool and see how long they could hold him under, they said it made them wet between their legs just counting the bubbles, and he let them, associating it with the excitement he had felt as a drowning donkey, but now it's over, he's not the youth he was then, his ancient chest is beginning to spasm involuntarily, he can't hold it any longer o babbo mio! o Fatina! — and then, just when all seems lost, something hooks him under his collar and hauls him, snorting and choking and webbed in slime, halfway out of the water.

"Have a good bath, signore?" rumbles a gravelly old voice above him.

"Help! Help — !" he splutters, floundering about in thick icy water. From what he can see through the muck and tears, he appears to be dangling from the end of a pole held by a hulking figure wearing a straw gondolier's boater with the braid torn at the brim, tilted rakishly over a sinister red mask with hornlike brows. "Save me!"

"Hmm, I must think about that, signore. Why should I succor one who is running from the police? Save the hanged man and you'll be hanged by him, as they say — "

"I am not running — splut! glub! — from anybody! I am a decent law-abiding citizen! It's all a — gasp! — mistake!"

"So you say, signore! But why should one believe you?"

"But you must! I am the most truthful person in the world — !"

"Yes, yes, and you've got the nose of a titmouse, too! Ha ha!"

"But can't you see? I am an American — glurp! — professor! A professor emeritus! Everyone knows me! I am a — blub! — good man! Un gran signore!"

"Oh I can see the great man you are through the holes in your clothes, Eccellenza! Che spettacolo! Perhaps the little fish have been feeding on your 'poor festered amorettos' — ?"

"Oh, shut up, you damned fool, and get me out of here!" he cries and — thplup! — finds himself under water again, this time unfortunately with his mouth open. "Please — !" he gurgles when next brought to the surface. "I'll pay!"

"Ebbene, at your service, padrone!" replies the devilish oarsman with a bow, lifting the professor out of the canal at last and, as though landing a crab, depositing his sodden catch on the black leather cushions of his gondola. "One must not be too hasty, you can never tell a tree by its bark, as I always say, or a pocket by its pants. So will it be the grand tour, signor professore, or famous murders, masterpieces, and executions, or perhaps the Venezia esotica of the poets and their param — ?"

"No, no! I only want… I want…" What? He is dying. And soon. He knows that now. And what he wants, what he longs for, as he huddles there on the stiff black cushions, drenched through and trembling in the wintry wind, are his old down comforter, his snuggies, his hot water bottle. He wants a bed, a soft warm bed. "Did you see… go past… a young woman…?"

"Ah! Una bambina — ?"

"Yes — "

"Bella — ?"

"Yes, yes!"

"Wearing a hat — !"

"No…"

"I mean, hair — "

"Yes…"

"Dark — "

"Ah — "

"But not too dark — ?"

"Well…"

"You might almost say blond — "

"Yes!"

"Eh, how much money do you have, signore?"

"I–I don't know…" He tries to reach into his soggy pockets for the few notes that Alidoro and Melampetta stuffed there, but his hands are frozen into inflexible claws.

"Permesso!" the gondolier growls soothingly, and reaches in to help himself, pulling out a hairy handful of cheese, wet bread, a few soaked lire, and an ear. He cocks his head to peer at this collection through one of the eyeholes of his mask, the mask's expression of fiendish menace giving way at this angle to something more like red-faced bewilderment. "Is, eh, is this all there is?" he asks, sniffing the ear.

"It's all I have left," he whimpers through chattering teeth. The tears are starting. He isn't going to make it. "It's not my fault! I am not a poor man! I have been the — sob! — victim of a cruel deceit! I have lost everything! Please help me — !"

"Well, on a day like this, I suppose, somewhat is better than nothing," sighs the gondolier, tossing the ear and bread over his shoulder with a shrug, pocketing the lire, and popping the cheese behind the mask into his mouth with a slurp before setting off. "A little wood, as the saying goes, will heat a little oven."

