"If you'd care to sign in, please," says the porter, standing before an old wooden table with the two candles on it, and the person in the bauta, the hotel manager no doubt, thrusts an old stick pen with a splayed point at him and repeats this in a rather horrible cavernous voice, befitting the macabre austerity of his costume: "Would you please care to sign in?"
"It's rather cold," the professor remarks, taking up the pen and gazing about. The huge dark hall, which runs the length of the building, opening out onto what is apparently a garden at the rear, is empty save for two boats parked on dollies and this wooden table. There is an intense unmistakable odor of cats and a glutinous damp darkness all about. "Are you sure -?"
"The rooms upstairs of course are all heated," the porter assures him with an impatient sigh. "Come along now, professore, when you're between the door and the wall, don't try to look for the hair in the egg. You're showing the rope, I know, but a little supper, a glass of wine, and you'll soon be in fine leg!"
"A fine leg!" repeats the hotel manager.
"I'm not hungry," grumbles the professor, taking up the pen, though he's not sure of this, being too tired even to think about it. "I just want to get to bed."
"Ah well, appetite comes with the eating, dottore, as the saying goes. And my friend, not knowing you were coming, has only just put the heat on in your room," he seems to flick a foot out and give the hotel proprietor a kick on the shins, for the bauta mask dips abruptly and there is a grunt from behind it. "It will take a little while for it to warm up."
"I just put the hee-hee-heat on in your room," mewls the hotel manager, hobbling around in a small circle. "It will take a while to, eh, to, eh "
"Besides," adds the porter, leaning closer to whisper in his ear: "the repast is included in the price of the room." The traveler, however, is staring in some amazement at the hotel manager's missing hand, the stump of which has just bobbed out from under the cloak to thump the table (it now ducks back in again): so many handicapped citizens in this town! Maybe it's the damp weather, all those miserable bridges, the slippery steps "The war, you see," explains the porter, evidently following his startled gaze. "The Resistance. A national hero! This fellow, I tell you, this fellow has the heart of a Caesar!" The hotel proprietor modestly turns his masked head away, sweeping a candle to the floor with his remaining hand. The porter rocks forward and whispers in the professor's ear with a breath dizzyingly foul: "And the balls of Caesar's wife!" He chortles wheezily, then, straightening up, adds: "But come along now, it's time to go bend the proverbial elbow, professore. The kitchen is not yet in operation here, but there is an arrangement with a little inn just two steps away, where you cannot tell the polenta from Saint John's halo and there is at least as much wine in the wine as water. We will direct you there, but they will be closing soon so we must burn the laps. Animo! Don't worry about your bags, they will be waiting in your room for you when you return."
"Well " Something is bothering him about all this, but he cannot think what it might be. He almost cannot think at all. He stares at his luggage, spread out in a heap on the cold stone floor like a careless jotting, his umbrella lying at one end like the line at the bottom of a long sum. Ah "How much for all this? What do I owe you?" He is prepared for the worst, though admittedly, with the securing of his room here, the worst, in truth, is no longer the worst. But the porter merely shrugs, and it is a gesture so deeply iconic it almost brings tears to the professor's eyes. It means nothing, of course. And everything. Only rarely, in one "Little Italy" or another across America, has he seen its like. Perhaps the Plague Doctor's mask with its painted half-smile has intensified it: for it is an act of ultimate submission as well as negotiation, an acceptance, in effect, of mortality itself. There is a profit to be made, but the profit belongs to the act itself, not to the mortal through whose hands it is temporarily passing. The professor also shrugs, a different kind of shrug, one that says: Yes, we understand each other, I am a poor man, my fashionable camelhair coat which has caught your cunning eye notwithstanding, but not so poor that you do not fancy yourself a handsome return at my expense before we both must die. Yes, it is going to be a very daring figure. The professor, anticipating, not without a certain appetite in spite of his desperate weariness, a long ceremonial haggling, counts out a modest sum, fair but admittedly mean, and hands it to the porter.
To his amazement, the porter hands part of it back. "The dottore is too generous," he says. "I take what comes, to be sure, when the horse is given, one must not sound the teeth, but, alas," he sighs regretfully, "there are regulations, and this is more than they allow. I cannot afford to risk, at my age, you will understand " He ducks his head as though winking behind his mask. "But perhaps the professore will invite us all to a small drop of wine at dinner "
"Then the room -?"
