Throughout all this — and the subsequent exchange of greetings, toasts, and tributes, which included a brief memorial to the original Little Man in the form of a chorus of "Viva i balocchi!" and "Abbasso l'aritmetica!" followed by the unscrolling of the ancient parchment deed to the Palazzo Ducale, doodled on, it was said, by Doge Sebastiano Ziani himself, decorated with architectural fancies, and colorful as a circus poster, then the scattering into the wind of the billion lire, which the Count somehow managed to discharge explosively out the end of his upraised phallus, much to the squealing and scrambling delight of the vast crowd, and finally the presentation to the city of the "Madonna of the Organs," an unveiling that was more like the opening of a pop-up book — the venerable scholar sat hunched in his portantina, dunce-capped head ducked, beating with impotent fury at the chair arms with his little balled fists, and grinding his teeth so hard that most of the ones that remained fell out in his lap. What most galled him was his awareness of how much his own wooden-headed resistance to well-meant advice, that ancient bane, was responsible for his present distress. It was as though he were inhabited by some kind of demonic antibodies to common prudence and sanity! Oh, he had blundered in public before, exposed himself, played the fool, but now it was as though he were making a career of it!
"There, there, don't pull the snout so, dear friend," growls Melampetta at his side. "True, it's about as pretty as a blackhead, this cazzo di niente we call life — 'un bel pasticcio,' were the Abbé de Montfaucon de Villars' immortal words for it, I believe, as he lay dying in the road in a bed of horse dumplings, asking only that they pass the parmesano — but as Horace Il Poetastro once counseled the constipated Augustus Caesar whilst feeling his way hopefully in the dark, 'Nil desperandum, padrone, there's a plug here somewhere!' So cheer up! Not all sorrow comes to bring damage! Besides, I have a surprise for you!" When he first arrived, Melampetta had, less generously, greeted him with a bitter howl of invective and reproach, quoting everyone from Alexander of Abonuteichus to the Zenos of Citium, Elea, and the Zattere on the subjects of ingratitude, bad manners, false friends, the corruptions of power ("Was it not our own Zan Petrarca who denounced in these very streets those who 'swallow a gazeta and shit it in silver — ?' "), sins of omission, faithless love, broken promises, and blind folly, and not forgetting in her citations Zosimos of Panopolis, whose mystical vision of a world alchemically bonded by interlaced dogs and puppets, here betrayed, led the sagacious old gnostic to rewrite the incommunicable axiom to include "arf!" and "cuců!" and to remark on his deathbed that the only dangers to universal happiness were a warm nose and a cold arse. But her desperately wagging tail revealed her true feelings and she soon took pity on his dire condition, even acknowledging his justification in abandoning the doghouse and taking refuge in the Palazzo dei Balocchi: "It's an old prole's dream, after all, to live the life of Michelaccio among the filthy rich, vicious unprincipled pricks though they be. But just the same, comrade, you might've stopped by the yard from time to time to scratch my ears and let me give you a lick or two " Now she reaches beneath her tail with her teeth and strips a watch off her hind leg, holds it up to him: it is his own, the one he threw through a window the night he came here. "Alidoro managed to wrest it away from those pirates down at the Questura, but when he got back where he'd left you, you weren't there."
"Something came up. Another another engagement "
"The bright lights, break a leg, a star is burned, and all that, you mean, yes, yes, Lido found your crazy tracks, heard the commotion but by the time he reached your venue the show was over. Nothing but greasepaint smears and ashes. They'd rung down the curtain and then burned that, too. Nobody left onstage but a few of his pals from the pula, toasting their garlic sausages and warming themselves like sanctimonious Parsees around the embers of their fiendish bone-fires, as they are properly called, according to Saint Elmo of the Smoldering Ecstatics, or else it was Saint Anthony the Great in his bone-on fever. The mangy old mutt was heartbroken, of course, until he picked up your scent in an underpass and saw your ear floating in the canal at the end of it. He didn't know if you'd been thrown in or fell but — "
"I fell — !" Yes, he had almost forgotten: the wild ride, the mad chase, the icy green slime underfoot -
"Without thinking, something the fart-brained testardo always did find harder to do than fly backwards, he jumped in to try to save you — "
"Alidoro — ?! But he can't — he can't swim — !"
"From all the available evidence, amico mio," growls Melampetta, scratching her ear with her hind foot, "that would seem to be a reasonable deduction. The driveling old eyesore, at no loss to the general aesthetics of this open sewer, has not been seen since."
"Oh no !" Though Alidoro later rescued him from fire, sealing the ancient bond between them, they had met, so to speak, in water, the powerful young police dog having leapt into the sea to chase him, only remembering after it was too late that he did not know how to swim. It was the first time he had ever had the authorities at his mercy, and he reveled in it. He taunted the drowning mastiff, toyed with him, exacted promises, swam teasing circles around him. Finally, convinced the miserable beast was too bloated from all the salt water he had swallowed to pursue him any further, but still wary of the fanged jaws, he took hold of the thick tail he still had in those days and dragged the half-dead creature back to the lido. Alidoro could not even stand up, but lay helplessly on his side, draining from all his orifices like a punctured balloon, blubbering out his gratitude. Pretending to be administering artificial respiration, he jumped up and down on the prostrate body, just for fun, and kicked the turgid belly-bag like a football, then jumped back into the water, daring the police dog to follow. Only later, on the lip of the Green Fisherman's frying pan, did he come to understand that he had made a friend for life, a real friend, perhaps the truest one he ever had.
"Now, now, no need for tears. There are those who would say the poor dim brute should have been put down years ago. He was a good comrade but something of a backslider in his old age and stupid as warm water, alia fin fine he may have done us all a favor."
"But — sob! — why didn't you tell me — ?!"
Melampetta tips her head and gazes up at him quizzically, but before she can reply, the Count, who has been lamenting in the high style on behalf of the dripping kidneys and swollen bladder of the Madonna, not to mention his own leaking instrument, the removal from this campo of a municipal urinal ("Here, where a great public facility once stood, and where many great public figures thus stood as well "), now announces his intention to conduct them all, en route to their official civic reception in the Piazza San Marco, on a sacred pilgrimage in memory of what he calls the original fourteen "pisciatoi della Via Crucis," commencing with a communal pee of homage and protest from the Accademia bridge.
And so the old scholar, weighed down now with grief, is hoisted once again by the palazzo servants and, led by il Conte Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo and the Madonna of the Organs (New Acquisition), with the rest of the zany assemblage trailing behind, the Count's personal attendants with their bodily parts a soqquadro, as they say here, bringing up the rear with their cartloads of free-flowing wine, he is ported ceremonially up the massive wooden staircase, past a priest and a blind nun posted there at the foot like sentinels of conscience, nodding lugubriously as though tolling the knell of the passing sinners, and, at the bridge's crest, is tipped foward, portantina and all, so that just his nose with its translucent red-tipped rubber sheath droops over the railing.