As the gondola turns and noses its way up the canal, the oar splashing sluggishly in the snow-clotted water, the professor, slumped desolately in his wet rags and deprived even of the somewhat, describes through his tears, because, like the gondolier's proverbial bit of wood, it seems to warm him a little to do so, how those two ruthless thieves last night stole all his earthly possessions, leaving him alone and homeless in the bitter weather. "They threw me to the lions! Literally! It's true! Sniff! I was even chased by one! They took my clothes, my money, my papers, my medicines, my traveling garment steamer — "

"Ah, it is a terrible story, professore, my heart weeps for you!" commiserates the gondolier, reaching under his mask as though to wipe a tear, or perhaps to pick his teeth. "What a world we are condemned to live in, eh? Where can we gentle folk find a safe shelter? Well, but here we are! Step out, please!"

"What — ? Already? But — !" They have bumped up against a small open campo, he sees, in front of a church whose bare façade today is striped with snow, giving it the appearance of a circus tent. They have not even left the area of the police operation. It is just across the canal, they have only circled around it, he can still hear the screams, the shouts, smell the smoke, people are fleeing this way, then turning around to watch the action on the other side. "But wait, this isn't — ! You promised — !"

"Yes, yes, as requested, signore, thank you very much!"

"What do you mean, thank you very much — ?! I gave you all my money! You haven't taken me anywhere yet! This is robbery!"

"Now, now, lower the comb," cautions the gondolier, glancing over his shoulder. "No sense drowning in a glass of water, as the I saying goes, professore, so don't make an affair of state out of it!"

"But, see here, you — Stop! What are you doing — ?!" The oar has caught him by the collar again, and once more he finds himself helplessly treading air, his coattails flapping soggily, over the murky brown waters of the snow-scummed canal. "Help! Thief! He stole my money!" he cries, appealing to the people in the square, even as he dangles from the gondolier's pole, but they only laugh and cheer, as though he were part of the daily entertainment.

"Look at him!" mocks the gondolier, waving a few soggy lire at the crowd. "Il gran signore!"

"Che bestiola!"

"He's too small! Throw him back!"

"Put me down! This is an outrage!"

"People who wear small shoes," the scoundrel declares portentiously, easing him down onto the snowy paving stones beside a little fat man, broader than he is tall, who seems, like everyone else, greatly amused by it all, "should not try to live on a large foot, dottore!"

"Foot dottore!" a blind beggar echoes, waving his white cane with the only hand he has.

"You!" he gasps, recognizing his old enemy at last. "You stole my baggage! You stole my computer, all my work! You stole my life — !"

"Ah well, that was long ago," rumbles the masked villain, dipping his head between his shoulders and leaning heavily on one foot. The fat man gives the rogue something, money probably, though the gesture is so fleetingly subtle as to be all but imperceptible. "Temporibus illis, and all that, dottore, if you please, let's pass the sponge over it, let's put a stone on it, as they say over on San Michele, let bygones be — "

"Bygones!" cries the beggar, and rattles his tin cup. "If you please!"

"It's La Volpe! Don't let her get away!" the old scholar wails, as the devilish creature pushes away with a tip of her tatty straw boater, slipping deftly up the waterway and out of sight. "Help! Police!" His voice is all that's left him, he cannot move, he cannot even point his finger. "She's the one! She stole everything I had! Stop her!"

But the police, not far away, have other things to do, and the gathered crowds seem merely amused, waiting to see what will happen next. What does happen is that the strange little fat man, his round rosy face split with a gleaming smile, turns to the water-logged professor, takes him tenderly in his arms, and squeezes him as though to wring him dry. "Pini, Pini, my love!" he gushes with a soft old voice full of loving kindness. "Safe at last!"

16. THE LITTLE MAN

The low sky's sullen light is ebbing, as though swept up into the clouds of mothlike snow now blowing around the melancholy lilac-tinted lamps along the waterfront, by the time the rapidly sinking emeritus professor is lifted out of the rocking motor launch and onto his old friend's private dock on the Molo, the landing stage and promenade near the Piazzetta of San Marco. The ancient traveler is dimly aware, ravaged by illness and cruel abuse though he is, that he is making, at last, his proper entrance into this "fairy city of the heart," as Eugenio has just called it, quoting one or another of the city's agents, and it does not fail to occur to him, as his porters bear him ceremonially between the Piazzetta's two eccentric gallows posts as though through a turnstile, deep-throated bells ringing out their somber consent overhead, that had he somehow landed here last night, as so many who have preceded him to this city through the centuries have advised, the mortal disasters that have befallen him this past night and day might never have happened, a thought that, far from easing his despair, merely deepens it, reminding him once again of his deplorable ingrained resistance to all advice, no matter how noble and well meaning its source. He is that proverbial impetuous fool, who, rushing in, gets, over and over again, trod upon.

