All around him, even as his own devastated trash-bagged limbs petrify, he can hear through his wheezing a fluttering, pattering, pounding, and swishing, as the city, shaking itself, crawls out from under its strange white blanket to reinstate its restless habits of scurry and exchange. The storm is letting up. Shutters are grinding open. There are choruses of "Ciao!" "Ciao!" and bursts of laughter, the trampling of booted feet. Nearby, in the middle of this broad open campo, the wooden news kiosk has opened up, spreading its wings like a traveling puppet show, delivery boys are rolling heavy blue and green metal carts past the red benches, and the tarpaulins over the greengrocer stalls are being flung back, pitching clouds of snow into the glittery air. At the far end, a musical group of some sort seems to be setting up at the foot of a truncated bell tower with snow-frosted shrubs growing out the top, the only evidence remaining of whatever church once gave its name to this square. He hears the loose clang of cymbals being unpacked and a squeal like that of an overblown fife when a loudspeaker is plugged in. Crowds are gathering, mostly students with bookbags, housewives pushing strollers. The windows of cafés are steaming up, taunting him with the offer of hot coffee and grappa which he cannot, from his wire crib, alas, even though he has the cash for it, accept. As though to taunt him, on a door within reach of his failing sight, someone has spray-painted: "Only liberty is necessary; everything else is only important." Snow is being swept from shop entrances, sawdust spread. Not far away, as he knows, men in bright-colored slickers are scraping clean the bridges, shoveling the snow and ice into the canals to be flushed to the sea. Earlier, two of them, laughing, lifted him over one of the bridges when he'd been brought to a standstill halfway up, his knees refusing to bend enough to get his toe up past the next step.
"Ha Ha! Che brutta figura! Poor little cock's lost all his feathers!" exclaimed one.
"He's so light," laughed the other, "it's more like the feathers have lost their cock!"
That was his last bridge. Before that, how many, he doesn't know. He was in a kind of delirium. Fever probably. What's left of his flesh must be literally burning itself away. It was cold when he staggered out of the bedlam of that august temple gone suddenly berserk, colder than he'd remembered, and snow was being whipped about still in the sharp wind, obscuring the high bridge in front of the church, only meters away, his first obstacle, but he was on fire with terror, desire, and the hot flush of his infirmity, and the bitterness of the weather seemed only to invigorate him. Up the bridge he went and down, escaping and pursuing at the same time, hobbling to be sure, cracking and splintering and creaking with the cold, hacking and snorting, half blind, but on the move, his withered limbs at times outflung, tossed convulsively awry, to the casual onlooker appearing no doubt a bit whimsical and unstrung, but still clattering resolutely on down the narrow calle on the other side, feeling indeed like something of an athlete, a centenarian version of that spunky youngster who could leap ditches and hedgerows at a single bound, now with each lurching step making about as much progress laterally as forward perhaps, and having to improvise rather desperately at corners and bridges, but feeling that same exhilaration of the blood, that delicious conflict of pain and pleasure that characterizes a race well run, and keeping in mind all the while his noble goal — he will teach her! she will become his last great project! his pupil, his protégé, perhaps even his secretary, biographer, curator, and literary executrix! — as well as the more compelling images of a hot bath, a warm bed, clean sheets, and a pillowy blue hollow wherein to tuck his frostbitten nose.
Which was what, having no other guide, he had had to trust on that mad chase, following wherever it might lead, sniffing the crisp air for traces of her powdery warmth, her slept-in jeans, the tang of bubble gum and nail polish — and, at the crest of a short arching bridge, he was rewarded suddenly by a glimpse of azure blue, a distant flicker of startling color within the white blur, vanishing as quickly as seen, but which could only have been her sweater (had she taken off her windbreaker? was it a signal? a tease? was she walking backwards? he couldn't stop to think about this), and thereafter he seemed to see it more often, on a bridge, at the edge of a riva or the end of a little calle, fleeting and elusive as his famous last chapter, there and not there, yet drawing him on, though he couldn't be sure he saw it, saw anything for that matter, his vision, never the best, now hazed by icy tears and sweat and the crazy pounding of his heart in his temples and sinuses. So absorbed was he with the object of his pursuit that, as had often happened in the middle of books he was writing, he failed to notice the weariness, the physical and emotional exhaustion, that was rapidly overtaking him, overtaking him once and for all, his mind racing far ahead, abandoning his body, leaving it to drag along behind as best it could until it stopped. Which, inevitably, it did. Halfway up a bridge. He, who was very much afraid of the ridiculous, was then, with fearful ridicule, lifted laughingly to the other side. And stood for a time just where he was deposited, intent only on not adding to his indignity by falling over. It was not easy. Had anyone so much as sneezed nearby, it would have toppled him. And, straining thus to stay upright, he inadvertently pushed out a tiny gust of flatulence which escaped him like the shrill little peep of a wooden whistle.
"Ho! Thou wert a beautiful thought, and softly bodied forth!" declaimed a voice that seemed to come from the brick wall above him.
"Who is it that speaks so eloquently?"
"Not who is it, but what? It looks like a holdover from the last plague!"
"Or else something the boss might have had for lunch! Porca Madonna! If I had a stomach, I'd be throwing up!"
He was standing, he saw through his frozen tears, in front of a maskmaker's workshop, its entrance and windows lined with the painted faces of mythical creatures, wild animals, goblins and fairies, jesters, plague victims, suns and moons, bautas and moretas, death's heads, goddesses, chinless rustics, and bearded nobles. "Whatever it is, it's got more holes in it than a piece of cheese!" declared one of them, the pale pink-cheeked sun perhaps, a somber white-bearded Bacchus replying majestically: "Maybe it's a flute." "You mean, dearie," cooed an angel with cherry-red lips, "you don't know whether you should eat it or blow it — ?" The ancient scholar, feeling now the full weight of his folly, wished desperately to escape these japes, but could not, his father's infamous joke — "What brought you here, Geppetto my friend?" "My legs!" — no longer a joke. "If I had a body like that," scoffed a freckled face with a red hood and golden braids, "I'd sell it for a pegboard!" "If you had a body, cara mia," whispered a ghostly voice from behind an expressionless white mask with large hollow eyes, "you'd sell it for anything!" From behind the window, he could see, he was being watched by a glowering figure with a wild black beard like a scribble of India ink, making hasty sketches on a pad. "But what's that lump between his shoulders with the pump handle on it?" the empty snout of a camel posted in the doorway wanted to know, and: "Look from what pulpit comes the sermon!" jeered a grinning noseless skull.
Then suddenly they all fell silent. Even the distant scraping of shovels stopped and the wind died down. Nothing could be heard but the water in the canals, far away, timidly lapping wood and stone. "Who was it," thundered a deep ogrish voice from overhead, the very sound of which set the masks rattling on the wall with terror, "laid this turd at my doorway?" It was the maskmaker with his apron of black beard, smeared with paint and plaster, his roaring mouth big enough to bake buns in, and eyes so reddened by grappa they seemed to be lit from behind by a fire deep in his skull. "Who has made this inhuman mess?"