V

"There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she." 53; "the chase [...] was for Stencil grim, joyless; a conscious acceptance of the unpleasant for no other reason than that V. was there to track down." 55; "V. was merely a scholarly quest after all, an adventure of the mind," 61; "natural habitat [...] state of siege," 62; "assumed into the fabric of any of a thousand Great Paintings," 155; "glassy-eyed lady," 178; 209; "grand Gothic pile of inferences," 226; "If she was a historical fact [...] V. might be no more a she than a sailing vessel or nation." 226; V-structure, 226; "he who looks for V." 226; "navel of glass," 307, 487; disassembled, 341-44; "V. and sleep [...] two versions of the same thing," 346; "until 1913 when she knew she'd done all she could and so took time out for love," 386; "the motive's part of the quarry," 386; glass eye, 388; "disguise is one of her attributes," 388; "a fierce [...] 'hussar' [pirate, or soldier] who came rushing by in a red field-cape," 388; "In Majorca she spent at least a year as an old fisherman [...] who would smoke seaweed," 388; "lucky mascot to the Mahdists," 388; "Live in Cairo and take Sir Alistair Wren for a lover when she came of age." 388; "Giving tango lessons in Rotterdam," 388; "a remarkable scattered concept," 389; in the guise of Paris patroness and dress shop owner, 399-401; "expressionless, poised like one of her own mannequins," 401; "If we've not already guessed," 406; age, 408; discussed, 410-11; "V. needed her fetish, Mélanie a mirror," 410; "perhaps if [V.] were Victoria Wren," 410; V. as automata, 411; 445; 465; glass eye: 237, 445 (Vera Meroving), 343 (Bad Priest), 487 (V. Manganese); wearing silver ring at Black Mass, 402; meets Mélanie, 404; V.'s Paris apartment, 406; "aware of her own progression toward inanimateness," 410; "if she were in fact Veronica Wren," 410; "she was a beast of venery," 412 (see: p. 63); "one feels her in the city [...] In the light." 447; "It is a presence?" 447; "an obsession [...] blooms" 448; "The glass eye [...] V. used it for a hypnotic aid." 451; "'Absolute upheaval [...] that is your way, Victoria'." 487; "Riot was her element." 487; "Our ends are the same: to keep Italy out of Malta," 487; affair with S. Stencil, 487-88; "star sappire sewn into her navel" 487; "obsession with bodily incorporating little bits of inert matter" 488; See also Bad Priest; ivory comb; Manganese, Veronica; Meroving, Vera; Vheissu; v-shapes; Wren, Victoria

"mercury-vapor lamps, receding in an asymmetric V to the east where it's dark and there are no more bars" 10; sawteeth, 12, 47; wedge: 16, 108,196, 259, 341, 355; "As spread thighs are to the libertine, flights of migratory birds to the ornithologist, the working part of his tool bit to the production machinist," 61; isoceles triangle, 68; zenith, 79; "the point of the green triangle is Cairo, 82; "a motley pyramid of Syrians," 86; "a starless zenith," 87; triangular stain, 90, 92; "two equal-sized vectors head to head," 338; waterspout, 492;See also V.; wedge

332; 339

303; capital of Malta founded by Grand Master Valette; 381; 424; "a city named after a man, but of feminine gender, a peninsula shaped like the mons Veneris," 465; Map of Malta

Valletta of the Knights
See Valette, Jean Parisot de la

316; Gascon Jean de la Valette Parisot was a French knight who became grandmaster in 1557. Famous for his exploits against the Turks which culminated in his successful defence of Malta, he founded the city of Valletta; 448-49; Grandmaster La Valette's dream, 457; "blocking the creek between Senglea and St. Angelo," 462; 464; See also Great Siege

Varese, Edgar (1885-1965)
380; American composer born in Paris. His compositions, almost all orchestral, are fairly abstract and employ unconventional percussion instruments.

Varkumian
91; "the pimp" in bierhalle in Cairo; 92

Väterliche Züchtigung
267; "fatherly chastisement"

Vaugirard
402; the sculptress from, who is present at the Black Mass

veld
236; African grasslands

Veldschoendragers
232; "Veldschoen" is Afrikaans for "veld/field shoe", i.e., a tough leather shoe. Literally, "Veldschoendragers" means "veld-shoe wearers", e.g. the Witboois, Swartboois and Bondelswaarts; "homicidally disposed" Hottentot tribe in southern Südwest

162; 175; consulate, 176, 178; Venezuelan colony: centered in northeast part of Florence; being organized by the Gaucho, 179; 192; 196-97; 202; demonstration in front of consulate, 207; 1899 demonstration, 487; See also Aparicio, Luis; Ratón; Salazar

198; Roman goddess of beauty and sensual love, said to have sprung from the foam of the sea, as depicted in Botticelli's Birth of Venus; planet, 239; See also mons Veneris

379; family in Profane's neighborhood, whose daughter always tried to lure him into the bathroom; Etymology

Vergeltungswaffe Eins and Zwei
228; German: "vengeance weapon one and two"; German V-1 and V-2 rockets used in WWII

Vernichtungs Befehl
245; German: "extermination order"; August 4, 1904; October 4, 1904

121; rat who is Fairing's lover and wants to be a nun; "a kind of voluptuous Magdalen," 133

Versuchsstelle
260; German: "testing or experimental station"

Vesuvius
197; active volcano in Campagnia region of southern Italy. The first recorded eruption was in AD 79; the last was March 20, 1944.

