(1991) Pinocchio in Venice

by Robert Coover

  "Your nose! It seems to be -!"

  "Ah, it's - it's a cold!" he mutters confusedly, his eyes watering. He turns his head away in embarrassment, pulls his hands back, hides his nose in his sleeve. "I'm sorry! Nasty thing, don't want you to catch it "

  She seems to be giggling behind him, but he can't be certain, and he's too ashamed to look. He ducks his head. What was he thinking - exposing himself - in his condition - and if she saw the rest -! He is wheezing again, his chest racked anew by a fit of coughing. "You sure you don't want to come home with me?" she asks, rising from the pew, her jaws snapping at the gum once more. "I could put an extra blanket on -"

  "No! A friend! I have to wait!" he gasps between the painful spasms, keeping his offending part tucked between his knees.

  "Well, can't blame a girl for - fllupp! POP!- trying. It was terrif seeing you again, prof. You're really something else!" And - "Peace!" - she is gone.

  "Wait -!" he whispers and, twisting round, catches just a glimpse of her tightly denimed posteriors disappearing provocatively out the door. "B-Bluebell -? Miss -?!" Too late. He has lost her, lost her forever! Of course, he cautions himself, turning back, shriveling once more into his terrible debilities, it's no catastrophe, insolent uncouth creature that she is, frivolous and disrespectful, no, good riddance, his final hours can be better spent without suffering yet another gum-popping American barbarian, her cockiness exceeded only by her ignorance, though she is not completely stupid, it must be said, brash, garrulous, but also fresh and winsome in her boorish way, blasphemous to be sure, impudent, a shamelessly wanton creature no doubt, but warm-hearted (he knows, he has been there), generous, compassionate, and willing to learn, yes, he could teach her, he has already changed her life, has he not, she said so, the soil is prepared, as it were, it's never too late - and think of it! a hot bath! What does he want to do, go back to that stinking boat yard? He finds he has already staggered to his feet. In the painting behind the altar, if his beclouded eyes do not deceive him, the Virgin Mary has opened her bodice to give baby Jesus and all the cherubs and angels crowding round a suck and is peering down now past her hiked skirts at Saint Sebastian, struggling in agony against his bonds beneath her but his eyes to heaven. And then (is something dripping on his face -?! what is she doing -?!) the holy martyr's nose begins to grow! Straight up! Oh my God! Even before the arrow in the saint's groin starts to twang obscenely, the old professor is out of his pew and scrambling stiff-kneed up the aisle. "Miss -!" he croaks. "WAIT FOR ME -!"

  "What -?! Is the old sinner going to chase after that poor bambina, that little chick in the tow with milk at her mouth still?" comes an indignant voice, quavering eerily, from behind the organ. "Is he defiling my tomb and sanctuary with thoughts of pederasty? Has the wretch no dignity? Has he no shame?"

  "Beware of men who make public profession of virtue but behave like perfect scoundrels!" thunders a hollow voice above him on the left: the Bishop of Cyprus, he sees with horror, is sitting straight up, rigid and stony-eyed, blood dripping from the corners of his mouth as though he might have bit the host with his teeth. "It just goes to prove that a naughty person retains his evil character even if his outward appearance is altered!" And - crash! - he falls back onto his stone bier again.

  "Let me give you some advice!" trumpets a voice from above, and others pick up the theme: "I want to give you some advice!" "Give you advice!" "Advice!" "Advice!" The entire church, as he struggles up the aisle (nothing's working right, it was his old babbo who taught him how to walk, he could use another lesson now), echoes and resounds with clamorous counsel: "Do not go for things bald-headed, woodenpate! Old codgers who, in an excess of passion, rush into affairs without precaution, rush blindly into their own destruction!" "Regrets are useless, booby, once the damage is done!"

