"It's my old cla.s.smate Eugenio, Colombo! A true dear friend! He saved my -!"

"Ah, bada, bada, Pinocchio -!" the pigeon gasps, trying to rise. Pinocchio -!" the pigeon gasps, trying to rise. "Take care -!" "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 done - -?!" the professor squeaks in alarm. 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, 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 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 trembling so! It's like you're trying to shake yourself so! It's like you're trying to shake yourself out out of yourself -!" of yourself -!"

"You - you've killed killed him -!" him -!"

"Now, now, let's not make an elephant out of a fly, precious boy! There are too many of these little s.h.i.t-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 Speak to me!" to me!"

PALAZZO DEI BALOCCHI.

17. VIEW FROM THE CLOCK TOWER.

Across the ruffled lead-colored waters of St. Mark's Basin, poised between crenellated Gothic fantasy and High Renaissance exuberance, Andrea Palladio's masterful church of San Giorgio Maggiore, with its sagging cheeks, carbuncular dome, and stiff cone-capped campanile at its rear (his grumbling companion has likened it to a belled cat with its tail in the air), sits gravely at anchor like an ordered thought within a confused sensuous dream, this damp dream called Venice, "the original wet dream," as his dear friend Eugenio likes to call it. The church's pale facade, caught obliquely in the winter sun's angular light and framed now between the two absurd columns of the Piazzetta like a carnival mask hung in a window, peers out past the growling, bobbing water traffic upon this shabby but bejeweled old tart of a city, the mystery of reason confronting the mystery of desire, and what it seems to be saying is: history, true, is at best a disappointment ("It is a fairy tale full of wind, master, you are right, an empty masquerade, a handful of dead flies!"), but it is also, in spite of itself, beautiful!

Not an easy idea for the old professor to accept, any more than that traditional Venetian notion of art as speech, as a discourse with time ("No, no," he is muttering now, his voice m.u.f.fled by ruin and his thick woolen wraps, "that's not what I mean at all!"), a kind of ongoing dialogue between form and history, as Palladio, that Paduan Aristotelian, would have it. "Dialogue," after all, smacks of the theater and "history" of the storybook, and the professor, in his dedicated pursuit of ideal forms, has always rejected the theatrical, the narrative, indeed all all arts with concepts of time other than eternity. This was, in his early days, his argument with Palladio, who drew echoes of Venice's corrupt and mongrel history into his designs even as he gently chastised the city with his intimations of a rational geometric ideal, a compromise the professor himself, schooled in the categorical imperatives of the Blue-Haired Fairy, was unable to make. Such an accommodation to the moment was, he felt then, both patronizing and delusory. Just as there were good boys and bad boys, there were, the artistic image being the form given to thought, pure thoughts and those contaminated by history. If art's endeavor, it being otherwise useless, was to express man's ceaseless striving for perfection, then history was what always went wrong. arts with concepts of time other than eternity. This was, in his early days, his argument with Palladio, who drew echoes of Venice's corrupt and mongrel history into his designs even as he gently chastised the city with his intimations of a rational geometric ideal, a compromise the professor himself, schooled in the categorical imperatives of the Blue-Haired Fairy, was unable to make. Such an accommodation to the moment was, he felt then, both patronizing and delusory. Just as there were good boys and bad boys, there were, the artistic image being the form given to thought, pure thoughts and those contaminated by history. If art's endeavor, it being otherwise useless, was to express man's ceaseless striving for perfection, then history was what always went wrong.

"Yes, you have put your treacherous finger on the very sore, Excellency," snarls the old bewhiskered dark-visaged servant who, on Eugenio's orders, has wheeled him out here onto the balcony of the Torre dell'Orologio, muttering sourly at the time that he was "just tying the donkey, as they say, where the master wants." The balcony overlooks a Piazza San Marco decorously strewn this cold bright Sunday morning with the preparations for Carnival: raw yellow timbers, metal frames and scaffolding, duckboards and bunting, all stacked helter skelter below him amid the cafe tables laid out like chips in a board game and the souvenir stands with their fluttering bouquets of gondolier hats and the flocks of bundled-up tourists and feeding pigeons. It is a view of this glorious court, dizzying but thrilling, not unlike the one he enjoyed a century ago, long before the Age of Flight, when, clinging in joyous terror to the slippery pigeon feathers, he flew on Colombo's back in search of his father. Ah, the excitement of that flight! The freedom! He'd called Colombo his "little horse": "Galoppa, galoppa, cavallino!" "Galoppa, galoppa, cavallino!" he'd cried. he'd cried.

"Gladly, master, but my instructions were to stay at my post while drying you out in the sun."

