(1991) Pinocchio in Venice

by Robert Coover

  "He says he knows the Pope."

  "Well, almost everything." Alidoro raises his heavy snout and sniffs, then leaves the professor and goes to nose about the blackened doorway of the old palazzo. "Now, I think we should open up, gentlemen. There's something decidedly foxy on the air."

  "La Volpe -?!"

  "Very nasty, whatever it is. Hop to it now!"

  One of the policemen fumbles with a big ring of keys. "It gives me a hell of a fright to go in here at night," shudders another, and a third laughs nervously: "Afraid of ghosts?" "A ghost - you know, that woman who died here in the fire." "Fire?" "That's just a legend," says the policeman with the keys, as he pushes the door open. "Beam one of those spotlights in here!" "Whew, when was the last time this pesthole was opened up?" "They say she was waiting for the return of a beloved brother or son who had abandoned her and that maybe in sorrow she set the fire herself. The place hasn't been used since." "Except by cats. It stinks worse than the old man in here!"

  "The woman," gasps the old professor, startled by the tale, his voice reduced now after all the hysterics to a hoarse whisper, "did she have did she have blue hair?"

  "Blue hair!" they laugh. "Whoever heard of such a thing!"

  "Well, like you can see, Lido. The old ruin's as bald as your pal's conk."

  "There's still a kind of smoky smell in this place. Like she's still burning or something. Let's get out of here -!"

  "Wait a minute! What's this over here? Someone shine a light!"

  "It's a watch! Do you recognize this, old man?"

  "Yes, it's mine." This is not going to turn out well. The truth is beginning to sink in. And the story of the woman dying by fire has left him feeling frightened and confused. He knows about fire. He once burned his own feet off. He thought he was going to have to walk through life on his knees. Fire is his greatest fear.

  "Did they steal your watch?" rumbles Alidoro, peering up from the shadows where he's been sniffing around.

  "No. I threw it through a window. To wake them up."

  "To wake who up?"

  "His friend the Pope, no doubt. Lido, your mate's got his head in a sack of shit! He's a raving lunatic!"

  "Let's take him to the Questura and lock him up. This place makes my blood freeze!"

  "Really, Lido, come on, this is a complete waste of time. There's nothing else here except catshit and an old umbrella."

  "Yes, that's mine, too. The umbrella, I mean."

  "Aha! Did you throw that through the window, too, you daft old geezer?"

  "No " But there is something confusing about this, too. When he burned his feet off, they felt as if they belonged to somebody else. Which is how his head is beginning to feel now "There was a blind monk -"

  "A blind monk -! Madonna! What next -?!"

  "He's gone from God's grace, this one, Lido! He's completely pazzo!"

  "Maybe," sighs Alidoro, nosing at a piece of candle wax. "But they were here, just the same."

  "You mean -?"

  "I mean, gentlemen," rumbles Alidoro, stepping into the light from the doorway and rising to his full height, "that this distinguished visitor - and, indeed, more than a visitor, this native son returned here to his beloved homeland - has been the innocent and very nearly tragic victim of two of our city's most notorious felons. They have lured him here to this lonely site under false pretenses, no doubt playing upon his natural sympathies for the maimed and the infirm, for my friend is famous for his good heart, and here have robbed him of all his earthly goods. He's been sent for a walk, as they say in the trade, taken for a ride, put in the sack, he's been shorn, fiddled, landed, and gaffed. He's been worked like farm butter, boys, he's been had on toast. He's taken a crab and left his feathers in it, lost both lye and soap, do you follow? He was the pigeon, the pup, the one in the middle - am I right, my friend?"

  "Yes! That's true, when we went to the Gambero Rosso, they made me walk between -"

  "Then, having separated him from his possessions, they abandoned him to the elements - and on a night such as this! Gentlemen! The charge is not murder, not yet, but it might as well be! No hand was raised against him, true, but it was quite enough to lock all the doors. No hand, gentlemen, except your own!"

  "Come on, mate, we were only doing our duty "

  "You're no shinbone of a saint yourself, Lido!"