  "Stop it! Stop it!" he squawks, wheezing and snorting. He would clap his hands over his ears if he still had any ears and if he didn't need both hands for forward progress. The rose and white marble squares of the checkered floor seem to be on springs, rising and falling erratically, making him climb over some and out of others. Some drop away completely to reveal heaps of bones and moldering bishop's hats far below, forcing him to circle around, grasping pews and benches which are also on the move, sliding apart and then together again with great clashing noises like monstrous gates. "Woe to those blockheads whose minds are so beclouded by monkey business that they do not perceive the dangers that beset them!" cry the lugubrious voices, which seem to be coming from another world. Terrible odors, like hung game going off, rise up from the yawning chasms opening up in the floor. "Woe to those wicked ragamuffins who run away from their homeland! They will never do any good in this world!" "Woe to those who do not wait for their friends!" "They will repent bitterly!" "They will lose the bone of their neck!" "They will pay through the NOSE!" From the ceiling above, where Esther and her uncle Mordecai are subverting the reign of Xerxes, forestalling one massacre and launching another, come wild whinnies and a glittery blitz, as he fights his way over the undulating floor and through the crashing gates, of brightly gilded horse turds. Splat! SPLAT! they fall, bursting around him like thrown pies. "Eh, big shot! Pezzo grosso!" "Mister Nobel Laureate!" "Where do you think you are going?" Books are thrown at him from the Nuns' Choir, skulls rattle underfoot like bowling balls, arrows fly, the hanging brass lamps swing, clinking and clanking like muffled bells, the organ doors flap, the martyred saint screams in his reduplicated pain, masonry rains down, the whole church seems to be splitting and cracking and threatening him with destruction! "Eh, furfante! Vagabondo! Ragazzaccio!" Splut! Crash! Ka-pok! "Come back! Come back, you little ninny!"

  As he drags himself past the font of holy water near the door, the tumult now fading behind him, the carved Christ's halo falls off and, ringing like a coin, rolls around on the stone floor in front of him. "I say, pick that up for me, would you, Pinenut old man? That's a good chap! I can't seem to move my arms." As, still on his hands and knees, he snatches at it, the hung Christ dips a bit lower and, chin at his navel, adds in a whisper: "You know, from one woodenhead to another, old boy, let me give you a little useful advice -"

  "No!" he screams, staggering to his feet. "Why is everybody always trying to give me advice?!" And he flings the halo into the suddenly stilled and dusty church: it sails like a Frisbee straight to the front where, in the deep hush, it blasts away a jar of pink and yellow carnations, startling an old bespectacled nun dusting the altar. She squeaks like a mouse caught in a trap and drops her feather duster, crossing herself in terror. As he turns to flee, the talking Christ is counseling him to "calm down, let things take their own course, dear fellow, let the water run along its own slope, as we say," whereupon, as though cued, the font tips over, threatening to inundate the church - he splashes through the flood and out the door, a fresh chorus of "Let me give you some advice!" ringing in his aching head like canned laughter.

  13. THE TALKING CRICKET

  He's caged. As he ought to be. As Jiminy once said: You buttered your bread, now sleep in it. People passing by glance at him, stuffed there, shivering and sniveling, in the metal rubbish basket, and cast upon him weary expressions of pity mixed with undisguised loathing and contempt. They dump garbage on him, hang lost mittens on his nose. No more than he deserves. No more! Rushing baldheaded into this bizarre adventure, blind to dangers, deaf to advice, he has, just as all those madhouse voices prophesied, lost his neck bone in this one and all else besides. A lifetime of virtue, of self-conquest and in-spite-of's, an heroic career of the most rigid discipline and soberest endeavor, with all its books, honors, degrees, and endowed chairs, is no protection against the wild whims of senectitude, extremity's giddy last-minute bravado. Ah, Bluebell, Bluebell, you silly wise-cracking dumb-blonde murderess! he thinks, hruffing and hawffing and sucking up cold strangulated breaths that may well be his last. What have you done to me now?

  All around him, even as his own devastated trash-bagged limbs petrify, he can hear through his
wheezing a fluttering, pattering, pounding, and swishing, as the city, shaking itself, crawls out from under its strange white blanket to reinstate its restless habits of scurry and exchange. The storm is letting up. Shutters are grinding open. There are choruses of "Ciao!" "Ciao!" and bursts of laughter, the trampling of booted feet. Nearby, in the middle of this broad open campo, the wooden news kiosk has opened up, spreading its wings like a traveling puppet show, delivery boys are rolling heavy blue and green metal carts past the red benches, and the tarpaulins over the greengrocer stalls are being flung back, pitching clouds of snow into the glittery air. At the far end, a musical group of some sort seems to be setting up at the foot of a truncated bell tower with snow-frosted shrubs growing out the top, the only evidence remaining of whatever church once gave its name to this square. He hears the loose clang of cymbals being unpacked and a squeal like that of an overblown fife when a loudspeaker is plugged in. Crowds are gathering, mostly students with bookbags, housewives pushing strollers. The windows of cafés are steaming up, taunting him with the offer of hot coffee and grappa which he cannot, from his wire crib, alas, even though he has the cash for it, accept. As though to taunt him, on a door within reach of his failing sight, someone has spray-painted: "Only liberty is necessary; everything else is only important." Snow is being swept from shop entrances, sawdust spread. Not far away, as he knows, men in bright-colored slickers are scraping clean the bridges, shoveling the snow and ice into the canals to be flushed to the sea. Earlier, two of them, laughing, lifted him over one of the bridges when he'd been brought to a standstill halfway up, his knees refusing to bend enough to get his toe up past the next step.