"No, no, I didn't mean you! I was only recalling! a flight!"

"You wish to fly, master -?"

There is something wrong with this memory. Something out of his recent ordeal that he does not wish to recall. Or, better said, that he has simply forgotten, and probably a good thing, too, he needs to put all that behind him like Eugenio says, his recovery may depend upon it. Three cafe orchestras are playing all at once this morning, their whimsical cacophony interscored with the clangor of the city's mult.i.tudinous bells, the blast of recorded music, the whistling of hawkers and the honking of gulls and boats, the shouting and laughter in the square, the grinding of the clock mechanism beside him, all of it echoing and rebounding off the glittering waters of the lagoon like a single clamorous voice, which even he can hear in spite of having lost his ears, a voice which seems to insist upon the dominion of the present. Above him, the two huge bronze figures, known popularly as "Moors" because of their shiny black patina and their legendary genitalia, pivot stiffly and hammer out the morning hours, while, beneath them, under the symbolic Winged Lion of St. Mark with his stone paw on an open book and the copper Virgin and Child on their little terrace, the great revolving face of the zodiacal clock celebrates eternity with its serene turnings even as it intransigently mills away the pa.s.sing moment, turning history into a kind of painting on the wall. "It is a devilish priest's game not worth the candle, a charade of charlatans, am I right?" hisses Marten the servant, keeping up his subversive p.i.s.si-p.i.s.si p.i.s.si-p.i.s.si in his ear. "History! Hah! It is a veritable s.h.i.t storm, master, in his ear. "History! Hah! It is a veritable s.h.i.t storm, master, punto e basta!" punto e basta!"

"But, no, I was wrong then, you see!" For in time, tutored by Giorgione and by his beloved Bellini, he came to recognize that, if there were pure and impure thoughts, there were also simple and complex ones, and pure complex thought, which he was increasingly given to (he had taken on flesh, after all, he was no longer a mere stick figure), was obliged to embrace the impure world, else, blinkered, it found itself jumping, again and again, through the same narrow hoop.

"Uhm, excellent way to break a leg, padrone."

"Oh, I know, I know!"

"Or, heh heh, a neck!"

Moreover, as he himself had been a sort of walking parody of thought given form, a.s.suming that what was in old Geppetto's pickled head was so n.o.ble a thing as to be called thought, he had been able to intuit (here, perhaps, the years in Hollywood helped) the hidden ironies in all ideal forms, and so began to perceive that thought's purity lay not so much in its forms as in its pursuit pursuit of those forms - whereupon: his "go with the grain" as a moral imperative, "character counts," his symbolic quest for the Azure Fleece, the concept of I-ness, "from wood to will," and all that. Already, in of those forms - whereupon: his "go with the grain" as a moral imperative, "character counts," his symbolic quest for the Azure Fleece, the concept of I-ness, "from wood to will," and all that. Already, in Art and the Spirit, Art and the Spirit, erroneous as it might have been in its refusal to acknowledge the theatrical in Venetian art (what, he was obliged to admit, was the "emergence of archetypes from the watery atmosphere like Platonic ideas materializing in the fog of Becoming" but pure theater, after all pure stage hok.u.m?), he had begun, if not wholly to accept ("Ebbene, I too am interested in archetypes, condottiero!"), at least to understand and respect Palladio's position, and if he was once impatient, he was now more sympathetic, more prepared to make room for the human condition. Which was his condition, too! more or less! erroneous as it might have been in its refusal to acknowledge the theatrical in Venetian art (what, he was obliged to admit, was the "emergence of archetypes from the watery atmosphere like Platonic ideas materializing in the fog of Becoming" but pure theater, after all pure stage hok.u.m?), he had begun, if not wholly to accept ("Ebbene, I too am interested in archetypes, condottiero!"), at least to understand and respect Palladio's position, and if he was once impatient, he was now more sympathetic, more prepared to make room for the human condition. Which was his condition, too! more or less!

"! Provided the little stronzos are edible!" And Marten s.n.a.t.c.hes, or seems to s.n.a.t.c.h, at a pa.s.sing pigeon, throttle it, and stuff it into a bag at his side.

"Of course, it might just be my weakened eyesight!"

"Eh?"