  "I know, I know, no one's paws itch for an occasional turn of tourist-bashing more than mine, you know that, boys, I'm not pulling your ear, I'm not hitting you with a paternale, I wouldn't think of it! All I'm saying is, you've done a duck here, this gentleman is not who or what he might seem, and you owe him an apology and a little courteous attention. I know him as a comrade, lads, I know his life, death, and miracles, as the expression goes, and believe me, he's good pasta, this one, a grand fellow and brave. When you're in over your head and it's drink or drown, when the fat hits the fire and the shit the fan, this is the man, speaking loosely, you want by your side! When Nature made him, as that old hound Ariosto Furioso once said, she broke the mold!"

  "Yeah? Well, she might have waited at least until she was finished!"

  "I'm not talking now just to give breath to my mouth, my friends! A serious crime has been committed here tonight! It's not just the theft of his luggage, you know me, I don't give a cabbage's fart for private property - it's the theft of his dignity! His honor! You can't restore that to him, you sadistic coglioni, but at the very least you should be trying to bring a little justice to bear! You should be trying to find the thieves and get those bags back!"

  "All right, all right, we'll look for them, Lido - but do us the favor, enough of this cacca -!"

  "And may I remind you, gentlemen, that you have been trying to clap those two rogues in a gattabuia since the last century? You and your fathers have always complained that they were too wily, you could never get the goods on them. Well, my boys, here's your chance, here's your case! In flagrante, ironclad, with ribbons and bows! If you grasp it by the hair, you'll be national heroes! In fact, come to think of it, it's probably worth a little reward to me and my -"

  "But no, Lido! Falla finita! As far as we're concerned it's better to lose the little shit-machine than to find him, so if he's a chum of yours, do as you please with him, it doesn't do us hot or cold. But don't try to pass the plate, you old mutt, it won't go down! You're not getting the centesimo of a whore out of us!"

  "Well, all right," says Alidoro with what might be a trace of a grin. "Give us a ride then." He puts a paw around the professor and leads him toward one of the launches. "Come along now, compagno, you've suffered enough. It's time to draw in the oars."

  6. THE PHILOSOPHICAL WATCHDOG

  The benumbed wayfarer lies, swaddled in newspapers, blankets, and old rags like a wizened parody of the Christ child from a rigid Trecento nativity, on a bed of wood chips and sawdust under the umbrella of a corrugated tin roof, his back against an overturned gondola, his bundled feet pointed toward an old rusty barrel in which a fire is being stoked by the boatyard's watchdog, Melampetta. "Come Monday, they'll give me a rogue's thumping for letting thieves steal the firewood," she growls, "but cosě va il mondo, as the philosopher said, if it wasn't the poet - destiny's not to be tampered with unless the Party takes a hand in it, and the Party's hand nowadays is in its pants. So, nothing to do but face whatever comes with a good heart and stout buttocks, and if the evil beggars get carried away, the devil take them, I'll piss on their sandwiches." "That's letting them off easy," Alidoro rumbles from out on the lip of the old dock, where he is rummaging through a snowy heap of broken tiles and glass, bricks, rusted pipes, old paint tins and plastic bags, chain links, bottles, gas cans, and stiff old socks for any burnable bits of wood, rag, and paper. "You should piss in their wine, Mela, hit the tyrannical swillpots where it most hurts." "The wine they drink, cazzo mio, piss improves it, they'd be beating me for the profit in it," she replies. " 'When the masters drink pee and call it claret, the wretched of the earth must grin and bear it; but when
the masters drink claret and call it pee, then hang the bastards from the nearest tree!' I think it was either Pliny or the blessed Apuleius who said that, or else it was Saint John of the Apocalypse."

