This was how they'd got in here, the two of them scrapping like strays, it was a kind of code between them, as though recognition depended on insult and invective, affection upon rhetorical display. On the way, rocking between Alidoro's shoulder blades in his stolen wool blanket like a withered seed pod, the old scholar had drifted off momentarily, dreaming of the little Tuscan village by the sea where he was born, with its one main street running from home to school and crossed by another leading to to ? He couldn't remember, but what he found when he turned down it was a little cottage as white as snow, or perhaps white with snow, except for its blackened doorway, where he was met by some junior faculty, blocking his entrance, to whom, when they suggested that with all due respect they desired to hang the distinguished visitor from the nearest oak tree, he was obliged to explain that he could not accept their offer at this time because he was still teaching at one of the East Coast I.V.'s, so named, he pointed out, because of their innovative method of education by intravenous feeding. They seemed to admire this insight, if that's what it was, an insight, and not an encyclopedia entry he'd been paid to provide, nodding their heads solemnly in unison, and they went on to ask him (though by now he might have been hanging, for the north wind seemed to be blowing and whistling, and he was swinging back and forth like a bell clapper on a wedding day), if, in his renowned wisdom, he might be able to elucidate a mysterious inscription on the back of a famous work of art attributed to one Paolo Venereo, or Venerato (a portrait of a cross-eyed yellow-haired Pope whose fat round face was dripping like candlewax), which read: "ABBASSO LARIN METICA." He understood the inscription instantly, and in fact was startled by the lucidity of his perception, but when he was jolted awake suddenly by Alidoro shouting out something about a black fart ("Melampeto!" he had bellowed — only later did the professor understand that this was a rude play on the watchdog's name), he found he could no longer remember what the perception was. Nor, for a moment, could he even remember where he was, he thought he might be on a ship at sea, bundled up in a deck chair or lashed to the mast, certainly he was feeling seasick -
"Melamputtana! Open the door, you ungrateful diabolectical sesquipedalian windbag, and let me in!"
"Aha! Is that you, Alidildo, you shameless eudemonist ass-licking retard? Everything I've got you to thank for I have to scratch! Let you in? Don't make the chickens laugh! You can go suck the Pope's infallible hind tit, as attested to by Zoroaster and the sibylline Teresa of Avila, for all I care! Addio, Alido! My regards to your worms and chancres!"
"Hold on, drooping-drains, don't put on airs, on you they smell like the farts of the dead! Remember who you're talking to! Your asster will be a whole lot sorer if you don't drag your vile syphilline cunt-flaps over here and open this gate up! Do you hear me, twaddle-twat? We're freezing our nuts off out here!"
"Oh, I do remember who I'm talking to, Alidolce, my sweet little bum-gut. I'm afraid your theoretical nuts were harvested years ago, if you feel something down there, it's probably just boils on the ass, for which cold compresses are highly recommended, vide Aesculapius' Principles of Mycology, and as for threats of violence, remember who you're talking to, you preposterous old humbug! I could split your hollow toothless skull quicker than Saint Thomas could split a hair from the Virgin's hemorrhoidal behind in four, in or out of the catechism! No, you can sing all you want, squat-for-brains, you're just pounding water in your mortar, as Leucippus of blessed memory once said to William of Ockham over an epagogic pot of aglioli, there's no room at the inn nor in this shithole either, and that's conclusive, absolute, categorical, and a fortiori finito in spades! So go spread your filthy pox among your misses of the opiates, fuckface! Arrivederci! Ciao!"
"I think she's weakening," Alidoro muttered then over his shoulder, and the professor, alarmed at all this vicious howling and barking, gasped: "Is this the right way to go about it — ?" The storm had worsened, he could hardly see for the swirling snow — it was as though he were being pushed out of the world at full blow.
"Patience, old friend, it's part of the dance. For her all these citations, enthymemes, postulates, and premises are like a warm nose on her clit, the wormy old gabbler won't spread without them."
"Who've you got out there with you, you fatuous lump of clotted dookie? Are you on a sleigh ride with another of your cuntless junkies?"
"An aged compatriot, Melampieta, who is, I'm afraid, more there than here. I have carried him all this way on my back, not knowing what else to do, I tell you, mona mia, with my heart in my forepaws, if you have no pity for me tonight, so be it and amen, a fartiari o'fuckem and spayed, I've weathered worse — but please take in my poor friend Pinocchio. If you don't, I won't know where to hit my — "
"Pinocchio — ?!" There was a clattering and slapping of locks and bolts and the scraping of the gates against the flagstones. "Davvero? In flesh and bones — ? But he must be — !"
"As you can see "
"Ah, the poor little cock! I can hardly believe it! Why didn't you say so in the first place, you tedious fleabitten hothead, instead of standing out there and showing off for all the neighbors? Get in here and stop yapping like the damned fool mentioned by Saint Peter in his Epistle to the Cartesians, the one who claimed his farts were prayers and so got theophanically dumped on by what in effect he'd prayed for! Pinocchio, esteemed friend and comrade, you are welcome, for as Julianus the Chaldean once wrote in an oracle, Whoso shitteth not on the dead earneth access forevermore to the privies of the living, or sterling sentiments to that effect, and if this walking mange-farm had only announced you promptly, you would not have had to suffer such prolonged exposure to the seventy-some provisionally acknowledged elements, as well as all those not known but suspected, such as sewer gas and monads. In our family, if one can call such a bastardly plague of debauched egg-suckers a family, it has not been forgotten how you honored our great-grandsire Melampo with your eloquent silence when the poor beast, too dead to speak for himself, stood accused — and by a ruling class of lickerish unprincipled graspers born and spit — of the theft of his own meager sustenance. To wit, the odd chicken or two he'd been hired to guard. Some said that great-granddad was bent, others that he was an old prole ahead of his time, and a martyr to causes as yet unformulated, but your mute testimony shut all their pustulous faces and left the old sonofabitch to lie in peace at the bottom of whatever stinking well they dumped him in. You earned thereby our eternal gratitude, though you'll probably get somewhat less than that, memory being the garbagey stewpot of doodoo that it is, and certainly your presence, which, if I may say so in passing, seems a mite fragrant, honors my poor hovel. So come along now, good sir — and easy, Alidodo, you blundering beffardo! You must transport the gentleman with the same cunning tenderness with which God's chosen ass is said to have borne the gravid Virgin so as not to tear her gossamery maidenhead, the frangibility of which was likened by Thomas the Rhymer unto that of crisp silk, and whose rupture would have detheologized the Western World, catastrophically orphaning us all. Come, come! I'll put a fire on!"