Thus, from his lofty Clock Tower perch, coped and hooded in thick cashmere blankets with only his nose poking out, the old professor peers out upon this luminous spectacle and, face to face with Palladio's pale sober San Giorgio Maggiore across the sun-glazed bay, muses, his own pale and sober thoughts punctuated by the thick fluttering of pigeons and the rude interruptions ("Eh? Eh?") of Eugenio's impertinent servant, upon the folly of his youth and the debilities ("That fog, I mean!") of old age. Which, it would seem, contrary to his expectations of just a few nights ago, is not yet over. Like this crumbling old city, these famous "winged lion's marble piles" ("A d.a.m.ned nuisance, I can tell you, and no b.l.o.o.d.y cure for them either," he hears somebody grumble, might be Marten, he can't be sure) now scattered out before him in their antique devastation - pocked, ravaged, bombed, flooded, tourist-trampled, plague-ridden, pillaged, debauched, defaced, shaken by earthquake, sapped and polluted, yet somehow still stubbornly, comically afloat - he too, perversely, lingers on. Little more than, perhaps, but if by some misfortune he is not yet dead, as one of his doctors so wisely put it that night of Eugenio's rescue, then it's a sure sign he's still alive.

He had awakened, having apparently pa.s.sed out in the Piazza, a Piazza he could not however at that moment recall (even now that bitter night with its monstrous snow-frosted shapes looming over him in the swirling wind like howling ghosts is little more than a half-remembered nightmare, in no way resembling the cheerful scene spread out before him now), in a soft warm bed piled high with down comforters, a hot water bottle at his feet, and three doctors at all his other parts, probing and prodding with various tools of their trade and debating the particulars of his imminent demise.

"It is my professional opinion," said one solemnly, flicking the old pilgrim's tender nose back and forth as though testing its reflexes, "that he is dying from top to bottom, or else from bottom to top, though one could conceivably hold the position that death was rapidly overtaking him, both inside and out."

"I quite disagree!" exclaimed a second, lifting a foot by a toe that snapped off like a dry twig. "You see? His condition is clearly as desparate at one end as at the other, even if if the surface is as moribund as the core!" the surface is as moribund as the core!"

"Gentlemen! Please!" protested Eugenio, who, for a confused moment, the dying scholar mistook for his old friend and benefactor Walt Disney with his apple red cheeks and p.u.s.s.ycat voice and sweet soft ways, oily as whipped b.u.t.ter. "Is there no hope?"

"Well," sighed the first, pressing a stethoscope to the place where an ear used to be and rapping the professor's feverish brow speculatively, "if he is not dead by midnight, he may live until tomorrow."

"How can you say that?" cried the second, sticking a thermometer in his peehole, and glaring angrily at his watch. "He will certainly not not live until tomorrow, if he is dead by midnight!" live until tomorrow, if he is dead by midnight!"

"And have you nothing to say, sir?" Eugenio asked, turning to the third doctor.

"This face is not new to me!" that personage responded, pointing at the place where others might have a navel and he but a knothole. "I know him for a perfidious rogue and a shameless ideomaniac, buono a nulla, this faithless figlio di N.N., this good-for-nothing wh.o.r.eson legno da catasta! Fortunately, all knots come to the comb, and to the lancet as well, this one no exception, so out with it, I say! Gentlemen, hand me my brace and bit!"

"Wait!" cried the first doctor suddenly, drawing back. "Could it be - not being otherwise, that is - the plague?" plague?"

"It might might be," gasped the second, wiping his hands nervously on his trousers, "but then again, if it isn't, it's a.s.suredly not!" be," gasped the second, wiping his hands nervously on his trousers, "but then again, if it isn't, it's a.s.suredly not!"

"Oh woe, woe, WOE!" woe, WOE!" exclaimed the third doctor, beating his chest and gazing upon the patient in horror. Certainly he could not have been a pretty sight, his hide foxed and tattered and falling away, bits and pieces of him missing altogether, his miserable water-soaked body wracked by fever and a rasping cough - as Eugenio remarked wryly when first seeing his eyelids flutter: "Behold, gentlemen, there is the man who has been in h.e.l.l!" In truth, in his condition the plague might have been a mercy. "As one who has had it hammered into him by bitter experience," the third doctor continued, clubbing his own pate with a balled fist, "let me a.s.sure you that neither earth, nor air, nor water, nor flesh itself is a safe refuge for wicked little philosophasters under the lignilingual curse!" exclaimed the third doctor, beating his chest and gazing upon the patient in horror. Certainly he could not have been a pretty sight, his hide foxed and tattered and falling away, bits and pieces of him missing altogether, his miserable water-soaked body wracked by fever and a rasping cough - as Eugenio remarked wryly when first seeing his eyelids flutter: "Behold, gentlemen, there is the man who has been in h.e.l.l!" In truth, in his condition the plague might have been a mercy. "As one who has had it hammered into him by bitter experience," the third doctor continued, clubbing his own pate with a balled fist, "let me a.s.sure you that neither earth, nor air, nor water, nor flesh itself is a safe refuge for wicked little philosophasters under the lignilingual curse!"

