realized: It was, beneath its filigree and paint, its strange glass and bejeweled frame, 
a tiny clock!
  
  I closed my hand on it and felt dizzy. I had never known clocks to be anything but 
great venerable things in bell towers or on walls.
  
  "I carry time now," I whispered in Greek, looking to my friends.
  
  "Amadeo," said Riccardo. "Count the hours for me."
  
  I wanted to say that this prodigious discovery meant something, something personal. It 
was a message to me from some other too hastily and perilously forgotten world. Time was 
not time anymore and never would be. The day was not the day, nor the night the night. I 
couldn't articulate it, not in Greek, nor any tongue, nor even in my feverish thoughts. I 
wiped the sweat from my forehead. I squinted into the brilliant sun of Italy. My eyes 
clapped upon the birds who flew in great flocks across the sky, like tiny pen strokes 
made to flap in unison. I think I whispered foolishly, "We are in the world."
  
  "We are in the center of it, the greatest city of it!" Riccardo cried, urging me on 
into the crowds. "We shall see it before we get locked up in the tailor's, that's for 
damned sure."
  
  But first it was time for the sweetshop, for the miracle of chocolate with sugar, for 
syrupy concoctions of unnameable but bright red and yellow sweets.
  
  One of the boys showed to me his little book of the most frightening printed pictures, 
men and women embraced in carnality. It was the stories of Boccaccio. Riccardo said he 
would read them to me, that it was in fact an excellent book to teach me Italian. And 
that he would teach me Dante too.
  
  Boccaccio and Dante were Florentines, said one of the other boys, but all in all the 
two weren't so bad.
  
  Our Master loved all kinds of books, I was told, you couldn't go wrong spending your 
money on them, he was always pleased with that. I'd come to see that the teachers who 
came to the house would drive me crazy with their lessons. It was the studia humanitatis 
that we must all learn, and it included history, grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and 
ancient authors ... all of this so much dazzling words that only revealed its meaning to 
me as it was often repeated and demonstrated in the days to come.
  
  We could not look too good for our Master either, that was another lesson I must learn. 
Gold and silver chains, necklaces with medallions and other such trinkets were bought for 
me and laid over my neck. I needed rings, jeweled rings. We had to bargain fiercely with 
the jewelers for these, and I came out of it wearing a real emerald from the new world, 
and two ruby rings carved with silver inscriptions which I couldn't read.
  
  I couldn't get over the sight of my hand with a ring. To this very night of my life, 
some five hundred years after, you see, I have a weakness for jeweled rings. Only during 
those centuries in Paris when I was a penitent, one of Satan's discalced Children of the 
Night, during that long slumber only, did I give up my rings. But we'll come to that 
nightmare soon enough.
  
  For now, this was Venice, I was Marius's child and romped with his other children in a 
manner that would be repeated for years ahead.
  
  On to the tailor.
  
  As I was measured and pinned and dressed, the boys told me stories of all those rich 
Venetians who came to our Master seeking to have even the smallest piece of his work. As 
for our Master, he, claiming that he was too wretched, sold almost nothing but 
occasionally did a portrait of a woman or man who struck his eye. These portraits almost 
always worked the person into a mythological subject-gods, goddesses, angels, saints. 
Names I knew and names I'd never heard of tripped off the boys' tongues. It seemed here 
all echoes of sacred things were swept up in a new tide.
  
  Memory would jolt me only to release me. Saints and gods, they were one and the same? 
Wasn't there a code to which I should remain faithful that somehow dictated these were 
but artful lies? I couldn't get it clear in my head, and all around me was such 
happiness, yes, happiness. It seemed impossible that these simple shining faces could 
mask wickedness. I didn't believe it. Yet all pleasure to me was suspect. I was dazzled 
when I could not give in, and overcome when I did surrender, and as the days followed I 
surrendered with ever greater ease all the time.
  
  This day of initiation was only one of hundreds, nay, thousands that were to follow, 
and I don't know when I started to understand with any preciseness what my boy companions 
said. That time came, however, and rather quickly. I do not remember being the naive one 
very long.
  
  On this first excursion, it was magic. And high above the sky was the perfect blue of 
cobalt, and the breeze from the sea was fresh and moist and cool. There above were massed 
the scudding clouds I had seen so wondrously rendered in the paintings of the palazzo, 
and there came my first hint that the paintings of my Master were no lie.
  
  Indeed when we entered, by special permission, the Doges' chapel, San Marco, I was 
caught by the throat by its splendor-its walls of gleaming tessellated gold. But another 
shock followed hard upon my finding myself virtually entombed in light and in riches. 
Here were stark, somber figures, figures of saints I knew.
  
  These were no mystery to me, the almond-eyed tenants of these hammered walls, severe in 
their straight careful drapery, their hands infallibly folded in prayer. I knew their 
halos, I knew the tiny holes made in the gold to make it glitter ever more magically. I 
knew the judgment of these bearded patriarchs who gazed impassively on me as I stopped, 
dead in my tracks, unable to go on.
  
  I slumped to the stone floor. I was sick.
  
  I had to be taken from the church. The noise of the piazza rose over me as if I were 
descending to some awful denouement. I wanted to tell my friends it was inevitable, not 
their fault.