(1991) Pinocchio in Venice

by Robert Coover

  The Gambero Rosso landlord, yawning, fills his glass once more. Is this a gift or has he just asked for it? In either event, he thanks him, returning his yawn and feeling somewhat abashed. What is happening to him? It is as if the force of his reason and of a discipline which he has practiced since youth has suddenly abandoned him. In his time, it is true, he was young and raw; and, misled by his greenness and his admittedly peculiar identity crisis, he blundered in public. He lumbered about, he stumbled, he exposed himself, he offended against caution and tact. He has written about all this in The Wretch. But he renounced vagabondage and rebellion and idle amusements, and so, through discipline, has acquired that dignity which, as all the world insists, is the innate good and craving of every moral being; it could even be said that his entire development has been a conscious undeviating progression away from the embarrassments of idleness and anarchy, not to mention a few indelicate pratfalls, and toward dignity. Indeed, he is one of the great living exemplars of this universal experience, this passage, as it were, from nature to civilization - from the raw to the cooked, as one young wag has put it - or, as he himself has described it in his current work-on-hard-disk in the chapter "The Voice in the Would-Pile," "from wood to will." And now, suddenly, that voice has returned to haunt him, as though to avenge its long confinement by reclaiming, as his own powers weaken, its mischievous autonomy. Nor is that the worst that has beset him. What is most alarming is that - pain, sorrow, and the door on top, as the porter might say: if it's not one thing, it's another - he is turning back to wood again. It is poking out now at his knees and elbows, he can see it, bleached and twisted and full of rot, maybe even a worm or two. He can also see the osteria landlord standing in front of him with his camelhair coat over his arm and a long piece of paper. He stares up at him quizzically, lowering his sleeves and pantlegs.

  "You said something about paying, signore, and to show you the door."

  "Ah." His grappa is gone, though he doesn't remember drinking it. His stomach is not turning to wood, it feels like a soft collapsing bag, burbling indelicately now from under his napkin. "Of course." He stands, bumping the table, but luckily there's nothing on it left to spill. He'd rather sit for a while longer, it's quite peaceful here really, but he's too humiliated to admit it. "That's exactly what I said." But he can hardly say even that. Said, he said "said," he heard that part himself, it's still ringing in his mind, but he is not sure about the rest. He is reminded, as he stands there weaving from side to side, of certain particularly odious faculty luncheons of the past. Yes, I could use a digestive walk, he thinks, hoping he is only thinking it. He reaches for the bill, but the landlord seems to be waving it about. He pauses, studying its movements, the patterns (he has always been particularly skillful at discerning patterns), then, with an abrupt lurch that sends his chair flying, snatches it: "Got you!" he laughs. But he can't read it. Must have the wrong glasses on. He asks the landlord to explain it to him. "Just the general principles," he says with a generous wave of his hand. It seems he is paying for all three suppers. The figure is astronomical. Of course all sums expressed in Italian lire are astronomical. You have to take off three or four zeros, he can't remember which. And his hotel bill will be credited, the landlord says. That's his understanding. The landlord removes the requisite banknotes from his wallet, which the professor seems to have given to him for this purpose. There is apparently just enough to cover the bill, which is a good thing because he left his credit cards and traveler's checks back at the hotel. His good friends had not wanted to pay the bill for fear of implying he was not at liberty to have all he wanted to eat and drink, the landlord explains, handing the empty wallet back. It might have been an insult to a gentleman like himself. "I would not have minded the insult," the professor says grandly. He has one arm in a sleeve of the coat but cannot find the other one. The other sleeve, that is. He knows where the arm is. "In fact, it would have given me - bwrrpp! - scusi! - considerable pleasure." He has found the sleeve, but now he has lost the arm. This is because the first arm is in the wrong sleeve, or anyway that is the landlord's interpretation of the dilemma, an interpretation that proves functional if perhaps overly simple, for no sooner is it enunciated than both arms and both sleeves appear in their proper places. Whereupon a certain magic ensues: the professor finds himself, seemingly without transition, out in the snowy campo, all alone, bundled up in his coat and muffler, the Gambero Rosso behind him locked and dark, and such an immaculate silence all about that he can actually hear the snow falling upon other snow.

