Freewheeling: The Collected Stories

By Tom Foran Clark

“It was like being Peter Pan, flying around,” our book begins. In “Freewheeling: The Collected Stories” the author gives a clear nod and tip of the hat also to the picaresque works of Kerouac, Pirsig, Bellow, Cervantes, and Rabelais. Here are the adventures of two young vagabonds, Emery and Pike.

“Pike had made a plan,” the story goes. “He was going to ride a bike south through Spain to Morocco, then east across North Africa to Italy. Emery proposes, “I’ll join you if you do it backwards” – from northern Italy south to Sicily and on to Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Spain. Going to Crete had come as an afterthought. They’d actually believed they would never see each other again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664158061

Tom Foran Clark

Tom Foran Clark, a native Californian born in Burbank, went to public schools, completed his undergraduate studies in Logan, Utah, and graduate studies in Boston, Massachusetts. He has also lived in New Hampshire, Western Massachusetts, France, and Germany. Beyond his writing and vagabonding, Clark has worked, variously over the years, as a graphic artist and copy editor in advertising firms, as a quality assurance engineer for assorted eBooks and marketing firms and, occasionally, off and on, as a public library director. Long a bookman, he has for many years been the proprietor of the online bookstore The Bungalow Shop. Clark is the author of The Significance of Being Frank, a biography of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, the 19th century Concord, Massachusetts schoolteacher, radical abolitionist, and chronicler and biographer of the lives and times of John Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Clark is also the author of another collection of stories, The House of Great Spirit, and the novel Jacob’s Papers.

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Copyright © 2021 by Tom Foran Clark.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Thank you to Robert D. Morritt for permission to use content about ancient

Minoa from his book Stones That Speak, © 2010, in this book.

Published in cooperation with Xlibris by

The Bungalow Shop Press,

P.O. Box 2398, Idyllwild, California 92549.

Rev. date: 02/17/2021

Xlibris

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www.Xlibris.com

825709

CONTENTS

RIDING IN ITALY

Arcadia

Milan

Venice

Florence

On Top Of The World

Perugia

Assisi

The Tiber

Rome

Paradise Coast

Naples

Pompeii

Magna Graeca

Palermo

DERAILED IN NORTH AFRICA

Tunis

Sousse

Medenine

Gafsa

Ghardia

Laghouat

Ain-Sefra

Tlemcen

Taza

Beni-Mellal

Marrakech

Moulay-Idriss

Taza-Haut

Tetouan

RAMBLING IN SPAIN

Algeciras

Marbella

Malaga

Grenada

The Coast Of Light

Cartagena

Sagunto

Toledo

Madrid

Santiago

Costa Da Morte

Cap Finisterra

La Rioja

Barcelona

WRITING ON CRETE

Grez-Sur-Loing

Heraklion

Loutro

The Sacred Dance

Dionysus

Triangles

Sega

Minoa

The Minotaur

The Maenads

Denmark

Vritomartis

Chania

Pandora

For Serge Castel

and Christa Bock

Freewheel. Noun. The part of the rear gear cluster that

allows the bike to coast without the pedals turning.

RIDING IN ITALY

ARCADIA

It was like being Peter Pan, flying around, a friend of mine said of his life – at the end of it. I think the morphine helped. He often asked me about my journey – my long bike ride – how nice was that? It was fabulous! Here are my tales. In these stories, I am Emery.

It began in New England, years ago now. It was late summer, a perfect time for idle contemplation. Still unclear to Emery, who’d just got through four years at UMass, Amherst, was what he’d actually gone to college for. His father had insisted it hadn’t been to get an education but to develop character. Burn! he had advised his son.

Burn. By this he knew his father meant he should catch fire: Richard Mark Emery should rise and shine. According to the father, the son didn’t need to do anything in particular except to be, most honestly and deeply and completely, himself. Heraclitean fire is at the heart of everything, his father had often told him. Search your heart. Whether we run, walk, sit, daydream, or sleep deeply, the fire is burning.

Lying in the backyard hammock of a western Massachusetts friend one afternoon, Emery (he liked being called by his last name) searched his heart. There was so much to know and be and do. Outside of the aching, overarching desire to mate with goddesses – the sacred siren phantasms of his ineluctable lust or craving, screaming genes – Emery didn’t know what he wanted. He only knew that he wanted. How he wanted! He felt his will was less a fire than a flood in him, rising high over the banks. The urge, the urge, the urge. But, what to do? What to do?

One idea rose up with sudden force and clarity: Emery would board a boat bound for Europe. He’d go to foreign shores among total strangers and walk everywhere. He’d go to sea and see the old world and its treasures with his own eyes. He’d walk from Amsterdam to Paris, then on to Florence and to Rome, turning north to Munich, Copenhagen, Stockholm – those havens – and meet girls here and there and revel in the art and architecture all along the way.

Walking was a means of transportation he could afford – he hadn’t saved much. He was hoping to earn wages, to be a worker on the cargo ship carrying him, but it didn’t happen like that. Emery sold his bookshelves, stereo, pots and pans, and mandolin. He bought a backpack and boat fare for about the same price as a one-way airplane ticket and was soon one of eight passengers in four cabins on a Rotterdam-bound Polish freighter.