"You mean!?" Eugenio moaned, a pudgy hand clasped mournfully to his soft breast.

"Lamentably, sir, he is, as we say here," replied the first doctor, stepping forward, "truly between bed and cot! His hours are counted! He will soon be, morto e sepolto, making soil for the beans! That is to say -"

"On the contrary," interrupted the second, crowding in front of the first, "he is rather, sir, as the saying goes, more on the other than on this side! bell'e s.p.a.cciato! Dead and done for! Furthermore -"

"Ah!" screamed the third, bounding about the room and banging his head vehemently on the walls. "But what's the moral? What's the MORAL?" What's the MORAL?"

"Exactly!" exclaimed the first.

"For once I agree with my esteemed colleague!" put in the second.

"Ohi, povero diavolo!" sobbed Eugenio, rubbing his eyes with his rolled fists. "He is my dearest sweetest friend! Surely there is some remedy -?!"

"Alas, I am afraid he is a tragic and more or less fatal victim of dermatological cytoclasis," sighed the first, stroking his beard, "for which no known cure has yet been found!"

"I am sorry to have to disagree once again with my distinguished colleague," argued the second, clutching his lapels firmly, "but the patient has clearly contracted a somewhat lethal dose of cytolysis of the epidermis, the cure for which remains, regrettably, a scientific mystery!"

"Idiots!" snapped the third, suddenly standing tall and composed beside the bed, staring severely down at - or into - the ancient traveler as though penetrating to the very core of his ignominy. "Can't you see? It is as plain as the face on his nose! This shameless ragazzaccio is turning back to wood again! is turning back to wood again! Look at him! The little scoundrel is suffering from lignivorous invasions of all kinds, evil eruptions of xylostroma, probable sclerosis of the resin ca.n.a.ls, peduncular collapse, weevil infestation, and galloping wet rot. He's starting to warp, too, disgustingly enough, and that offensive musty stench is unmistakable evidence that he's rotten to the very Look at him! The little scoundrel is suffering from lignivorous invasions of all kinds, evil eruptions of xylostroma, probable sclerosis of the resin ca.n.a.ls, peduncular collapse, weevil infestation, and galloping wet rot. He's starting to warp, too, disgustingly enough, and that offensive musty stench is unmistakable evidence that he's rotten to the very pith!" pith!"

"I resent your calling my colleague an idiot," complained the first doctor huffily.

"No, no," bl.u.s.tered the second, "it is I I who resent your unwarranted abuse of who resent your unwarranted abuse of my my colleague!" colleague!"

"But, gentlemen, gentlemen," pleaded Eugenio, "what can we do?" do?"

"Very little," sighed the first doctor, and the second said: "Not much."

"The treatment is quite simple," responded the third doctor grimly. "The rot should be chopped out and burnt immediately, the remaining structures, if any, drilled and impregnated with fungicides and insecticides, using sprays or double-vacuum techniques to a.s.sure the deepest possible penetration, followed by total immersion of the subject in organic solvent-based preservatives for at least a week."

"Hmm, yes, I can see that," the first doctor conceded grudgingly, "but it's a stopgap measure at best."

"I am afraid my ill.u.s.trious colleague is in error there," contended the second. "Such a treatment may be of temporary help, but only for a short time."

"Thereafter," concluded the third, "I recommend a restringing of all the joints, a thorough rubdown with fine sandpaper or steel wool, and finally repeated applications of linseed oil or else a few coats of yacht varnish!" Wherewith, he opened up his black bag and clapped it over his head, mashed his hat under his arm, and stalked blindly out, sending things rattling and crashing in the next room, his two colleagues following him in somber parade, quarreling about vocational dignity.

"This would be a most honorable profession," grumbled one, "if it were not for the wretched patients!"

"No, no, I must insist," objected the other, "it is precisely the patients who most dishonor this n.o.ble profession!"

During the days that have followed, as he slipped in and out of his feverish dreams, all too haunted by dark reminders of his recent folly, he has been lovingly cared for by Eugenio and his staff of servants and advisors and nurses in his private suite in the magnificent Palazzo dei Balocchi, which, as he came slowly to realize, looks out, here just below where he sits now, upon the Piazza, itself. He has slept upon satin sheets, drunk his medicine from golden goblets, been fed Venetian liver and onions and bigoi in salsa and golden polenta and risi e bisi and other curative delicacies from a jewel-encrusted silver tea tray, said to have been part of the plunder from the sacking of Byzantium - along with the four bronze horses rearing up over the door of the Basilica of St. Mark just in front of him now - by the Blind Doge in the Fourth Crusade, and has attended to his daily needs, minimal as they now are, upon a fur-lined bedpan made of the finest azure blue Murano gla.s.s, hand-blown to his exact dimensions. Not only has he enjoyed the comfort of a hot water bottle, it is amazingly like the very one he had taken to bed with him each night since he first left for America, until it was lost to thieves that fateful night of his arrival here. Nothing perhaps has made him feel more at home.