  "Ha Ha! Che brutta figura! Poor little cock's lost all his feathers!" exclaimed one.

  "He's so light," laughed the other, "it's more like the feathers have lost their cock!"

  That was his last bridge. Before that, how many, he doesn't know. He was in a kind of delirium. Fever probably. What's left of his flesh must be literally burning itself away. It was cold when he staggered out of the bedlam of that august temple gone suddenly berserk, colder than he'd remembered, and snow was being whipped about still in the sharp wind, obscuring the high bridge in front of the church, only meters away, his first obstacle, but he was on fire with terror, desire, and the hot flush of his infirmity, and the bitterness of the weather seemed only to invigorate him. Up the bridge he went and down, escaping and pursuing at the same time, hobbling to be sure, cracking and splintering and creaking with the cold, hacking and snorting, half blind, but on the move, his withered limbs at times outflung, tossed convulsively awry, to the casual onlooker appearing no doubt a bit whimsical and unstrung, but still clattering resolutely on down the narrow calle on the other side, feeling indeed like something of an athlete, a centenarian version of that spunky youngster who could leap ditches and hedgerows at a single bound, now with each lurching step making about as much progress laterally as forward perhaps, and having to improvise rather desperately at corners and bridges, but feeling that same exhilaration of the blood, that delicious conflict of pain and pleasure that characterizes a race well run, and keeping in mind all the while his noble goal - he will teach her! she will become his last great project! his pupil, his protégé, perhaps even his secretary, biographer, curator, and literary executrix! - as well as the more compelling images of a hot bath, a warm bed, clean sheets, and a pillowy blue hollow wherein to tuck his frostbitten nose.

  Which was what, having no other guide, he had had to trust on that mad chase, following wherever it might lead, sniffing the crisp air for traces of her powdery warmth, her slept-in jeans, the tang of bubble gum and nail polish - and, at the crest of a short arching bridge, he was rewarded suddenly by a glimpse of azure blue, a distant flicker of startling color within the white blur, vanishing as quickly as seen, but which could only have been her sweater (had she taken off her windbreaker? was it a signal? a tease? was she walking backwards? he couldn't stop to think about this), and thereafter he seemed to see it more often, on a bridge, at the edge of a riva or the end of a little calle, fleeting and elusive as his famous last chapter, there and not there, yet drawing him on, though he couldn't be sure he saw it, saw anything for that matter, his vision, never the best, now hazed by icy tears and sweat and the crazy pounding of his heart in his temples and sinuses. So absorbed was he with the object of his pursuit that, as had often happened in the middle of books he was writing, he failed to notice the weariness, the physical and emotional exhaustion, that was rapidly overtaking him, overtaking him once and for all, his mind racing far ahead, abandoning his body, leaving it to drag along behind as best it could until it stopped. Which, inevitably, it did. Halfway up a bridge. He, who was very much afraid of the ridiculous, was then, with fearful ridicule, lifted laughingly to the other side. And stood for a time just where he was deposited, intent only on not adding to his indignity by falling over. It was not easy. Had anyone so much as sneezed nearby, it would have toppled him. And, straining thus to stay upright, he inadvertently pushed out a tiny gust of flatulence which escaped him like the shrill little peep of a wooden whistle.

  "Ho! Thou wert a beautiful thought, and softly bodied forth!" declaimed a voice that seemed to come from the brick wall above him.

  "Who is it that speaks so eloquently?"

  "Not who is it, but what? It looks like a holdover from the last plague!"

  "Or else something the boss might have had for lunch! Porca Madonna! If I had a stomach, I'd be throwing up!"