The M/SR Polansky departed from Wilmington, North Carolina in fierce weather on a stormy September morning, while it was still dark out. With high winds lashing at the boat, lightning cracking the sky, and thunder rumbling over the ocean, the ship was loosed from its moorings. The boat tipped and rocked, creaking, churning up waves as it sliced its set course across the angry, turbulent surface of the deep, calm sea.

Eight days later, in glistening sunshine, the ship arrived in Holland. From Rotterdam, Emery took a train to Amsterdam where, for the better part of a week, he walked in art museums. Then he hitchhiked to Paris and, after eight or nine swirling days amid its miracles, Emery made his way south to the village of Grez-sur-Loing at the edge of the Fontainbleau forest, where he got a job at a quaint bookshop called The George Sand. There Emery pitched in, helping the proprietor Walt Lowen, a Don Quixote look-alike, in exchange for bathroom privileges, a couch to sleep on, and lessons in bookselling.

The bookseller’s apprentice was unpacking boxes at the front of the store in the second week of his apprenticeship when a lanky, deeply tanned guy in a way-oversized beige fur-trapper’s coat (with the thick wool lining of it pushing out not only at his neck but also at his wrists) extended a telescopic lens from the camera at his belly and, crouching down to take a photo of the aqueduct over the river, suddenly fell sideways. Flat on his back on the sidewalk, the guy raised his fist and swore at the blue sky, God in heaven, Jesus Christ, the apostles and the saints, the world’s unfairness, injustice in general and, in particular, this indignity.

Emery rushed out to help the fallen character get up. He had brown eyes and brown hair with just light downy hair on his golden face. He was slightly taller than his rescuer, who was six feet tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, with black hair and, on most days, a red-brown beard. Behind the big front windows of The George Sand, Walt Lowen – with a salt-and-pepper goatee and harshly etched, sallow face – scowled and made vivid, large, unsubtle gestures indicating, Move away from the shop! Move! Move! Go on!

Emery led the guy across the street to the café of the Hotel Chevillon where, over a few cups of café au lait he calmed himself. Then the coffee got him talking. He spoke of his recently arriving in Grez-sur-Loing after a delightful week of baby-sitting the three beautiful daughters of an aristocratic couple living in a huge wedding-cake of a mansion in Brussels, Belgium before going on to Paris from which he’d wandered into the woods of Fontainbleau and stumbled into Grez. He said he’d been born in Canada but as an infant had been abandoned by his parents who’d moved from Montreal to Quebec, then to Trois-Saumons, and on to Riviére-Du-Loup, then still further east and north of these to yet more distant realms higher on the St. Lawrence River. I was sent by my mother and father to be raised by my aunt and uncle – my father’s brother and his second wife – in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

"Get out of here! I was born in Massachusetts – out in the west – in West Derry."

"I was raised in Lawrence, and that’s my name: Lawrence Dulac Pike. You’ve heard of Lawrence of Arabia, no? Well, I’m Lawrence of Lawrence, but everybody just calls me Pike."

The two shook hands.

Everybody calls me Emery. My folks insist they named me Richard Mark Emery after the actor Richard Widmark. Why they dropped the ‘Wid’ in Widmark, I don’t know – just whimsically, I suppose. Emery told Pike he’d decided to hit the road after his folks had moved west to California, to a suburb a stone’s throw from Hollywood. I felt I had four choices – stay in West Derry, move to Los Angeles, walk the Appalachian Trail, or board a freighter bound for Europe.

Pike said he knew about whimsy. "Everybody’s all over the place, telling me what not to do. This absolutely has not helped me – it has not dog-gone helped at all." Pike had made a plan: he was going to ride a bike south through Spain to Morocco, then east across North Africa to Italy.

A bike, Emery pondered. That’s a thought. Listen, here’s what I’m thinking, Pike. I’ll join you if you start in Italy and do the journey backwards.

MILAN

It was hard for Emery to say goodbye to lovely Grez-sur-Loing and The George Sand, but Walt Lowen said for sure another lousy dough-faced book lover would show up to replace him, not to worry, so Emery didn’t feel so bad. He and Pike shared a bottle of cheap red table wine by the bridge, then walked to the Garé to board a late night train going down to Monaco, a dazzling place of Baroque casinos, palms, and terraced gardens with views all out to the sparkling ocean.

The sky clouded over even as the two moved on, walking eastward along the Cote d’ Azur to the luxurious Ligurian coast of Riviera villas and chateaus. They walked all the way to San Remo, where they got a ride in a Fiat to Genoa. A second lift took them north all the way to Milan, where they were deposited, at sunset, in the gridlock of downtown – a fogbound madhouse of a million angry honking, gnashing, sideswiping cars.