"Now, now," says Eugenio gently, sidling up and tucking his blankets more tightly about him, "stop carrying on so, my angel, take your courage in both hands, we'll be there soon."

"There" is Eugenio's palace, the Palazzo dei Balocchi, "my humble abode," as his old school chum called it, "my little capanna in the Piazza," which has been offered to the professor, not merely for the night, but for so long as he is able to remain, which, under the grave circumstances, may be, alas, the shorter span of time. He has been offered a suite of his own, centrally heated and "fitted out in full rule" with built-in bar, medieval tapestries, a billiard table, marble bathroom with its original frescos, sauna, Byzantine mosaic floors, and an advanced electronic wraparound sound system, along with a staff of servants, doctors, nurses, cooks, priests, pharmacists, tailors, secretaries, and cellarmasters at his disposal, and more: a curative herbal risotto on arrival, silk pajamas, a new electric toothbrush, satin sheets and breakfast in bed, if he should last that long, even a personal hot water bottle and all the credit he might need during this emergency. "Indeed the whole city shall be laid at your feet, my exalted friend," Eugenio had exclaimed while still embracing him back there on the little exposed campo where La Volpe had deposited him, "you'll be sleeping between two pillars, as they say here, pillows, I mean, so long as I have anything to do with it, trust me — to the laureate his guerdon, the master his meed! Eh? So come along, contentment awaits, dear boy, but hurry now, the night is cold and the way is long! Andiamo pure!"

But, soaked to the core from his fatal dunking and fast icing up in the bitter wind, he could no longer even speak, much less move, and hurrying was like a forgotten dream. He could only lift his chin creakily an inch or two and sneeze: "Etci! Etci!" Whereupon, with a snap of Eugenio's fingers, two servants appeared with a kind of sedan chair or litter, strapped him into it, bundled him up snugly in cashmere blankets, and hoisted him aboard the gleaming motor launch, which had all the while been growling impatiently alongside them at the foot of the bridge.

There was much, as the launch lurched away like a runner breaking out of the starting block and went roaring, right through a red light, down the narrow rio, darting in and out among the slower gondolas, barges, and the honking express vaporetto, snow-thickened spray flying from the bounding prow and water slapping stone and wood along the sides, that was troubling the dying scholar, the smoke in the air, for example, the remarks of that infernal Fox and then the money that had passed hands, the very coincidence that had brought Eugenio to just that little square beside the water at just such a moment on such a day and made his rescue possible, but all of this was far at the back of his bruised and water-soaked head, and it disappeared altogether when Eugenio, declaring how sweet it was to go simply mad over a lost friend found again, proceeded to recite, as proof of his uninterrupted love and devotion to his old prepubescent pal, all of the grants, awards, fellowships, degrees (earned and honorary), prizes and publications, chairmanships, medals, titles, professional and honorary society memberships, special commissions, anthologizations, trusteeships, presidential citations, distinguished visiting professorships, biographies, eulogies, monuments, festschrifts, film credits, book and children's park dedications, and every single Who's Who entry of the professor's long and illustrious career, even mentioning the establishment, in his honor, upon the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first edition of The Wretch, of "The Annual 'Character Counts' Award" by Rotary International, and his more recent (politely refused) nomination as honorary president of the national "Nuke the Whales" campaign.

