(1991) Pinocchio in Venice Read Free Page B

fresh information at the end of his cane, turns to swish wildly at the professor again, backs off the top step, misses the second, finds only the lip of the third, lands gingerly, cassock flying, on the fifth, his momentum propelling him to the seventh and eighth, where he strikes the one bag that has not tumbled to the bottom, and, his heels soaring gracefully now above his cowled head, completes his descent on all but his feet, yowling all the way down like a baby with colic or a cat in heat. At the bottom, where he seems to have landed on all fours, if he has four, the monk scrambles about in bewildered circles, searching for his cane, then, finding instead the professor's umbrella, rushes away without a backward glance, so to speak, disappearing down one of the dark foggy alleyways, his frantic tapping slowly trailing away into the night.
    "Mezza calzetta!" the porter shouts after him. He sets the trembling professor down on his feet at last, twists his finger meaningfully at his blue hat. "That turnip-head lacks a Friday, his stupid little wheels are out of place!" He pauses, seeming to regret his outburst, tipping his head to one side, stooping lower, clasping his hands in his armpits. "Still, a holy man, a happy heart no doubt, and blind as a mole in the bargain, we mustn't hit him with the cross, even if he does lack a bit of salt in his pumpkin. Eh, dottore? No, it takes all kinds, as the saying goes, saints are more famous for feast days than brains, we can't all be blessed with square heads. Come along now," he adds, starting down, planting both feet heavily on each step, "we'd better gather up your wares before the ants carry it all away."
        The professor follows the decrepit porter down the steps, keeping close to the stone balustrade, snatching up the bag the monk tripped over when the porter passes it by and dragging it along, too shaken by his recent brush with disaster to feel imposed upon or indignant, his knees weak as water still from the memory of nothing but empty space beneath them, his heart still knocking in his chest. It was not any false attachment to property that led him to that rash and potentially fatal impulse, he knows, but rather a profound unconstrainable feeling of duty toward her, a feeling nothing short of chivalric devotion, at least that was how it felt in the hot rush of the moment, foolish perhaps but genuine and selfless, as though her own survival were somehow bound up in the safety of the contents of his luggage and she herself were about to suffer the shocks and blows of that calamitous fall. And once again, he thinks, picking up his damp, battered bags at the foot of the bridge and loading them onto the trolley, I have failed her. I have brought her here and then, like a false servant, I have deceived and abused her. Metaphorically speaking, of course. "Don't make an illness of it, dottore," as the porter says now, strapping the luggage to the trolley, "everything makes broth, as they say." Yes, he is all too easily carried away by his own turns of phrase. Everything is well packed, after all, his luggage is solid and water-resistant, his computer is nested in polystyrene - all things considered, it was probably the easiest way to get everything down from up there. And even his reckless solicitude, his terrible moment of mortal peril, his pang of remorse afterwards: all this, in the end, will serve him as surely and faithfully as he serves her. "Just two steps away! Volere č potere!"
        "E patire," the old traveler adds, where there's a will there's suffering, but only in jest, for in truth his spirits, since he stepped down off the bridge, have been slowly rising. The bitterness that had gripped him in the railway station and then followed him up the Scalzi bridge seems gradually to be melting away, as though his own hard geometry, brought along from America like a kind of shield, or at least a badge of identity, were now being lovingly dissolved in the coiling