"No, no!" he cries in alarm, as they snatch him up and strap him in. "I want to stay here!"
"There's nothing to see here, professore, it's closed for renovations, as you can see for yourself! Come now, we've got to run! There's a new Bellini at the Accademia!"
"But I don't care about -!"
"It's the Madonna of the Organs, dottore! II Conte Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo has brought it! A masterpiece! You have to see it to believe it!"
"A new acquisition!"
"A gift to the city!"
"He's the heir of eleven doges!"
"Twelve!"
"And he's brought the deed to the family palace!"
"We have to escort the Count back to the Piazza for his official reception! Hurry! There's not a moment to lose!"
"No! Stop!" he protests, tears coming to his eyes. "You can't do this! My - my life's work -!" But they have already bundled him out of there, not even time to glance back, and now they go clattering down the marble stairs and out onto the busy Bazzetta, past the diapered Ducal Palace and the stiffened digits of the patron saints twin monoliths, racing at full tilt toward the motor launch.
22. THE PROCESSION IN HONOR OF COUNT ACNELLO ZIANI-ZIANI ORSEOLO AND THE MADONNA OF THE ORGANS (NEW ACQUISITION)
"Ah! casa mia, casa mia!" exclaims il Conte Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo, his old head thrown back, pointed gray beard thrust high in the wintry wind, his eyes closed his immense dripping phallus bobbing with the tremulous ecstasy of his wide-armed embrace of this city he calls his dulce domum and summum bonum, il suo paese, bell'e buono, first cause and final hope: "My fulcrum! My feedbag! My fetish! My fenny fount and fungous funiculus! Floating fleshpot of my fancy! My foolscap, fizgig, flophouse, and fantod! My foreskin! My fistulae!" Thus, to the cheers of his strange audience there on the Campo della Caritŕ, the Count glorifies the alleged city of his birth, exhausting the alphabet in his exaltation, or at least all the F's, prompting Melampetta to bark out finally from beside the professor's portantina: "Ma, fammi il favore! Va' a farti fottere, faccia da culo! "
Which, far from arousing the ire of the Count or the crowd only draws more cheers ("Viva! Viva! Go fuck yourself, buttface!" they chant lustily, led by Francatrippa, who conducts them with a candy-striped phallus of his own, Buffetto and Truffaldino bounding gaily about the campo doing handsprings and cartwheels: "Va' a farti fottere! Va' a farti fottere!") and incites the old graybeard to even loftier flights of grandiloquence: "Ah, Venezia! Mother of all my pleasure and profit!" he cries, striding about manfully, gripping his phallus with both hands to keep it from slapping the pavement as he goes, the onlookers ducking and scattering to make room for the monstrous engine. "Father to my glorious misdeeds! Uncle of my wild oats, sown and unsown, mother-in-law of my exile, and second cousin of my throbbing green-isled imagination! Great aunt by marriage of my melancholic flatulence! Grand nephew of my noble erections and half-sister to my sweet ruin! Venezia! Veni etiam! Your errant prodigal has indeed come again! And again! Clasp me close to your bosom as a scrotum clasps its restless testes, let me wander no more! Those of us who have changed our homes and pleasant thresholds, and sought a country spreading its legs beneath another sun, as a great Roman publicist was wont to say, ought to have our heads examined, if we can find them, stuffed up our irrespective rectums as they waywardly are. No, no, propria domus omnium optima, or oppressa, or obstupida, and/or words to that effect, home is where the hard is, he who lies everywhere, gets laid nowhere, eheu, eheu, sic passim!"
This oration draws more applause and cheers ("Bravo! Viva la faccia!" they shout: "Ipse dixit! Viva il Magnifico!") which the Count acknowledges by leaning back and raising his glitteringly decorated organ on high like a bejeweled flagpole, others in the assembly at the Accademia landing stage responding in kind as their constitutions permit, the monumental Madonna of the Organs for her part reaching into the scarlet folds of her glistening vagina with both hands and pulling out her ovaries which she proceeds to flick on their fallopian strings at the Count's shaft like little pink yo-yos. Her face, true, the professor has to admit, does, except for the hollow eyes and the fringe of ink-black beard peeking out from under her chin, resemble that of Giovanni Bellini's "Madonna of the Small Trees," but the rest of her is more like an oversized walking anatomy lesson, an elaboration of sorts upon the traditional Madonna of the Bleeding Heart, in that not just her heart (which is bright green) is outside her body, but all her glands and organs are dangling from her generous flesh like Christmas ornaments: her spleen, kidneys, liver, brains, bladder, stomach, larynx, pancreas, and all the rest, her lungs worn like water wings, her mammaries like shoulder pads, her intestines looping from her rear like a long spongy tail or a vacuum sweeper hose.