Whether it was this extraordinary exhibition of his boyhood companion's lifelong loyalty and admiration that set him off, or the sudden pungent awareness of the distance between that glorious past and his present misfortunes, the old wayfarer burst into tears and, taken generously into Eugenio's open arms, proceeded to unburden himself upon his dear friend's plump silk-shirted breast. Sobbing and wheezing, he has gasped out, as they've come spanking down the Grand Canal, engines wide open and sirens bleating, his terrible tale, in fragments only and in no particular order, getting blind monks confused with drunk lions, trash bags with turncoats, and grappa with graffiti, calamity tumbling upon calamity and all mixed up

"And — sob! — he stole my computer!"

"The gondolier — ?"

"Yes, but not — !"

"But, my dear boy, what were you doing jumping into the canal with a computer?"

"No, you don't — and the police! It was terrible! You saw — !"

"Now, now, boys will be boys, Pini…"

"But — wah! — my best friend! It was only music — !"

"We weren't afraid of a little music, ragazzo mio, we were worried about you in the hands of those Puppet Brigade terrorists! We were rescuing you from a possible kidnapping — !"

"Was that a rescue — ? I was — boohoo! — in a trash bag — !"

"I know, I know, let it all pour out, my love…"

… And maybe not even entirely audible over the speedboat's wail and roar, but it hasn't mattered, Eugenio has seemed to understand and forgive everything, hugging him close, assuring him that his nightmare was over, truly over, he was with trusted and altogether human friends now ("And in Venice we value friendship dearer than life! I would be unworthy of the name of Venetian if I did not follow the example of my brave fellow citizens, who are the soul of honor!"), and consoling him with promises of the luxuries and unstinting cordiality that await him. "This is not only the world's most beautiful city, as has often been said, it is also, in case you have forgotten, amor mio, its most civilized and opulent host. Indeed, there is no other city quite like it! It is a kind of paradise, una cittŕ benedetta, set like a golden clasp, as someone has said, on the girdle of the earth, a boast, a marvel, and a show, magical, dazzling, perplexing, the playground of the western world, the revel of the earth — the Masque of Italy! Una vera cuccagna! Pleasure, Pini, is its other name! I love it, almost as much as I love you! So stop crying now, you silly creature, life here is like a perpetual holiday, and you are its guest of honor! Oh, I have such plans for you, my friend! What good times we shall have together!"

"But — for the love of God, Eugenio! Sob! I–I am dying — !"

"Then, sweet boy, we shall have obsequies the likes of which have not been seen here since the ninth century when those two mercantile body snatchers brought Saint Mark's stolen corpse back in a perfumed basket from Alexandria, an entrepreneurial coup the world has envied ever since! Ah, what a delicious funeral that must have been! Think of the crowds! The marketing possibilities! And they've never stopped coming! Those fragrant bones, planted in a mausoleum unequaled in splendor till our own age of the movie palace, seeded an empire! Indeed, the odor of sanctity bestowed upon these islands by the ever-ripe Evangelist, is, when the wind turns, with us still, a daily reminder of the debt we all owe to those two quick-fingered traveling salesmen, bless their shameless little hearts! And now, Pini, if it's your turn, I can promise you a send-off unmatched in modern times! I see a glass coffin, a single transparent bubble, hand blown around the dear departed by Murano craftsmen like a bottle around a model square-rigger! You will lie in state on silken cushions the color of biscuits and cream, trimmed with the finest Burano lace and stuffed with canary feathers, surrounded by candlelit displays of memorabilia, souvenirs, articulated miniature replicas, death's masks, and other spin-offs, in the ballroom of one of the great Venetian palaces — the Casa Stecchini perhaps, yes, why not? The House of the Little Sticks — just over there, do you see it? On the left — !"

"I–I — choke! — can't see anything — !"

"I'm sure it can be arranged, and if not, we'll simply buy it for the occasion, the media will love it! When word gets out, there will be lines to view the body from here to Verona! It will take weeks! And right in the middle of the off-season, too, what a golden opportunity! We'll have screenings and readings, concerts, lotteries, public tributes from your fellow laureates, art exhibits of your portraits from around the world, fund-raising auctions and funny nose competitions, special travel packages for little children, cruises for the elderly and the handicapped! Then, on some feast day, such as that of Saint Paul the Simple, or Gabriel the Incarnating Archangel, or even, if the condition of the mortal remains permits such a delay, that of another Saint Mark, he of Arethusa, who was stabbed to death, back in the perilous days before felt tips, by the nasty little penpoints of his mischievous students — !"