"When you described it in your delirium, Pini," Eugenio told him, "it reminded me of one I had had as a child. It took a lot of hunting, but I finally found it!"

Ah, the great Eugenio! Very dear and very deep! Soon, after Sunday Ma.s.s, he will join him here on the Clock Tower solarium, and they will talk about the city and about the old times when they were schoolboys together and about the professor's ill.u.s.trious career. Eugenio has promised to have him ported about the island to see once more before he dies all the masterpieces he most loves and has written about (his entire bibliography seems to be at his great admirer's command) - and may write about yet again, for Eugenio has also promised to replace in some manner his stolen computer, perhaps even with a similar model, a feat not beyond his resourceful friend's capacities. Already he has found for him some foot snuggies with the identical pattern of his old ones, a half bottle of his personal French Canadian brand of pine-scented mouth wash, and a pair of spectacles that fit him better than the ones he lost. So much Eugenio has done for him, dedicating to him from the moment of their fortuitous reunion all the treasures of his vast wealth and experience and attending to his every need, not least of all his daily oil treatments, applied personally by his own soothing plump hands, treatments which seem to have helped wonderfully, for if his condition is no less critical, the pain has lessened and the stiffness eased.

"Probably the belladonna," growls old Marten behind his ear, fussing with the blankets.

"No, I wasn't even thinking about her," sighs the professor, though of course he was. He has been thinking of little else. As his life has ebbed, she has seemed to draw nearer, becoming once more the subtext, as it were, of all his thoughts, rational or otherwise. Even these musings on Palladio and Venice, eternity and history, purity and its pursuit have really been little more, he knows, than coded meditations on that guiding spirit of all his years, at least the fruitful and n.o.ble ones. She was, after all, his first healer, just a child then like himself with her waxen face and strange blue hair and cold but nimble fingers. She dressed and undressed him like a doll, called him her little brother, poured bitter medicine down his throat and laughed to see his little faucet work. Sister, mother, ghost or goat, he loved her madly and, dying, he loves her still.

"Coast or float, Excellency? In the strange blue air? Still thinking about flying, eh? Ebbene! Detto fatto! Your least wish, padroncino: my urgent command! For as il direttore so graphically put it to me: 'Let his every twig, Marten my man, become a branch!' "

"What -?!" He realizes he has been pushed perilously close to the edge of the balcony and that his chair is beginning to tip forward. "What are you doing -?!"

"You pontificate very learnedly upon our exotic but delusive city, signer canino canarino, but perhaps you have missed some of the detail. I would like you to become more intimately acquainted with it! Faccia a faccia, Faccia a faccia, as one might say!" as one might say!"

"Canino? Canarino -?! Stop! Don't you know who I am?"

"But of course, my devious little watchdog with the long nose, mister mock-Melampo, I know you well! For it has not been forgotten within our humble clan how, by your infamous theatrics, you did the shoes to our dear old nonno, betraying poor granddad and all his kinfolk to that ruthless henhouse tyrant, who not only had the entire brotherhood summarily executed, but had their earthly remains served up at the local inn disguised as stewed rabbit, a cruel and contemptible final indignity. 'B-b-b!' 'B-b-b!' - do you remember, my little barked barker? No wonder you are so fascinated by duplicity!" - do you remember, my little barked barker? No wonder you are so fascinated by duplicity!"

"But wait -!"

"Wait? As my own elders, then so innocent, waited through that calamitous night? 'We stayed up till dawn for the old fellow and the great chicken festicciole he so loved to provide,' my grieving babbo used to say, tearfully recalling that tragic event which left him forever orphaned, 'but our beloved papa did not come home that night, or - sob! sob! - any night thereafter!' It was a wrong bound to his finger, as is said, and so bound to mine in turn, and now at last it is time to give back bread for pie! You have sung like a canary, now let us see if you can fly like one as well!!" - any night thereafter!' It was a wrong bound to his finger, as is said, and so bound to mine in turn, and now at last it is time to give back bread for pie! You have sung like a canary, now let us see if you can fly like one as well!!"

"But it's not so simple as that -!" he protests, slipping forward in his seat ("Oh oh," rumbles a familiar voice nearby, "looks like another Palazzo dei Balocchi credit card's run out!"), as that enchanted square below, that fabulous open-air drawing room, that landing place that takes the breath away tips toward him now to take his own. Coc.o.o.ned in cashmere, he cannot even move his arms, would it do him any good if he could. "What about the chickens chickens - -?!"

