(1991) Pinocchio in Venice

by Robert Coover

  And yet, he thinks, the numbness in his feet having spread to his chest, is it really such a surprise? To what extent all these years, he must ask himself, has he truly believed in the physical separation of the Three Kingdoms because he wanted to? It was convenient, after all. His "psychogenetic geography," as he called it, to general acclaim - and he has liked the acclaim, liked being the famous professor and revered emeritus, whose exemplary pilgrimage moved the world. Would he have given all that up for so small a thing as the truth? He staggers, his knees sagging under the weight of his plummeting spirit. He squints up at the next bridge they must mount with a certain horror. He seems to see three bridges, piled on one another like a cartful of plague victims. Ah. No. Can't

  "You remember Eugenio, that ragazzo you laid out with your math book the day they sent me chasing after you -?"

  "It - it wasn't me -!" he whispers faintly.

  "He's running the show now. You should've killed him."

  He stops. He can go no further. It's as though these revelations have peeled more of his skin away, exposing him yet more ruthlessly to the petrifying cold. He can hear the wood cracking and splintering in his limbs with each step. "Alidoro, my dear friend, I - I " In his pockets, his hands are frozen like claws around ears now as hard as golden coins. And for some time now, he has been feeling something like loose marbles at his waistband. He shudders, and they rattle about down there. The dog gazes over at him from the foot of the bridge with his rheumy eyes. "Alidoro," he says, his chattering teeth clacking like wooden spoons, "I think I just froze my nipples off."

  11. ART AND THE SPIRIT

  The monster fish that swallowed Jonah, sucking him up as a raw egg is sucked, was a pious creature devoted to virtue and orthodoxy, a kind of blubbery angel, conjured up by a God who liked to flesh out his metaphors. He - or she, the anatomy is uncertain, "belly" perhaps a euphemism - kept the runaway prophet dutifully in his or her belly or whatever for three days and three nights, long enough for Jonah to get a poem written and promise to do as he was told, and then, with a kind of abject courtesy, vomited him up, if that is not also a euphemism, on dry land. This is what Bordone's dark stormy picture, sitting like a mummy-brown bruise on the stone wall near the front entrance, is trying to show: Jonah disgorged like the metaphor's tenor emerging gratefully from its vehicle. He has often tried to see his own experience in the same light. In his now-lost Mamma chapter, "The Undigested Truth," for example, he has compared his brawling, boozing, recalcitrant father with the wicked Ninevites whom Jonah was reluctant to exhort, and from whom the prophet felt even more estranged once he'd saved them, has asked whether it was really truancy that landed Jonah in the fish's entrails, or whether God, like the Blue-Haired Fairy in her goat suit, might not somehow have lured the prophet into his crisis for reasons of pedagogy, and has indicated thereby how both his and Jonah's maritime adventures, often interpreted symbolically in Christian terms of baptism and rebirth, or else Judaic ones of exile and return (in Hollywood, quite literally: the raw and the cooked), might be understood more accurately - and more profoundly perhaps - as violent forms of occupational therapy. They were also living demonstrations of vocation's fount in the viscera: only he and Jonah - and perhaps poor Saint Sebastian up there, standing like a twisted tree with an arrow through his - could fully understand what a gut feeling really is.

  Unfortunately, his own fish was not so decorous and accommodating as Jonah's. Attila was a decrepit, foul-smelling, asthmatic old tub of lard who slept heavily, snorting and eructating all night with his mouth open, airing his adenoids. Crawling out through his gorge was not so much dangerous as it was merely nauseating. His old man, he discovered, had been in and out many times. Old Geppetto had adjusted to the life and come to like it, brewing up his own lethal grappa in the fish's digestive juices, devising recipes for the tons of stuff the monster sucked up, one of his favorites being a cold porridge made out of mashed cuttlefish, live sea slugs, and walrus dung, and dressing up grandly in the uniforms of drowned sea captains. As far as he was concerned, he'd never had it so good. As a hobby, he'd taken up pornographic and religious scrimshaw, with which he decorated his chambers, ampler than any he'd ever known before. The place stank, but so had every other place he'd lived in. He'd fashioned playing cards out of bleached sea wrack, dice and pipes out of conches, smoked cured kelp. He'd developed, as though in imitation of his monstrous host, an Oriental pleasure in the swallowing of whitebait and polliwogs live to feel them tickle his throat as they died going down - that's what the old buzzard was doing when he discovered him in there and ran to give him a hug, getting in return a faceful of spat-up live fish and a smack on his tender nose. Mostly, though, his father just sat around hallucinating on his evil brew. It was this grappa that steeled his heart, as it stole his mind, and made him refuse to budge. He thought he'd never get the besotted wretch out of there. When he tried to plead with him, his father turned nasty, walloping him with an oar handle if he came too close and threatening to set him alight and smoke his herrings with him.

  "This shit is magic, finocchio mio! It's the only magic I've ever known!"

