“Let him up!” said a voice from outside our entangled heap.
It was only a piping falsetto of a voice, but it was loud and commanding. The five boys stopped pounding on me, and one after another, although reluctantly, peeled off me. Even when I was unencumbered, I still had to lie there for a bit and get my breath back before I could stand.
The other boys were shuffling their bare feet and sullenly regarding the owner of the voice. I was surprised to see that they had obeyed a mere girl. She was as ragged and aromatic as they were, but smaller and younger than any of them. She wore the short, tight, tubelike dress worn by all Venetian girl children until about the age of twelve—or I should say she wore the remains of one. Hers was so tattered that she would have been quite indecently exposed, except that what showed of her body was the same dingy gray color as her frock. Perhaps she derived some authority from the fact that she, alone of the urchins, wore shoes—the cloglike wooden tofi of the poor.
The girl came close to me and maternally brushed at my clothes, which were now not very disparate from her own. She also informed me that she was the sister of the boy whose nose I had bloodied.
“Mama told Boldo never to fight,” she said, and added, “Papa told him always to fight his own fights without help.”
I said, panting, “I wish he had listened to one of them.”
“My sister is a liar! We do not have a mama or a papa!”
“Well, if we did, that is what they would tell you. Now pick up that fish, Boldo. It was hard enough to steal.” To me she said, “What is your name? He is Ubaldo Tagiabue and I am Doris.”
Tagiabue means “built like an ox,” and I had learned in school that Doris was the daughter of the pagan god Oceanus. This Doris was too pitifully skinny to merit the surname, and far too dirty to resemble any water goddess. But she stood staunch as the ox, imperious as the goddess, as we watched her brother obediently go to pick up the discarded fish. He could not exactly pick it up; it had several times been stepped on during the brawl; he had more or less to gather it up.
“You must have done something terrible,” Doris said to me, “to have made him throw our supper at you.”
“I did nothing at all,” I said truthfully. “Until I hit him. And that was because he called me a cavron.”
She looked amused and asked, “Do you know what that means?”
“Yes, it means one must fight.”
She looked even more amused and said, “A cavron is a man who lets his wife be used by other men.”
I wondered why, if that was all it meant, the word should be such a deadly insult. I knew of several men whose wives were washerwomen or seamstresses, and those women’s services were used by many other men, and that excited no public commotion or private vendeta. I made some remark to that effect, and Doris burst out laughing.
“Marcolfo!” she jeered at me. “It means the men put their candles into the woman’s scabbard and together they do the dance of San Vito!”
No doubt you can divine the street meaning of her words, so I will not tell you the bizarre picture they brought to my ignorant mind. But some respectably merchant-looking gentlemen were strolling nearby at that moment, and they recoiled from Doris, their various mustaches and beards bristling like quills, when they heard those obscenities shouted by so small a female child.
Bringing the mangled corpse of his fish cradled in his grimy hands, Ubaldo said to me, “Will you share our supper?” I did not, but in the course of that afternoon he and I forgot our quarrel and became friends.
He and I were perhaps eleven or twelve years old then, and Doris about two years younger, and during the next few years I spent most of my days with them and their somewhat fluid following of other dockside brats. I could easily have been consorting in those years with the well-fed and well-dressed, prim and priggish offspring of the lustrisimi families, such as the Balbi and the Cornari—and Zia Zulia used every effort and persuasion to make me do so—but I preferred my vile and more vivacious friends. I admired their pungent language, and I adopted it. I admired their independence and their fichevelo attitude to life, and I did my best to imitate it. As could be expected, since I did not slough off those attitudes when I went home or elsewhere, they did not make me any better beloved by the other people in my life.
During my infrequent attendances at school, I began calling Fra Varisto by a couple of nicknames I had learned from Boldo—“il bel de Roma” and “il Culiseo”—and soon had all the other schoolboys doing the same. The friar-maistro put up with that informality, even seemed flattered by it, until gradually it dawned on him that we were not likening him to the grand old Beauty of Rome, the Colosseum, but were making a play on the word culo, and in effect were calling him the “landmark of buttocks.” At home, I scandalized the servants almost daily. On one occasion, after I had done a thing reprehensible, I overheard a conversation between Zia Zulia and Maistro Attilio, the maggiordomo of the household.
“Crispo!” I heard the old man exclaim. That was his fastidious way of uttering a profanity without actually saying the words “per Cristo!” but he managed, anyway, to sound outraged and disgusted. “Do you know what the whelp has done now? He called the boatman a black turd of merda, and now poor Michiel is dissolving in tears. It is an unforgivable cruelty to speak so to a slave, and remind him that he is a slave.”
“But Attilio, what can I do?” whimpered Zulia. “I cannot beat the boy and risk injuring his precious self.”
The chief servant said sternly, “Better he be beaten young, and here in the privacy of his home, than that he grow up to earn a public scourging at the pillars.”
“If I could keep him always under my eye …” sniffled my nena. “But I cannot chase him throughout the city. And since he took to running with those popolazo boat children …”
“He will be running with the bravi next,” growled Attilio, “if he lives long enough. I warn you, woman: you are letting that boy become a real bimbo viziato.”
A bimbo viziato is a child spoiled to rottenness, which is what I was, and I would have been delighted with a promotion from bimbo to bravo. In my childishness, I thought the bravi were what their name implies, but of course they are anything but brave.
The skulking bravi are the modern Vandals of Venice. They are young men, sometimes of good family, who have no morals and no useful employment, and no ability except low cunning and perhaps some swordsmanship, and no ambition except to earn an occasional ducat for committing a sneak murder. They are sometimes hired for that purpose by politicians seeking a short road to preferment, or merchants seeking to eliminate competition by the easiest means. But, ironically, the bravi are more often utilized by
This is no digression from my history, for I did live to become a bravo. Of sorts.
However, I was speaking of the time when I was still a bimbo viziato, when Zia Zulia complained of my being so often in the company of those boat children. Of course, considering the foul mouth and abominable manners I acquired from them, she had good reason to disapprove. But only a Slav, not Venice-born, would have thought it unnatural that I should loiter about the docks. I was a Venetian, so the salt of the sea was in my blood, and it urged me seaward. I was a boy, so I did not resist the urge, and to consort with the boat children was as close as I could then get to the sea.
I have, since then, known many seaside cities, but I have known none that is so nearly a part of the sea as is this Venice. The sea is not just our means of livelihood—as it is also for Genoa and Constantinople and the Cherbourg of the fictional Bauduin—here it is indissoluble from our lives. It washes about the verge of every island and islet composing Venice, and through the city’s canals, and sometimes—when the wind and the tide come in from the same quarter—it laps at the very steps of the Basilica of San Marco, and a gondolier can row his boat among the portal arches of Samarco’s great piazza.
Only Venice, of all the world’s port cities, claims the sea for its bride, and annually affirms that espousal with priests and panoply. I watched the ceremony again just last Thursday. That was Ascension Day, and I was one of the honored guests aboard the gold-encrusted bark of our Doge Zuane Soranzo. His splendid buzino d’oro, rowed by forty oarsmen, was but one of a great fleet of vessels, crowded with seamen and fishermen and priests and minstrels and lustrisimi citizens, going in stately procession out upon the lagoon. At the Lido, the most seaward of
