I was by now convinced. “And where do we buy the zafràn?”

“We do not. We grow it.” He put on the table beside the brick another object; I would have said it was a bulb of ordinary garlic. “That is a culm of the crocus flower. The Compagnia Polo plants them and harvests from the blossoms.”

I was astonished. “Not in Venice, surely!”

“Of course not. On the teraferma of the mainland southwest of here. I told you it requires innumerable zonte of terrain.”

“I never knew,” I said.

He laughed. “Probably half the people of Venice do not even know that the milk and eggs of their daily meals are extracted from animals, and that those animals must have dry land to live on. We Venetians are inclined to pay little attention to anything but our lagoon and sea and ocean.”

“How long have we been doing this, Doro? Growing crocuses and zafràn?”

He shrugged. “How long have there been Polos in Venice? That was the genius of some one of your long-ago ancestors. After the time of the Romans, zafràn became too much of a luxury to cultivate. No one farmer could grow enough of it to make it worth his while. And even a landowner of great estates could not afford all the paid laborers that crop would require. So zafràn was pretty well forgotten. Until some early Polo remembered it, and also realized that modern Venice has almost as big a supply of slaves as Rome had. Of course, we now have to buy our slaves, not just capture them. But the gathering of crocus stigmi is not an arduous labor. It does not require strong and expensive male slaves. The puniest women and children can do it; weaklings and cripples can do it. So that was the cheap sort of slaves your ancestor bought; the sort the Compagnia Polo has been acquiring ever since. They are a motley sort, of all nations and colors—Moors, Lezghians, Circassians, Russniaks, Armeniyans—but their colors blend, so to speak, to make that red-gold zafràn.”

“The foundation of our fortune,” I repeated.

“It buys everything else we sell,” said Isidoro. “Oh, we sell the zafràn too, for a price, when the price is right—to be used as a foodstuff, a dye, a perfume, a medicament. But basically it is our company’s capital, with which we barter for all our other articles of merchandise. Everything from Ibiza’s salt to Còrdoba’s leather to Sardinia’s wheat. Just as the house of Spinola in Genoa has the monopoly of trading in raisins, our Venetian house of Polo has the zafràn.”

The only son of the Venetian house of Polo thanked the old clerk for that edifying lesson in high commerce and bold endeavor—and, as usual, sauntered off again to partake of the easy indolence of the boat children.

As I have said, those children tended to come and go; there was seldom the same lot living in the derelict barge from one week to the next. Like all the grown-up popolàzo, the children dreamed of somewhere finding a Land of Cockaigne, where they could shirk work in luxury instead of squalor. So they might hear of some place offering better prospects than the Venice waterfront, and they might stow away aboard an outbound vessel to get there. Some of them would come back after a while, either because they could not reach their destination or because they had and were disillusioned. Some never came back at all, because—we never knew—the vessel sank and they drowned, or because they were apprehended and thrown into an orphanage, or maybe because they did find “il paese di Cuccagna” and stayed there.

But Ubaldo and Doris Tagiabue were the constants, and it was from them that I got most of my education in the ways and the language of the lower classes. That education was not force-fed to me in the way Fra Varisto stuffed Latin conjugations into his schoolboys; rather, the brother and sister parceled it out to me in fragments, as I required it. Whenever Ubaldo would jeer at some backwardness or bewilderment of mine, I would realize that I lacked some bit of knowledge, and Doris would supply it.

One day, I remember, Ubaldo said he was going to the western side of the city, and going by way of the Dogs’ Ferry. I had never heard of that, so I went along, to see what strange kind of boat he meant. But we crossed the Grand Canal by the quite ordinary agency of the Rialto Bridge, and I must have looked either disappointed or mystified, for he scoffed at me, “You are as ignorant as a cornerstone!” and Doris explained:

“There is only one way to get from the eastern to the western side of the city, no? That is to cross the Grand Canal. Cats are allowed in boats, to catch the rats, but dogs are not. So the dogs can cross the canal only on the Ponte Rialto. So that is the Dogs’ Ferry, no xe vero?”

Some of their street jargon I could translate without assistance. They spoke of every priest and monk as le rigioso, which could mean “the stiff one,” but it did not take me long to realize that they were merely twisting the word religioso. When, in fine summer weather, they announced that they were moving from the barge hulk to La Locanda de la Stela, I knew that they were not going to reside in any Starlight Inn; they meant that they would be sleeping outdoors for a season. When they spoke of a female person as una largazza, they were playing on the proper term for a girl, la ragazza, but coarsely suggesting that she was ample, even cavernous, in her genital aperture. As a matter of fact, the greater part of the boat people’s language—and the greater part of their conversations, and their interests—dealt with such indelicate topics. I absorbed a lot of information, but it sometimes did more to confuse than to enlighten me.

Zia Zulià and Fra Varisto had taught me to refer to those parts between my legs—if I had to refer to them at all—as le vergogne, “the shames.” On the docks I heard many other terms. The word baggage for a man’s genital equipment was clear enough; and candelòto was an apt word for his erect organ, which is like a stout candle; and so was fava for the bulbous end of that organ, since it does somewhat resemble a broad bean; and so was capèla for the foreskin, which does enclose the fava like a little cloak or a little chapel. But it was a mystery to me why the word lumaghèta was sometimes spoken in reference to a woman’s parts. I understood that a woman had nothing but an opening down there, and the word lumaghèta can mean either a small snail or the tiny peg with which a minstrel tunes each string of his lute.

Ubaldo and Doris and I were playing on a dock one day when a greengrocer came pushing his cart along the esplanade, and the boat wives ambled over to paw through his produce. One of the women fondled a large yellowish cucumber, and grinned and said, “II mescolòto,” and all the women cackled lasciviously. “The stirrer”—I could make out the implications of that. But then two lissome young men came strolling along the esplanade, arm in arm, walking with a sort of springiness in their step, and one of the boat women growled, “Don Meta and Sior Mona.” Another woman glanced scornfully at the more delicate of the two young men and muttered, “That one wears a split seat in his hose.” I had no notion of what they were talking about, and Doris’s explanation did not tell me much:

“Those are the sorts of men who do with each other what a real man does only with a woman.”

Well, there was the main flaw in my comprehension: I had no very clear idea of what a man did with a woman.

Mind you, I was not entirely benighted in the matter of sex, any more than other upper-class Venetian children are—or, I daresay, upper-class children of any other European nationality. We may not consciously remember it, but we have all had an early introduction to sex, from our mothers or our nursemaids, or both.

It seems that mothers and nurses have known, from the beginning of time, that the best way to quiet a restless baby or put it easily to sleep is to do for it the act of manustupraziòn. I have watched many a mother do that to an infant boy whose bimbìn was so tiny that she could only just manipulate it with her finger and thumb. Yet the wee organ lifted and grew, though not in proportion as a man’s does, of course. As the woman stroked, the baby quivered, then smiled, then squirmed voluptuously. He did not ejaculate any spruzzo, but there was no doubt that he enjoyed a climax of release. Then his little bimbìn shrank again to its littlest, and he lay quiet and soon he slept.