Assuredly my own mother often did that for me, and I think it is good that mothers do so. That early manipulation, besides being an excellent pacifier of the infant, clearly stimulates development in that part of him. The mothers in the Eastern countries do not engage in that practice, and the omission is sadly evident when their babies grow up. I have seen many Eastern men undressed, and almost all had organs pitifully minute in comparison to mine.
Although our mothers and nursemaids gradually leave off doing that, when their children are about two years old—that is, at the age when they are weaned from the breast milk and introduced to wine—nevertheless, every child retains some dim recollection of it. Therefore a boy is not puzzled or frightened when he grows to adolescence and that organ seeks attention of its own accord. When a boy wakes in the night with it coming erect under his hand, he knows what it wants.
“A cold sponge bath,” Fra Varisto used to tell us boys at school. “That will quell the upstart, and avert the risk of its shaming you with the midnight stain.”
We listened respectfully, but on our way home we laughed at him. Perhaps friars and priests do endure involuntary and surprising spruzzi, and feel embarrassed or somehow guilty on that account. But no healthy boy of my acquaintance ever did. And none would choose a cold douche in place of the warm pleasure of doing for his candeloto what his mother had done for it when it was just a bimbin. However, Ubaldo was contemptuous when he learned that those night games were the total extent of my sexual experience to date.
“What? You are still waging the war of the priests?” he jeered. “You have never had a girl?”
Once again uncomprehending, I inquired, “The war of the priests?”
“Five against one,” Doris said, without a blush. She added, “You must get yourself a smanza. A compliant girl friend.”
I thought about that and said, “I do not know any girls I could ask. Except you, and you are too young.”
She bridled and said angrily, “I may not have hair on my artichoke yet, but I am twelve, and that is of marrying age!”
“I do not wish to marry anybody,” I protested. “Only to—”
“Oh, no!” Ubaldo interrupted me. “My sister is a
“Malgarita is a fat pig,” said Doris.
“She is a fat pig,” I concurred.
“Who are you to sneer at pigs?” said Ubaldo. “Pigs have a patron saint. San Tonio was very fond of pigs.”
“He would not have been fond of Malgarita,” Doris said firmly.
Ubaldo went on, “Also there is Daniele’s mother. She will do it and not even ask a bagatin.”
Doris and I made noises of revulsion. Then she said, “There is someone down there waving at us.”
We three were idling the afternoon away on a rooftop. That is a favorite occupation of the lower classes. Because all the common houses of Venice are one story high, and all have flat roofs, their people like to stroll or loll upon them and enjoy the view. From that vantage, they can behold the streets and canals below, the lagoon and its ships beyond, and Venice’s more elegant buildings that stand above the mass: the domes and spires of churches, the bell towers, the carved facades of palazzi.
“He is waving at me,” I said. “That is our boatman, taking our batelo home from somewhere. I might as well ride with him.”
There was no necessity for me to go home before the bells began ringing the nighttime coprifuoco, when all honest citizens who do not retire indoors are supposed to carry lanterns to show that they are abroad on honest errands. But, to be truthful, I was at that moment feeling a bit apprehensive that Ubaldo might insist on my immediately coupling with some boat woman or girl. I did not so much fear the adventure, even with a slattern like Daniele’s mother; I feared making a fool of myself, not knowing what to
“What?” I said, unsure I had heard him right.
The black slave explained that he suffered from the bane of boatmen. Because his profession required him to spend most of his time with his backside on a hard and damp boat thwart, he was often troubled by bleeding piles. Our family medego, he said, had prescribed a simple allevement for that malady. “You boil an onion until it is soft, and you wad it well up in there, and you wind a cloth around your loins to hold it there. Truly, it does help. If you ever have piles, Messer Marco, you try that.”
I said I would indeed, and forgot about it. I arrived home to be accosted by Zia Zulia.
“The good friar Varisto was here today, and he was so angry that his dear face was bright red, clear to his tonsure.”
I remarked that that was not unusual.
She said warningly, “A marcolfo with no schooling should speak with a smaller mouth. Fra Varisto said you have been shirking your classes again. For more than a week this time. And tomorrow your class must be heard in recitation, whatever that is, by the Censori de Scole, whoever they are. It is required that you participate. The friar told me—and I am telling you, young man—you
(I realize that I have characterized as “old” almost all the people I knew in my youth. That is because they seemed so to my young eyes, though only a few of them really were. The company’s clerk Isidoro and the chief servant Attilio were perhaps as old as I am now. But the friar Varisto and the black slave Michiel were no more than middle-aged. Zulia of course seemed old because she was about the same age as my mother, and my mother was dead; but I suppose Zulia was a year or two younger than Michiel.)