  4. NIGHT OF THE ASSASSINS

  He is lost. Lost, frightened, bewildered. And freezing his bark off. Somehow he has left his German fedora with its little bluebird feather in the headband back at the osteria, and his head, bald as an egg and becoming, alas, even balder, went completely numb under its peaked bonnet of snow before he discovered it. He brushed away the snow and wrapped his frozen pate then in his Andean llama-wool scarf, tying it under his chin like an old woman's shawl, and that has left his flimsy chest exposed. Ah, what misery! His calfskin gloves are gone, he knows not where. His twice-imported Italian shoes - he has always joked back in America that he liked to keep both feet in the homeland - have proven useless in this weather, leaving his feet soaked and aching from the cold, the thin leather taking a no doubt terminal beating. He might as well be barefoot. Hadn't someone he once knew died of fatal chilblains of the feet? Forsaking his pride finally and throwing himself upon the charity of his fellow creatures, he has rung a doorbell in a deserted campo, crying out in his despair for help or a warm hat or at least the loan of a city map, only to have a window open up and a bucket of water, or what he hoped was water, be thrown on him as if he were a potted geranium. Others in the square shouted out obscenities from behind darkened windows like a hostile audience from behind the footlights, even threatening to bring the police, and he screamed back at them, calling them all a lot of bloody assassins and murderers, shrieking and squawking in an altogether undignified manner unfortunately, overtaken momentarily by a fit of blind fear and rage. Or perhaps not so momentarily, for his heart still feels caught in the grip of that icy fist as he goes staggering through the white night, up and down the steps of bridges he cannot even see, across barren squares and through frighteningly narrow defiles, pursued by a fierce wind that whips around him from all directions, his spectacles frosted over and his wet clothes crackling now with ice crystals, unable to remember very clearly anymore exactly what he's looking for, even if he could see it should he miraculously come upon it. Something about a blackened doorway. But under the blown snow, all the doors look blackened. He feels utterly abandoned in a world without mercy or even logic. How he wishes he had left the osteria together with his "dear friends," as they liked to flatter themselves, instead of lingering for that last glass of grappa!

  Yet how delightful it had seemed at first! He had stood for a moment in the radiant little square in front of the Gambero Rosso, one of those enchanting and forsaken places which lie in the interior of Venice as though within a secret fold, accessible only to intimates, his own interior aglow still from the generous infusions, thinking how right he had been to come back here! Here to this "vast and sumptuous pile," as a famous militarist once called it, this "peopled labyrinth of walls," magical, dazzling, and exquisitely perplexing, this "paradise of exiles!" She who called herself the Serenissima. Only hours before, he had been sitting in his lonely office back at the university at the end of the Christmas break, struggling to come to grips with the realization that his epic tribute to his beloved shepherdess and cynosure, thought concluded, was not. The "final" chapter was not the final chapter, after all. Something was missing. It was, like the stark New England landscape outside his office window, too cold, too intellectual, too abstract. Too empty. In his intransigent pursuit of the truth he had somehow neglected - virtue, truth, and beauty being, in the end (which was where, in the book at least, and in life too no doubt, he was), one and the same - the senses. Whereup
on he was suddenly struck by a most remarkable vision, sensuous yet pure, of this very place, which his mentor Petrarch, who had preceded him here as though to show the way, rightly called the "noblest of cities, sole refuge of humanity, peace, justice, and liberty, defended not so much by its waters as by the prudence and wisdom of its citizens," and which appeared to him in that moment in flesh tones as delicious as those of Giorgione or Tiziano. He reached out and, seemingly without transition, by the miracle of flight, here, his hands still outstretched, he was! He felt so happy just then that tears came to his eyes, tears now frozen on his face and pricking him like vicious little thumbtacks, but then warm and titillating as they ran down his cheeks and nose, and as purifying as the snow frosting the delicious little campo, turning the stone cylindrical wellhead in the middle into a kind of large pale lantern. "Ah! Che bel paese!" he cried aloud. If his knees hadn't been hurting him so, he might have knelt down and kissed it.