"It is nothing," the porter says with a dismissive gesture.
"Nothing," says the hotel manager.
Which means it's going to cost him an arm and a leg - or an eye out of his head, as they say here - but, under the circumstances, it's cheap at twice the price, especially given the miserable condition of these afflicted parts of his. Though he cannot remember when he last ate, he truthfully has no appetite, but he dreads the chill and loneliness of his room and something deep within him - part peasant, part adopted Yankee - rebels against the idea of turning down a free meal. Besides, the thought of a glass of wine greatly appeals to him just now, a little Prosecco maybe or a sparkling Marzemino, a kind of effervescent libation, as it were, to consecrate his heroic return and to invoke a blessing upon his solemn quest. There are wines here from the Euganean Hills and the Friuli, from the Tyrol and the Piave and the Alto Adige, all but unavailable elsewhere in the world, wines he hasn't tasted since childhood - Refoscos and Amarones, Blauburgunders, Franciacortas and young Teroldego Rotalianos with their almondy bitterness, lush Albanas, Pinot Grigios, pale Tokais from Lison, Traminers, and golden Picolits, sweet Ramandolos: their very invocation resounds like a benison in his ancient head. "Well, two steps, then," he says with a crooked smile. "What are we waiting for? While the dog scratches himself, the hare goes free. As the saying goes. Andiamo pure!"
3. THE GAMBERO ROSSO
It has begun to snow. At first just a flake or two like a fleeting dispatch sent from the world he has left behind, vanishing as quickly as glimpsed. Then a steadier fall, gently swirling, touching down, lifting up, touching down again, until the little square, or campo, outside the steamy window of the Gambero Rosso is aglow with a dusting of the purest white. Like a crisp clean sheet of paper, he thinks, and he is struck at the same time by the poignancy of this metaphor from the old days. For paper is no longer a debased surrogate for the stone tablets of old upon which one hammered out imperishable truths, but rather a ceaseless flow, fluttering through the printer like time itself, a medium for truth's restless fluidity, as flesh is for the spirit, and endlessly recyclable. The old professor sits there at the little osteria window, alone now with his reveries and musings, sipping the last of the fine grappa the landlord has offered him (he has forgotten how lovely the people are here, his people after all, to the extent he could be said to have any: how pleased he is to be among them again!) and staring out on the softly settling snow, letting himself be gradually submerged in a sweet melancholic languor. His erstwhile companions, perhaps sensing the onset of this pensive mood, have graciously slipped away for the moment, the porter to guide the blind hotel proprietor back to prepare the professor's lodgings for the night and to move the luggage up before returning for him here. Yes, blind as well as maimed. Upon leaving the hotel to come here, the unfortunate creature walked straight out the door and down the watersteps into the canal. "Now look what you've done! You've got your feet all wet!" the porter had scolded, pulling him out, and the hotel manager had whined: "My feet are all wet!" Which for some reason had made the professor laugh, made them all laugh. Then they had come here together, the ancient traveler in the middle holding both of the
hobbling locals up, feeling quite jolly and youthful in spite of himself.
