good as open rebellion. He became more bored with talk of Empire the further he lumbered upward out of the slough of adolescence; shunned every hint of glory like the sound of a leper's rattle. China, the Sudan, the East Indies, Vheissu had served their purpose: given him a sphere of influence roughly congruent with that of his skull, private colonies of the imagination whose borders were solidly defended against the Establishment's incursions or depredations. He wanted to be left alone, never to 'do well' in his own way, and would defend that oaf's integrity to the last lazy heartbeat.
The cab swung left, crossing the tram tracks with two bone-rattling jolts, and then right again into Via dei Vechietti. Evan shook four fingers in the air and swore at the driver, who smiled absently. A tram came blithering up behind them; drew abreast. Evan turned his head and saw a young girl in dimity blinking huge eyes at him.
'Signorina,' he cried, 'ah, brava fanciulla, sei tu inglesa?'
She blushed and began to study the embroidery on her parasol. Evan stood up on the cab's seat, postured, winked, began to sing Deh, vieni alla finestra from Don Giovanni. Whether or not she understood Italian, the song had a negative effect: she withdrew from the window and hid among a mob of Italians standing in the center aisle. Evan's driver chose this moment to lash the horses into a gallop and swerve across the tracks again, in front of the tram. Evan, still singing, lost his balance and fell halfway over the back of the carriage. He managed to catch hold of the boot's top with one flailing arm and after a deal of graceless floundering to haul himself back in. By this time they were in Via Pecori. He looked back and saw the girl getting out of the tram. He sighed as his cab bounced on past Giotto's Campanile, still wondering if she were English.
II
In front of a wine shop on the Ponte Vecchio sat Signor Mantissa and his accomplice in crime, a seedy-looking Calabrese named Cesare. Both were drinking Broglio wine and feeling unhappy. It had occurred to Cesare sometime during the rain that he was a steamboat. Now that the rain was only a slight drizzle the English tourists were beginning to emerge once more from the shops lining the bridge, and Cesare was announcing his discovery to those who came within earshot. He would emit short blasts across the mouth of the wine bottle to encourage the illusion. 'Toot,' he would go, 'toot. Vaporetto, io.'
Signor Mantissa was not paying attention. His five feet three rested angular on the folding chair, a body small, well-wrought and somehow precious, as if it were the forgotten creation of any goldsmith - even Cellini - shrouded now in dark serge and waiting to be put up for auction. His eyes were streaked and rimmed with the pinkness of what seemed to be years of lamenting. Sunlight, bouncing off the Arno, off the fronts of shops, fractured into spectra by the falling rain, seemed to tangle or lodge in his blond hair, eyebrows, mustache, turning that face to a mask of inaccessible ecstasy; contradicting the sorrowing and weary eyeholes. You would be drawn inevitably again to these eyes, linger as you might have on the rest of the face: any Visitors' Guide to Signor Mantissa must accord them an asterisk denoting especial interest. Though offering no clue to their enigma; for they reflected a free-floating sadness, unfocused, indeterminate: a woman, the casual tourist might think at first, be almost convinced until some more catholic light moving in and out of a web of capillaries would make him not so sure. What then? Politics, perhaps. Thinking of gentle-eyed Mazzini with his lambent dreams, the observer would sense frailness, a poet-liberal. But if he kept watching long enough, the plasma behind those eyes would soon run through every fashionable permutation of grief - financial trouble, declining health, destroyed faith, betrayal, impotence, loss - until eventually it would dawn on our tourist that he had been attending no wake after all: rather a street-long festival of sorrow with no booth the same, no exhibit offering anything solid enough to merit lingering at.
The reason was obvious and disappointing: simply that Signor Mantissa himself had been through them all, each booth was a permanent exhibit in memory of some time in his life when there had been a blond seamstress in Lyons, or an abortive plot to smuggle tobacco over the Pyrenees, or a minor assassination attempt in Belgrade. All his reversals had occurred, had been registered: he had assigned each one equal weight, had learned nothing from any of them except that they would happen again. Like Machiavelli he was in exile, and visited by shadows of rhythm and decay. He mused inviolate by the serene river of Italian pessimism, and all men were corrupt: history would continue to recapitulate the same patterns. There was hardly ever a dossier on him, wherever in the world his tiny, nimble feet should happen to walk. No one in authority seemed to care. He belonged to that inner circle of deracinated seers whose eyesight was clouded over only by occasional tears, whose outer rim was tangent to rims enclosing the Decadents of England and France, the Generation of '98 in Spain, for whom the continent of Europe was like a gallery one is familiar with but long weary of, useful now only as shelter from the rain, or some obscure pestilence.
Cesare drank from the wine bottle. He sang:
Il piove, dolor mia
Ed anch'io piango . . .
'No,' said Signor Mantissa, waving away the bottle. 'No more for me till he arrives.'
'There are two English ladies,' Cesare cried. 'I will sing to them.'
'For God's sake -'
Vedi, donna vezzosa, questo poveretto,
Sempre cantante d'amore come -
'Be quiet, can't you.'
'-un vaporetto.' Triumphantly he boomed a hundred-cycle note across the Ponte Vecchio. The English ladies cringed and passed on.
After a while Signor Mantissa reached under his chair, coming up with a new fiasco of wine.
'Here is the Gaucho,' he said. A tall, lumbering person in a wideawake hat loomed over them, blinking curiously.
Biting his thumb irritably at Cesare, Signor Mantissa found a corkscrew; gripped the bottle between his knees, drew the cork. The Gaucho straddled a chair backwards and took a long swallow from the wine bottle.
'Broglio,' Signor Mantissa said, 'the finest.'
The Gaucho fiddled absently with his hatbrim. Then burst out: 'I'm a man of action, signor, I'd rather not waste time. Allora. To business. I have considered your plan. I asked for no details last night. I dislike details. As it was, the few you gave me were superfluous. I'm sorry, I have many objections. It is much too subtle. There are too many things that can go wrong. How many people are in it now? You, myself and this lout.' Cesare beamed. 'Two too many. You should have done it all alone. You mentioned wanting to bribe one of the attendants. It would make four. How many more