  "But what about me, babbino mio? Your little talking -"

  "You, you little spunk, you sap, you sucker, you nutless wonder! You twist of tinder fungus! You're a thorn in my side! a splinter in my eye! a sprit up my ass! You stick in my craw! One step closer, knothole, and I'll make toothpicks out of you!"

  Finally he had to pretend to go along with him, throw a party, tell stories, get him blind drunk and carry him out through the snoring fish on his back, the old stew by now completely demented and raving at the top of his voice about the snakes in Saint Peter's green beard and the treachery of stars and fink pigeons and about being impaled on the devil's nose, which he envisioned apparently as appearing miraculously on the Virgin's shiny cerulean and enigmatically uncleft behind, the poor brute having tried desperately at the last minute, when he realized what was happening, to drink up his entire production before having to abandon it forever. When he woke up in the Fairy's cottage three days later, he thought he'd died and it was the Second Coming. In fact, he never quite got this idea out of his crazed old head after, and insisted on being called San 'Petto ever after.

  Maybe he should have just left the old ingrate in there. But already, unredeemed woodenhead though he still was, he had started reading his many trials as edifying metaphors, the didactic strategies of his blue-haired preceptress, and in their light he knew he had to bring his babbo out with him. Their light, with significance, has lit all his actions, without it his life would have been as dark and cold as this poor martyred church of a twice-martyred saint wherein, huddled in his tattered coat, shawled by his scarf, his ears in his pockets and his nipples at his belt, the old scholar sits, waiting for his friend Alidoro's return, frozen to the core and unsure even of his next minute - yet he can no longer say for certain whether the source of that imperiously guiding light was, all these years, without him or within. Did God, to put it another way, truly have plans for the Ninevites - they were spared, after all, nothing happened at all as Jonah said it would - or did Jonah, despairing of his own mortal condition, find himself invoking both God's plans and his own trials in reply, not to a luminous command from tempestuous skies, but to some inner storm of his own, his own career-engendering transformational wet dream, so to speak? A mystery frightening to ponder

  Paolo Veronese, whose church this is, having claimed it in the end with his very bones (his funerary bust gazes sternly down from the wall behind his painted organ upon its sickly visitor, shivering in his pitiable rags, and admonishes him with its straight classic nose, its unpocked flesh, its handsomely draped breast, its noble and contented demeanor, looking much like the benign host of some great and sumptuous feast, from which the visitor, though he may ogle, is forever excluded), toys with this problem of the light's source in his central altar painting, in which Saint Sebastian's pierced groin is vividly lit up, but his tormented face is cast in sh
adow by the thick cloud at the Virgin's feet. She hovers just above him with the infant Jesus as though in someone else's vision, stealing the scene, as it were bathed in a golden Technicolor light not quite real and attended by angels fussing about like dressers, while the saint, his view obstructed (and looking a bit fearful that, what with all his other problems, something awesome might be about to fall on him), turns black with death and doubt.

  Though it speaks in some ways to the abused traveler's embittered mood, this is not the classical Venetian Sebastiano. Veronese, as usual, has taken liberties. Traditionally the martyr is shown standing contented as a wooden post, bathed in golden light himself, and stuffed with arrows as though he might be sprouting them like twigs, an image that, while often ridiculed, once touched the professor deeply, especially as painted by his beloved Giovanni Bellini. The image - "a piercing of eternity's veil," as he called it - led him into his early Venetian monographs on traumatic transfiguration and on toys as instruments, simultaneously, of death and wisdom, and eventually lay at the heart of his controversial theoretical work, Art and the Spirit, the central theme of which was the absorption (the punctured flesh) of Becoming, fate, action, multiformity, naughtiness, discord, theatricality, bad temper, extrinsicality, evil companions, carpentry, negation, ignominy, and ultimately Art itself (the wooden arrows) by Being, will, repose, unity, obedience, peace, the eternal image, aplomb, intrinsicality, saints, teaching, affirmation, beatification, and all in the end by the transcendent Spirit (the languid gaze).

  That languid gaze, he felt, had something to do with the mysterious shimmering light of Venice, a light that, paradoxically, seemed permanently to fix before the eye the very flux that excluded all fixity, patterns and archetypes emerging from the watery atmosphere like Platonic ideas materializing in the fog of Becoming, and so spellbinding the gazer in a process that more or less mirrored that of the moviegoer lost conversely to seeming life in the flickering sequence of lifeless film frames, movement there emerging from fixity, the viewer's rapt gaze seduced, not by eternal Ideas, but by illusory angels cast up by the enchantment of "persistence of vision," as they called it. And as he called it, too, when speaking of the Venetian masters, borrowing from the then-disreputable cinema industry, another revolutionary and controversial - "mischievous," as his adversaries bitterly remarked - critical act. The illusory, that is to say, was, for the great Venetian painters, what was real. Change was changeless, Becoming was Being. For them, "persistence" of vision was active, not passive: they saw through. Theirs was the art of the intense but reposeful acceptance of the turbulent wonderful.