"Better strike the dinner hour, lads!"

"The chickens, master?"

"Yes, don't you see -?!" he cries, as above him the Moors suddenly hammer the great bronze bell and great flocks of pigeons lift off the Piazza below and rise with a vast fluttering communal roar like a black cloud of gathering mourners, beating their wings into the air, swirling before him down there like the great chain of being itself. "What is is a good boy? What is a good boy? What is good?! good?! Can one love the eaten and the eaters too -?! Where is it all to Can one love the eaten and the eaters too -?! Where is it all to end end - -?!"

"For you, Excellency, this curious philosophical enigma is, as they say, purely epidemic," snickers the servant wheezily, as this son of Italy, lost, found, lost again, slides out, untethered, into s.p.a.ce, "for you are, heh heh, being sent on holiday! Bon voyage, master! Galoppa, galoppa, and watch out below! Tim-BER -!!" Tim-BER -!!"

18. THE MIRACLE OF THE MIS-STRUCK HOUR.

"If you think this this is glorious, you should see it in the season of is glorious, you should see it in the season of acque alte, acque alte, Pini, when the sky blackens and the wind howls and the great foaming tides roll in," Eugenio rumbles wheezily in his ancient guest's earhole as they sit huddled together at his bedroom window in the palazzo, gazing out upon a more placid flooding, the celebrated lightness of the Piazza made doubly so this bright morning by its own crisp doubling in the square's limpid pool, this city of endless illusions seeming now to float in its symmetric fullness upon the reflected sky below. "Un tal pandemonio, as we used to say, un tal pa.s.seraio, un tal baccano indiavolato, you'd think, sitting here, you were in a ship on a boiling ocean! Waves crash against the columns and resound in the arcades below us, as if to loosen the palace from its very moorings and send us out to sea, the sunken street lamps standing then like rows of lilac-tinted channel markers out there showing us the way! Wastebins bob in the Piazza like buoys, inverted umbrellas tumble past like broken-winged birds, toothy predatory gondolas dart through the very porches of the Golden Basilica squatting helplessly in its stormy bath, and those red banners up there flap in the wind as though they might be wild wet sails, urging us upon our fatal course, as the entire trembling city seems suddenly intent on plunging downward to a watery doom!" Eugenio rakes up an emphysematous sigh from the depths of his sunken breast, no less ancient than the professor's, and, leaning back, exclaims: "Ah, Pini, Pini! This incomparable city, this most beautiful queen, this untainted virgin, as a celebrated wh.o.r.emaster once said of her in his postcoital delirium, this paradise, this temple, this rich diadem and the most flourishing garland of Christendom - Pini, when the sky blackens and the wind howls and the great foaming tides roll in," Eugenio rumbles wheezily in his ancient guest's earhole as they sit huddled together at his bedroom window in the palazzo, gazing out upon a more placid flooding, the celebrated lightness of the Piazza made doubly so this bright morning by its own crisp doubling in the square's limpid pool, this city of endless illusions seeming now to float in its symmetric fullness upon the reflected sky below. "Un tal pandemonio, as we used to say, un tal pa.s.seraio, un tal baccano indiavolato, you'd think, sitting here, you were in a ship on a boiling ocean! Waves crash against the columns and resound in the arcades below us, as if to loosen the palace from its very moorings and send us out to sea, the sunken street lamps standing then like rows of lilac-tinted channel markers out there showing us the way! Wastebins bob in the Piazza like buoys, inverted umbrellas tumble past like broken-winged birds, toothy predatory gondolas dart through the very porches of the Golden Basilica squatting helplessly in its stormy bath, and those red banners up there flap in the wind as though they might be wild wet sails, urging us upon our fatal course, as the entire trembling city seems suddenly intent on plunging downward to a watery doom!" Eugenio rakes up an emphysematous sigh from the depths of his sunken breast, no less ancient than the professor's, and, leaning back, exclaims: "Ah, Pini, Pini! This incomparable city, this most beautiful queen, this untainted virgin, as a celebrated wh.o.r.emaster once said of her in his postcoital delirium, this paradise, this temple, this rich diadem and the most flourishing garland of Christendom - I do love her so!" I do love her so!"

