The three servants hastily set the old scholar down in a quiet corner of the little campo, warning him not to run away or get into mischief or talk to strangers, and rush off to attend to the raging Lion, who seems prepared to eat the poor crumpled butterfly if he can just get on his feet again and if he hasn't lost all his teeth in the calamitous fall, Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo ordering that an entire barrel of wine be poured down the old fellow's throat as a kind of holy libation in recognition of the once-glorious empire and designating him Honorary Chaircreature and Despot of their entourage for their triumphal march into the Piazza San Marco.
Left alone, the professor, crushed by sorrow and chagrin, buries his veiled nose in his lap, the condom's red tip hanging forlornly from the end like a bloody drip, and fretfully twists his silvery watch as if he were telling his beads, gripping the skittish thing with both hands in the old way, before he had fingers, thinking bitterly: what a paltry bauble time is! He's had more than his share of it, and what good has it done him? He can't even see the face of it. All he can see is the shock and disappointment on Bluebell's innocent upturned face as she passed below him back at the Accademia bridge, a famous phrase from his early writings returning now to haunt him: "The bridge between It-ness," he wrote in The Wretch, elucidating a concept first introduced in Art and the Spirit, "and I-ness is character, whether staunch or frail, artfully made or haplessly jerry-built, and that which flows below is not Time, but the ceaseless current of implacable Judgment!"
As Buffetto and Truffaldino ported him down the broad wooden steps of the brdge, it recalled for him an earlier descent from another bridge, that night he first arrived here, full then of hope and joy and something like intellectual rapture, the city, silenced by snow, awakening in him an almost mythic sense, as it felt at the moment, of being a witness to eternity. He had plunged into the alluring labyrinth of the magical city that night on his damaged but still functional knees as a lover might enter the body of his beloved (speaking poetically of course), experiencing that rare creative communion between the spirit and the body that prophesied a happy conclusion to his final work-in-progress and thus to his long exemplary life as well. And now all that noble joy had come to this. That reckless eager plunge into the masked city had been his undoing. As they looped back toward the Piazza San Marco, whence this newest misadventure today began, he felt caught up in loops within loops, his fraudulent life a mad skein of recurrent self-deceptions, and he wished only, the tears streaming down the craquelure of his cheeks, to make it safely back to his room in the Palazzo dei Balocchi and to hide his terrible face there forevermore.
Around him, meanwhile, the Count and his followers celebrated with wine and song and wild abandon. Drums beat out a processional march as they wound their way from the site of one vanished urinal to another through the dreary Venetian labyrinth, the Count squirting his monstrous phallus on them all from time to time as though dispensing holy water, the Madonna waddling about seductively with her exaggerated Trecento dehanchement, wagging her intestines, her organs jouncing and bobbing like bangles, teasing passersby to give her parts a little squeeze. Feet went by with eyes and noses on the soles, an immense penis passed with semen dripping from a white mask at the tip, there were copulating rodents and horn-blowing bottoms and birdlike creatures with phallic beaks and pretty young novices with devils' faces winking from their bare behinds. But to the tormented professor, hunched over in his litter chair, they were all mere mourners at a wake, their revelry a dirge, their bawdy songs a last lament. Cast down in final defeat, he could only stare darkly at the recovered watch in his trembling hands, sinking ever deeper into that pit of inconsolable grief, regret, and bitter self-reproach into which he had fallen, or, as it were, been pushed. Most of the flesh had fallen away from the backs of his hands, and he noticed now how the grain stood out like reticulated tracery, the softer parts of the wood eaten away. It was as though its encasement of flesh had fed upon it like lichen. He tried to pick off a scabby piece of skin, but the pain, as ever, was harrowing, as if it were determined to hold fast, to carry through, even if he were not.
This power of flesh to go its own way became the subject (perhaps he had been talking aloud again, quite likely) of several of the Madonna's ceremonial performances as they went along the route of late lamented pissoirs. She would light the seminally blessed votive candles with her apple green heart, which worked like a kind of miniature blowtorch, empty her bladder on the site of the displaced pisciatoio, and with her spleen lead a communal prayer for making public urinals and ridotti out of all the city's banks and churches: "Piů cessi meno chiese!" they would chant. Then, after Count Ziani-Ziani had recited from what he called the Ancient and Holy Testament of Latrine Grafitti, she — or, more precisely, her organs — would sermonize briefly on various topics such as individual organ and glandular rights, cruelty by civic neglect of the tragicomically fused genito-urinary twins, or the body politics of visceral autonomy versus a united organic front, the various glands and organs sometimes getting into heated debates and even duels with one another, all trying to shout at once, the liver blackening with rage, the stomach turning sour, the bowels complaining rudely, the heart winning most arguments finally with its lethal blowtorch, the Madonna's body becoming a kind of strange traveling puppet booth, the organs her fractious tattermen. Finally, the larynx or the adenoids or the vagina would bring all the spitting and screaming and squirting of this anatomical psychomachia to an end by singing the Benedictus, the anus at the end of its long undulatory tube providing the resonant antiphon, and then the Madonna would deliver a few dozen marzipan Jesuses from her womb and pass them out to the children
Here in this campo, after the opening rituals, she and her organs, having paused to reflect upon martyrdom, had taken up as a case in point the professor's nose, on rubber-masked display above his "ECCE NASUS" sign, debating the question: which was the true martyr, his nose or the rest of him? Not surprisingly, the more exposed parts opted for the abused and repressed ("Hamstrung," was the way the hamstrings put it) nose, the glands and internal organs arguing contrarily on behalf of the inner humiliation and suffering brought to the whole by the offending part, which the fulminating colon called an intolerable pain in the butt and the uterus said wasn't worth a dried fig and, for its sins, as much of omission as commission, probably ought to get the chop. "I've had it up to my hair with the stuck-up thing!"
"That's right," agreed the adrenal glands, "let the snotty nuisance stew in its own juices!"
"I see what you mean," observed the eyeballs on their little strings. "At first glance, the little blowhard does appear to be something of a fist in the eye and more than a bit uppity, but it is our view that only the branch can be said to be martyred when the tree, for its own good, is pruned!"
"Right, I can swallow that," piped up the esophagus, and the shrunken kidneys, siding with the eyeballs, added: "Moreover, if the fault is in the handle, as the saying goes, so then is the anima: dismemberment hallows the honker!"
"I speak," said the heart, flaring up briefly, "from the heart when I say that your argument, my dear kidneys, doesn't hold water. The holy martyrs were canonized for their good hearts, not good hooters!"
Thus, inevitably, the debate, which grew increasingly tempestuous ("You're getting up my nose, you cardiocentric four-flusher!" screamed the sinuses, and the ovaries started throwing eggs again), evolved into a raucous theological dispute about the true location of the soul, each organ staking its claim as sole container of the elusive stuff, the lungs bellowing that insufflation had been the true sign of life since God first puffed up Adam, the brain retorting heatedly that the soul was inseparable from the logos and that to think otherwise was unimaginable idiocy, the mammary glands doing a bit of breast-beating of their own, and the rectum airing its "gut feeling" that, since everything else in the world got stuffed up it, the soul must, willy-nilly, be there as well. "Macchč! I haven't the stomach for this," rumbled the stomach acidly, burned by the heart and vainly seeking relief from the spreading crossfire, which came finally from on high with the head-over-heels arrival of the Winged Lion, explosively interrupting the performance.