(1991) Pinocchio in Venice

by Robert Coover

  The ancient pigeon gapes his gnarled beak as though to interrupt, but before he can manage so much as a peep, Eugenio, approaching the bird with a broad smile and full of loving kindness, steps on his head, crunching it into the stone pavement beneath the snow. The wings flop once and are still.

  "What what have you done -?!" the professor squeaks in alarm.

  "The tedious old thing had some kind of cricket in his head, as we say - qualche grillo per il capo, ha ha! - and I, as it were, got rid of it for him!" chuckles Eugenio, wiping his shoe in the snow. He waddles back to the sedan chair and caressingly tucks the blankets around his old friend once more. "But, dear fellow, you're trembling so! It's like you're trying to shake yourself out of yourself -!"

  "You - you've killed him -!"

  "Now, now, let's not make an elephant out of a fly, precious boy! There are too many of these little shit-factories in Venice as it is! The commissions we get on the tourist seed stalls may be good business in the summer, but this time of year the little bandits are just a drain on the economy! So, here we go, it's off to the Palazzo dei - Pini, my love! are you there? Pini -? Speak to me!"

  PALAZZO DEI BALOCCHI

  17. VIEW FROM THE CLOCK TOWER

  Across the ruffled lead-colored waters of St. Mark's Basin, poised between crenellated Gothic fantasy and High Renaissance exuberance, Andrea Palladio's masterful church of San Giorgio Maggiore, with its sagging cheeks, carbuncular dome, and stiff cone-capped campanile at its rear (his grumbling companion has likened it to a belled cat with its tail in the air), sits gravely at anchor like an ordered thought within a confused sensuous dream, this damp dream called Venice, "the original wet dream," as his dear friend Eugenio likes to call it. The church's pale façade, caught obliquely in the winter sun's angular light and framed now between the two absurd columns of the Piazzetta like a carnival mask hung in a window, peers out past the growling, bobbing water traffic upon this shabby but bejeweled old tart of a city, the mystery of reason confronting the mystery of desire, and what it seems to be saying is: history, true, is at best a disappointment ("It is a fairy tale full of wind, master, you are right, an empty masquerade, a handful of dead flies "), but it is also, in spite of itself, beautiful

  Not an easy idea for the old professor to accept, any more than that traditional Venetian notion of art as speech, as a discourse with time ("No, no," he is muttering now, his voice muffled by ruin and his thick woolen wraps, "that's not what I mean at all!"), a kind of ongoing dialogue between form and history, as Palladio, that Paduan Aristotelian, would have it. "Dialogue," after all, smacks of the theater and "history" of the storybook, and the professor, in his dedicated pursuit of ideal forms, has always rejected the theatrical, the narrative, indeed all arts with concepts of time other than eternity. This was, in his early days, his argument with Palladio, who drew echoes of Venice's corrupt and mongrel history into his designs even as he gently chastised the city with his intimations of a rational geometric ideal, a compromise the professor himself, schooled in the categorical imperatives of the Blue-Haired Fairy, was unable to make. Such an accommodation to the moment was, he felt then, both patronizing and delusory. Just as there were good boys and bad boys, there were, the artistic image being the form given to thought, pure thoughts and those contaminated by history. If art's endeavor, it being otherwise useless, was to express man's ceaseless striving for perfection, then history was what always went wrong.

  "Yes, you have put your treacherous finger on the very sore, Excellency," snarls the old bewhiskered dark-visaged servant who, on Eugenio's orders, has wheeled him out here onto the balcony of the Torre dell'Orologio, muttering sourly at the time that he was "just tying the donkey, as they say, where the master wants." The balcony overlooks a Piazza San Marco decorously strewn this cold bright Sunday morning with the preparations for Carnival: raw yellow timbers, metal frames and scaffolding, duckboards and bunting, all stacked helter skelter below him amid the café tables laid out like chips in a board game and the souvenir stands with their fluttering bouquets of gondolier hats and the flocks of bundled-up tourists and feeding pigeons. It is a view of this glorious court, dizzying but thrilling, not unlike the one he enjoyed a century ago, long before the Age of Flight, when, clinging in joyous terror to the slippery pigeon feathers, he flew on Colombo's back in search of his father. Ah, the excitement of that flight! The freedom! He'd called Colombo his "little horse": "Galoppa, galoppa, cavallino!" he'd cried.