Pike and Emery, finding themselves at the Romanesque Basilica of San Babila, asked a priest for directions to the Duomo, the central cathedral, a dizzying display of filigree and pinnacles, even in the spare light of just streetlamps, at the center of encroaching mayhem and confusion – streets and cars and human horde. They turned down a side street and went, piazza by piazza, out of the bustling city, through quieting neighborhoods, to the youth hostel.

In the morning, they set out in search of bikes. Pike strolled out and returned with a banged and dented, wobbly, pale blue ten-speed. On a red, embroidered carpet in front of a bike shop on Corso Garibaldi, Emery thought he saw the bike of his dreams, but things just seemed to get better from there.

This shop sold Sergio Rossignoli bicycles – and more: Cicli, Moto, Gomme, Accessori, Vendite all’ ingrosso ed al Minuto. The silver-mustachioed proprietor led Emery into his shop, and showed his his glistening array of fine bikes. He’d look from Emery’s face to a bike, and frown or smile and grasp his chin in contemplation. Then, suddenly, a look of joy spread into his face as he brought down a stunning Mediterranean blue new Rossignoli bicycle that immediately sent Emery’s imagination reeling. And that, indeed, would be Emery’s bike – the bike on which he would set out freewheeling.

With this bike, Emery bought a rack that old Giusseppi the bike-seller bolted on, over the back wheel. To that, Giusseppi strapped Emery’s backpack – then the tent to that. Emery put his other wares in a front pouch attached to the handlebars. He could have got panniers, deluxe twin front and back luggage bags, but he didn’t feel he could afford the additional expense.

Giusseppi was just checking the air pressure in Emery’s tires when Pike pulled in on his claptrap, his pack loaded with wine, cheese, canned peaches, and a dozen candles he’d got from area taverns, inns, and restaurants. Thinking Pike had showed up to sell or trade his bike, Giusseppi waved him away, conspicuously irritated. Emery managed to explain that he and Pike were going to be traveling together. The old man first shook his head, sighed heavily, and rolled his eyes. But soon Giusseppi was overcome with stronger emotions, launching the boys on their journey. It was obvious he was weeping, Pike said later, but he was trying hard not to show it – as if he were sending away his own beloved sons.

Pike and Emery rode right into the heart of Milan, where the old men argued and the women shopped, young men everywhere hovering near the bright faced girls. From the Duomo to the Piazza Scala spread a grand, elaborate gallery arcade, indoors, a covered roof arching across the tops of building walls that once were outdoors. It felt, to the two wide-eyed, eager pedlars, like they were passing through a birth canal into the great, wide world.

They passed by the Sforzesco Castle, a dim green-gray, and went to Bramante’s Cloister, then to Santa Maria delle Grazie, the monastery where is housed Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Emery was ready for it. He’d done his homework. He remembered art afficionado Bernard Berenson saying how he’d felt repulsion toward this picture. Berenson had found the faces uncanny but their expressions forced. Not Emery. Standing before the Last Supper in real time, in the real world, looking up at the real thing, he was really moved by the motion and emotion in the picture, very natural. Da Vinci had made his work look easy.

Leonardo had come to Milan at the age of thirty, playing his flute and doodling designs for bridges, tanks, and catapults. He’d scribbled, in his backwards (mirror-image) handwriting, satires, jests, and foreboding prophecies. Cultural historian Sir Kenneth Clark had called Leonardo disorganized, putting off the evil day when he should have to do something with the mass of material he had collected. But Sir Kenneth could see Leonardo was one of the greatest draftsmen ever – but not because he had such special insight into the world and the things themselves: It is truer to say that he knew about things because he drew so well.

So it was circular, Emery figured. If you wanted to see the beauty that there is, you had to echo it in your own soul, so that your eyes could discern it as you got it down with pencil, pen, or any other apparatus, tool, or means.

In his notebook, Emery doodled swirls based on the movement he perceived enlivened Da Vinci’s nearly disintegrated painting. The combination of Milan’s infamous dampness and Da Vinci’s experiments with paint had done the fresco no good. Adding insult to injury, seventeenth century monks had boldly gone at it with sledgehammers, putting a door smackdab in and under the middle of Leonardo’s painted table, they had thought so little of its lasting power.

Even as Emery pondered these things, a pretty girl in a steel-gray cotton dress came up beside him and gazed, too. She looked over his shoulder at what he was doing and very sweetly giggled. Emery looked at her – he felt he could love this person with all his heart, forever. She said something very sweet in Italian. Emery blushed. She smiled and gestured toward the magnificent picture before them. Her movement was as gracious, gentle, and affecting as that of any of the disciples in the picture, or of an ocean breeze on a summer evening. Emery was on the verge of either hugging her or crying when Pike walked up, talking to himself, saying, The dampness in this place! It’s been raining indoors here a thousand years. Oh hi, he said to the girl. "I’m Pike. This is Emery. What is-a your-a name-a?"

Again the girl giggled. Pike confessed, We of course don’t speak a word of Italian, mon cher belladonna mona Madonna. He bowed to her, took Emery by the elbow, and led him out. Don’t look back, he said.

