Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (37 page)

As Zuleto and I spoke in Venetian, Candio simultaneously translated every line into English for Cosgrove, adding his own ironic commentary. Irked at his son’s tone, certain he was being mocked, Zuleto constantly hectored the boy with comebacks and challenges. Yet it was clear that the two adored and accepted each
other lock, stock, and barrel. Zuleto must have passed thirty cracks, minimum, about la tedesca. But Candio laughed or shrugged at every one. They weren’t like father and son. They were like lovers who are perfectly suited but for one trivial yet recurring problem. Like one’s always on time and one’s always late.

Cosgrove was fascinated with all their byplay. When we left Chioza, he caught me while our hosts were deep in a nautical discussion and asked, “Do they know about us yet?”

“
I
don’t know about us; what do you want from
them?”

“I just mean, can we say gay things?”

“Say whatever you want. This is Italy. There are no language police here. And if someone’s homophobic, that’s
his
problem.”

We had pulled well north into the lagoon, and Candio, driving, had opened her up. Cosgrove leaned over the rail into the spray, enjoying the speed, the freedom. He was shouting for joy, in fact, and Zuleto came over, probably wondering, finally, exactly what transaction the two of us represented.

“Ti piase sta Chioza?” Zuleto asked Cosgrove.

I translated: “Did you like Chioza?”

“Oh, it was the worst place ever,” Cosgrove reported enthusiastically. “What a freak.”

I translated.

“El xe un bravo puto,” said Zuleto, riffling Cosgrove’s hair. Good boy. “Xelo . . . un cuzino?” Is he your cousin or something?

“No,” I said.

“Ma no el fio?” Not your son, surely?

“No.”

I guess it’s now. I got my mouth halfway open when Candio called over to Cosgrove: “Ask my father to tell you his Malamoco story. It is always his favorite, and you will be friends for the whole life.”

“Tell me how to do that,” Cosgrove asked me, his eyes on Zuleto.

I realized that Cosgrove really liked Zuleto (in the “thought he was hot” sense), and for some strange reason I was glad. Maybe
because . . . Anyway, I said, “Tell him, ‘La me diga, sta bela storia de Malamoco.’ ”

Cosgrove did as told, to Candio’s laughing “Ausgezeichnet!” Excellent!

Zuleto, ignoring the German, pointed over the water to the Lido, on our right.

“It was there, imagine it, that Venice built her capital, Malamoco. Out in the sea, as far as possible from the barbarians invading the mainland. Then came a vicious conqueror to destroy Venice: Pepino, the son of the terrible emperor Carlo Mango.” Charlemagne. To his son’s back he added, volume knob up, “A German.”

“Francese,” Candio laughed. French.

“He was born in Aachen,” Zuleto countered, emphasizing a German pronunciation. “Does that sound French?”

“Forza, pare,” Candio replied, still laughing. Go on, Dad.

“Pepino, he arrives by sea and takes Malamoco. Now comes la cria. Take hostages! Prisoners will be killed! Like all Germans, they want to crush everyone, this is known.”

“That was a thousand years ago, of course,” Candio put in.

“But everyone has run from Malamoco, before Pepino comes. They are all al Rialto, in the center of the lagoon. Safe from Germans. Only one person is left in all Malamoco to greet Pepino, a woman so old that she couldn’t manage the trip of escape and so ugly that no one would bother to hurt her. Una popolana! Un’ eroina!”

Cosgrove, fascinated, said, “She will find the secret way out!”

“La deve!” She must! “But you should know about our wonderful Venetian lagoon that it’s mostly very shallow, with just a few channels deep enough for boats. These are clearly marked by posts,
but!
When everyone abandons Malamoco, he takes with him all the posts. Now it is nothing but lagoon, quiet and waiting. What will happen? What is Venice? What is Pepino?”

“How he loves to tell this,” Candio noted.

“So the ugly old woman is brought before Pepino, shoved
roughly in the German manner, of course. We hear Pepino’s famous words: ‘Dove il Rialto?’ ” Which way to Venice?