  "She's a quarrelsome old bitch, who fancies herself something of an argufier and a heavy thinker, she's got a mouth like a brass band, as they say, and a cunt like a mailbag, but she's a good compagna for all that, and I believe she will not shut us out on a night like this," Alidoro had explained on the way over, a way that was, in the end, too long for the collapsing traveler. Almost too tired and ill to know what he was doing, he had signed a general denunciation of the thieves, the police offering to fill in all the names, surnames, descriptions, alleged villainies, and formal criminal and civil charges back at the Questura, then he and Alidoro had hitched a ride in one of the patrol boats, Alidoro stealing a blanket as they got under way and stuffing it under the professor's coat, pretending to be buttoning him up. En route (and, yes, the railway station was just two steps away from the fraudulent hotel, that charlatan had taken him in circles: the police, annoyingly amused, promised to add this to his list of complaints), the old mastiff was the forbearant butt of a lot of more or less friendly banter about all his presumed mistresses, one or more of whom they were apparently about to visit, so the professor was alarmed to learn, when they were dropped off at the San Barnaba traghetto stop and the police had roared away, that the poor brute was broke and homeless ("I'm on the straw, old friend," he apologized with a woeful gaze, snow drifting down around his ears, "you've caught me between head and neck, to put it plain, I'm flat, I'm dry, I've neither bone nor bed. The last woman who, more in pity than in passion, took me in was on the prod and caught the plague from one of the fiendish instruments, sad to say, so I've been bedding down on my wits, what's left of them, ever since "), and that their best hope was an old gondola repair yard at the backside of the island where he knew the watchdog.

  So Alidoro wrapped the professor up in the blanket they had stolen off the patrol boat ("How did you recognize me?" he asked, and the old mastiff, cope-and-cowling him, replied: "You're the only one I've ever known, my friend, who gave off the smell of holm-oak." "So you've noticed then " "Noticed -?") and they set off to come here, Alidoro plodding heavily ahead through the snow, the professor, hungover and weak-kneed, staggering along behind, afraid only of dying alone. What had been a partial misgiving back in America, a faint doubt as to the advisability of his expedition, had now become a bitter conviction that his own nature was somehow fatally betraying him. That dignity which has taken him nearly a century to cultivate and sustain had vanished in an instant, as though his very pursuit of a meaningful life were itself depriving him of it. He once stated quite plainly in some remote place (in his published lectures, perhaps, on "The Curse of Irony"?) that nearly everything great which comes into being does so in spite of something - in spite of sorrow or suffering, poverty, destitution, physical weakness, depravity, metamorphosis, the plague, being born a puppet - but he has never really considered the lingering power of that spite

  "What's that noise?" Alidoro had paused to ask. They were in a dark narrow street. The old dog sniffed the air, squinted blearily about him. "Sounds like an old rusty sign, swinging in the wind " The ancient professor emeritus slumped, creaking, against a shop window. "It's - it's my knees," he gasped. "Something awful is happening, Alidoro! I'm - I'm turning back to wood again!" He felt tears pricking his eyes again and trickling down his nose. He'd never told anyone before, not even a doctor. "And this weather - sob! - the joints are seizing up. I'm so ashamed " The shop, if his eyes did not deceive him, sold wooden puzzles. Such a gratuitous irony, which might have once offended him, now, in his deplorable humiliation, made his heart ache. "I don't think I can go any farther." "Poor old fellow," Alidoro said then with a deep rumbling sigh, and he hoisted him up and carried him the rest of the way here on his broad bony back.

  The old mastiff reenters their shelter now, rump first, dragging in a weathered beach chair, its torn canvas seat wrapped around a load of firewood. He has rigged up a green plastic tarpaulin on the windward side of the projecting tin roof to keep out the blowing snow, built short walls out of overturned gondolas on the two lee sides, the fourth wall provided by the rustic repair shed, then feathered their nest with sawdust, newspapers, and wood chips. "Here's a few more arguments for your fire, you old Jesuitical tart," he pants now, hauling the firewood up to the barrel, and the watchdog barks back: "Those aren't arguments, buttbrain, those are the a priori and assumptive conditions- axiomatic, absolute, and apodictical - of the argument, which hasn't even heated up enough yet to make your piss sizzle, so before you open your yap to answer back, just keep in mind I've only started on the As, there's at least twenty-seven or twenty-eight more letters to go, if I remember rightly, and the soup's not on yet." Alidoro winks drily down at the professor and shakes the snow off his coat. "With all that hard thinking you do, Mela, I'm surprised your rectum doesn't fall out."

