The Bellini Card

49

Swarms of beggars were retreating from their pitches as night fell.

Some were carried away by charitable friends, but the famous legless beggar of San Marco, using nothing more than his fingertips, wheeled himself up a side alley where he was released from the wheeled board by a faithful servant and slowly and painfully stood up, cracking his joints.

A furious German soldier, reddened by false piety and wine, stumped off on a wooden leg to one of the more forlorn wineshops of the city. A wraithlike woman, preternaturally skinny, and clutching to her breast a tiny, malnourished baby in a shift, stuffed the baby headfirst into a bag. It was only made of wax and wood, and she scuttled away to prepare dinner for her husband and five children.

All over Venice, under cover of darkness, tiny miracles were being performed. All over the city people found tongues, limbs, parents, and appetites. The halt walked; the weak took up their beds; the idiots and the insane, with looks of innocent cunning, counted their takings and found their way to a mug of wine or a dish of polenta.

On Palewski’s bridge, the bundle of rags stirred, too. What emerged from its nest was, at least, a man; he had sores on his shaved skull and a dirty yellow beard. He pissed into the canal, then made his way painfully up the alley, clutching a few kreuzers in a grimy hand.

Nobody passed him. Across the next bridge, he spotted something pretty on the ground and stooped to pick it up.

It was a little pointed object made of hard red leather and for a few moments he held it to his eye as if assessing its value. But even in Venice, among the poorest of the poor, a heel is worth nothing without its shoe; the beggar spat and passed on.

Later, having eaten half a slab of polenta, with the other half tucked away, he returned to his bridge.

He snuggled deep into his bed of rags and pondered, dreamily, the comings and goings on the street.