"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.