Il Conte Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo's first act, upon the arrival of the emissaries from the Palazzo dei Balocchi, the exchange of greetings, the display of the deed, the windblown dissemination of the billion lire, and the Count's knighting, as it might be called, of the professor, was to present the Madonna as a gift to the city ("Urbi et orbi!" he'd cried, making the sign of the cross over her in the Byzantine fashion with his ithyphallic appendage, the genuflecting citizenry in the Campo della Caritŕ replying with a communal breaking of wind and a whooping ovation), observing that, as he pointed to her exuberant crimson-petaled gash: "Heroes have trod this spot! Poets have slept here and signed their ineffable names! Merchants have here lost all their earthly goods, philosophers their minds! Only a few intrepid explorers, venturing into its labyrinthine depths, have returned to tell the tale in their epistles and travel guides of the fatal gift of beauty, the very sight of which sets us afire with pain and longing and sends us plunging, lance hoisted, blind to dangers, into the awesome abyss! Ah, but roses, roses all the way, good friends and figsuckers, so loving and so lovely, nature herself shivers with ecstasy at the sight of this toothsome apparition! She walks the waters like a thing of life! Beauteous even where beauties most abound, she is the answer to our bedtime prayer that womankind have but one rosy mouth, to kiss them all at once from North to South!" Which is what they all did, lined up to lap, more to the south than to the north, at the Madonna's fluorescent lips, which some said exuded a dewy liquor not unlike zabaglione laced with rum and holy water and went eagerly back for seconds, the professor in his dark temper demurring, furious still at having been dragged away from his former student (he felt that some grave academic principle had been ruthlessly violated, but his threats and protests had gone unheeded) and subjected once more to the cruel abuse of the elements and the callous masses.
On their way here, as they came spanking up the blustery Grand Canal in the roaring motor launch, Truffaldino, Buffetto, and Francatrippa had driven him finally into a sullen silence with their breathless overlapping accounts of the triumphant arrival in Venice of the famous Count, descendant of at least thirteen doges ("No, no, fifteen!" cried Francatrippa vehemently: "Fifteen doges! And three popes!"), the splendor of his entourage, the undeniable authenticity of his deed to the Palazzo Ducale, attested to by 579 recognized doctors of law, living and dead, for which he had already received from Omino e figli, S.R.L., a preliminary down payment of a billion lire, and his gift to the city of the newly uncovered Bellini masterpiece, "The Madonna of the Organs," which they called "a living miracle." "Well, yes, it's sort of in the style of the 'Madonna of the Small Trees,' master, only more like a 'Madonna of the Stunted Kidneys,' as you might say!"
What they meant by this became clear when they rumbled up under the green steel frame and dark heavy timbers of the Accademia bridge to the vaporetto landing stage of the great museum and were met there by his onetime boatyard hostess Melampetta, serving as official watchdog in the absence of Alidoro, and now yapping out something between a joyful welcome and an angry scolding; a motley assemblage of hundreds of citizens, local or otherwise, many of them bearing or wearing gaudy organs of their own, together with a number of wild animals, demons, extraterrestrials, monsters, and plague victims, a
ll cheering the new arrivals with grunts and roars and exposure of their backsides; a squadron of regally dressed attendants to the Count, standing at attention, their genitals where their faces should be and their faces between their legs, and each with a barrel of wine on a little cart in tow; the Count himself in the crimson cap, vest, and tight breeches of his ancestral dogeship, his flowing black gown lined in crimson satin and trimmed with sable, his yellow gloves and golden mules in the Turkish style, and his colossal erection emerging from the gaping money pouch hanging between his thighs; and finally, towering above them all, "The Madonna of the Organs" with all her insides on her outside, including her disproportionately small kidneys, sticking out at either side of her ample waist like shriveled tree-shaped little handles.
"Here he is!" Buffetto exclaimed, as Truffaldino and Francatrippa unloaded him from the boat and onto the landing, elements of the bearded Ladies' Marching Band beating out a drumroll as they disembarked. "L'Omino's dearest and oldest pal! Old Sticks himself! Un gran cultore! Winner of the No-Balls Prize and, as you see, a worthy challenge to any present! Make way! Make way! Largo per il Gran Nasone!"
He was paraded in his litter chair, with much pomp and swagger, past the ticket booth and up a kind of aisle beside a small garden, the scraggly bushes crowding up there like groundlings, a bank of outdoor phones standing in the front like spectators in the orchestra seats, to be deposited eventually, seething still with rage, mocking cheers and applause ringing in his defoliated tympanic cavities, in the middle of the broad campo under a massive yellow brick wall with tall dark windows, flat as a backdrop, a wall he recognized from the postcard pictures of Canaletto, prince of the vedutisti, to be that of the defrocked church become Venice's celebrated Temple of Art. His temple, too, alas, and there, in its scowling shadow, looked down upon, as it were, by those very masters to whom his own long life had been devoted, he was obliged to exchange his new felt borsalino for the tall conical sugar-loaf hat of someone called Il Zoppo, a red-tipped prophylactic device was slipped on over the end of his nose and unrolled to his cheeks, around his neck they hung a sign reading "ECCE NASUS," and then Count Ziani-Ziani tapped him on each shoulder with his huge phallus and declared him an Immortal Member in Firm Standing in the Great Privy Council of the Illustrious and Lubricious Republic of Venice.
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.