"Oh, please, Eugenio — !"

"No, wait, Pini, this is the best part! On that day, a flotilla of black gondolas, the largest ever assembled in Venice and all of them heaped with sage, narcissus, and laurel, along with bouquets of bleeding hearts and woodbine, bachelor buttons and elderberry, dog roses, fairy ferns, cat's paw and foxglove, and sprinkled with a touch of wild oats, sea wrack, bitterroot, and rue, will bear your crystal casket up the Grand Canal, the opposite way we've just come, under the Accademia Bridge back there, which will be closed off that day of course, leased to all the world's major television networks, and on to the vaporetto landing at the Ramo del Teatro. There, greeted by the orchestra of the Fenice Opera House playing "Siegfried's Funeral March" from our own dear Riccardino's Götterdämmerung, it will disembark the entire cortege, composed of the greatest scholars, artists, politicians, theologians, bankers, carpenters, movie stars, self-made millionaires, and social reformers of the world, which will then make its ceremonious way down the Streets of the Tree and the Lawyers to the Rio Terra degli Assassini, chased thence up the Fuseri Canal to the Calle dei Pignoli, the Street of the Pinenuts — henceforth, my friend, in memoriam, your street! I love it! Meanwhile, in the Piazza San Marco — ah! a proposito, dear boy! Here we are!"

And so they have disembarked there on the stormy Molo, the ancient sojourner solicitously chaired in a traditional Venetian portantina, and made their way into the Piazza, Eugenio shouting: "Make way! Make way! Largo per un gran signore!" — though he cannot be sure, buried in blankets and blinded by the freezing wind, that there is actually anyone out in this wretched weather but themselves. He seems to hear voices and is dimly aware of passing under lamps and illumined façades, perhaps the Basilica itself, but his senses, he knows, can no longer be trusted, for he also seems to hear the murderous cries of squealing assassins, angels fluttering and making rude windy noises overhead, and a little whistlmg sound inside his skull as though something might be boring away in there, and the blur before his eyes is throbbing as though his pulse were beating on him from without. Even inside all his blankets, he is trembling violently, and his tears, shed on his dear friend's breast, have frozen on his face, threatening to split the exposed parts of his cheeks open. He feels light-headed and heavyhearted all at once, as though his bodily parts were trying to go in two different directions at the same time. It is not unlike the sensation he had while drowning in the canal, and he wonders, in his feverish confusion, if he might not still be down there, sinking into the slime, this rescue but a dying dream.

Or worse. Perhaps his whole rational human life has been nothing more than the dying dream of that poor drowned donkey, maybe he has only imagined that conveniently ravenous shoal of mullets and whiting, all the heroics thereafter and the transfiguration and the lonely century that has followed being just so much wishful thinking, certainly it all seems to have passed in the blinking of an eye, yes, maybe, all illusions aside, he is fated to be a drumhead after all, one more noseful and the mad dream over. He takes a deep snort: no, no such luck, just more frosty air, faintly Venetian-tinted, it has not yet, whatever it is, stopped going on

"Ah, Pini, still with us! Good boy!" enthuses Eugenio at his side. "Coraggio, dear friend, we are almost there! But, ah! what a splendid night this is, a pity you're under the weather! It reminds me of the first night I came here all those years ago! It was snowing then, too, and dog-cold, but we were young and Carnival had begun, so what did it matter? No one to drag us in to baths and books, no one to make us keep our caps and scarves on, our pants either for that matter! Who could be happier, who could be more contented than we?"

The professor, too, is thinking, deep down inside his fever, where thinking is more like pure sensation, about happiness, and about all the pain and suffering that seems needed to make it possible. Everyone loves a circus, but to make the children laugh, his master whipped him mercilessly and struck him on his sensitive nose with the handle of the whip, so dizzying him with pain (yet now, when his thoughts are more like dreams, he knows — and this knowledge itself is like a blow on the nose — he was as happy as a dancing donkey as he has ever been since) that he lamed himself and so condemned himself to die. And as for that country fellow who tried to drown him, he was at heart a gentle sort who dreamt only of a new drum for the village band. No doubt some other donkey, even more ruthlessly treated, was eventually slaughtered for the purpose, maybe even someone he knew, because: who would want the village band to be without a drum?

