He was first drawn to the study of art, being self-taught in this as in all subjects, by a painting on the wall of his father's little room under the stairs. His father was a poor man, unable to afford even a fireplace or a kettle, so he had painted one, or had had one painted, on the wall, with a fire lit under the kettle that looked just like a real fire, a cloud of steam coming out of it that looked just like real steam, and a kettle lid so convincing he nearly splintered his fingers trying to take it off before he discovered the illusion. Locked in often by his loving but, it must be said, ill-tempered father, and with little more to eat than pear cores and his own hat, he had ample time to study this trompe l'oeil, learning something therefrom about the function of appetite in scholarship (he has often argued that more interesting than the things that are studied by mankind is the infinite catalogue of things that are not), the implications of the wall (surfaces are not passive!), and the power of raw color upon the imagination: he found, on bitter days, he could actually warm himself by that painted fire, and indeed, even now, it might comfort him and still the rising panic in his heart.
For he does not want to die. Not yet. Not with just one more chapter to go. But the choice may not be his. He is nearing exhaustion. He no longer knows if he is walking or crawling. He cannot feel his hands and feet. The snow is everywhere, in his face, down his back, inside him as well as out — snow and the deep night, for the world is weirdly white and pitch black at the same time, just as his mind has gone blank and his spirits horribly dark. Somehow he has made a wrong turn. Probably more than one. He climbed that last bridge, expecting to see the old palazzo and its charred doorway, all warmly lit up and waiting for him, but it was the wrong bridge. He retraced his steps, but soon they disappeared under the fresh snow. He tried to find his way back to the Gambero Rosso, but the fold had closed. So his search became more random, more frenzied. His knees began to give way. Passages beckoned that, like his father's trompe l'oeil, were not ones, and he smacked his face on them. Or they let him in, then dead-ended in mazelike traps occupied by prides of mad squalling cats. He hobbled painfully over slippery bridges that led only to locked and darkened doors. He cried out for help, got doused, reviled.
Now he wants to stop but he cannot, he is too afraid. It is as though he is running not toward something, but from it. If he bumps into something, he jumps back as though struck; if he stumbles toward the edge of a canal yawning out of the swirling white night below him, he feels pushed. All the old childhood traumas have returned and he recalls with renewed terror that night in the woods when he was set upon by murderers who chased him, caught him, knifed him, hung him, a night that has haunted him all his life and haunts him now, driving him through this befuddling network of alleyways and squares like the pursued heroines in gothic movies. Except that he lacks the heroines' youthful strength. When he was just a little sliver, as his father liked to call him, he used to be able to run all day like a hare before hunters, to zip up and down trees, scale cliffs, leap hedgerows at a single bound — indeed, on that "Night of the Assassins," as it has come to be called, he delayed his capture by leaping a wide canal of filthy water the color of a cold cappuccino just like these, his would-be killers falling in — patatunfete! — when they tried to follow — but now, far from leaping one of these wretched ditches, he cannot even pull himself over their bridges. He can barely walk. He is feeling, oddly, seasick. His head is pounding. He is beginning to turn in smaller and smaller circles.
But wait! What was that — ? Something behind him? He stops dead in his tracks, stooped over, his knees knocking, sour breath tearing from his ancient ill-made lungs, afraid to turn around and look. All about him there is a deep hush, almost as though the whole island were frozen up, holding its breath, he can hear nothing but his own desperate snorting and the tormented creaking of his knees — and then suddenly a terrible flutter as of a thousand assassins comes roaring up out of the night, swooping down over him and away, and he screams and nearly jumps out of his skin, what's left of it. As his scream dies away, he can hear them, or it, circling back, so, terror reviving him — this is real! — he takes off down a narrow calletta, praying only that the little alley doesn't end in watersteps. Whatever it is that's after him — just a bevy of desperate pigeons caught out in the snow, he tells himself, but he doesn't believe it, pigeons aren't that stupid, for this kind of stupidity it takes a Ph.D. - chases him right down it, he can hear it, or them, bearing down on him, bellowing mightily, or maybe cursing (it sometimes sounds like belching), wings slapping and scraping the crumbly old brick walls, sending loose chips raining down, rattling the drawn wooden shutters, jostling flowerpots out of window boxes — no wonder this place looks so beat-up!
He emerges, dangerously, into an open square, no place to hide, the huge wings paddling away overhead — but in the nick of time he spies a low underpass, and he ducks down it. He can hear his pursuer roar with alarm ("Vaffanculo!" he seems to hear the beast cry) before slamming into the walls and bringing down chimney pots and roof tiles in its frantic climb. The sottoportico, shorter than he might have hoped, leads him to another clumsy bridge, the bridge to a riva edging a canal full of docked boats sheeted with white snow, the riva to more streets and side streets past metal-shuttered shops and snow-topped heaps of garbage bags, the streets to other bridges and courtyards and passageways and squares, while, just above and behind him, the pounding wings bear down relentlessly, his assailant losing him and finding him in all these mazy turnings, as though it might be a game it's playing, like a cat toying with a trapped mouse. The old professor is not exactly running, but he's not walking either, it would be hard to say what he's doing, but he's picking them up and putting them down, all four of his wasted limbs at once and not in any special order, his head ducked for fear of having it snatched away, his torso bouncing along erratically like unwieldy luggage.
But then he finds himself again in an open campo, probably one he has been in before, and though his mind is racing down the next alleyway, his body is on its knees. It just does not want to go any farther. He crawls dutifully ahead, carrying through in the old way, holding fast, hauling his resistant carcass through the snow like a dull plow, a thing heavier even than his abusive old father was the night he had to wrench the old brute, hallucinating wildly on grappa he had made from seaweed, fish eyes, and ship wreckage, and fermented in his erstwhile host's digestive juices, a grappa too good, he kept blubbering insistently, to leave behind, out of the giant fish's belly. Which is where he is again, swallowed up as one sucks up an oyster and waiting to be digested, only now his daddy's not here and there's no escape. He can hear his assassin flapping fiercely in the wind above him, circling round as though, at last, to pounce. Well, let it, whatever it is, come. He curls up against the wall. It is not the wall of the painted fire and steaming kettle, but it will have to do. He can go no further. His opus magnum will remain unfinished. Our worst fears, he thinks, are always justified. He is going to "sleep like the Pope" all right, but not the present one. Above him, what looks for all the world like a flying lion is thrashing about in the snowstorm, roaring lustily and batting the snow away from its eyes with its massive paws. But it may be his own dizziness, his poor sight, his indigestion which delivers to him this vision. "PAX TIBI — wurrp! — EXCREMENTUM MEUS!" the fiendish creature bawls: "Hic! — REQUIESCET CORPUS TUUM!" and, its great ghostly wings churning up the snowy air theatrically, it circles a bell tower once to commence its murderous descent.