  This was how they'd got in here, the two of them scrapping like strays, it was a kind of code between them, as though recognition depended on insult and invective, affection upon rhetorical display. On the way, rocking between Alidoro's shoulder blades in his stolen wool blanket like a withered seed pod, the old scholar had drifted off momentarily, dreaming of the little Tuscan village by the sea where he was born, with its one main street running from home to school and crossed by another leading to to ? He couldn't remember, but what he found when he turned down it was a little cottage as white as snow, or perhaps white with snow, except for its blackened doorway, where he was met by some junior faculty, blocking his entrance, to whom, when they suggested that with all due respect they desired to hang the distinguished visitor from the nearest oak tree, he was obliged to explain that he could not accept their offer at this time because he was still teaching at one of the East Coast I.V.'s, so named, he pointed out, because of their innovative method of education by intravenous feeding. They seemed to admire this insight, if that's what it was, an insight, and not an encyclopedia entry he'd been paid to provide, nodding their heads solemnly in unison, and they went on to ask him (though by now he might have been hanging, for the north wind seemed to be blowing and whistling, and he was swinging back and forth like a bell clapper on a wedding day), if, in his renowned wisdom, he might be able to elucidate a mysterious inscription on the back of a famous work of art attributed to one Paolo Venereo, or Venerato (a portrait of a cross-eyed yellow-haired Pope whose fat round face was dripping like candlewax), which read: "ABBASSO LARIN METICA." He understood the inscription instantly, and in fact was startled by the lucidity of his perception, but when he was jolted awake suddenly by Alidoro shouting out something about a black fart ("Melampeto!" he had bellowed - only later did the professor understand that this was a rude play on the watchdog's name), he found he could no longer remember what the perception was. Nor, for a moment, could he even remember where he was, he thought he might be on a ship at sea, bundled up in a deck chair or lashed to the mast, certainly he was feeling seasick -

  "Melamputtana! Open the door, you ungrateful diabolectical sesquipedalian windbag, and let me in!"

  "Aha! Is that you, Alidildo, you shameless eudemonist ass-licking retard? Everything I've got you to thank for I have to scratch! Let you in? Don't make the chickens laugh! You can go suck the Pope's infallible hind tit, as attested to by Zoroaster and the sibylline Teresa of Avila, for all I care! Addio, Alido! My regards to your worms and chancres!"

  "Hold on, drooping-drains, don't put on airs, on you they smell like the farts of the dead! Remember who you're talking to! Your asster will be a whole lot sorer if you don't drag your vile syphilline cunt-flaps over here and open this gate up! Do you hear me, twaddle-twat? We're freezing our nuts off out here!"

  "Oh, I do remember who I'm talking to, Alidolce, my sweet little bum-gut. I'm afraid your theoretical nuts were harvested years ago, if you feel something down there, it's probably just boils on the ass, f
or which cold compresses are highly recommended, vide Aesculapius' Principles of Mycology, and as for threats of violence, remember who you're talking to, you preposterous old humbug! I could split your hollow toothless skull quicker than Saint Thomas could split a hair from the Virgin's hemorrhoidal behind in four, in or out of the catechism! No, you can sing all you want, squat-for-brains, you're just pounding water in your mortar, as Leucippus of blessed memory once said to William of Ockham over an epagogic pot of aglioli, there's no room at the inn nor in this shithole either, and that's conclusive, absolute, categorical, and a fortiori finito in spades! So go spread your filthy pox among your misses of the opiates, fuckface! Arrivederci! Ciao!"

  "I think she's weakening," Alidoro muttered then over his shoulder, and the professor, alarmed at all this vicious howling and barking, gasped: "Is this the right way to go about it -?" The storm had worsened, he could hardly see for the swirling snow - it was as though he were being pushed out of the world at full blow.

  "Patience, old friend, it's part of the dance. For her all these citations, enthymemes, postulates, and premises are like a warm nose on her clit, the wormy old gabbler won't spread without them."

  "Who've you got out there with you, you fatuous lump of clotted dookie? Are you on a sleigh ride with another of your cuntless junkies?"

  "An aged compatriot, Melampieta, who is, I'm afraid, more there than here. I have carried him all this way on my back, not knowing what else to do, I tell you, mona mia, with my heart in my forepaws, if you have no pity for me tonight, so be it and amen, a fartiari o'fuckem and spayed, I've weathered worse - but please take in my poor friend Pinocchio. If you don't, I won't know where to hit my -"

  "Pinocchio -?!" There was a clattering and slapping of locks and bolts and the scraping of the gates against the flagstones. "Davvero? In flesh and bones -? But he must be -!"