Bells were peeling. Men were up in the bell tower, pulling ropes. A Fanfare Carabinier – a police marching band – played Sousa-like rousing tunes, and crowds gathered to listen. After the men had put on their hats with feathers on top and had played their last triumphant piece, the audience applauded and quickly dispersed. A hundred or more pigeons winged in overhead, then swooped down. Pike said afterwards he’d felt they were headed straight for his head but then, at the last possible moment, had changed their minds.

Pike and Emery rode out to the Ospedale Maggiore, an overly ornate, double-tiered facade with a grand inner square. Columned arcade galleries ran the length of the street, the Via Festa del Perdono. Carabinier officers conducted traffic with the dignity, calm, and grace of Monte Carlo blackjack dealers in beige safari helmets, black suits, and white gloves and armbands.

They rolled over to the Brera Gallery to see the pictures there by Raphael, mainly. Pierro della Francesca’s great Urbino Altarpiece was there, too. They went out through the courtyard, emerging, exhausted, onto the Piazza de la Scala.

"Soulful eyes!" Pike raved, and Emery knew what he meant. He meant the eyes of the Italian girls and women. Their piercing, liquid gaze. Sublime poise. Soulful eyes.

At the damp, rust-laden Poldi Pezzoli museum was a glut of swords, guns, armor, objects d‘art, ticking gilded clockworks, Murana glass, Dresden china, Persian carpets, and a hundred tiny sculptural pieces showing strong men wrestling mightily or the twin infant founders of ancient Rome, Romulus and Remus, drinking milk from the underbelly of their mother, a she-wolf. Of all he’d yet seen in Milan, Pike found these to be the most fascinating. Though he never took a single photograph of any one of these, he was enamored of them, clearly. They seemed to hold him spellbound. Now Emery took him by the elbow and pulled him away. Pike’s attention was wholly diverted from Romulus and Remus, of course, when the two came to stand before Pollaiuolo’s Portrait of a Young Woman and Botticelli’s golden girls.

Pike and Emery rode down streets with names like Marooni, Diaz, Alovicci, Garibaldi, Verdi, Torino, Stefano, Fulcorina, Magenta, Vercellini, Papiniano, De Amicus, Monte Bianco, Monte Rosa, Corduso, Amendola, Conciliazore, Burchiello. There were bars, grocery stores, pastry shops, and candy stores all over. They loaded up on fresh bread. It was a cold, foggy morning in mid-November when they left Milan, rolling down Route SS-11 into bleak industrial suburbs interspersed with golden cornfields, heading for Brescia.

They were rolling. The sun came out. The elucidating clarity of the vast blue Italian sky, and the wind at their backs, thrilled them. Dogs snapped at their ankles and pedals. Tractors emerged from broad stands of poplars and willows to mow the fields of wheat and maize as clouds collected overhead again, now threatening rain.

Just outside Treriglio, the two stopped at a supermercado for milk, cookies, pickled vegetables, fresh tomatoes, and red Rosso Classico wine. They traveled on to a gravel-bottomed riverbed, roadside, and ate, then went on a ways and pitched their tent under one full tree of dark brown clinging autumn leaves in a long line of such trees along one side of a long and narrow triangular meadow. A thick veil of mist descended even as they laid out their sleeping bags. By candlelight, they spread out and studied their maps, scheming routes. Their sleep was interrupted only by the intermittent clattering and whistles of passing trains.

The chirping of birds awoke them in the cold, cold morning. The fog lay heavy; visibility reached to only about ten feet in any direction. Shivering, they packed, took down the tent, and went back to the main road. Roosters sensed their presence, or departure, and complained, that dim morning, with a muffled cacophony of cock-a-doodling.

They walked along the road carefully, simply to stay on it, and eventually found the way that led to Lago del Gardo, where they rode a while along the lake, and then continued on. Somewhere along that road, Emery’s left kneecap suddenly gave way, as if a pin in there had snapped and left the whole unit flapping. Ten or fifteen minutes passed, and the pain lessened, and he figured they could proceed. They did continue, but the pain in Emery’s knew grew worse. At a pharmacy in the middle of nowhere, somewhere amid endless cornfields, he bought an ointment and an elastic bandage wrap. Emery’s face was twisted up into a toothy, squinting, grinning sneer, his unkempt hair curling out from under his woolen ski cap in contorted knots.

It was a long time before evening came again. Pike and Emery finally spotted a sort of natural stadium that seemed a fine place to stop for the night. About the size of a football field, the yellow dandelion filled meadow was bounded on two sides by bleachers of tree-covered slopes. Grape vineyards were spread out across the upper plateaus. A switchback road led up to a low hill of grape vines at one end of this meadow, and the highway stretched along a cypress-lined knoll at the other. There they camped.

The next morning, the two struggled to resume their journey. It had rained most of the night. The gloomy gray around them now seemed appropriate for the dull throbbing still in Emery’s knee – the pain was no longer a ripping, shredding sensation. It was not so specific as it had been at the initial onset of agony. No blacksmith’s white-hot pincers clasped his patella now. He felt he could grin and bear it.

