If all my days stolen from school had been passed in such improving conversations, no one could have complained. I probably would have had a better education than I could ever have got from Fra Varisto. But inevitably my loitering about the waterfront brought me into contact with persons less admirable than the clerk Isidoro.
I do not mean to say that the Riva is in any sense a low-class street. While it teems with workmen, seamen and fishermen at all hours of the day, there are just as many well-dressed merchants and brokers and other businessmen, often accompanied by their genteel wives. The Riva is also the promenade, even after dark on fine nights, of fashionable men and women come merely to stroll and enjoy the lagoon breeze. Nevertheless, among those people, day or night, there lurk the louts and cutpurses and prostitutes and other specimens of the rabble we call the popolazo. There were, for example, the urchins I met one afternoon on that Riva dockside, when one of them introduced himself by throwing a fish at me.
Bringing the mangled corpse of his fish cradled in his grimy hands, Ubaldo said to me, “Will you share our supper?” I did not, but in the course of that afternoon he and I forgot our quarrel and became friends.
He and I were perhaps eleven or twelve years old then, and Doris about two years younger, and during the next few years I spent most of my days with them and their somewhat fluid following of other dockside brats. I could easily have been consorting in those years with the well-fed and well-dressed, prim and priggish offspring of the lustrisimi families, such as the Balbi and the Cornari—and Zia Zulia used every effort and persuasion to make me do so—but I preferred my vile and more vivacious friends. I admired their pungent language, and I adopted it. I admired their independence and their fichevelo attitude to life, and I did my best to imitate it. As could be expected, since I did not slough off those attitudes when I went home or elsewhere, they did not make me any better beloved by the other people in my life.
During my infrequent attendances at school, I began calling Fra Varisto by a couple of nicknames I had learned from Boldo—“il bel de Roma” and “il Culiseo”—and soon had all the other schoolboys doing the same. The friar-maistro put up with that informality, even seemed flattered by it, until gradually it dawned on him that we were not likening him to the grand old Beauty of Rome, the Colosseum, but were making a play on the word culo, and in effect were calling him the “landmark of buttocks.” At home, I scandalized the servants almost daily. On one occasion, after I had done a thing reprehensible, I overheard a conversation between Zia Zulia and Maistro Attilio, the maggiordomo of the household.