As my eyes adapted to the darkness, I noted that Malgarita was indeed hairy. Her palely shining breasts seemed the only hairless part of her. In addition to the frowze on her head and the fuzz on her upper lip, she was shaggy of legs and arms, and a large plume of hair hung from either armpit. What with the darkness in the hold and the veritable bush on her artichoke, I could see considerably less of her female apparatus than I had seen of Zia Zulià’s. (I could smell it, however, Malgarita being no more given to bathing than were any of the boat people.) I knew that I was expected to insert myself somewhere down there, but …

Wham! from the hull, and a yowl from the cat, further confounding me. In some perplexity, I began to feel about Malgarita’s nether regions.

“Why are you playing with my pota?” she demanded, using the most vulgar word for that orifice.

I laughed, no doubt shakily, and said, “I am trying to find the—er—your lumaghèta.”

“Whatever for? That is of no use to you. Here is what you want.” She reached down one hand to spread herself and the other to guide me in. It was easily done, she was so well reamed.

Wham! Squawl!

“Clumsy, you jerked it out again!” she said peevishly, and did some brisk rearranging.

I lay there for a moment, trying to ignore her piggishness and her aroma and the dismal surroundings, trying to enjoy the unfamiliar, warm, moist cavity in which I was loosely clasped.

“Well, get on with it,” she whined. “I have not yet peed this morning.”

I commenced to bounce as I had seen Michièl do, but, before I could get fairly started, the barge hold seemed to darken still more before my eyes. Though I tried to restrain and savor it, my spruzzo gushed unbidden and without any sensation of pleasure whatever.

Wham! Yee-oww!

“Oh, che braga! What a lot of it!” Malgarita said disgustedly. “My legs will be sticking together all day. All right, get off, you fool, so I can jump!”

“What?” I said groggily.

She wriggled out from under me, stood up, and took a jump backward. She jumped forward, then backward again, and the whole barge rocked. “Make me laugh!” she commanded, between jumps.

“What?” I said.

“Tell me a funny story! There, that was seven jumps. I said make me laugh, marcolfo! Or would you rather make a baby?”

“What?”

“Oh, never mind. I will sneeze instead.” She grabbed a lock of her hair, stuck the frowzy ends of it up one of her nostrils, and sneezed explosively.

Wham! Rowr-rr-rrr … The cat’s complaint died off as, evidently, the cat died, too. I could hear the boys squabbling about what to do with the carcass. Ubaldo wanted to throw it in onto me and Malgarita, Daniele wanted to throw it in some Jew’s shop door.

“I hope I have jarred it all out,” said Malgarita, wiping at her thighs with one of her bed rags. She dropped the rag back on her pallet, moved to the opposite side of the hold, squatted down and began copiously to urinate. I waited, thinking that one of us ought to say something more. But finally I decided that her morning bladder was inexhaustible, and so crept out of the barge the way I had come in.

“Sana capàna!” shouted Ubaldo, as if I had just then joined the company. “How was it?”

I gave him the jaded smile of a man of the world. All the boys whooped and hooted good-naturedly, and Daniele called, “My sister is good, yes, but my mother is better!”

Doris was nowhere about, and I was glad I did not have to meet her eyes. I had made my first journey of discovery—a short foray toward manhood—but I was not disposed to preen myself on that accomplishment. I felt dirty and I was sure I smelled of Malgarita. I wished I had listened to Doris and not done it. If that was all there was to being a man, and doing it with a woman, well, I had done it. From now on, I was entitled to swagger as brashly as any of the other boys, and swagger I would. But I was privately determining, all over again, to be kind to Zia Zulià. I would not tease her about what I had found in her room, or despise her, or tell on her, or wrest concessions with the threat of telling. I was sorry for her. If I felt soiled and wretched after my experience with a mere boat girl, how much more miserable my nena must feel, having no one willing to do it with her but a contemptible black man.

However, I was to have no opportunity to demonstrate my noble-mindedness. I got home again to find all the other servants in a turmoil, because Zulià and Michièl had disappeared during the night.

The sbiri had already been called in by Maistro Attilio, and those police apes were making conjectures typical of them: that Michièl had forcibly abducted Zulià in his batèlo, or that the two of them had for some reason gone out in the boat in the night, overturned it, and drowned. So the sbiri were going to ask the fishermen on the seaward side of Venice to keep a close eye on their hooks and nets, and the peasants on the Vèneto mainland to keep a lookout for a black boatman conveying a captive white damsel. But then they thought to investigate the canal right outside the Ca’ Polo, and there lay the batèlo innocently moored to its post, so the sbiri scratched their heads for new theories. In any event, if they could have caught Michièl even without the woman, they would have had the pleasure of executing him. A runaway slave is ipso facto a thief, in that he steals his master’s property: his own living self.

I kept silent about what I knew. I was convinced that Michièl and Zulià, alarmed by my discovery of their sordid connection, had eloped together. Anyway, they were never apprehended and never heard from again. So they must have made their way to some back corner of the world, like his native Nubia or her native Bohemia, where they could live squalidly ever after.

5

I was feeling so guilty, for so many different reasons, that I did something unprecedented for me. Of my own accord, not impelled by any authority, I betook myself to church to make my confession. I did not go to our confino’s San Felice, for its old Pare Nunziata knew me as well as the local sbiri did, and I desired a more disinterested auditor. So I went all the way to the Basilica of San Marco. None of the priests there knew me, but the bones of my namesake saint lay there, and I hoped they would be sympathetic.

In that great vaulted nave, I felt like a bug, diminished by all the glowing gold and marble and the holy notables aloft and aloof in the ceiling mosaics. Everything in that most beautiful building is bigger than real life, including the sonorous music, which brays and bleats from a rigabèlo that seems too small to contain so much noise. San Marco’s is always thronged, so I had to stand in line before one of the confessionals. Finally, I got in and got launched on my purgation: “Father, I have too freely followed where my curiosity has led me, and it has led me astray from the paths of virtue … .” I went on in that vein for some time, until the priest impatiently requested that I not regale him with all the circumstances preliminary to my misdemeanors. So, albeit reluctantly, I fell back on formula—“have sinned in thought and word and deed”—and the pare decreed some number of Paternosters and Avemarìas, and I left the box to begin on them, and I got hit by lightning.

I mean that almost literally, so vivid was the shock I felt when I first laid eyes on the Dona Ilaria. I did not then know her name, of course; I knew only that I was looking at the most beautiful woman I had yet seen in my life, and that my heart was hers. She was just then coming out of a confessional herself, so her veil was up. I could not believe that a lady of such radiant loveliness could have had anything more than trivial to confess, but, before she lowered her veil, I saw a sparkle as of tears in her glorious eyes. I heard a creak as the priest shut the slide in the box she had just quitted, and he too came out. He said something to the other supplicants waiting in line there, and they all mumbled grouchily and dispersed to other lines. He joined the Dona Ilaria and both of them knelt in an empty pew.