  "Gladly, master, but my instructions were to stay at my post while drying you out in the sun."

  "No, no, I didn't mean you! I was only recalling a flight "

  "You wish to fly, master -?"

  There is something wrong with this memory. Something out of his recent ordeal that he does not wish to recall. Or, better said, that he has simply forgotten, and probably a good thing, too, he needs to put all that behind him like Eugenio says, his recovery may depend upon it. Three café orchestras are playing all at once this morning, their whimsical cacophony interscored with the clangor of the city's multitudinous bells, the blast of recorded music, the whistling of hawkers and the honking of gulls and boats, the shouting and laughter in the square, the grinding of the clock mechanism beside him, all of it echoing and rebounding off the glittering waters of the lagoon like a single clamorous voice, which even he can hear in spite of having lost his ears, a voice which seems to insist upon the dominion of the present. Above him, the two huge bronze figures, known popularly as "Moors" because of their shiny black patina and their legendary genitalia, pivot stiffly and hammer out the morning hours, while, beneath them, under the symbolic Winged Lion of St. Mark with his stone paw on an open book and the copper Virgin and Child on their little terrace, the great revolving face of the zodiacal clock celebrates eternity with its serene turnings even as it intransigently mills away the passing moment, turning history into a kind of painting on the wall. "It is a devilish priest's game not worth the candle, a charade of charlatans, am I right?" hisses Marten the servant, keeping up his subversive pissi-pissi in his ear. "History! Hah! It is a veritable shit storm, master, punto e basta!"

  "But, no, I was wrong then, you see " For in time, tutored by Giorgione and by his beloved Bellini, he came to recognize that, if there were pure and impure thoughts, there were also simple and complex ones, and pure complex thought, which he was increasingly given to (he had taken on flesh, after all, he was no longer a mere stick figure), was obliged to embrace the impure world, else, blinkered, it found itself jumping, again and again, through the same narrow hoop.

  "Uhm, excellent way to break a leg, padrone."

  "Oh, I know, I know "

  "Or, heh heh, a neck "

  Moreover, as he himself had been a sort of walking parody of thought given form, assuming that what was in old Geppetto's pickled head was so noble a thing as to be called thought, he had been able to intuit (here, perhaps, the years in Hollywood helped) the hidden ironies in all ideal forms, and so began to perceive that thought's purity lay not so much in its forms as in its pursuit of those forms - whereupon: his "go with the grain" as a moral imperative, "character counts," his symbolic quest for the Azure Fleece, the concept of I-ness, "from wood to will," and all that. Already, in Art and the Spirit, erroneous as it might have been in its refusal to acknowledge the theatrical in Venetian art (what, he was obliged to admit, was the "emergence of archetypes from the watery atmosphere like Platonic ideas materializing in the fog of Becoming" but pure theater, after all pure stage hokum?), he had begun, if not wholly to accept ("Ebbene, I too am interested in archetypes, condottiero "), at least to understand and respect Palladio's position, and if he was once impatient, he was now more sympathetic, more prepared to make room for the human condition. Which was his condition, too more or less

  " Provided the little stronzos are edible!" And Marten snatches, or seems to snatch, at a passing pigeon, throttle it, and stuff it into a bag at his side.

  "Of course, it might just be my weakened
eyesight "

  "Eh?"

  Thus, from his lofty Clock Tower perch, coped and hooded in thick cashmere blankets with only his nose poking out, the old professor peers out upon this luminous spectacle and, face to face with Palladio's pale sober San Giorgio Maggiore across the sun-glazed bay, muses, his own pale and sober thoughts punctuated by the thick fluttering of pigeons and the rude interruptions ("Eh? Eh?") of Eugenio's impertinent servant, upon the folly of his youth and the debilities ("That fog, I mean ") of old age. Which, it would seem, contrary to his expectations of just a few nights ago, is not yet over. Like this crumbling old city, these famous "winged lion's marble piles" ("A damned nuisance, I can tell you, and no bloody cure for them either," he hears somebody grumble, might be Marten, he can't be sure) now scattered out before him in their antique devastation - pocked, ravaged, bombed, flooded, tourist-trampled, plague-ridden, pillaged, debauched, defaced, shaken by earthquake, sapped and polluted, yet somehow still stubbornly, comically afloat - he too, perversely, lingers on. Little more than, perhaps, but if by some misfortune he is not yet dead, as one of his doctors so wisely put it that night of Eugenio's rescue, then it's a sure sign he's still alive.

