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realize that I lacked some bit of knowledge, and Doris would supply it.
    One day, I remember, Ubaldo said he was going to the western side of the city, and going by way of the Dogs’ Ferry. I had never heard of that, so I went along, to see what strange kind of boat he meant. But we crossed the Grand Canal by the quite ordinary agency of the Rialto Bridge, and I must have looked either disappointed or mystified, for he scoffed at me, “You are as ignorant as a cornerstone!” and Doris explained:
    “There is only one way to get from the eastern to the western side of the city, no? That is to cross the Grand Canal. Cats are allowed in boats, to catch the rats, but dogs are not. So the dogs can cross the canal only on the Ponte Rialto. So that is the Dogs’ Ferry, no xe vero?”
    Some of their street jargon I could translate without assistance. They spoke of every priest and monk as le rigioso, which could mean “the stiff one,” but it did not take me long to realize that they were merely twisting the word religioso. When, in fine summer weather, they announced that they were moving from the barge hulk to La Locanda de la Stela, I knew that they were not going to reside in any Starlight Inn; they meant that they would be sleeping outdoors for a season. When they spoke of a female person as una largazza, they were playing on the proper term for a girl, la ragazza, but coarsely suggesting that she was ample, even cavernous, in her genital aperture. As a matter of fact, the greater part of the boat people’s language—and the greater part of their conversations, and their interests—dealt with such indelicate topics. I absorbed a lot of information, but it sometimes did more to confuse than to enlighten me.
    Zia Zulià and Fra Varisto had taught me to refer to those parts between my legs—if I had to refer to them at all—as le vergogne, “the shames.” On the docks I heard many other terms. The word baggage for a man’s genital equipment was clear enough; and candelòto was an apt word for his erect organ, which is like a stout candle; and so was fava for the bulbous end of that organ, since it does somewhat resemble a broad bean; and so was capèla for the foreskin, which does enclose the fava like a little cloak or a little chapel. But it was a mystery to me why the word lumaghèta was sometimes spoken in reference to a woman’s parts. I understood that a woman had nothing but an opening down there, and the word lumaghèta can mean either a small snail or the tiny peg with which a minstrel tunes each string of his lute.
    Ubaldo and Doris and I were playing on a dock one day when a greengrocer came pushing his cart along the esplanade, and the boat wives ambled over to paw through his produce. One of the women fondled a large yellowish cucumber, and grinned and said, “II mescolòto,” and all the women cackled lasciviously. “The stirrer”—I could make out the implications of that. But then two lissome young men came strolling along the esplanade, arm in arm, walking with a sort of springiness in their step, and one of the boat women growled, “Don Meta and Sior Mona.” Another woman glanced scornfully at the more delicate of the two young men and muttered, “That one wears a split seat in his hose.” I had no notion of what they were talking about, and Doris’s explanation did not tell me much:
    “Those are the sorts of men who do with each other what a real man does only with a woman.”
    Well, there was the main flaw in my comprehension: I had no very clear idea of what a man did with a woman.
    Mind you, I was not entirely benighted in the matter of sex, any more than other upper-class Venetian children are—or, I daresay, upper-class children of any other European nationality. We may not consciously remember it, but we have all had an early introduction to sex, from our mothers or our nursemaids, or both.
    It seems that mothers and nurses have known, from the beginning of time, that the best way