  He had easily discovered the route back to the hotel and set off, expecting at every turn to meet the bent back and broken beak of his lugubrious guide, returning for him, and meanwhile enjoying his digestive walk, as he thought of it, rejoicing in the luminous spectacle of Venice in the snow and laying plans for the morrow when he might encounter once again - in the flesh, as it were, the unblighted flesh - his old friends Giambellino and Giorgione, Titian and Tintoretto, Carpaccio, Lotto, Veronese, and all the rest. For it was with them it all began. Once all the other beginnings were over, that is. Now he is better known for intellectual works of a tougher order such as Sacred Sins or Art and the Spirit, his devastating indictment of theatricality and amateurism in the plastic arts, but it was through the great masters of the Venetian school that his scholarly career, then as an art critic and historian, originally - as they say in the Other World - "took off" (here only the pigeons would understand such an expression, and they would not mean the same thing by it), with his seminal studies on illusionism, transfiguration, and the motif of the ass in Venetian paintings of the life of Christ.

  He was first drawn to the study of art, being self-taught in this as in all subjects, by a painting on the wall of his father's little room under the stairs. His father was a poor man, unable to afford even a fireplace or a kettle, so he had painted one, or had had one painted, on the wall, with a fire lit under the kettle that looked just like a real fire, a cloud of steam coming out of it that looked just like real steam, and a kettle lid so convincing he nearly splintered his fingers trying to take it off before he discovered the illusion. Locked in often by his loving but, it must be said, ill-tempered father, and with little more to eat than pear cores and his own hat, he had ample time to study this trompe l'oeil, learning something therefrom about the function of appetite in scholarship (he has often argued that more interesting than the things that are studied by mankind is the infinite catalogue of things that are not), the implications of the wall (surfaces are not passive!), and the power of raw color upon the imagination: he found, on bitter days, he could actually warm himself by that painted fire, and indeed, even now, it might comfort him and still the rising panic in his heart.

  For he does not want to die. Not yet. Not with just one more chapter to go. But the choice may not be his. He is nearing exhaustion. He no longer knows if he is walking or crawling. He cannot feel his hands and feet. The snow is everywhere, in his face, down his back, inside him as well as out - snow and the deep night, for the world is weirdly white and pitch black at the same time, just as his mind has gone blank and his spirits horribly dark. Somehow he has made a wrong turn. Probably more than one. He climbed that last bridge, expecting to see the old palazzo and its charred doorway, all warmly lit up and waiting for him, but it was the wrong bridge. He retraced his steps, but soon they disappeared under the fresh snow. He tried to find his way back to the Gambero Rosso, but the fold had closed. So his search became more random, more frenzied. His knees began to give way. Passages beckoned that, like his father's trompe l'oeil, were not ones, and he smacked his face on them. Or they let him in, then dead-ended in mazelike traps occupied by prides of mad squalling cats. He hobbled painfully over slippery bridges that led only to locked and darkened doors. He cried out for help, got doused, reviled.

  Now he wants to stop but he cannot, he is too afraid. It is as though he is running not toward something, but from it. If he bumps into something, he jumps back as though struck; if he stumbles toward the edge of a canal yawning out of the swirling white night below him, he feels pushed. All the old childhood traumas have returned and he recalls with renewed terror that night in the woods when he was set upon by murderers who chased him, caught him, knifed him, hung him, a night that has haunted him all his life and haunts him now, driving him through this befuddling network of alleyways and squares like the pursued heroines in gothic movies. Except that he lacks the heroines' youthful strength. When he was just a little sliver, as his father liked to call him, he used to be able to run all day like a hare before hunters, to zip up and down trees, scale cliffs, leap hedgerows at a single bound - indeed, on that "Night of the Assassins," as it has come to be called, he delayed his capture by leaping a wide canal of filthy water the color of a cold cappuccino just like these, his would-be killers falling in - patatunfete! - when they tried to follow - but now, far from leaping one of these wretched ditches, he cannot even pull himself over their bridges. He can barely walk. He is feeling, oddly, seasick. His head is pounding. He is beginning to turn in smaller and smaller circles.

