(1991) Pinocchio in Venice Read Online Free PDF Page A

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