… Cooler up here — after a good two hundred and fifty tunnels: Hem at seventeen was abed here back when the Universite Degli Studi di Milano was a hospital. As in Catania, the school was right in the city — Old Town, actually. His hoteclass="underline" seven minutes' walk away. Professor Ina Bulletti, who'd just had a cancer operation, emitted a sense of vast humility. Her handshake was like walking in rain on a sunny day. She must have been sixty. “I met you once in the states but that was years ago. You wouldn't remember… ” Her smile was self-effacing. “Your work will be the subject of a whole chapter in a book I'm writing.” They finished their coffee and went across the street with its old street-car tracks toward the university. It was midafternoon and people were going back to work. She led him into the courtyard then along the walkway to the Instituto di Lingua and Litteratura Inglese e Letturatura. She was chairman of that outfit. As she rapped about the author he felt a strange twitch: wanted to turn himself by voodoo or hype or hip or volcanic faith into a snail safely housed inside a Prince Albert tin at the bottom of the last ditch on the outskirts of the last cockfight with wagerers screaming, shouting, calling through cocaine-thick voices for more blood. Keep close to the action. She gave him an upbeat introduction. Mason started off talking about his early influences — mentioned Vittorini, bridged this with the French thing, connected to Toomer's magical rendering of soft, lingering shadows, the dew and dusk, morning mist and mulattoes, sweetness of a land without Spring snow. His language was like stepping nervously in fine grained cowboy boots made by Santa Rosa 1906. He hooked this whole romantic mood to Claude's hectic, joyful exploration of nightlife in Harlem and gave them the wonderful details of that ol' banjo strummer rambling mentally and physically about Marseilles. The whole so-called lecture was a merry-go-round of egocentric, brash jive with references that some of them caught only because they were students of Bulletti. This stuff was sculptured language; cryptic skip-system junk; pretzels; jigsaw hunks. After the show the “champ” got a big hand then went to the toilet where he did not find a message from headquarters scrawled on the booth wall. A Nazi symbol, yes, but no word from Control. Although Professor Bulletti took him to Santa Maria delle Grazie to see those cracked and faded figures, it made him feel like a bleeding tunnel through a stone mountain.
He was spacing — not quite sure where he was: was this Zocalo and was he feeding the stupid pigeons peanuts—? Never mind: it was lonely being a fugitive. Had somebody slipped a different name into his little blue book? Say, Jack Verbb or Geechee McKee or Gauz Gazabo or Heavy Hebe or — Cut it out. He'd come through more tunnels, he knew. Italy? It had to be: then why this feeling of Mexico City — chatter, tinsel, beeps, rumble, screech. Gringo negro on the run! If only the Templo Mayor de Tenochtitlan were there to hide in, lie still in. You must have a bad, bad hangover: this is Italy! Italy I said! Sure, sure. And I'm on my way to the Empire of Genova, right. Correct. Roger. Check. One thing he needed was time. There was a cactus taste in his sour mouth just beneath the whim of scotch. The tavern smelled faintly of kerosene. He missed his Monet Fall surfaces, the Mediterranean: though it wasn't far. Finally, he saw the road sign: Pisa. Took exit. Tried to hold up the falling structure with all he had. Crowds of tourists cackled at his effort as he gave up, crawling to safety as the edifice tumbled. But it wasn't Pisa that he wanted was it. No, that Empire. Back in his vehicle he turned on the radio to try to short circuit the circle of his flapping fangs. The radio, in English, said, “Hi. I'm still your friend. Keep on trucking.” It turned out to be an American rock star making it big in Italy. Then there was an American punk star singing an interesting hit full of pals and gals guys and girls dudes and dames. It made him laugh till tears.
In Genova and totally a victim of vertigo Mason flapped his wings and threw his voice against an auditorium ceiling. If he could make his whirling voice true, being in brackets wouldn't matter: swastika and cross both could exist within the confinement of a triangle. He read: “He felt his heart had been cut out. He could still feel a draft where holes had been driven into his head. He was Still Life with Holes. Hard of hearing, he didn't listen to Florence whispering, the pineapple and chocolate lap of her bitter tongue. The flesh of his body seemed all he had — at the moment. His enemies — unclean spirits — tied him down and searched through, back far into, his cave, up into the flue of his flamed mind, down through his Coca Cola-cold blood, in the shoestrings and telephone wires of his being. They cut sharply not only along the flesh but deeper into the fanged bone. Devils! No yolk, no jelly! Only the ashes of an ancient West African village, a teepee pole, the scarred boots of an Irishman, the apron of an Irishwoman. He smiled. Alone in himself, things howled at him in the mineral night. First snow, through gray heat: he could almost see a white bank glowing in fog. Flakes wide apart. Black limbs of emotional trees with Springtime pink blossoms. He hoped for renewal, a kind of life, to unseat the lame-duck. Florence held him but not closely, not with feeling, with enjoyment. She also held a large bunch of artificial flowers. Going deeper into himself he found a jazzhall full of brass: nobody'd ever robbed this place: decked with scarred, juice-stained, tough furniture. But walking in the city — for him, as he remembered it now while lying in bed — was a comfort, a distraction: in front of an antique shop on a narrow cobbled street an old woman — Celt in disguise? — with a mullet-face wearing a tartan fumbled at the window of a bar he was about to enter. She couldn't see in there: wasn't wearing her specs. Flaccidly pretending to be seriously involved in life, she touched her tam-o-shanter gingerly then pulled her fifty-year-old dress unstuck from her girdle; found her rhinestone glasses then looked through her luster at the imitation figures moving around: he was one. A full silty sky was clamped firmly overhead. It was carnival time in these streets. Confetti floated from high windows. He looked into the woman's alarmist-eyes: they were paste and gem quartz: salmon tongue, spotted. She aimed her best eye at a big tree by the cathedraclass="underline" it was just a way to avoid the piercing and derailing eye of Mason. What did he want? The state of his mind: noise. He liked it: it made him want to go to the center of the carnival, dream there, as though inside the delicate fluttering heartbeat of a nuclear holocaust: he'd ride a ferris wheel — oiled by faith and politics. He'd drink pig-tea from a wooden creosote-dipped cup, dip horse-snuff: it was always the same when he tried to reconnect with lost Celt or to find the root of C or the siren or Kangaroo Eye or Wind Voice or Chiro or—: they were each so distinct; interfaces yet interchangeable.