  This ground-breaking work, dismissed at the time as the "malicious prank of an irredeemable parricide," was to be sure an audacious frontal assault (though never, in obedience to the Blue-Haired Fairy's precepts, disrespectful to his elders) upon the established dogma of the day, a dogma that reduced Venetian painting to mindless decoration, mere theater sets for cultic spectacle, as it were, "unperplexed by naturalism, religious mysticism, philosophical theories" and "exempt from the stress of thought and sentiment," as the paterfamilias of aestheticians put it, but, disturbing as his youthful iconoclasm was, it turned out to be less controversial than the book's many alleged parallels with his own life story. In those long-ago days of faith still in progress and pragmatism, personality was seen as a hindrance to "pure science," and "spirit" of course was a dirty word, "I" anathema. He was accused of feeding, with works of art, "the great maw of a monstrous ego." His theories were ridiculed as "thin laminations, scarcely concealing a deep-rooted psychosis." "The confused work of a split personality," another said. "Dr. Pinenut cannot see the forest for the tree."

  He could not entirely deny these charges. He was himself a product, after all, of his father's rude art and a transfigured spirit; the title had not come to him by accident. The quest for the abiding forms within life's ceaseless mutations was his quest, had been since he burnt his feet off; he too, rejecting all theatricality, sought repose in the capricious turbulence - freedom, as it were, from story. Even his decision to study the Venetians had to do with his own origins. If the beginnings of Venetian painting, as that same father figure of the priesthood who had dismissed Venetian art as "a space of color on the wall" argued, "link themselves to the last, stiff, half-barbaric splendors of Byzantine decoration," how could he help, pagan lump of talking wood that he once was, but be drawn to these magicians of the transitional? No, his reply to all these accusations in his germinal "Go with the Grain" manifesto was: "All great scholarship is a transcendent form of autobiography!" "It-ness," he declared (this was the first time he was to use the concept later to be made world-famous in The Wretch), "contains I-ness!" The victory was his. Even physics would never be the same again.

  Oh, she would have been proud of him, she who had launched his great quest with her little Parable of the Two Houses, here on this very island, all those many years ago. He'd been cast up by a storm and was begging at the edge of town when she found him. She offered him a supper of bread, cauliflower, and liquor-filled sweets in exchange for carrying a jug of water home for her. He'd last seen her as a little girl, and moreover presumed her dead, so he didn't recognize this woman, old enough to be his mother, until she took her shawl off and he saw her blue hair. Whereupon he threw himself at her feet and, sobbing uncontrollably, hugged her knees. "Oh, why can't we go home again, Fairy?" he wept. "Why can't we go back to the little white house in the woods?" Her knees spread a bit in his impassioned embrace, and the fragrant warmth between them drew him in under her skirts. He wasn't sure he should be in here, but in his simple puppetish way he thought perhaps she didn't notice. He felt terribly sleepy, and yet terribly awake, his eyes open but filled with tears.

  "Let me tell you a story, my little illiterate woodenknob," she said above his tented head, "about the pretty little white house and the nasty little brown house - do you see them there?" He rubbed his eyes and running nose against her stocking tops and peered blearily down her long white thighs. Yes, there was the dense blue forest, there the valley, and there (he drew closer) the little house, just hidden away, more pink than white really, and gleaming like alabaster. But the other -? "A little lower " She pushed on his head, sinking him deeper between the thighs, until he saw it: dark and primitive, more like a cave than a house, a dank and airless place ringed about by indigo weeds, dreary as a tomb. She pushed his nose in it. "That is the house of laziness and disobedience and vagrancy," she said. "Little boys who don't go to school and so can only follow their noses come here, thinking it's the circus, and disappear forever." He was suffocating and thought he might be disappearing, too. She let him out but, even as he gasped for breath, stuffed his nose into the little white house: "And here is the house for good little boys who study and work hard and do as they are told. Here, life is rosy and sweet, and they can play in the garden and come and go as they please. Isn't that much better?"

  "Yes, Mamma!" he said, and it was better, but he was still having trouble breathing. He tried to back out but he was clamped in her thighs.

  "Don't be idle!" she scolded, and she gave him a spank on his wooden bottom that drove him in deeper. "Look around! Idleness is a dreadful disease, of which one should be cured immediately in childhood; if not, one never gets over it."

  What he saw when he looked around was a glistening little snail peeking out under the eaves. "What are you doing there, with your nose in the door?" she asked, laughing. Or someone did, he wasn't sure, he was confused, and thought he might be about to faint.

  "I odly wadt to stop beigg a puppet and becubb a little boy," he wept. "Wod't you help be, little sdail?"

  "And will you ever tell a lie again?"

  "Ndo!" he cried desperately and, alarmingly, his nose began to grow again as it had done the last time he'd been in the little white house when the Fairy was still just a girl. That time she'd unloosed on him a thousand prickly woodpeckers to peck it all away, a pecking he still sometimes felt out beyond his face like a ne
rvous tingle as Il Gattino once told him he still felt his missing paw.

  "Oh!" the Fairy gasped, giggling and wriggling about so, she seemed this time to be trying to break his nose off at the root. "A lie about lying, that's the worst kind, you naughty boy!" And then she began to spank him for real. No more playful smacks, she really let him have it.