  But wait! What was that -? Something behind him? He stops dead in his tracks, stooped over, his knees knocking, sour breath tearing from his ancient ill-made lungs, afraid to turn around and look. All about him there is a deep hush, almost as though the whole island were frozen up, holding its breath, he can hear nothing but his own desperate snorting and the tormented creaking of his knees - and then suddenly a terrible flutter as of a thousand assassins comes roaring up out of the night, swooping down over him and away, and he screams and nearly jumps out of his skin, what's left of it. As his scream dies away, he can hear them, or it, circling back, so, terror reviving him - this is real!- he takes off down a narrow calletta, praying only that the little alley doesn't end in watersteps. Whatever it is that's after him - just a bevy of desperate pigeons caught out in the snow, he tells himself, but he doesn't believe it, pigeons aren't that stupid, for this kind of stupidity it takes a Ph.D. - chases him right down it, he can hear it, or them, bearing down on him, bellowing mightily, or maybe cursing (it sometimes sounds like belching), wings slapping and scraping the crumbly old brick walls, sending loose chips raining down, rattling the drawn wooden shutters, jostling flowerpots out of window boxes - no wonder this place looks so beat-up!

  He emerges, dangerously, into an open square, no place to hide, the huge wings paddling away overhead - but in the nick of time he spies a low underpass, and he ducks down it. He can hear his pursuer roar with alarm ("Vaffanculo!" he seems to hear the beast cry) before slamming into the walls and bringing down chimney pots and roof tiles in its frantic climb. The sottoportico, shorter than he might have hoped, leads him to another clumsy bridge, the bridge to a riva edging a canal full of docked boats sheeted with white snow, the riva to more streets and side streets past metal-shuttered shops and snow-topped heaps of garbage bags, the streets to other bridges and courtyards and passageways and squares, while, just above and behind him, the pounding wings bear down relentlessly, his assailant losing him and finding him in all these mazy turnings, as though it might be a game it's playing, like a cat toying with a trapped mouse. The old professor is not exactly running, but he's not walking either, it would be hard to say what he's doing, but he's picking them up and putting them down, all four of his wasted limbs at once and not in any special order, his head ducked for fear of having it snatched away, his torso bouncing along erratically like unwieldy luggage.

  But then he finds himself again in an open campo, probably one he has been in before, and though his mind is racing down the
next alleyway, his body is on its knees. It just does not want to go any farther. He crawls dutifully ahead, carrying through in the old way, holding fast, hauling his resistant carcass through the snow like a dull plow, a thing heavier even than his abusive old father was the night he had to wrench the old brute, hallucinating wildly on grappa he had made from seaweed, fish eyes, and ship wreckage, and fermented in his erstwhile host's digestive juices, a grappa too good, he kept blubbering insistently, to leave behind, out of the giant fish's belly. Which is where he is again, swallowed up as one sucks up an oyster and waiting to be digested, only now his daddy's not here and there's no escape. He can hear his assassin flapping fiercely in the wind above him, circling round as though, at last, to pounce. Well, let it, whatever it is, come. He curls up against the wall. It is not the wall of the painted fire and steaming kettle, but it will have to do. He can go no further. His opus magnum will remain unfinished. Our worst fears, he thinks, are always justified. He is going to "sleep like the Pope" all right, but not the present one. Above him, what looks for all the world like a flying lion is thrashing about in the snowstorm, roaring lustily and batting the snow away from its eyes with its massive paws. But it may be his own dizziness, his poor sight, his indigestion which delivers to him this vision. "PAX TIBI - wurrp! - EXCREMENTUM MEUS!" the fiendish creature bawls: "Hic! - REQUIESCET CORPUS TUUM!" and, its great ghostly wings churning up the snowy air theatrically, it circles a bell tower once to commence its murderous descent.