“Now her pungent reply. Turning to point to the glorious towers of the great city of Saint Mark evangelista himself, the old woman cries, ‘Sempre drito!’ ”

Cosgrove turned to me for a translation, for I’d taken over from Candio throughout this recitation.

“Straight ahead!” I told him.

“And so Pepino and his army sailed straight ahead, and there upon the mudflats of the lagoon they were wrecked to pieces. And Venice lived and is always here. Look! Where we are? This is where it happened, just here a thousand years ago.”

Then Cosgrove threw his arms around Zuleto and pressed his cheek against Zuleto’s, and loved Zuleto. They were at one in this way for quite some little time, then broke apart.

“Grazie,” said Cosgrove, pronouncing it Venetian-style: “Grassye.”

Zuleto looked at me and . . . well, what would
you
have done? I nodded, that’s all.

I wasn’t off the hook about applying my silver tongue to Zuleto’s family problems. As we docked in Venice, he gestured to me behind Candio’s back that Now Was the Time. To be sure that I would perform, Zuleto took Cosgrove hostage. Well, just out to dinner. Still, I was expected to make some sort of dent in Candio’s marriage plans, and I hated that. Who am I to interfere? Who, even, is Zuleto to? It’s Candio’s life, so it’s Candio’s choice to make, to his profit or pain.

Besides, wasn’t it ridiculous for me to have an opinion about this girl without even having met her?

Candio was affable about it all, especially once I assured him that he had the right to diagnose his own condition without reference to a second opinion.

“It is always this,” he told me, as we ordered “ombre” (“shadows,” denoting late-afternoon white wines) at a café near the Accademia.
“Your family is telling you what it is, what you should do. The old, they think they know everything. Mostly. I believe they are jealous because you are young and can do anything. For him, now, it is all . . . how you say ‘un zoco da puti’?”

“ ‘Downhill all the way’ ”

“I am sympathetic to him, you know this. It was shipping in evil water for him, raising a child without the mother. He is grouchy but kind. And against others, always on my side. That is a rule with us. But now, when he is to beat sullo stesso chiodo senza fin . . .” When he hammers on one nail incessantly . . .

“Has he met her?”

Candio laughed ironically. “When he learns that she is German, the stadium collapses and the game is surrendered. No more football shall be played today. But what?” He shrugged. “Do you, for example, tell your young friend how to live?”

“Yes, but he wants to be told. He’s not a former motherless child. He’s a current orphan. So he feels desperately in need of parenting.”

Candio thought that over for a minute, then said, “What?”

“Cosgrove never really had a childhood, as far as I can make out. He’s undergoing it now. Under my supervision.”

Candio nodded. “This is strange American thing. In Italy, everything has been the same for two thousand years. In America, everything changes every five or six years.
That
is place to be young!”

One day of exploring later, and Cosgrove officially challenged me to a race through the town. We took the bus to the Public Gardens stop, and, at the bench, I laid down the rules.

“No transport of any kind, if you are a serious contestant. On foot, from here to the station.”

“Can I use my map?”

“Those who need to crib will never win. The race is to the fantasist who carries all the data in his head.”

“Can
I
use
my
map?”

“If you like.”

“When do we start?”

I was backing away from him, slow and smiling, hands in my pockets, heading for the Naval Museum on my way north to the first leg of my secret route, along the Fondamente Nuove, which run virtually opposite to the Zattere: along the
north
edge of the place. Life would be seen to be filled with opposites, if only we noticed them.

“When do we start?” Cosgrove repeated, following me.

“We have started, fio mio. And I’m ahead. I’m winning already.”

I waved at him, and instantly he took off down the Riva dei Sette Martiri while I nipped up the Viale Garibaldi. Some seventy-five minutes later, sitting on another bench, this one in the Papadopoli Gardens across the Grand Canal from the station, I saw Cosgrove stagger in from San Simeone Piccolo. I had a bottle of water for him and a salami sandwich, which he tore into. Now that we were on the Continent, breakfast consisted of coffee and rolls, and Cosgrove ravened all day.