They had met no one en route except for a poor deranged drunk, shouting to himself in an empty campo, lamenting the hammerings he had taken and excoriating a no doubt imaginary untrue lover as though she were present, a deplorable reminder that even here, in the noblest of settings, loathsome disorderly lives are possible, beauty being no proof against asininity. Virtue, he had written (the line is now in Bartlett's) in his pioneering transdisciplinary work, The Transformation of the Beast, a "lucid and powerful prose epic in the tradition of Augustine and Petrarch," as it was widely heralded, standing as a fortress against the false psychologism of the day (there was perhaps in this work a youthful fascination with beastliness rather than its transcendence, since successfully purged, but it remained to this day the most convincing composite image of the Genius-in-History), is sanity. Indeed it would have done the crazy man in the campo no harm, what with all his ravings about untamable beasts and savage natures untouched by kindness and unredeemable evil fates (or fairies, his slurred ramblings were ambiguous), to have read that book before falling victim to his own self-fulfilling prophecies: natures do remain just as they first appear if they are completely mad. However, the poor creature, storming up and down a bridge over and over as though in the forlorn hope, a hope repeatedly renewed even when repeatedly baffled, that it might one time translate him to greater heights - up into one of Tiepolo's sky-high parades perhaps, though nothing so fair was above him now - did succeed in startling the professor as they passed by with what amounted to a demented paraphrase of another of his famous sayings, this one from the book the world best knows him by, The Wretch, his first essay in unabashed autobiography, stark precursor to Mamma, his current work-in-progress. Originally little more than a film treatment, notes for a storyboard, as it were, The Wretch had evolved into a program guide to the completed motion picture, sold in the lobbies, and from there into a comprehensive best-selling assault upon all the heretical modern and eventually postmodern (he was a man ahead of his time) denials of what in a famous coinage he called "I-ness," a masterpiece whose single message (other than learning not to be naughty and helping one's parents when they are sick and poor) was that each man makes himself and thus the world: "Character counts!" "Making makes the made mad!" is what the poor devil cried in his delirium, his voice eerily hollow as though coming from the other world. "Crackers! Curses! Listen to me and go back home!" Then he rushed to a church wall and beat his dark bony head against it, wailing forth his "Woe! Woe! Woe!" ("Guai! Guai! Guai!" - or maybe it was "Cry! Cry! Cry!") and eliciting from the beak-nosed porter in his role as the Plague Doctor the laconic remark: "That's what happens to people who get all their ideas on one side of their head, dottore: it tips their brains over."
He has been introduced here at the Gambero Rosso as un gran signore, and in truth has been treated as such by the beaming host, who seems to be chef, waiter, barkeep, and master of ceremonies all in one, as liberal with his wine as with his chatter, accepting their incongruous lot with that democratic grace and forbearance typical of the people of these islands, so leery of popes and kings alike, even joining them briefly for a plateful of stuffed pig's trotters and a Pinot Bianco from Collio, much recommended and indeed nothing amiss. On entering this simple inn with its yellow painted walls and tattered football posters and plastic wine barrels, he had felt suddenly that he had been here before, not in this particular osteria of course, nothing so mawkishly improbable as that - rather, it recalled for him all those village osterias of his childhood, too long forgotten, this one now their quintessence. What was it? A certain rancidity in the frying oil perhaps, the scrape of the cheap chairs on the wooden floors, the frayed napkins, a sharpness to the Parmesan on the tripe - whatever it was, he was overtaken by a sudden sorrow, and a sudden joy, as though life itself were reaching out for him in one last loving embrace, an embrace in which he feels himself still happily, if wistfully, enfolded.
Unable to sham an appetite which has utterly abandoned him in his weariness and excitement, the professor has nibbled at all the dishes for old times' sake yet eaten little, suffering, as it were, a mental indigestion of memories and anticipations churned up in the language by which he means to capture it all, the individual words springing up and flowering now in his head like golden coins on a magic tree, all atinkle with their manifest profundity and poetry. Zin! zin! zin! they go. I should be taking notes, he thinks. The blind hotel proprietor, likewise, complaining of a "grave indisposition of the gut, as it is called," said he could eat very little, settling in the end for a few modest portions of mullet al pomodoro, grilled cuttlefish, sea bass baked in salt, razor clams, and stuffed crabs, the house specialty, and finishing with sweetbreads and mushrooms, plus a simple risotto with sliced kidneys trifolato, smoked eels, and prawns with chicken gizzards and polenta, all of it consumed noisily from beneath the grim visor of his bauta mask, pressed upon his plate like a pale severed head, his one black-gloved hand left free thereby to clutch his glass, from which he seemed not so much to drink the wine as to snort it.