Although misfortune, most recently his being pitched from on high toward the stonier realities of this fantastic square, such mischief thwarted only by a spectacular rescue, which is already being referred to, he understands, at least here in the palazzo, as "the Miracle of the Mis-struck Hour," has conditioned the old scholar to see more of peril and duplicity in this mirrored doubling than any alleged paradisiacal beauty, he cannot entirely resist its shimmering appeal. Between his window and the Procuratie Nuove across the way, their stately arches now stretched in the reduplicating flood waters to slender O's, the skeletal half-built Carnival platforms and the stacked scaffolding and ladders and barrier fences rise out of their own pooled reflections like the scuttled wrecks of ancient ships, disturbing the more timeless illusions, and they seem in their gentle mockery to be counseling him to accept his peculiar fate, which could be worse, after all, if not much, and let all the acc.u.mulated bitterness and suspicion of these past days, so alien in truth to his deepest nature, be dissolved once and for all into the pleasant watery vision before him.

His dear friend Eugenio, now gently oiling his creaking nape, has more openly urged this, extending to him all the amenities of his vast estates, and, in return, asking only that he surrender to the great love he offers him and to the pleasures which that love and his Palazzo dei Balocchi can provide. He has protested - "No, no, and no again!" - at each of Eugenio's many generous gifts, but in the end, having little choice, he has accepted them all, and often as not with tears in his eyes; that he should have come to this and that, in such adversity, he should find so great and true a friend! Moreover, the situation is only temporary. With Eugenio's help, he has written off to America for new credit cards and checkbooks, bank and royalty and retirement fund statements, and all his professional credentials, insisting that, even should he decide to remain a guest of the palazzo, he would wish to pay his own way, Eugenio smiling at that and observing that he always did suffer, even as a puppet, from an excess of woodenheaded pride. Meanwhile, at Eugenio's wise suggestion, he has signed his stolen cards over to the charitable inst.i.tution of which his friend is presently director, Omino e figli, S.R.L., which will a.s.sume full responsibility for any misuse of them by the thieves, and which will have the power, under the labyrinthine Italian law, to prosecute them if apprehended. Eugenio has submitted all the requisite papers for a new pa.s.sport and local visa, has bought him two new silk suits and a handsome woolen Tyrolean duffle coat with a felt borsalino to match, as well as a pair of green knee-high rubber boots to splash about in, has provided him with liniments, medicines, toiletries, and even a wonderful old-fashioned cotton sleeping cap, and has replaced the cracked waterlogged shoes he came here in with three new pairs, custom made from the softest hand-tooled Venetian leather, remarking as he threw out the old ones that they reminded him of those strange stiff shoes made out of tree bark that he used to wear to school.

"Devilish weapons, Pini my boy, especially for one with so free a kick as yours! Once - I swear! swear! - I saw your leg whip clear around like a windmill, popping one boy on the chin on the way up, flattening another behind on the way down with a blow to the top of his head, and, still swinging on around, catching yet a third, trying to flee, right on his little culetto, delivering him such a stroke that it lifted the poor birichino five feet off the ground, as if he too were on strings!" - I saw your leg whip clear around like a windmill, popping one boy on the chin on the way up, flattening another behind on the way down with a blow to the top of his head, and, still swinging on around, catching yet a third, trying to flee, right on his little culetto, delivering him such a stroke that it lifted the poor birichino five feet off the ground, as if he too were on strings!"

"But I was never on -!"

"No, it's true, true, my love! You can't deny it, I was my love! You can't deny it, I was there! there! How we feared - and coveted! - those bark-shod feet of yours! So How we feared - and coveted! - those bark-shod feet of yours! So stylish, stylish, too! And whatever happened to that too! And whatever happened to that amazing amazing little breadcrumb cap you used to wear?" little breadcrumb cap you used to wear?"

"I don't remember. I think a dog ate it."

Sitting here today at his bedroom window, here in this ark of his own personal deluge, as he thinks of it, they have been reminiscing about those old school days together, about how they met and abused each other, and about all the wicked things they did, and with what consequences, and perhaps it is the seductive apparition of these reflected fantasies out in the flooded Piazza San Marco, or his old friend's soothing hands upon the back of his skull, or merely the miracle of his continuing survival, but the shame and disgust such recollections ordinarily arouse are today subversively commingled with nostalgia, disturbingly sweet. Eugenio has reminded him, for example, of the day he and the other boys cornered him in the school latrine and ripped off his wallpaper pants to see the little bra.s.s tap which Geppetto had plugged there between his wooden legs and which was, as Eugenio admitted, the envy of them all, despite their cruel taunts ("Your golden drainc.o.c.k, we called it!"), and what has come back to him most vividly from all that was not the humiliation he suffered but the comfortingly familiar pungency of those primitive open-air urinals and the warm sunlight that fell upon their innocent schoolboy curiosity. Just as Eugenio's account of that day at the beach when a math book thrown at him had missed and struck Eugenio instead, resulting in his arrest for murder (Eugenio had not been hurt at all, he confessed, he'd just been pretending, and when the two black-cloaked carabinieri had dragged Pinocchio away between them, Eugenio had sat up and thumbed his nose at them, laughing openly at his friend's distress: "That was very naughty of me, I know, dear Pini, but, eh, what can I say, io sono fatto cos!"), has recalled for him not the terror of capture nor even the adventure of his famous escape - from the fire into the frying pan, as it turned out - but the delicious lure the sea had for him in those days and the way his disobedient truancy excited him and made his nose tingle.

