(1991) Pinocchio in Venice

by Robert Coover

  "Probably the belladonna," growls old Marten behind his ear, fussing with the blankets.

  "No, I wasn't even thinking about her," sighs the professor, though of course he was. He has been thinking of little else. As his life has ebbed, she has seemed to draw nearer, becoming once more the subtext, as it were, of all his thoughts, rational or otherwise. Even these musings on Palladio and Venice, eternity and history, purity and its pursuit have really been little more, he knows, than coded meditations on that guiding spirit of all his years, at least the fruitful and noble ones. She was, after all, his first healer, just a child then like himself with her waxen face and strange blue hair and cold but nimble fingers. She dressed and undressed him like a doll, called him her little brother, poured bitter medicine down his throat and laughed to see his little faucet work. Sister, mother, ghost or goat, he loved her madly and, dying, he loves her still.

  "Coast or float, Excellency? In the strange blue air? Still thinking about flying, eh? Ebbene! Detto fatto! Your least wish, padroncino: my urgent command! For as il direttore so graphically put it to me: 'Let his every twig, Marten my man, become a branch!' "

  "What -?!" He realizes he has been pushed perilously close to the edge of the balcony and that his chair is beginning to tip forward. "What are you doing -?!"

  "You pontificate very learnedly upon our exotic but delusive city, signer canino canarino, but perhaps you have missed some of the detail. I would like you to become more intimately acquainted with it! Faccia a faccia, as one might say!"

  "Canino? Canarino -?! Stop! Don't you know who I am?"

  "But of course, my devious little watchdog with the long nose, mister mock-Melampo, I know you well! For it has not been forgotten within our humble clan how, by your infamous theatrics, you did the shoes to our dear old nonno, betraying poor granddad and all his kinfolk to that ruthless henhouse tyrant, who not only had the entire brotherhood summarily executed, but had their earthly remains served up at the local inn disguised as stewed rabbit, a cruel and contemptible final indignity. 'Bů-bů-bů!' - do you remember, my little barked barker? No wonder you are so fascinated by duplicity!"

  "But wait -!"

  "Wait? As my own elders, then so innocent, waited through that calamitous night? 'We stayed up till dawn for the old fellow and the great chicken festicciole he so loved to provide,' my grieving babbo used to say, tearfully recalling that tragic event which left him forever orphaned, 'but our beloved papa did not come home that night, or - sob! - any night thereafter!' It was a wrong bound to his finger, as is said, and so bound to mine in turn, and now at last it is time to give back bread for pie! You have sung like a canary, now let us see if you can fly like one as well !"

  "But it's not so simple as that -!" he protests, slipping forward in his seat ("Oh oh," rumbles a familiar voice nearby, "looks like another Palazzo dei Balocchi credit card's run out!"), as that enchanted square below, that fabulous open-air drawing room, that landing place that takes the breath away tips toward him now to take his own. Cocooned in cashmere, he cannot even move his arms, would it do him any good if he could. "What about the chickens -?!"

  "Better strike the dinner hour, lads!"

  "The chickens, master?"

  "Yes, don't you see -?!" he cries, as above him the Moors suddenly hammer the great bronze bell and great flocks of pigeons lift off the Piazza below and rise with a vast fluttering communal roar like a black cloud of gathering mourners, beating their wings into the air, swirling before him down there like the great chain of being itself. "What is a good boy? What is good?! Can one love the eaten and the eaters too -?! Where is it all to end -?!"

  "For you, Excellency, this curious philosophical enigma is, as they say, purely epidemic," snickers the servant wheezily, as this son of Italy, lost, found, lost again, slides out, untethered, into space, "for you are, heh heh, being sent on holiday! Bon voyage, master! Galoppa, galoppa, and watch out below! Tim-BER -!!"

  18. THE MIRACLE OF THE MIS-STRUCK HOUR

  "If you think this is glorious, you should see it in the season of acque alte, Pini, when the sky blackens and the wind howls and the great foaming tides roll in," Eugenio rumbles wheezily in his ancient guest's earhole as they sit huddled together at his bedroom window in the palazzo, gazing out upon a more placid flooding, the celebrated lightness of the Piazza made doubly so this bright morning by its own crisp doubling in the square's limpid pool, this city of endless illusions seeming now to float in its symmetric fullness upon the reflected sky below. "Un tal pandemonio, as we used to say, un tal passeraio, un tal baccano indiavolato, you'd think, sitting here, you were in a ship on a boiling ocean! Waves crash against the columns and resound in the arcades below us, as if to loosen the palace from its very moorings and send us out to sea, the sunken street lamps standing then like rows of lilac-tinted channel markers out there showing us the way! Wastebins bob in the Piazza like buoys, inverted umbrellas tumble past like broken-winged birds, toothy predatory gondolas dart through the very porches of the Golden Basilica squatting helplessly in its stormy bath, and those red banners up there flap in the wind as though they might be wild wet sails, urging us upon our fatal course, as the entire trembling city seems suddenly intent on plunging downward to a watery doom!" Eugenio rakes up an emphysematous sigh from the depths of his sunken breast, no less ancient than the professor's, and, leaning back, exclaims: "Ah, Pini, Pini! This incomparable city, this most beautiful queen, this untainted virgin, as a celebrated whoremaster once said of her in his postcoital delirium, this paradise, this temple, this rich diadem and the most flourishing garland of Christendom - I do love her so!"