  He had awakened, having apparently passed out in the Piazza, a Piazza he could not however at that moment recall (even now that bitter night with its monstrous snow-frosted shapes looming over him in the swirling wind like howling ghosts is little more than a half-remembered nightmare, in no way resembling the cheerful scene spread out before him now), in a soft warm bed piled high with down comforters, a hot water bottle at his feet, and three doctors at all his other parts, probing and prodding with various tools of their trade and debating the particulars of his imminent demise.

  "It is my professional opinion," said one solemnly, flicking the old pilgrim's tender nose back and forth as though testing its reflexes, "that he is dying from top to bottom, or else from bottom to top, though one could conceivably hold the position that death was rapidly overtaking him, both inside and out."

  "I quite disagree!" exclaimed a second, lifting a foot by a toe that snapped off like a dry twig. "You see? His condition is clearly as desparate at one end as at the other, even if the surface is as moribund as the core!"

  "Gentlemen! Please!" protested Eugenio, who, for a confused moment, the dying scholar mistook for his old friend and benefactor Walt Disney with his apple red cheeks and pussycat voice and sweet soft ways, oily as whipped butter. "Is there no hope?"

  "Well," sighed the first, pressing a stethoscope to the place where an ear used to be and rapping the professor's feverish brow speculatively, "if he is not dead by midnight, he may live until tomorrow."

  "How can you say that?" cried the second, sticking a thermometer in his peehole, and glaring angrily at his watch. "He will certainly not live until tomorrow, if he is dead by midnight!"

  "And have you nothing to say, sir?" Eugenio asked, turning to the third doctor.

  "This face is not new to me!" that personage responded, pointing at the place where others might have a navel and he but a knothole. "I know him for a perfidious rogue and a shameless ideomaniac, buono a nulla, this faithless figlio di N.N., this good-for-nothing whoreson legno da catasta! Fortunately, all knots come to the comb, and to the lancet as well, this one no exception, so out with it, I say! Gentlemen, hand me my brace and bit!"

  "Wait!" cried the first doctor suddenly, drawing back. "Could it be - not being otherwise, that is - the plague?"

  "It might be," gasped the second, wiping his hands nervously on his trousers, "but then again, if it isn't, it's assuredly not!"

  "Oh woe, woe, WOE!" exclaimed the third doctor, beating his chest and gazing upon the patient in horror. Certainly he could not have been a pretty sight, his hide foxed and tattered and falling away, bits and pieces of him missing altogether, his miserable water-soaked body wracked by fever and a rasping cough - as Eugenio remarked wryly when first seeing his eyelids flutter: "Behold, gentlemen, there is the man who has been in Hell!" In truth, in his condition the plague might have been a mercy. "As one who has had it hammered into him by bitter experience," the third doctor continued, clubbing his own pate with a balled fist, "let me assure you that neither earth, nor air, nor water, nor flesh itself is a safe refuge for wicked little philosophasters under the lignilingual curse!"

  "You mean ?" Eugenio moaned, a pudgy hand clasped mournfully to his soft breast.

  "Lamentably, sir, he is, as we say here," replied the first doctor, stepping forward, "truly between bed and cot! His hours are counted! He will soon be, morto e sepolto, making soil for the beans! That is to say -"

  "On the contrary," interrupted the second, crowding in front of the first, "he is rather, sir, as the saying goes, more on the other than on this side! Č bell'e spacciato! Dead and done for! Furthermore -"

  "Ah!" screamed the third, bounding about the room and banging his head vehemently on the walls. "But what's the moral? What's the MORAL?"

  "Exactly!" exclaimed the first.

  "For once I agree with my esteemed colleague!" put in the second.

  "Ohi, povero diavolo!" sobbed Eugenio, rubbing his eyes with his rolled fists. "He is my dearest sweetest friend! Surely there is some remedy -?!"

  "Alas, I am afraid he is a tragic and more or less fatal victim of dermatological cytoclasis," sighed the first, stroking his beard, "for which no known cure has yet been found!"

  "I am sorry to have to disagree once again with my distinguished colleague," argued the second, clutching his lapels firmly, "but the patient has clearly contracted a somewhat lethal dose of cytolysis of the epidermis, the cure for which remains, regrettably, a scientific mystery!"