They made their way in to Verona while it was still morning. The cathedral stood majestically upright in the very horizontal, foggy town. They rode right on through, stopping only to buy bread, butter, orange marmalade, pain relievers, and chianti. Halfway through the afternoon, the pain in Emery’s knee again flamed up brightly. But he insisted they sail on. Then his knee just plain gave out. Emery hobbled on with his bike, walking all the way to the outskirts of Vicenza, where the two arrived just after nightfall.

They pitched their tent beside train tracks and, in the morning, went straight downtown to see if they could find a pharmacy having something stronger Emery might acquire to kill the pain. For all he knew, the sweet old lady at the counter gave him a bottle filled with magic beans – or perhaps morphine. But it did the trick, whatever it was. Emery was lighter hearted after that, the whole day and night, and into the next day, too. The bells rang out, ding dong, ding dong, ding dong, and he sang along, I’ve been working on the railroad, all the livelong day; I’ve been working on the railroad, just to pass the time away.

They were in Padua by noon. They rode past the university to the Ruben Gardens, and on to the old Church del’Carmine and the Basilica of S. Giustina. The whole effect of this dizzying architectural phenomenon was to inspire nausea, so the two went on to the Chiesa degli Eremitani to see the glorious Giotto frescoes, then on to Saint Anthony’s. There were nuns and priests all over Padua, blessing them profusely every step of their way, and souvenir stands galore. The vendors covered their stands with tarps when the rain began to fall. Pike and Emery headed right out into the lashing downpour. They pitched their tent in a cornfield in the rain.

In the morning, it was still raining, but they kept on. Emery ran out of morphine, or whatever it was, and the bone shards loose in his kneecap, or whatever they were, again hurt like freshly torched hell. He was trying to put up a good front, but on the inside he was biting the bullet, morbidly supposing he’d need to have serious surgery. Emery had visions of ambulances, emergency rooms, doctors, anesthesia, the big light glaring overhead, and the rest – the journey ended. This he did not want.

Emery pedaled on, riding with tremendous passion and resolve, matching Pike’s fairly manic pace. It wasn’t very long before the two arrived in Venice.

VENICE

Pike and Emery entered Venice on the Lido Bridge. Pike was cheerful when they got to the youth hostel, the Ostello, which he immediately dubbed the Flotilla della Vagabondiers. He leaned Emery up against the registration desk like a sack of potatoes and told the fellow at the front desk they’d soared into Venice on their bikes, coasting across the Adriatic waters and Venetian lagoon via the Lido, their coats functioning as sails.

We are the Zeno Brothers, from the eastern United States. My poor brother Emery has taken a wicked spill and he is not of a piece, as you see for yourself. We are in need of considerable and immediate attention.

Assorted other Vagabondiers, idly hanging around the Ostello, overheard Pike’s declamations and drew in closer. Pike repeated, We are the Zeno brothers from New England, Pike and Emery. We have crossed the ocean – and the Lido Bridge – in search of adventure, treasure, and romance. As you see, my brother, he is not of a piece – he is not himself.

Emery knew he had to pull himself together. We just need a cot, he said. A bed – to sleep – that’s all.

The two newcomers wer now led graciously to their bunks, accompanied by half dozen curious Vagabondiers.

What was all that about us flying over the Lido? Emery asked Pike angrily. And me not being of a piece? And who the hell are the Zeno brothers?

The two Zenos were wealthy brothers who’d ventured out, in the 1390s, to new lands in the northern seas, traveling due west from Iceland, returning to Italy with amazing maps and tales that now make evident they must have visited not only Greenland and Newfoundland, but also the coast of Maine - a hundred years before Columbus ventured out.

"How do you come to know all this so suddenly?" Emery demanded.

Pike showed him a pamphlet in which all this was written down. He’d just been holding it to the side, and was simply reading from it. It was free, at the front desk, Pike clarified. While you were telling people to back off and mind their own business and all that, I had a quick look at this literature.

Who did I tell to back off? I didn’t tell anyone to mind their own business, Emery insisted.

Oh Emery, Pike said, You are in a bad way. Lie down. Your whole body must be infested. Are you sure you don’t want to go to a hospital?

I never said I didn’t want to go to a hospital.

"Your mind’s on fire, Emery. You have a fever. You’re boiling. Lie down and close your eyes. Last night, in your sleep, you were screaming, ‘I don’t want to see a doctor! I don’t need surgery! Leave me alone!’"

I had a fever.

I just said that, Emery.

Emery closed his eyes. When he opened them, a beautiful young woman was hovering over him.

"Are you an angel? Emery asked. Have I died? Am I in heaven?"

I am Frida Christensen, she said. You are at the Venice Ostello. You are having a fever like you are being hit by Thor’s hammer, I am thinking. You must keep staying to being warm and lying down, she said. She sat down next to Emery and put her lovely hand on his anguished forehead. Your friend is asking about a doctor and I am telling him I am studying for being a nurse, so I am coming here to you.

This Frida had long blonde hair and high cheekbones. She was porcelain-pale, but cheerfully red-cheeked. Emery, boiling in delirium, asked her outright, Are you actually this beautiful in reality?