"Oh, the lights then! the extravagant music and endless gambols! In the streets there was such laughter and shouting! such pandemonium! such maddening squeals! such a devilish uproar! It was like no other place in the world! It is like no other place in the world, Pini! What fun it is still!"

But should we, he asks himself, rising briefly out of the pit of his present distress, resisting the seductive lure of donkey thoughts, should we, aware of all the attendant suffering, deny ourselves then the pleasure of the circus, of the drum? Or should we, knowing that none escape the pain, not even we, seize at whatever cost (here he is seized by a fit of violent wheezing and coughing as though there were something caustic in the atmosphere, not unlike the foul air at faculty meetings) what fleeting pleasures, life's only miracles, come our way? In short, somewhere, far inside, something (what is it?) faintly troubles him

"And look, Pini! Look how beautiful!" Eugenio exclaims, tenderly patting away the coughing fit. "See how the snow has been blown against the buildings! It's like ornamental frosting! Every cap capped, every tracery retraced, the decorative decorated! It's like fairyland! The Moors on the Clock Tower are wearing lambskin jackets tonight and downy cocksocks on their lovely organs and all the lions are draped in white woolly blankets! The snow is at once as soft and fat as ricotta cheese, yet more delicate in its patterns than the finest Burano lace! And now, do you see? in the last light of day, it is all aglow, it is as though, at this moment, the city were somehow lit from within! Look, Pini! O che bel paese! Che bella vita!"

Having been ever, or nearly ever, the very model of obedience, a trait learned early and the hard way at the Fairy's knees, or, more accurately, at (so to speak) her deathbed, or beds, the old scholar cannot risk, in his own extremity, changing his stripes now (though that is, he is all too dizzyingly aware, the very nature of his extremity), so he does his best to respond to the wishes of his old friend and providential benefactor who clearly loves him so, poking his nose into the wind and nodding gravely, even though to his fevered eye it is a bit like gazing out upon a photographic negative, the ghastly pallor of the snow-blown buildings more a threat than a delight. All the towers and poles in the swirling snow appear to be leaning toward him as though about to topple, lights flicker in the multitudinous windows like chilling but unreadable messages, and the Basilica itself seems to be staring down at him as though in horror with fierce little squinting eyes above a cluster of dark gaping mouths, its familiar contours dissolving mysteriously into the dimming confusion of the sky above. All around him there is some kind of strange temporary scaffolding going up like hastily whitewashed gibbets. Blood red banners, stretched overhead, snap in the wind, a wind that tugs at the umbrellas of the few scattered early evening shoppers still abroad, stirs their furs, and whips at the tails of their pleated duffle coats. Pigeons, dark as rats, crawl through the trampled snow, no longer able to fly, their feathers spread and tattered, chased by schoolboys who pelt them with snowballs, aiming for their ducked gray heads.

"No!" he wheezes, struggling to rise up within his bonds. "Stop… stop that — !"

"Ah, the mischievous little tykes," chuckles Eugenio. "Reminds me of our own schooldays, Pini, when we used to trap the little beggars with breadcrumbs, tie their claws together, and pitch them off the roof to watch them belly-flop below! What times we used to have — !"

"I never did!" he croaks. "I loved pigeons! Don't do that, you young scamps! Stop it, I say!"

A boy near his litter looks up at him, grinning, his narrow eyes aglitter, his mittened fists full of snow. He drops the snow, reaches up, and pulls on the professor's nose. When it doesn't come off, he backs away, the grin fading. His eyes widen, his mouth gapes, then, shock giving way to horror, he runs off screaming.

"Ha ha! Well done, Pinocchio!" Eugenio laughs, as the boy, crying out for his mother, goes sprawling in the snow. "You haven't changed a bit!"