That night, when I determined to make amends to her, I did not wait for Zia Zulia to do her customary before-bedtime rounds of the house. I went to her little room and rapped on the door and opened it without waiting for an avanti. I probably had always assumed that servants did nothing at night except sleep to restore their energies for service the next day. But what was happening in that room that night was not sleep. It was something appalling and ludicrous and astounding to me—and educational.
Immediately before me on the bed was a pair of immense buttocks bouncing up and down. They were distinctive buttocks, being as purple-black as aubergines, and even more distinctive because they had a strip of cloth binding a large, pale-yellow onion in the cleft between them. At my sudden entrance, there was a squawk of dismay and the buttocks bounded out of the candlelight into a darker corner of the room. This revealed on the bed a contrastingly fish-white body—the naked Zulia, sprawled supine and splayed wide open. Her eyes were shut, so she had not noticed my arrival.
At the buttocks’ abrupt withdrawal, she gave a wail of deprivation, but continued to move as if she were still being bounced upon. I had never seen my nena except in gowns of many layers and floor length, and of atrociously garish Slavic colors. And the woman’s broad Slavic face was so very plain that I had never even tried to imagine her similarly broad body as it might look undressed. But now I took avid notice of everything so wantonly displayed before me, and one detail was so eminently noticeable that I could not restrain a blurted comment:
“Zia Zulia,” I said wonderingly, “you have a bright red mole down there on your—”
Her meaty legs closed together with a slap, and her eyes flew open almost as audibly. She grabbed for the bed covers, but Michiel had taken those along in his leap, so she seized at the bed curtains. There was a moment of consternation and contortion, as she and the slave fumbled to swaddle themselves. Then there was a much longer moment of petrified embarrassment, during which I was stared at by four eyeballs almost as big and luminous as the onion had been. I congratulate myself that I was the first to regain composure. I smiled sweetly upon my nena and spoke, not the words of apology I had come to say, but the words of an arrant extortioner.
With smug assurance I said, “I will not go to school tomorrow, Zia Zulia,” and I backed out of the room and closed the door.
“At this hour?” he said, mildly scandalized. “Malgarita is likely still asleep, the pig. But I will see.”
He ducked back inside the barge, and Doris, who had overheard us, said to me, “I do not think you ought to, Marco.”
I was accustomed to her always commenting on everything that everybody did or said, and I did not always appreciate it, but I asked, “Why ought I not?”
“I do not want you to.”
“That is no reason.”
“Malgarita is a fat pig.” I could not deny that, and I did not, so she added, “Even I am better looking than Malgarita.”
Impolitely I laughed, but I was polite enough not to say that there was small choice between a fat pig and a scrawny kitten.
Doris kicked moodily at the mud where she stood, and then said in a rush of words, “Malgarita will do it with you because she does not care what man or boy she does it with. But I would do it with you because I do care.”
I looked at her with amused surprise, and perhaps I also looked at her for the first time with appraisal. Her maidenly blush was perceptible even through the dirt on her face, and so was her earnestness, and so was a dim prefiguring of prettiness. At any rate, her undirtied eyes were of a nice blue, and seemed extraordinarily large, though that was probably because her face was somewhat pinched by lifelong hunger.
“You will be a comely woman someday, Doris,” I said, to make her feel better. “If you ever get washed—or at least scraped. And if you grow more of a figure than a broomstick. Malgarita already is grown as ample as her mother.”
Doris said acidly, “Actually she looks more like her father, since she also grew a mustache.”
A head with frowzy hair and gummy eyelids poked out through one of the splintery holes in the barge hull, and Malgarita called, “Well, come on then, before I put on my frock, so I do not have to take it off!”
I turned to go and Doris said, “Marco!” but when I turned back impatiently, she said, “No matter. Go and play the pig.”
I clambered inside the dark, dank hull and crept along its rotting plank decking until I came to the hold partition where Malgarita squatted on a pallet of reeds and rags. My groping hands encountered her before I saw her, and her bare body felt as sweaty and spongy as the barge’s timbers. She immediately said, “Not even a feel until I get my bagatin.”
I gave her the copper, and she lay back on the pallet. I got over her, in the position in which I had seen Michiel. Then I flinched, as there came a loud wham! from the outside of the barge hull, but just beside my ear, and then a screech! The boat boys were playing one of their favorite games. One of them had caught a cat—and that is no easy feat, although Venice does teem with cats—and had tied it to the barge side, and the boys were taking turns running and butting it with their heads, competing to see who would first mash it to death.