  "Idiots!" snapped the third, suddenly standing tall and composed beside the bed, staring severely down at - or into - the ancient traveler as though penetrating to the very core of his ignominy. "Can't you see? It is as plain as the face on his nose! This shameless ragazzaccio is turning back to wood again! Look at him! The little scoundrel is suffering from lignivorous invasions of all kinds, evil eruptions of xylostroma, probable sclerosis of the resin canals, peduncular collapse, weevil infestation, and galloping wet rot. He's starting to warp, too, disgustingly enough, and that offensive musty stench is unmistakable evidence that he's rotten to the very pith!"

  "I resent your calling my colleague an idiot," complained the first doctor huffily.

  "No, no," blustered the second, "it is I who resent your unwarranted abuse of my colleague!"

  "But, gentlemen, gentlemen," pleaded Eugenio, "what can we do?"

  "Very little," sighed the first doctor, and the second said: "Not much."

  "The treatment is quite simple," responded the third doctor grimly. "The rot should be chopped out and burnt immediately, the remaining structures, if any, drilled and impregnated with fungicides and insecticides, using sprays or double-vacuum techniques to assure the deepest possible penetration, followed by total immersion of the subject in organic solvent-based preservatives for at least a week."

  "Hmm, yes, I can see that," the first doctor conceded grudgingly, "but it's a stopgap measure at best."

  "I am afraid my illustrious colleague is in error there," contended the second. "Such a treatment may be of temporary help, but only for a short time."

  "Thereafter," concluded the third, "I recommend a restringing of all the joints, a thorough rubdown with fine sandpaper or steel wool, and finally repeated applications of linseed oil or else a few coats of yacht varnish!" Wherewith, he opened up his black bag and clapped it over his head, mashed his hat under his arm, and stalked blindly out, sending things rattling and crashing in the next room, his two colleagues following him in somber parade, quarreling about vocational dignity.

  "This would be a most honorable profession," grumbled one, "if it were not for the wretched patients!"

  "No, no, I must insist," objected the other, "it is precisely the patients who most dishonor this noble profession!"

  During the days that have followed, a
s he slipped in and out of his feverish dreams, all too haunted by dark reminders of his recent folly, he has been lovingly cared for by Eugenio and his staff of servants and advisors and nurses in his private suite in the magnificent Palazzo dei Balocchi, which, as he came slowly to realize, looks out, here just below where he sits now, upon the Piazza, itself. He has slept upon satin sheets, drunk his medicine from golden goblets, been fed Venetian liver and onions and bigoi in salsa and golden polenta and risi e bisi and other curative delicacies from a jewel-encrusted silver tea tray, said to have been part of the plunder from the sacking of Byzantium - along with the four bronze horses rearing up over the door of the Basilica of St. Mark just in front of him now - by the Blind Doge in the Fourth Crusade, and has attended to his daily needs, minimal as they now are, upon a fur-lined bedpan made of the finest azure blue Murano glass, hand-blown to his exact dimensions. Not only has he enjoyed the comfort of a hot water bottle, it is amazingly like the very one he had taken to bed with him each night since he first left for America, until it was lost to thieves that fateful night of his arrival here. Nothing perhaps has made him feel more at home.

  "When you described it in your delirium, Pini," Eugenio told him, "it reminded me of one I had had as a child. It took a lot of hunting, but I finally found it!"

  Ah, the great Eugenio! Very dear and very deep! Soon, after Sunday Mass, he will join him here on the Clock Tower solarium, and they will talk about the city and about the old times when they were schoolboys together and about the professor's illustrious career. Eugenio has promised to have him ported about the island to see once more before he dies all the masterpieces he most loves and has written about (his entire bibliography seems to be at his great admirer's command) - and may write about yet again, for Eugenio has also promised to replace in some manner his stolen computer, perhaps even with a similar model, a feat not beyond his resourceful friend's capacities. Already he has found for him some foot snuggies with the identical pattern of his old ones, a half bottle of his personal French Canadian brand of pine-scented mouth wash, and a pair of spectacles that fit him better than the ones he lost. So much Eugenio has done for him, dedicating to him from the moment of their fortuitous reunion all the treasures of his vast wealth and experience and attending to his every need, not least of all his daily oil treatments, applied personally by his own soothing plump hands, treatments which seem to have helped wonderfully, for if his condition is no less critical, the pain has lessened and the stiffness eased.