"Pinocchio — ?" askes a feeble voice below. A dull gray eye blinks up at him from a crumpled mass half-buried in the snow. Eugenio has gone over to pick up the small boy and brush him off, giving him a number of kindly little pats and pinches. "Is that… Pinocchio?"

"What — ? Who is it — ?!" he gasps, peering into the dark blotch on the snow. "Can it be — ?!"

"Did you… did you ever find your father…?"

"Colombo! It is you! Yes, but that was long ago — !"

"I know, I know. At least the day before yesterday. I could still fly then…"

"But, dear Colombo — ! How can it be you're still…?"

"Alive? Don't exaggerate, my lad… As you see… But you're looking well…"

"Well — ! I am dying!" he groans. "Just look at me!"

"Ah, I wish I could, friend, but that's gone, too, I'm afraid. Fortune's not satisfied, as they say, with a single calamity…"

"I know…"

"Can't see past my bill, or coo either, if you know what I mean, can't remember if I ever did, that's going, too, my memory, I mean, and… and… What was I saying…?"

"That it was all going, your — "

"Going? No, no, I'm still… Ah, yes, your father! Well, at least I still have my memory! He was off in a boat somewhere… We stopped in a dovecote, do you remember, and feasted on birdseed…!"

"I remember, green tares, I had cramps for a week after, nearly drowned — oh, but it was wonderful up there in the sky with you, Colombo, galloping through the clouds! I've… I've often had dreams…"

"We flew all the way to Malamocco!"

"I thought… I thought it was farther…"

"It was far enough. What times those were! I can't believe I ever knew how…" The old pigeon, his dear strong friend of all those years ago, flutters a wing weakly, as though searching his memory with it. "What? Who's there…?"

"It… it's me, Colombo…" Tears have started in the corners of his eyes again, melting the ones that had frozen there. He feels something deep down give way, popping and snapping like the banners in the wind overhead, releasing a rising turmoil of grief. He has soldiered on through so much, "carrying through" in the old way, "holding fast," and now, on the very threshold of deliverance from all his terrible trials, he fears he may not be able to keep his chin up any longer. Assuming he still has one. Eugenio has returned and seems to be poking at the bird curiously with his booted toe.

"Oh yes… Pinocchio. I heard you were in town. Someone… someone was looking for you…"

"For me? What — what was she wearing — ?!"

"Ah, forgive me, dear boy!" exclaims Eugenio, snapping his fingers at the servants. "We must get you in out of this abysmal weather! Come along now!"

"Wearing? Nothing, so far as I could tell — "

"Nothing — ?! But — wait — !" he cries as his porters pick him up again.

"No dawdling, carino mio, your risotto's already cooking, can't let it get cold!"

"Just an old fleabitten dog by the smell of him… But… who — who is that with you, Pinocchio my child? Is that — ?"

"It's my old classmate Eugenio, Colombo! A true dear friend! He saved my — !"

"Ah, bada, Pinocchio — !" the pigeon gasps, trying to rise. "Take care — !"

"I've suffered so much, dear Colombo! If you only knew! And now — a real bed and doctors and — Eugenio knows everything I've ever — !"

The ancient pigeon gapes his gnarled beak as though to interrupt, but before he can manage so much as a peep, Eugenio, approaching the bird with a broad smile and full of loving kindness, steps on his head, crunching it into the stone pavement beneath the snow. The wings flop once and are still.

"What… what have you done — ?!" the professor squeaks in alarm.

"The tedious old thing had some kind of cricket in his head, as we say — qualche grillo per il capo, ha ha! — and I, as it were, got rid of it for him!" chuckles Eugenio, wiping his shoe in the snow. He waddles back to the sedan chair and caressingly tucks the blankets around his old friend once more. "But, dear fellow, you're trembling so! It's like you're trying to shake yourself out of yourself — !"

"You — you've killed him — !"

"Now, now, let's not make an elephant out of a fly, precious boy! There are too many of these little shit-factories in Venice as it is! The commissions we get on the tourist seed stalls may be good business in the summer, but this time of year the little bandits are just a drain on the economy! So, here we go, it's off to the Palazzo dei — Pini, my love! are you there? Pini — ? Speak to me!"