You’re nicely speaking – it is sounding very sweet, she said, blushing slightly. But now you must be resting.

Are you ready? Pike called into the room. Let’s get this show on the road.

I am leaving now, but we are to be coming again soon, this Frida said gently, and stood to go.

Frida did not return to the ailing martyr’s bedside that night, because Pike kept her out past the hostel’s curfew, and with only the greatest reluctance did the night clerk let him and her and the others in their group back in. Certainly Frida was not allowed back into the men’s area at that hour. So it was Pike who ministered to Emery now.

How are we feeling? Pike asked him.

Where did you go? Emery answered his question with a question.

We went to the canals, Pike said. "Can you believe it? They have canals here, Emery. They’re beautiful. Little men in funny suits stand up precariously in narrow little boats – gondolas. You have to admire those guys! We visited an elegant but inexpensive little restaurant where we were served squid’s eyes and who knows sliced what from purple porpoises. It could have been eggplant, for all I know. You should have been there, though, Emery. I really missed you. It was a special evening."

Did Frida have any? Emery asked, but Pike had already turned and gone to wash up or brush his teeth or something. Emery closed his eyes and quickly drifted back into his torpid state.

The next morning, Emery felt better. He felt returned to himself, like a package that had been dropped from the back of a truck and run over once or twice but eventually safely delivered. His knee was not in any pain at all. He took out a little ball peen hammer he had with him, and had at himself, trying to locate again the exact place where the shattered bone shards had so harshly stuck themselves into him. But he felt okay – no pain. He could hardly believe it – but there it was. Emery showered gleefully, feeling tremendous joy in every part of him. He put on the cleanest clothes he had, and joined Pike in going down to breakfast.

To-to-to-tooooo, Pike trumpeted. Presenting Brother Zeno, Sir Richard Emery, the Duke of West Derry.

Frida was present, wearing a white blouse with very nicely embroidered smooth and textured filigree all over it, and blue carpenter’s overalls. Glowing with enjoyment of Pike’s antics, she clapped her hands.

Over tea, coffee, orange juice pastries, cheese, and bread sticks, Pike requested Emery tell Frida and the assembled Vagabondiers, as Pike called them, what he remembered of the last forty-eight hours. Not much, Emery admitted. I saw an angel, he said. Lovely Frida, on cue, blushed richly. Emery had a strong feeling he’d just got a moment’s glimpse into time’s standing still for an eternity.

One of the chattier Vagabondiers immediately picked up the slack, relating a story about a haggard fellow traveler who’d claimed he’d seen, in Amsterdam, an exquisite painting by Vermeer. The picture now haunted him. He’d revisited the Rijksmuseum to have another look at this gem, but the picture was gone. He spoke of it to the guards, but they could not place it. And nobody at the museum, as it turned out, had any inkling of what picture he was talking of. The painting was not there; it had never been there, the museum people insisted. (I liked that: the museum people.) They did their damnedest to find it, but it was a no go. This guy was persistent. He kept looking. He ransacked the museum and library people’s books, fiche, files, and records of all kinds. But he never found that picture. He roamed the world in search of it, but he never did see that Vermeer again.

Emery studied Frida’s face. Hers was a thoughtful, deeply romantic disposition, Emery decided. Her lips moved along with every word enunciated by the Vagabondier.

Under cloudy skies, aboard a ferry crossing to the Doge’s Palace and Saint Mark’s Square, Frida revealed something of a research scientist’s finger-pointing disposition in her, instilled perhaps by her professors at the University at Uppsala, Sweden, where she’d studied psychopathology and nursing. Frida excitedly shared her views on culture and psychology with her new friends. She then gave a demonstration of her powers, analyzing Pike severely. She said he’d soon be encountering very troubling dangers, perhaps even matters of life and death, for which he’d best soon get prepared by being more authentically engaged with the world and not only going along with things on the surface as he imagined them.

Emery took this last judgment very much to heart, for Pike was, after all, Emery’s traveling partner and these dangers Frida mentioned – were they then not also Emery’s dangers? He was glad she scarcely knew him, as he decidedly did not want to be similarly – severely – judged. Then this beautiful but exacting angel turned to him.

You will be paying a price for your past nonchalance, seeing a reality that is being very inviting but a taking of the wrong road for you, Frida said. Your hubris, it will be shrinking, I am imagining! She flayed him. What a vocabulary! he thought. And that charming accent! Beyond appreciation, Emery was filled with worshipful affection.

As the group approached Saint Mark’s, Emery began limping. There was again a very light throbbing pain in his knee. Very boldly, he put his arm around Frida’s shoulder, for support. She did not push his arm away.

On the piazza, there were many more pigeons than people. In contrast to the pigeons, the people were making a racket and commotion. A six-piece band played loudly (and terribly) while paraders walked in circles holding up red and gold banners. It was a worker’s strike, formally declared by the Italian Communist Party. A burly, deep-voiced man with a megaphone made stirring declarations; the emboldened crowd chanted these apparent slogans right back at him, fists raised. No one seemed at all to mind a lighthearted little girl dressed merrily in red and gold, spraypainting graffiti on the world renowned church campanile.

