But then, just when ("Why not," he can hear Truffaldino saying with a shrug, "we're going that way anyway ") all hope vanishes, something occurs that reminds him forcibly of his old babbo's favorite saying. "One never knows, carogna mia," he would say, tipping his dirty yellow wig slyly down over one eye and sucking wickedly at his grappa jug, "what might happen next in this curious world "
24. LA BELLA BAMBINA
It is to be believed, as Father Tertullian once said, leaping from paganism to the Apocalypse in a single bound, because it is absurd. It is certain because it is impossible: Tonight he is to have her at last! In his case, too, the miracle has owed something to the Apocalypse, though he can hardly be said to have leapt, and the Apocalypse in his tale of redemptive grace was a Carnival ride on the Riva degli Schiavoni: no mere mystical vision, that is, but an extraordinary and dizzying reality. Even now, he seems to lose his balance whenever he thinks of it, an experience he has never felt when contemplating something relatively so frivolous as the end of the world — and that magical ride was as nothing compared to what is yet to come before this day is over! "At last, tomorrow," Eugenio promised him yesterday, after making the arrangements, "your biggest wish will come true!" His mind cannot even quite take it in, though the rest of him is certainly more than ready, his whole body trembling in anticipation of that which, for his staggered imagination, remains ultimately unimaginable. As Bluebell put it on the Apocalypse yesterday, begging him to hug her close: "Wow! I'm so excited, teach, I feel like I'm about to wet my doggone pants!"
"Easy, master! You'll tip us over!"
"We'll be there soon enough!"
Yes, they are rocking dangerously, standing huddled there together in the frail gondola in the middle of the Grand Canal, both shores now lost to view in the damp cold fog of this wintry Mardi Gras morning, lost to his view anyway, but it doesn't frighten him, nothing frightens him since his wild ride on the Apocalypse, he feels reckless and manly and heroic, invulnerable even, and he responds to their silly fears with devil-may-care laughter, which unfortunately comes out more like deranged cackling, no doubt making him sound to the servants porting him completely fazzo, as they'd say — as indeed, in love, he is. Stark staring.
"Brr! What a cold stinking soup this is!"
"It's like the old Queen let one and it froze!"
"If this caeca gets any thicker we'll have to shovel our way across!"
For the professor, the dense fog which rolled in last night is full not of threat but of tender promise, an obliging curtain dropping upon the past, dissolving its regrettable angularities, so harsh and obstinate, in the sensuous dreamlike potential of the present. It is as though the city were masking itself in buoyant anticipation of secret revels of its own, hiding its shabbiness and decay behind a seductively mysterious disguise which is not so much a deception as an amorous courtesy. "The important thing about Carnival," he wrote recently in a note intended as part of his monograph-then-in-progress, "is not the masking, but the unmasking, the revelation, the repentance, the re-establishment of sanity," but, as always in all the days before yesterday, he was wrong. The important thing is the masking. What is sanity itself, after all, but terror's sweet foggy disguise? And love the mask that shields us from the abyss, art its compassionate accomplice?
These poignant thoughts come to him unbidden, full-formed already in a language, though chaste, clearly steeped in Eros's ennobling power (only now could he write that monograph which now he knows he will never write), swirling through his quickened mind as easily as do the coiling twists of fog here upon the still gray surface of the Grand Canal. This fog has caused the suspension this morning of all motorized water traffic and so forced upon them this slow labyrinthine journey to the mask shop by foot and now traghetto, a journey whose purpose is, in effect, to initiate a healing, providing him the means, designed by Eugenio, by which to rejoin, after the misguided century, his life's lost theater. He will put a new face on and, in love's name, learn to lie again, free at last from the tyranny of his blue-haired preceptress with her "civilizing" mania, her cruel tombstone lessons. The long oar splashes softly behind him as the black-snouted bark carves its perilous way across the silent waters, drawing a line erased as soon as drawn, thus celebrating, not the line, dull as death itself, but the motion that has made it. The others stand in a cluster in the rocking gondola like passengers on a crowded bus, holding him up between them, chattering nervously and peering intently through the purling mists for a glimpse of a landing, as though afraid that what they cannot see might not exist. Though impatience grips the old scholar, fear does not, and, least of all, the fear of movement, once such a bugbear that even melody's traveling line offended him and his gardens all were paved so as not to have to witness growth. No more. Movement, after all, was his very raison d'ętre, he was made for it. "To dance and fence and turn somersaults in the air," as his father advertised. His concept of I-ness, as he tried to explain yesterday to his former student, aboard the whirling Apocalypse, was never more valid: he could not, without doing violence to himself, be other than what, at the core, he was. "And only here, dear Bluebell, right now, where I am, am I truly what I truly am!"
Or words, in his cross-eyed, thick-tongued, mouth-stuffed delirium, to that effect
"Ecco!" cries Francatrippa as the gondola strikes its dock, unseen till hit, and slides, bumping and scraping, into its berth. "We're here!"
"Where else," asks Buffetto impatiently, stepping onto the bobbing dock and reaching back to help with the portantina, "could we be?"
"Well, if I were here and you were there," replies Francatrippa, as the two of them lift him out, "and vice versa, then we'd be, both, both here and there, would we not?"
"And if I were here and you were there," pipes up Truffaldino, following them ashore, "and he were neither here nor there, then we'd all be both here and there and neither either, too!"
"Hrmff. And yet here is where we'd each still be for all that," insisted Buffetto. "Isn't that so, professore? But now come along, if you are to find the romance and adventure that you seek, we must find the guise for it. Am I right? Tonight's the night!"
Yes, so he believes, though twenty-four hours ago he would not have thought it possible. Nothing seemed possible then. His desire to go on living, guttering out, had dimmed to nothing more than the simple wish to be able to die in his bed at the palazzo beside his hot water bottle, and even that wish was more like the memory of a wish than the thing itself. Moreover, as he thought about that hot water bottle, there, surrounded by Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo's raucous court with their drunken taunts and fountaining organs, dunce cap on his lowered head and condom on his nose, bereft, grieving, his manuscript pirated and his watch stolen for the second time, the realization slowly invaded his consciousness like a last lethal wounding that it was his hot water bottle, the snuggies, too, also his the bent spectacles, the half-empty bottle of pine-scented mouth-wash, and certain very grievous patterns began to emerge, not least the lifelong pattern of self-deception: he had known all along that was his own hot water bottle, there could not be two of them.
The procession had reached the Bocca di San Marco. Through the columns and beyond the temporary stands and stages built for Carnival, a vast assembly of the island's smart set and power elect could be seen congregated together in full regalia under the Clock Tower, prepared to receive the venerable Count Ziani-Ziani, now poised arm in arm with the Madonna of the Organs, his free hand tucked in his vest of crimson velvet ŕ la the builder of this final wing of Venice's so-called "open-air drawing room," his chin high and pointy gray beard fluttering in the gusty wind, his immense phallus held aloft with the help of little Truffaldino. On a cart being pulled along beside him, the Winged Lion snored drunkenly, a sign around his neck reading "THE GOOD SOVEREIGN." Il Zoppo, as Pulcinella and Lisetta were — or was — now called, stepped forward from the crowd and raised a horn to Lisetta's lips, prepared to lead the multitudes into the Piazza, and just at that moment he heard it again, as though in fulfillment of some grim brassy oracle: "Oh my Ga-ahd! Lookit this! What a lotta crazy lolly-pops! Ding-dong, man! It's like a — ffpupp! squit! — little girl's dream come true!"