“This is the greatest place ever,” he announced after a while of eating. “I’m never going back. I expect I would have to be pathetically grateful to you if I didn’t suspect a hidden motive.”

“There’s none.”

“But Virgil told me that everyone is selfish all the time. He said some appear generous and others sly, but if you
really
know . . .”

“Do you think that’s true?”

After a bit, he said, “It could be. But would that mean Virgil is selfish, too? I owe everything to him, for saving me from the desperate life of the streets. Is he now saying that he did it for his own good reason, and not out of tender love and compassion for Cosgrove?”

“There was once a composer of great symphonies, German and total, as symphonies should be. Fear overtook him after his Eighth, for both Beethoven and Schubert died once they’d composed their Ninth. It seemed, to this composer, a barrier beyond which Death beckoned.”

“But what about all those Haydn symphonies?” Cosgrove asked, scarfing up the last of his sandwich. “They go past a hundred.”

“Haydn was guacamole to this composer. He dealt in
profound.”

“Next stop,” said Cosgrove, napkining off, “a gelato stand.”

“The composer thought of a trick to play. He would
entitle
his Ninth Symphony. So it wouldn’t be his Ninth at all. It would be . . .
The Song of the Earth
. Then he would write a Ninth, having got through the terror.”

I paused, feeding Cosgrove’s interest. “So he what?” he asked.

“So he made very public this new symphony. And he thought he had fooled his fate.”

Now Cosgrove was interested. “Then somebody stabbed him?”

“Then he wrote his Ninth Symphony.”

“And?”

“And he promptly died. Because
nobody
fools his fate.”

Almost delicately, Cosgrove asked, “Is this another of those little tales to tell that are really about what’s happening now?”

“Let’s start back,” I said, rising. “We’re having dinner with Zuleto’s family tonight.”

“I like Zuleto,” said Cosgrove, following me across the bridge to the bus stop.

“So I notice.”

“What was he like before?”

“Exactly like Candio, physically.”

“Yum.”

“But very intense. Everything a do-or-die proposition.”

“Did you ever fuck with him?”

“No.”

“Did you want to?”

“Ah, here’s our boat.”

It was an express, and we charged on amid a heavy taste of tourists of many nations, all first-timers going Wow! As we took
off, to the clicking of many cameras and the silent turning of video machines, Cosgrove jumped up and cried, “Mi son Cosgrove, el fio de Venezia!” I’m Cosgrove, the boy of Venice!

Then, to sounds of appreciation, the cameras turned to catch Cosgrove in his guiltlessly elated tumult. “We’re going to move here,” he told them, while executing poses.

About Zuleto’s dinner in famiglia I was somewhat apprehensive. Wouldn’t
somebody
wonder about Cosgrove and me and pipe up with a Troublesome Question? I didn’t know the Venetian for what Cosgrove and I are, and, besides, I enthusiastically resent and habitually reject questions of a personal nature from people I hardly know.

(Boys and girls, let me share my list of the Five Forbidden Questions:

How much money do you earn?
Are you a top or a bottom?
Did one of your female ancestors mate with an animal?
Is that your boy friend?
How old are you?

The reason why these questions are forbidden is that if the subject wanted you to have this information, he would have volunteered it himself. Remember, too, that none of us enjoys letting someone else set the limits of our privacy. It may seem hypocritical of me in view of how ruthlessly I have detailed the lives of my friends; but any reader who has reached this late stage of the fourth volume in this series must have noticed that there are a lot of Interior Contradictions in these stories. I dream that that’s their charm.)

Back to the tale at hand: No one in the whole dinner party paid the slightest attention to the, uh, income-tax status of Cosgrove and me, and Zuleto had thoughtfully invited a few English speakers: a woman reporter for some French magazine who only wanted to
know about Sylvester Stallone, and an English academic émigré researching some arcane bit of Byroniana for a monograph.