The other hostel vagabondiers suddenly disappeared in the crowd, conveniently perhaps, rightly wary of also being psychoanalyzed by Frida, who seemed totally comfortable with the mayhem on the square. She very naturally and simply joined arms with Emery and Pike, and the three spent the rest of that day together. Emery was hobbling a little, but he was resolved to keep up with the other two. Pike accused him of faking this trick knee in order to get Frida more deeply involved in his recuperation. At that, Frida again blushed, delighted to perceive a psychological insight neatly tucked away inside what Pike had said.

Due to the national worker’s strike, the Accademia was closed. The three wandered down side streets and got lost, but that didn’t seem to matter. All of Venice seemed designed for this purpose: to get lost in. They came to alleyways so winding and narrow they had to pass through them single-file. They had a late lunch in a little ristorante where they laughed and shared stories and didn’t place their order for an hour or more; then they took another hour and a half to eat.

They next wound up at the square of Campo St. Giovanni E. Paolo, where Verrochio’s equestrian Collioni frowned at them from his high place even as sun broke through the clouds. A young woman holding a bambino wrapped up in soft blue blankets approached them with her free hand extended. Then she held out her little bambino to Emery. Mia Bambino, she said. Emery gave her all the change in his pocket. Frida simply asked the pitiful mother for directions back to the Doge’s Palace. The weepy eyes and imploring stance faded quickly, as the mother very matter-of-factly pointed out the direction the three should go.

Did she seem at all to have a lisp to you? Pike asked his companions. Before they could answer, Pike explained, "The Michelin Green Guide says all the people of Venice lisp. ‘Venetians have pale complexions and lisp slightly.’ Here," he said, showing Emery and Frida the place in his guide. Oddly, so soon as Pike drew attention to this, they seemed to hear lisping everywhere. And, in fact, the mother with the bambino had been pale.

The three took a quick tour of the palace. The pale and lisping palace guards were right on their heels the whole time. They crossed the Bridge of Sighs to the prison, where the guards jangled their keys obnoxiously when the sun began to set. The muffled, yet resounding sound of many closing doors caught up to them. It was closing time.

The Michelin Green Guide describes everything in Venice as being charming and poetic, Pike pointed out when the three returned to the Ostello on their ferry in the evening. With the sun going down crimson and the bounty of stars emerging, they agreed the Michelin Guide was also right about that.

Back at the Flotilla della Vagabondiers, against house rules, much wine was shared. Pike thrilled the assembled with intimations of his and Emery’s plans to ride their bikes to North Africa. A fellow sojourner then spoke up, They’d as soon take a razor to your neck to get your money as say hello, he declared, which Pike said struck him as being about as blunt and narrow-minded as what the Michelin Green Guide had to say about pale and lisping Venetians. As for Emery, he didn’t let it get under his skin. Several simultaneous heated arguments erupted after that comment, but Emery’s thoughts all revolved around Frida, who said not a word – tired, she was nodding off. Finally, she stood, excused herself from the evening fray, and went to bed. Emery did likewise.

The Accademia was open the next day. Frida, who had already already visited it twice prior to Emery and Pike’s arrival in Venice, told them the place was like heaven. Follow me, she said, leading the way. I’ll introduce you to your joys. The three made arrangements for meeting later, and Pike and Emery went in. They were astonished. The pictures by the Veneziano brothers were breathtaking. The Madonna Benidicente by Giovanni Bellini was powerfully affecting. It was a kind of heaven – a beautiful maze filled with utterly divine creations. But nothing could have prepared Pike or Emery for one awesome painting which, when they came to, just about knocked them down. They did kneel down before it: Giorgione’s The Tempest.

Talk about enigmatic. In that picture is world enough and time. A cataclysm looms. A young mother nurses her baby. A proud young man stands by. There is danger, dignity, urging, and emerging at the heart of everything. Giorgione imbued his picture with intimate knowledge of this.

There were the Tintorettos, the Veroneses, the Crivellis, Vivarinis, d’Alemagnas, and Muranos – all fine and good – but before Pike and Emery finally left the Accademia that afternoon, they had to go back to see The Tempest again.

Then they walked out to the Campo S. Margarita, where Frida was waiting. She’d already reserved a table for them at a little corner ristorante. You saw the Giorgione, she said instantly, seeing the red, bloodstirred faces of Pike and Emery. She said they had the same baked, glazed look she’d also noticed on the faces of other young men departing the Accademia after seeing The Tempest. "What are you thinking of that sky? she asked excitedly – waxing poetic on the looming danger, so perplexing and troubling, close along the edge of life and death. The couple in this picture, they are not engaging with their beauty, they are not preparing for their plight!"

They ordered dinner, sipped fine Fossato wine, and talked while waiting for the meal. Frida told Pike and Emery more of what she knew about Giorgione’s picture. She said it clearly represented a surface enigma, a sign or emblem of the beauty and the danger in the world. She said the child fed by the mother had been born through illicit things they’d done – joyful sins which, according to Frida, represented the essence of the reintegrated God.

