“Mefè! You have been eating it and smelling it and wearing it all your life! Zafràn is what gives that special flavor and yellow color to rice and polenta and pasta. What gives that unique yellow color to fabrics. What gives the women’s favorite scent to their salves and pomades. A mèdego uses it, too, in his medicines, but what it does there I do not know.”
“Oh,” I said again, my respect somewhat less for such an everyday article. “Is that all?”
“All!” he blurted. “Hear me, marcolfo.” That word is not an affectionate play on my name; it is addressed to any exceedingly stupid boy. “Zafràn has a history more ancient and more noble even than the history of Venice. Long before Venice existed, zafràn was used by the Greeks and Romans to perfume their baths. They scattered it on their floors to perfume whole rooms. When the Emperor Nero made his entry into Rome, the streets of the entire city were strewn with zafràn and made fragrant.”
“Well,” I said, “if it has always been so commonly available …”
“It may have been common then,” said Isidoro, “in the days when slaves were numerous and cost nothing. Zafràn is not common today. It is a scarce commodity, and therefore of much value. That one brick you see there is worth an ingot of gold of almost equal weight.”
“Is it indeed?” I said, perhaps sounding unconvinced. “But why?”
“Because that brick was made by the labor of many hands and immeasurable zonte of land and a countless multitude of flowers.”
“Flowers !”
Maistro Doro sighed and said patiently, “There is a purple flower called the crocus. When it blooms, it extends from that blossom three delicate stigmi of an orange-red color. Those stigmi are ever so carefully detached by human hands. When some millions of those dainty and almost impalpable stigmi are collected, they are either dried to make loose zafràn, what is called hay zafràn, or they are what is called ‘sweated’ and compressed together to make brick zafràn like this one. The arable land must be devoted to nothing but that crop, and the crocus blooms only once a year. That blooming season is brief, so many gatherers must work at the same time, and they must work diligently. I do not know how many zonte of land and how many hands are required to produce just one brick of zafràn in a year, but you will understand why it is of such extravagant value.”
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.
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 candelòto what his mother had done for it when it was just a bimbìn. 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 good girl.”
You might smile at the assertion that a girl who could talk as she did could be a “good” girl. But there you have evidence of one thing our upper and lower classes have in common: their reverent regard for a maiden’s virginity. To the lustrìsimi and the popolàzo alike, that counts for more than all other feminine qualities: beauty, charm, sweetness, demureness, whatever. Their women may be plain and malicious and ill-spoken and ungracious and slovenly, but they must retain unbroken that little tuck of maidenhead tissue. In that respect at least, the most primitive and barbarous savages of the East are superior to us: they value a female for attributes other than the bung in her hole.
To our upper classes, virginity is not so much a matter of virtue as of good business, and they regard a daughter with the same cool calculation as they would a slave girl in the market. A daughter or a slave, like a cask of wine, commands a better price if it is sealed and demonstrably untampered with. Thus they barter their daughters for commercial advantage or social enhancement. But the lower classes foolishly think that their betters have a high moral regard for virginity, and they try to imitate that. Also, they are more easily frightened by the thunders of the Church, and the Church demands the preservation of virginity as a sort of negative show of virtue, in the same way that good Christians show virtue by abstaining from meat during Lent.
But even in those days when I was still a boy, I found reason to wonder just how many girls, of any class, really were kept “good” by the prevailing social precepts and attitudes. From the time I was old enough to sprout the first fuzz of “hair on my artichoke,” I had to listen to lectures from Fra Varisto and Zia Zulià on the moral and physical dangers of consorting with bad girls. I listened with close attention to their descriptions of such vile creatures, and their warnings about them, and their inveighings against them. I wanted to make sure I would recognize any bad girl at first sight, because I hoped with all my heart that I would soon get to meet one. That seemed quite likely, because the main impression I got from those lectures was that the bad girls must considerably outnumber the good ones.
There is other evidence for that impression. Venice is not a very tidy city, because it does not have to be. All of its discards go straight into the canals. Street garbage, kitchen trash, the wastes from our chamber pots and licet closets, all gets dumped into the nearest canal and is soon flushed away. The tide comes in twice daily, and surges through every least waterway, roiling up whatever matter lies on the bottom or is crusted on the canal walls. Then the tide departs and takes all those substances with it, through the lagoon, out past the Lido and off to sea. That keeps the city clean and sweet-smelling, but it frequently afflicts fishermen with unwelcome catches. There is not one of them who has not many times found on his hook or in his net the glistening pale blue and purple cadaver of a newborn infant. Granted, Venice is one of the three most populous cities of Europe. Still, only half of its citizens are female, and of those perhaps only half are of childbearing age. So the fishermen’s annual catch of discarded infants would seem to indicate a scarcity of “good” Venetian girls.
“There is always Daniele’s sister Malgarita,” said Ubaldo. He was not enumerating good girls, but quite the contrary. He was counting those females of our acquaintance who might serve to wean me from the war of the priests to a more manly diversion. “She will do it with anybody who will give her a bagatìn.”
“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 bagatìn.”
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 batèlo 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 do with her.
From time to time, I tried to atone for my being so often rude to poor old Michièl, so that day I took the oars from him and myself rowed us homeward, while he took his ease under the boat canopy. We conversed as we went, and he told me that he was going to boil an onion when he got to the house.
“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 mèdego, 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.”