"It's — it's not my fault!" the old professor wheezed, indignant even in his indignity, bold even in his abject dismay.
"What? What — ?! It speaks?" bellowed the black-bearded giant, leaning closer and baring his horrible smoke-stained teeth. "Talking turds have been outlawed in Venice! Is this the work of a rival seeking to discredit me? Is this — what you say — dirty tricks?"
"Believe me, my — "
"Enough! Basta cosě!" roared the maskmaker, snatching him up by the scruff. "There's only one place for rubbish like you!" And holding him aloft with one mighty fist, from which the unhappy pilgrim dangled limp as a skinned eel, the bearded giant strode into the nearby campo and, much to the amusement of the passersby — "Ciao, Mangiano! What's this? One of your rejects?" "Madonna! What an obscenity!" — thrust him, up to his armpits, into this plastic-lined wastebin.
Where, with the filling up of the campo, he has become the popular target of insults and horseplay. Mothers show him off to bundled toddlers to make them laugh; little boys, when they're not chasing bedraggled and dying pigeons, pelt him with snowballs; teenagers with ghetto blasters hugged to their ears flip their cigarette butts at him. He is crowned with fruit peels, pink sports pages, and rancid boxes from fast-food joints, christened with the dregs from supermarket wine cartons. "Piů in alto che se va," the musicians are singing raucously and tunelessly at the other end of the square while testing out their equipment, "piů el culse mostra!" The higher one climbs, the more he exposes his behind: a sentiment so apposite to the old emeritus professor's present humiliation, he might suspect them of malice had they not been entertaining the passing crowds with all manner of rude scatological lyrics since they began setting up. To add mockery to the damage, pigeons use him as a perch and public restroom, which causes one of the musicians drifting by, a swarthy snubnosed character looking more like a thief than an entertainer, to remark loudly and histrionically that "Every beautiful rose — " he lingers over this image to draw the guffaws, his plastic features twisted into a set painful smile, his hands flowering about the old bespackled professor's head, "- eventually becomes an assmop!" And the others in the campo gleefully pick up the refrain: "Un strassacul! Un strassacul!" The caged visitor, ever an emotional, even irascible defender of his own dignity when driven to it, would object, or would at least chase the pigeons off, but he is utterly and catastrophically undone, overcome by exhaustion and racked with pain and fever and a blinding cold in the head, suffering now, he knows, that final apathy of limb that marks, against his choosing, the end of the cold staggering race which he's, willy-nilly, losing or however that old doggerel goes
"It's the oldest truth under the sun: life is a race that can't be won "
Something like that. And moreover, the abuse is warranted, is it not? — a fit judgment upon his perfidious heart, his capricious and ultimately fatal betrayal of Her and thence of himself, a betrayal that no doubt began back in America with his decision (if it was a decision — ? it's all like a dream he can no longer recall) to return to this sinking Queen, this treacherous sea Cybele "as changeable as a nervous woman," this "most unreal of cities, half legend, half snare for strangers," this home of the counterfeit and the fickle heart, this infamous Acchiappacitrulli. The zany jester is mincing about, miming the crippled antics of an old fool, wheezing and snorting and tossing out his jibes on the comical debilities of the aged ("When one grows old," he croaks, wobbling about knock-kneed with his rear stuck out, his back bowed, and his toes turned in, "he loses his renown! His legs go flabby and his stockings fall down!"), his mocking parodies in the Venetian dialect about "this heartless city of nervous strangers and old queens" and "untimely fetal decisions" ("Ay, ay!" the fool cries with a quavering voice, pulling his shabby felt hat down over his ears, "I can't think, I've got this damnable bone in my head!"), but he does not even approach the true depths of disgrace into which the old wayfarer knows he has fallen. Up at the foot of the cutoff bell tower, the other musicians, augmented now by electronic keyboard and guitar, harmonica, and a set of traps (over their heads, on the scaffolding of cloth and boards, there's a sign painted every color of the rainbow, but the colors run together and he can't read it — no doubt yet another obscenity), are singing, to the same tune as before, if such hoarse shouting can be called a tune, can be called singing: "El tempo, el culo e i siori, / I fa quel che i vol lori!" — Time, one's arse, and the moneyed few, / All do just what they want to do! — and they might as well be singing about "el tempo, el culo e i professori." When some within the jeering crowd pretend to come to his aid — "Now, now, remember that in this world, we must be kind to all such unfortunate creatures, that we ourselves may be treated kindly in our time of need — this poor old grillino, he really can't help it, you know!" — their patronizing remarks enrage him more than the abuse. No, no! he wants to tell them. I can help it, you idiots! But I'm a villain to the core! Believe me! A brute! An ass!
"Ha ha! Che parlare da bestia! Give him a hand, everybody! In fact, give him two, he needs them!"
But it's true! It's true! A fraud! A turncoat without even a coat to turn! I'm a vile unprincipled scoundrel through and through!
"He may have a small mind, ladies and gentlemen, but he knows it from corner to corner!"
Yet how can it have happened? A century of prudence and sobriety and effortful mastery blown away in a day, less than a day, vanished into the flux as though it never existed, leaving him not only the ludicrous dupe of charlatans, robbed of his every possession, arrested and humiliated by the authorities, stripped of his clothing as of his pride, indeed of his very humanity, enfeebled with illness and deprived even of his ears and nipples — "Lai, lai," the grimacing clown is crooning sourly to the rhythm of a child's taunt, "co se xe veci se xe buzarai! Ay, ay! Hugger-mugger! To be old is to be buggered!" — but now, having abandoned his only true friend in the world in mad pursuit of a vaporous fantasy, a true ignis fatuus, a most foolish fire, he is hopelessly paralyzed as well, frozen, lost, confused by fever and hunger, left to die in a trash bag, taunted by cretins and crushed by his own shame, and all because of a vulgar American coed with a soft blue sweater
"Oho!" cries the jester, leaping into the air and clicking his heels. "So that's the rock you've split your decrepit buns on, old man! Ha ha! Rispettabile pubblico! Here is where the donkey has fallen!"
He seems, alas, to have been talking out loud again. He doesn't know for how long, but fears the worst. It's almost as though he's forgotten how not to. Crowds of people, scarfed and booted, have gathered around, laughing and applauding and stamping their feet in the snow, whooping the prancing buffoon through his mocking routines — now, hobbling and cackling wildly, he is chasing all the young girls in the audience, making them squeal and clutch tight their coats and skirts. The venerable scholar has become, he sees through bitter tears, seeing little else, the very fool of fools. Butts' butt. But what, being four-fifths buried in refuse already and the rest soon to follow, does it matter? Oh, bambina mia, you little blue-jeaned and cowboy-booted barbarian, you twangy gum-popping red-white-and-blue siren! You have been my death!