"there's a man in England, president of a Flat Earth society, who says [that the Earth is flat] and is ringed by ice barriers, a frozen world which is where all missing persons go and never return from." 47; "Unwise to say too much in a telegram. Vheissu. You understand." 157; H. Godolphin first went in 1884, 168-69; described, 170-71, 193; "thirteen of us went in and three ["poor civilian engineer"; Pike-Leeming; H. Godolphin - 183] came out," 172; "Evan [...] had never pressed his father for details." 173; Gaucho asked about it by S. Stencil, 181; "Did he owe it to them, the lovers of skins, not to tell about Vheissu, not even to let them suspect the suicidal fact that below the glittering integument of every foreign land there is a hard dead-point of truth," 184; "The name Vheissu occurred in [Godolphin's dossier] only once, in a secret F.O. memorandum," 190; described, 193; plot, 196-98; "the only radiance left is in," 201; "feral and lunatic dominion," 205; frozen spider monkeys, 205-06; "dream of annihilation," 206, 210; spider-monkeys, 209; "Vheissu is gone and impossible to bring back, along with so many other old jokes, songs, 'rages.'" 247; "the [Foppl] siege is Vheissu" 248; "There's been a war [...] Vheissu was a luxury, an indugence. We can no longer afford the likes of Vheissu." 248; "the sense of comedy about the Vheissu affair [is] with us no more, our Vheissus are no longer our own, or even confined to a circle of friends; they're public property." 248; "each filled the other in on the two decades between the Vheissu affair and here," 470; "Call Vheissu a symptom. Symptoms like that are always alive, somewhere in the world." 473; 483-84; Etymology

Via Cavour
179; in northeast party of Florence near where Venezuelan colony is centered, in abandoned tobacco warehouse (202); 194

Via del'Orivolo,
184

198;The Divine Comedy, written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and his death in 1321, is widely considered the central epic poem of Italian literature, and one of the greatest of world literature. It is composed of three canticas (or "cantiche"): Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise), composed respectively of 34, 33, and 33 cantos. The first cantica, Inferno, is by far the most famous of the three, and is often published separately under the title Dante's Inferno. As a part of the whole literary work, Inferno serves as an introduction to the entire Divine Comedy, making each of the canticas 33 cantos long. The number 3 is prominent in the work, represented here by the length of each cantica. Also, that they add up to 100 cantos is not accidental. The verse scheme used, terza rima, is the hendecasyllable (line of eleven syllables), with the lines composing tercets according to the rhyme scheme ABA BCB CDC . . . YZY Z. Wikipedia

Via del Paradisio
201; reference to the second cantica of Dante's The Divine Comedy (See above)

Via del Purgatorio
198; reference to the third cantica of Dante's The Divine Comedy (See above)

Via Pecori
159; street in Florence, Italy

Via Porta Rossa
201; street in Florence, Italy

Via Tornabuoni
180; location of British and American consulates in Florence

Via Tosinghi
183; street in Florence, Italy

Victoria, Queen (1819-1901)
52; queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and, in 1876, empress of India. She was a staunch conservative who was shrewd and politically savvy; 73

Vie Heureuse, La
407; French: "the happy life"

Villa di Sammut
474; where La Manganese lives; "past Sliema toward the sea"

Villiers, M. de
68; Russian consul in Alexandria

Viola, Mme.
452; oneiromancer (dream interpreter) and hypnotist possibly in possession of glass eye

Violet
384; "gives willingly"; "all-electronic woman" whose name might be Violet

sacrificial, 63; "destroyer of virginity," 195; "virginal-looking limbs," 221; "virgin's skull for a loving cup," 248; "Whore lives in one place and stays there. Like some little virgin girl in a fairy tale." 291; "he would find a virgin someday and 'educate' her to sin" 312; "a young girl has to take her virginity out on something," 384; "Rape of the Chinese Virgins" 396; "virgin's hair whip," 454;See also L'Enlevement des Vierges Chinoises; Virgin, the

aka the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ; Mary, 321; "an unconscious identification of one's own mother with the Virgin all sent simple daulism into strange patterns indeed" 338; "The Virgin assailed." 338; See also Miraculous Medal; Education of Henry Adams; Pynchon's Entropy

"a reassurance of self-agency," 66; "Whether a cataclysm is accident or design," 78; "Events between soul and soul are not God's direct province: they are under the influence either of Fortune, or of virtue." 78; "some sense of personal guilt or agency," 173; "She overrated virtú, individual agency," 199; "his peak of virtú: Fiume!" 248; "Not even as if she were any cause, any agent." 386; "the young entrepreneuse with all spring's hope in her virtú" 410; "the dynamic figure whose virtú used to be a determinant of history" 472; "combined to undermine what virtú he'd brought through sixty years on the go," 489; "a last burst of duplicity and virtú" 490; See also Fortune; Machiavelli; paranoia; Principe, Il; Pynchon's Entropy; Il Principe, VII]

311; town on narrow peninsula in the Grand Harbour. Was originally called Birgù, but Grand Master Valette changed the name to Vittoriosa ("victorious") after the Great Seige of 1565. It was the home of the Knights from 1530 until 1571; death of Elena's mother in, 319; 457; See also Three Cities

V-Note
51; jazz club on Third Avenue in New York; 58; 281; 292

Voce del Popolo, La
476; Mizzist newspaper

239; German: "birdsong"; 16-year-old girl who sings S&M song at Foppl's villa; "my purpose on earth is to tantalize and send raving the race of man"; 274; Etymological Musings...

Vogt
195; German: "overseer, warden, governor"; Austrian who runs musical instrument factory in Florence, which is a hub of spy activities

Vosläuer
72; wine (white)

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