That’s interesting, Emery said, actually understanding only a word or two of what she’d said, probably.

In this painting, Frida further beautifully asserted, you could see the couple had fallen – like Adam and Eve. But the wonderful enigma of the picture, she said, was the potential, or promise, that was virtually absent from and yet inherent in the painting – the family’s eventual return, through bliss, to their natural state of joy. "The husband and the wife, they are sharing – and they are not sharing – their conjugal love, Frida said mysteriously, which is rising to cosmic significance."

Emery said nothing for a long time, then quietly asked Frida and Pike if they’d mind it if he read aloud to them what he’d written in his diary that day about the proud young man, the nursing mother, the sacred feminine – both human and divine – and the cataclysm looming in The Tempest.

When Emery finished telling them his view on what was at the heart of Giorgione’s picture, Frida said abruptly, There is being no mystery in your thinking, Emery. Any girl containing a brain in her mind is knowing what you are seeing. I don’t think I am needing to be spelling this out for you.

The psychologist. The pointing finger points, and having pointed moves on. Emery must have given Frida a pained look, because she immediately laughed and put her arm around his shoulder. Okay, she said, I am telling you, Emery. It is not being a mystery. Young men they are thinking the baby is being very lucky on the mother’s chest.

Pike spewed out wine, he laughed so hard, pounding the table with his palms so that the plates and glasses shook. Frida laughed, too. Emery didn’t see all that much humor in it. He insisted there was far more to it than that. There were mysteries. He poured more wine. The three spoke of other matters. Frida laughed at everything Pike said.

The power of suggestion! For the life of him, Emery now could not keep his eyes from Frida’s jiggling blouse. It must have been the wine. He wanted to drop a spoon into the valley of her cleavage and reach in and take it out. He was very unsettled. He pretended to be studying his wine glass. Maybe she was right. Emery had more wine. Looking up, he had to keep refocusing, staring intently into Frida’s cool, green eyes. It was hopeless.

They ate their spaghetti and Verdura di Stagione salads. The Madonna Benedicente, Frida, held her napkin crumpled in her hand like a delicate white carnation. The waiters balanced dishes above their heads like circus performers. A sad faced cook kept peering out from behind the kitchen door, obviously enjoying our pleasure in the meal he’d prepared. Frida, Pike, and Emery lifted their glasses in salute to him. Pike gregariously gestured to the cook that he should come over to their table, but the cook turned as red as the tomato sauce on his apron and retreated back into the kitchen. Emery ordered more wine.

The three wove their way back through the maze of Venice, all along the canals, arm in arm. Pike and Frida almost carried wobbling, weak-kneed Emery. They had a ferry to catch, and his hobbling was a liability. There was a half moon glowing and stars filled the sky. On the waterfront, another vagabond waiting for the ferry played a flute – simple variations on familiar melodies, which grew more intricate and subtle as he played on.

The sound of the flute and the lapping waters was soothing. The three listened. A mist rose up at the water’s edge. Emery drifted. Clouds gathered over. The next thing he knew, angels were looking down on them – on Pike and Emery – from heaven. One of the angels, a Frida look-alike, said, "Why are you just sitting there? Do you think that you are princes, and that angels will serve you? Oh no. You clearly have forgotten that in heaven who desires to be great must be a servant."

The angel led Emery through a gate woven from the branches of tall, stately trees. They entered into a paradise that looked like it had been painted, of course, by Giorgione. Men, women, boys, and girls were picking fruits from trees and carrying them in baskets to others. Some were pressing out juice from grapes, cherries, and berries into cups, and drinking. Some were playing flutes or singing songs, delighting all. Some sat at fountains, splashing water, which arose in intricate and marvelous patterns. Some just walked along on paths, side by side, exchanging pleasantries. Others were running, playing, dancing. All these pleasures seemed just right, exactly appropriate for a paradise.

Now the angel took Emery down a path that led to a group of people sitting on the ground in a rose garden surrounded by olive, orange, and lemon trees. They were rocking back and forth, grieving and weeping. Emery asked one, Why are you sitting here like this?

It is the seventh day since we came into this paradise, Emery was told. "When we arrived it seemed as though we had been raised into heaven. But, after three days, the blessings seemed to whither, and then vanish. We became afraid we’d lose all of the delight in our lives, despairing of eternal happiness. We wandered aimlessly on assorted paths in search of the gate through which we’d entered, going round and round in circles. In trying to leave, we only got more lost. We’ve been sitting here in this rose garden for a day and a half, looking around us at the lovely and abundant olives, grapes, lemons, and oranges but, the more we look at these, the wearier our eyes grow of seeing them, our noses of smelling them, and our mouths of tasting them. That’s the reason for our grief and our tears."

"Actually, the angel said, This maze is an entrance into heaven. I know the way, and I will take you." The people got up, and followed. On the way, the angel explained it’s a very common misperception that the outward