The porter, contrarily, protesting that the night's exertions had aroused in him a most woeful discomfort in the stomach that closely resembled appetite, declared that he intended to consume at one sitting all that the liberality of il buon dottore had bestowed upon him, down to the last quattrino, speaking in the old way, and in demonstration of this proclamation proceeded to devour monumental quantities of tortellini and cannelloni, penne all'arrabbiata, rich and tangy, spaghetti with salt pork and peppers, heaps of thick chewy gnocchi made from cornmeal, tender pasticcio layered with baked radicchio from Treviso, pickled spleen and cooked tendons (or nervetti, as they call them here, "little nerves," slick and translucent as hospital tubing), bowls of risi e bisi and sliced stuffed esophagus (the professor skipped this one), fennel rolled in cured beef, and breaded meatballs with eggplant alla parmigiana. His doctor unfortunately having put him on a strict regimen (and here the masked porter patted his overflowing hips plaintively), he was denied the pleasures of the fish course, but he was able, in all good conscience, to round off his evening's repast with a dish of calf's liver alla veneziana, wild hare in wine sauce with a homely garnishing of baby cocks, beef brains, pheasants, and veal marrow, a small suckling lamb smothered in kiwi fruit, sage, and toasted almonds, and a kind of fricassee of partridges, rabbits, frogs, lizards, and dried paradise grapes, said to be another famous specialty of the house and particularly recommended for persons on stringent diets. "Ah, that was its own death!" he exclaimed on crunching up the last of the little birds, his gravelly old voice greased now to a mellow rumble. "I'm full as an egg!"
Of course there was an abundance of wine to be had with all this food, for as the porter put it: "You can't build a wall without mortar, professore!" True, true, and, given the hearty generosity of the hotel manager in providing such a feast, even if he himself in his jet-lagged condition was able to enjoy so little of it, how could he refuse them all a few simple bottles, especially since in this respect at least he was able to join in the festivities. Indeed, it was the delicate whisper of a fizzy Cartizze from Valdobbiadene, the soft cheeky blush in a Pinot Grigio from the Veneto, the meaty brusqueness of a young Friulian Refosco, the tangy, faintly sour aroma of a spilled bottle of Venegazzu Riserva as it spread through the tablecloth stiffened with stains (not to mention the evaporation of his own reserve as the wines coursed through his age- and travel-stiffened limbs: good wine makes good blood, as they say here) that most pungently drew him back to the drama of his origins, leaving him now in this delicious metaphysical torpor, blessed as it were with purposeful idleness, at rest in the face of perfection - the very indolence in effect of Paradise itself, wherein self-knowledge is not pursued but intuitively received: seek not and (a belch arises from some deep inner well like a kind of affirmation of the pneuma, and he welcomes it, clothing it in his spirit as it climbs toward the world, hugging it to his heart as he might a ch
ild, caressing it at the back of his throat as though to hone its eloquence, releasing if finally with a kind of tender exultation:) - WUURRRP!- and ye shall find
"How's that, signore? You have lost something?"
"Ah! No, I said, I feel fine! Another round, my friend - while we wait!"
Though he shouldn't, of course. Thinking out loud like that, always worse when he's had a couple, but the magic of this moment and this place has him utterly entranced, and he wants to prolong the moment, to reach, if he can, the very dizzying heart of that enchantment. This, this, is what I have come back for, he thinks, sipping the pale grappa with its stalky aroma, its harsh green flavor, faintly reminiscent of winter pears and vanilla, his father's favorite drink. The old man brewed it himself, aging it under the stairs in an old oak barrel black with antiquity, and every week Maestro Ciliegia, as they called him because of his notorious love for grappa and the cherrylike nose it conferred upon him (he can't remember his real name, it doesn't matter), would drop by with a little something for them, some fried pastry or a basket of figs or a few scraps of firewood, and his father would invite him in then for "a drop of riserva," as he called it, dignifying it in that way, Maestro Ciliegia protesting all the way to the barrel. Then they would pull the broken-down table up to the cot and the rickety old chair up to the table, and commence a game of bazzica with cards as soft as empty pockets, or sometimes a chess match with little pegs and splinters only they knew how to identify, Maestro Ciliegia reminding his father each week that if he would only bring the table over to his workshop he would put a new leg on it, his father replying each week that the last time he visited that place he got pregnant, he would rather live with a ruined table than a ruined reputation. There would be more trips to the grappa barrel and sooner or later a piece would seem to move by itself on the chessboard or a card would magically turn up twice in one round, the joking would turn to insults, the words to pokes and punches, and soon the room would be a shambles, both men scratched and bruised, their ears and noses bit, their buttons torn off and their wigs scattered, and then from somewhere under all the rubble, his father would say: "Another drop, Maestro Ciliegia?" "One more spot perhaps before I go."