  He was standing, he saw through his frozen tears, in front of a maskmaker's workshop, its entrance and windows lined with the painted faces of mythical creatures, wild animals, goblins and fairies, jesters, plague victims, suns and moons, bautas and moretas, death's heads, goddesses, chinless rustics, and bearded nobles. "Whatever it is, it's got more holes in it than a piece of cheese!" declared one of them, the pale pink-cheeked sun perhaps, a somber white-bearded Bacchus replying majestically: "Maybe it's a flute." "You mean, dearie," cooed an angel with cherry-red lips, "you don't know whether you should eat it or blow it -?" The ancient scholar, feeling now the full weight of his folly, wished desperately to escape these japes, but could not, his father's infamous joke - "What brought you here, Geppetto my friend?" "My legs!" - no longer a joke. "If I had a body like that," scoffed a freckled face with a red hood and golden braids, "I'd sell it for a pegboard!" "If you had a body, cara mia," whispered a ghostly voice from behind an expressionless white mask with large hollow eyes, "you'd sell it for anything!" From behind the window, he could see, he was being watched by a glowering figure with a wild black beard like a scribble of India ink, making hasty sketches on a pad. "But what's that lump between his shoulders with the pump handle on it?" the empty snout of a camel posted in the doorway wanted to know, and: "Look from what pulpit comes the sermon!" jeered a grinning noseless skull.

  Then suddenly they all fell silent. Even the distant scraping of shovels stopped and the wind died down. Nothing could be heard but the water in the canals, far away, timidly lapping wood and stone. "Who was it," thundered a deep ogrish voice from overhead, the very sound of which set the masks rattling on the wall with terror, "laid this turd at my doorway?" It was the maskmaker with his apron of black beard, smeared with paint and plaster, his roaring mouth big enough to bake buns in, and eyes so reddened by grappa they seemed to be lit from behind by a fire deep in his skull. "Who has made this inhuman mess?"

  "It's - it's not my fault!" the old professor wheezed, indignant even in his indignity, bold even in his abject dismay.

  "What? What -?! It speaks?" bellowed the black-bearded giant, leaning closer and baring his horrible smoke-stained teeth. "Talking turds have been outlawed in Venice! Is this the work of a rival seeking to discredit me? Is this - what you say - dirty tricks?"

  "Believe me, my -"

  "Enough! Basta cosě!" roared the maskmaker, snatching him up by the scruff. "There's only one place for rubbish like you!" And holding him aloft with one m
ighty fist, from which the unhappy pilgrim dangled limp as a skinned eel, the bearded giant strode into the nearby campo and, much to the amusement of the passersby - "Ciao, Mangiano! What's this? One of your rejects?" "Madonna! What an obscenity!" - thrust him, up to his armpits, into this plastic-lined wastebin.

  Where, with the filling up of the campo, he has become the popular target of insults and horseplay. Mothers show him off to bundled toddlers to make them laugh; little boys, when they're not chasing bedraggled and dying pigeons, pelt him with snowballs; teenagers with ghetto blasters hugged to their ears flip their cigarette butts at him. He is crowned with fruit peels, pink sports pages, and rancid boxes from fast-food joints, christened with the dregs from supermarket wine cartons. "Piů in alto che se va," the musicians are singing raucously and tunelessly at the other end of the square while testing out their equipment, "piů el culse mostra!" The higher one climbs, the more he exposes his behind: a sentiment so apposite to the old emeritus professor's present humiliation, he might suspect them of malice had they not been entertaining the passing crowds with all manner of rude scatological lyrics since they began setting up. To add mockery to the damage, pigeons use him as a perch and public restroom, which causes one of the musicians drifting by, a swarthy snubnosed character looking more like a thief than an entertainer, to remark loudly and histrionically that "Every beautiful rose -" he lingers over this image to draw the guffaws, his plastic features twisted into a set painful smile, his hands flowering about the old bespackled professor's head, "- eventually becomes an assmop!" And the others in the campo gleefully pick up the refrain: "Un strassacul! Un strassacul!" The caged visitor, ever an emotional, even irascible defender of his own dignity when driven to it, would object, or would at least chase the pigeons off, but he is utterly and catastrophically undone, overcome by exhaustion and racked with pain and fever and a blinding cold in the head, suffering now, he knows, that final apathy of limb that marks, against his choosing, the end of the cold staggering race which he's, willy-nilly, losing or however that old doggerel goes