4. NIGHT OF THE ASSASSINS
He is lost. Lost, frightened, bewildered. And freezing his bark off. Somehow he has left his German fedora with its little bluebird feather in the headband back at the osteria, and his head, bald as an egg and becoming, alas, even balder, went completely numb under its peaked bonnet of snow before he discovered it. He brushed away the snow and wrapped his frozen pate then in his Andean llama-wool scarf, tying it under his chin like an old woman's shawl, and that has left his flimsy chest exposed. Ah, what misery! His calfskin gloves are gone, he knows not where. His twice-imported Italian shoes — he has always joked back in America that he liked to keep both feet in the homeland — have proven useless in this weather, leaving his feet soaked and aching from the cold, the thin leather taking a no doubt terminal beating. He might as well be barefoot. Hadn't someone he once knew died of fatal chilblains of the feet? Forsaking his pride finally and throwing himself upon the charity of his fellow creatures, he has rung a doorbell in a deserted campo, crying out in his despair for help or a warm hat or at least the loan of a city map, only to have a window open up and a bucket of water, or what he hoped was water, be thrown on him as if he were a potted geranium. Others in the square shouted out obscenities from behind darkened windows like a hostile audience from behind the footlights, even threatening to bring the police, and he screamed back at them, calling them all a lot of bloody assassins and murderers, shrieking and squawking in an altogether undignified manner unfortunately, overtaken momentarily by a fit of blind fear and rage. Or perhaps not so momentarily, for his heart still feels caught in the grip of that icy fist as he goes staggering through the white night, up and down the steps of bridges he cannot even see, across barren squares and through frighteningly narrow defiles, pursued by a fierce wind that whips around him from all directions, his spectacles frosted over and his wet clothes crackling now with ice crystals, unable to remember very clearly anymore exactly what he's looking for, even if he could see it should he miraculously come upon it. Something about a blackened doorway. But under the blown snow, all the doors look blackened. He feels utterly abandoned in a world without mercy or even logic. How he wishes he had left the osteria together with his "dear friends," as they liked to flatter themselves, instead of lingering for that last glass of grappa!
Yet how delightful it had seemed at first! He had stood for a moment in the radiant little square in front of the Gambero Rosso, one of those enchanting and forsaken places which lie in the interior of Venice as though within a secret fold, accessible only to intimates, his own interior aglow still from the generous infusions, thinking how right he had been to come back here! Here to this "vast and sumptuous pile," as a famous militarist once called it, this "peopled labyrinth of walls," magical, dazzling, and exquisitely perplexing, this "paradise of exiles!" She who called herself the Serenissima. Only hours before, he had been sitting in his lonely office back at the university at the end of the Christmas break, struggling to come to grips with the realization that his epic tribute to his beloved shepherdess and cynosure, thought concluded, was not. The "final" chapter was not the final chapter, after all. Something was missing. It was, like the stark New England landscape outside his office window, too cold, too intellectual, too abstract. Too empty. In his intransigent pursuit of the truth he had somehow neglected — virtue, truth, and beauty being, in the end (which was where, in the book at least, and in life too no doubt, he was), one and the same — the senses. Whereupon he was suddenly struck by a most remarkable vision, sensuous yet pure, of this very place, which his mentor Petrarch, who had preceded him here as though to show the way, rightly called the "noblest of cities, sole refuge of humanity, peace, justice, and liberty, defended not so much by its waters as by the prudence and wisdom of its citizens," and which appeared to him in that moment in flesh tones as delicious as those of Giorgione or Tiziano. He reached out and, seemingly without transition, by the miracle of flight, here, his hands still outstretched, he was! He felt so happy just then that tears came to his eyes, tears now frozen on his face and pricking him like vicious little thumbtacks, but then warm and titillating as they ran down his cheeks and nose, and as purifying as the snow frosting the delicious little campo, turning the stone cylindrical wellhead in the middle into a kind of large pale lantern. "Ah! Che bel paese!" he cried aloud. If his knees hadn't been hurting him so, he might have knelt down and kissed it.
He had easily discovered the route back to the hotel and set off, expecting at every turn to meet the bent back and broken beak of his lugubrious guide, returning for him, and meanwhile enjoying his digestive walk, as he thought of it, rejoicing in the luminous spectacle of Venice in the snow and laying plans for the morrow when he might encounter once again — in the flesh, as it were, the unblighted flesh — his old friends Giambellino and Giorgione, Titian and Tintoretto, Carpaccio, Lotto, Veronese, and all the rest. For it was with them it all began. Once all the other beginnings were over, that is. Now he is better known for intellectual works of a tougher order such as Sacred Sins or Art and the Spirit, his devastating indictment of theatricality and amateurism in the plastic arts, but it was through the great masters of the Venetian school that his scholarly career, then as an art critic and historian, originally — as they say in the Other World — "took off" (here only the pigeons would understand such an expression, and they would not mean the same thing by it), with his seminal studies on illusionism, transfiguration, and the motif of the ass in Venetian paintings of the life of Christ.