"We were merely, after all, as one of our naughtiest boys here once said," murmurs Eugenio, his subtle caressing voice like that of a mewling cat rubbing at his ear, " 'cheerful creatures, whose most sinful deeds / Were but the overheating of the heart!' "

"Nonsense! We were lazy unruly ragam.u.f.fins, seduced into brutishness by our own profligacy, wretched little a.s.ses bought and sold!"

"Well, as the Little Man himself used to say to me at the livestock auctions over there in the courtyard of the Convert.i.te, whilst squeezing my b.u.m affectionately: 'The world, Eugenio my precious little a.r.s.ewipe, is half to be sold, half to be loaned out, and all all to be laughed at!' " to be laughed at!' "

"So it's true then, as I've heard," the old scholar sighs, "you too went to Toyland!"

"I never left left it, dear boy!" it, dear boy!"

"Hrmff. I would have thought when you got hit by that math book, it might have knocked some sense into you."

"That it did, did, amor mio! That it amor mio! That it did!" did!" laughs Eugenio tenderly, pulling on the servants' bell rope. "I vowed never to get close enough to a book to get hit by one of the nasty things again! And you were, you must remember, then as now, our leader, our moral guide, our great exemplar of insubordination and mad adventure, whither thou went we could but follow! And so we did, dear Pini, each and every boy! And laughing all the way! You would have been proud of us!" laughs Eugenio tenderly, pulling on the servants' bell rope. "I vowed never to get close enough to a book to get hit by one of the nasty things again! And you were, you must remember, then as now, our leader, our moral guide, our great exemplar of insubordination and mad adventure, whither thou went we could but follow! And so we did, dear Pini, each and every boy! And laughing all the way! You would have been proud of us!"

The old professor snorts ruefully at this perversion of what he has called in The Wretch The Wretch and elsewhere his "long-eared mission" to "cast out, cast as, the outcast," an unhappy fate all great ideas and actions seem to suffer in this heedless world - but somewhere behind this rueful musing, in fact more or less at that spot just behind his ear which Eugenio's plump warm hand is oiling just now, or perhaps a bit lower, deeper, closer to the core, he is experiencing an acute longing for the strange exhilaration of that eery nighttime ride on the back of the weeping donkey with the bitten ears, his best friend Lampwick snoring like a bear in the cart behind him, the donkeys clopping down the dark road in their fancy white leather boots, the cart following mysteriously on its padded wheels like a sleigh on snow. They'd arrived at dawn, harness bells jingling and L'Omino blowing his coach horn like an exultant little bantam, at what, to a child's eyes, was paradise itself, so beautiful that it seemed rather celestial than of this world! and elsewhere his "long-eared mission" to "cast out, cast as, the outcast," an unhappy fate all great ideas and actions seem to suffer in this heedless world - but somewhere behind this rueful musing, in fact more or less at that spot just behind his ear which Eugenio's plump warm hand is oiling just now, or perhaps a bit lower, deeper, closer to the core, he is experiencing an acute longing for the strange exhilaration of that eery nighttime ride on the back of the weeping donkey with the bitten ears, his best friend Lampwick snoring like a bear in the cart behind him, the donkeys clopping down the dark road in their fancy white leather boots, the cart following mysteriously on its padded wheels like a sleigh on snow. They'd arrived at dawn, harness bells jingling and L'Omino blowing his coach horn like an exultant little bantam, at what, to a child's eyes, was paradise itself, so beautiful that it seemed rather celestial than of this world!

"Sports, cycling, acting, singing, reading, gymnastics - today we'd probably call it a kindergarten," chuckles Eugenio, giving another pull on the bell rope. "They even had us out there on the riva practicing soldiering! Ha ha! But how we loved it, eh? Gullible little gonzos that we were! Even our naughty graffiti was like an art cla.s.s in finger painting, not so lasting a form perhaps as that of a t.i.tian or a Tiepolo, but there's still a bit of it around, you know."

"I think I've seen some!"

"You asked us to a party, a kind of birthday party, you said, but when we turned up you weren't there! You'd gone prancing off, as I recall, with that dreadful boy Romeo - what did we call him -?"

"Lampwick. You remember him -?"