On the water you can get away from the beggars. This is an ideal existence. You just get in the gondola, under a canopy, and the gondolier does the work, and you glide along between build ings and wonder who lives there, and when they wake up, as all day long the blinds are closed, and everybody seems to be dead. But at night, when the canals are lighted, and the moon shines, the people put on their dress clothes and sit on verandas, or eat and drink, and talk Eyetalian, and ride in gondolas, and play guitars, and smoke cigarettes, and talk love. It is so warm you can wear your summer pants, and the water smells of clams that died long ago. It is just as though Chicago was flooded by the bursting of the sewers, and people had to go around State street, and all the cross streets, and Michigan avenue, in fishing boats, with three feet of water on top of the pavements. Imagine the people of Chicago taking gondolas and riding along the streets, landing at the stores and hotels, just as they do now from carriages.
We had been riding in gondolas for two days, getting around in the mud when the tide was out, and going to sleep and waiting for the tide to come in, when it seemed to me that dad needed some excitement, and last night I gave it to him.
We were out in our gondola, and the moon was shining, and the electric lights made the canal near the Rialto bridge as light as day. The Rialto bridge crosses the Grand canal, and has been the meeting place for lovers for thousands of years. It is a grand structure, of carved marble, but it wouldn't hold up a threshing machine engine half as well as an iron bridge. Well, the canal was filled with thousands of gondolas, loaded with the flower of Venetian society, and the music just made you want to fall in love. Dad said if he didn't fall in love, or something, before morning, he would quit the place. I made up my mind he should fall into something, so I began by telling dad it seemed strange to me that nobody but Eyetalians could run a gondola. Dad said he could run a gondola as well as any foreigner, and I told him he couldn't run a gondola for shucks, and he said he would show me, so he got out of the hen house where we were seated, and went back on to the pointed end of the gondola, and grabbed the pole or paddle from the gondolier, and said: “Now, Garibaldi, you go inside the pup tent with Hennery, and let me punt this ark around awhile.”
Garibaldi thought dad was crazy, but he gave up the pole, and just then, when they were both on the extreme point of the gondola, and she was wabbling some, I peeked out through the curtains and thought the fruit was about ripe enough to pick, so I threw myself over to one side of the gondola, and, by gosh, if dad and Garibaldi didn't both go overboard with a splash, and one yell in the English language, and one in Eye-talian, and I rushed out of the cabin and such a sight you never saw.
Dad retained the paddle, and had his head out of water, but nothing showed above the water, where Garibaldi was except a red patch on his black pants. Dad was yelling for help, and finally the gondolier got his head out of the water, and said something that sounded like grinding a butcher knife on a grindstone, and I yelled, too, and the gondolas began to gather around us, and the two men were rescued. The gondolier had been gondoling all his life and he had never been in the water before, and they thought it would strike in and kill him, so they wrapped him up in blankets and put him aboard his canoe, and he looked at me as though I was to blame. They got a boat hook fastened in dad's pants and landed him in the gondola, and he dripped all the way to our hotel, and he smelled like a fish market.
I asked Garibaldi, on the way to the hotel, if he was counting his beads when he was down under the water with nothing but his pants out of the water, and he said: “You're dam right,” but I don't think he knew the meaning of the words, because he probably wouldn't swear in the presence of death. Dad just sat and shivered all the way to the hotel, but when we got to our room I asked him what his idea was in jumping overboard right there before folks, with his best clothes on, and he said it was all Garibaldi's fault, that just as dad was getting a good grip on the paddle, the gondolier heaved a long sigh, and the onions in his breath paralyzed dad so he fell overboard.