  Although misfortune, most recently his being pitched from on high toward the stonier realities of this fantastic square, such mischief thwarted only by a spectacular rescue, which is already being referred to, he understands, at least here in the palazzo, as "the Miracle of the Mis-struck Hour," has conditioned the old scholar to see more of peril and duplicity in this mirrored doubling than any alleged paradisiacal beauty, he cannot entirely resist its shimmering appeal. Between his window and the Procuratie Nuove across the way, their stately arches now stretched in the reduplicating flood waters to slender O's, the skeletal half-built Carnival platforms and the stacked scaffolding and ladders and barrier fences rise out of their own pooled reflections like the scuttled wrecks of ancient ships, disturbing the more timeless illusions, and they seem in their gentle mockery to be counseling him to accept his peculiar fate, which could be worse, after all, if not much, and let all the accumulated bitterness and suspicion of these past days, so alien in truth to his deepest nature, be dissolved once and for all into the pleasant watery vision before him.

  His dear friend Eugenio, now gently oiling his creaking nape, has more openly urged this, extending to him all the amenities of his vast estates, and, in return, asking only that he surrender to the great love he offers him and to the pleasures which that love and his Palazzo dei Balocchi can provide. He has protested - "No, no, and no again!" - at each of Eugenio's many generous gifts, but in the end, having little choice, he has accepted them all, and often as not with tears in his eyes; that he should have come to this and that, in such adversity, he should find so great and true a friend! Moreover, the situation is only temporary. With Eugenio's help, he has written off to America for new credit cards and checkbooks, bank and royalty and retirement fund statements, and all his professional credentials, insisting that, even should he decide to remain a guest of the palazzo, he would wish to pay his own way, Eugenio smiling at that and observing that he always did suffer, even as a puppet, from an excess of woodenheaded pride. Meanwhile, at Eugenio's wise suggestion, he has signed his stolen cards over to the charitable institution of which his friend is presently director, Omino e figli, S.R.L., which will assume full responsibility for any misuse of them by the thieves, and which will have the power, under the labyrinthine Italian law, to prosecute them if apprehended. Eugenio has submitted all the requisite papers for a new passport
and local visa, has bought him two new silk suits and a handsome woolen Tyrolean duffle coat with a felt borsalino to match, as well as a pair of green knee-high rubber boots to splash about in, has provided him with liniments, medicines, toiletries, and even a wonderful old-fashioned cotton sleeping cap, and has replaced the cracked waterlogged shoes he came here in with three new pairs, custom made from the softest hand-tooled Venetian leather, remarking as he threw out the old ones that they reminded him of those strange stiff shoes made out of tree bark that he used to wear to school.

  "Devilish weapons, Pini my boy, especially for one with so free a kick as yours! Once - I swear! - I saw your leg whip clear around like a windmill, popping one boy on the chin on the way up, flattening another behind on the way down with a blow to the top of his head, and, still swinging on around, catching yet a third, trying to flee, right on his little culetto, delivering him such a stroke that it lifted the poor birichino five feet off the ground, as if he too were on strings!"

  "But I was never on -!"

  "No, it's true, my love! You can't deny it, I was there! How we feared - and coveted! - those bark-shod feet of yours! So stylish, too! And whatever happened to that amazing little breadcrumb cap you used to wear?"

  "I don't remember. I think a dog ate it."

  Sitting here today at his bedroom window, here in this ark of his own personal deluge, as he thinks of it, they have been reminiscing about those old school days together, about how they met and abused each other, and about all the wicked things they did, and with what consequences, and perhaps it is the seductive apparition of these reflected fantasies out in the flooded Piazza San Marco, or his old friend's soothing hands upon the back of his skull, or merely the miracle of his continuing survival, but the shame and disgust such recollections ordinarily arouse are today subversively commingled with nostalgia, disturbingly sweet. Eugenio has reminded him, for example, of the day he and the other boys cornered him in the school latrine and ripped off his wallpaper pants to see the little brass tap which Geppetto had plugged there between his wooden legs and which was, as Eugenio admitted, the envy of them all, despite their cruel taunts ("Your golden draincock, we called it!"), and what has come back to him most vividly from all that was not the humiliation he suffered but the comfortingly familiar pungency of those primitive open-air urinals and the warm sunlight that fell upon their innocent schoolboy curiosity. Just as Eugenio's account of that day at the beach when a math book thrown at him had missed and struck Eugenio instead, resulting in his arrest for murder (Eugenio had not been hurt at all, he confessed, he'd just been pretending, and when the two black-cloaked carabinieri had dragged Pinocchio away between them, Eugenio had sat up and thumbed his nose at them, laughing openly at his friend's distress: "That was very naughty of me, I know, dear Pini, but, eh, what can I say, io sono fatto cosě!"), has recalled for him not the terror of capture nor even the adventure of his famous escape - from the fire into the frying pan, as it turned out - but the delicious lure the sea had for him in those days and the way his disobedient truancy excited him and made his nose tingle.

  "We were merely, after all, as one of our naughtiest boys here once said," murmurs Eugenio, his subtle caressing voice like that of a mewling cat rubbing at his ear, " 'cheerful creatures, whose most sinful deeds / Were but the overheating of the heart ' "

  "Nonsense! We were lazy unruly ragamuffins, seduced into brutishness by our own profligacy, wretched little asses bought and sold "

  "Well, as the Little Man himself used to say to me at the livestock auctions over there in the courtyard of the Convertite, whilst squeezing my bum affectionately: 'The world, Eugenio my precious little arsewipe, is half to be sold, half to be loaned out, and all to be laughed at!' "

  "So it's true then, as I've heard," the old scholar sighs, "you too went to Toyland!"

  "I never left it, dear boy!"

  "Hrmff. I would have thought when you got hit by that math book, it might have knocked some sense into you."

  "That it did, amor mio! That it did!" laughs Eugenio tenderly, pulling on the servants' bell rope. "I vowed never to get close enough to a book to get hit by one of the nasty things again! And you were, you must remember, then as now, our leader, our moral guide, our great exemplar of insubordination and mad adventure, whither thou went we could but follow! And so we did, dear Pini, each and every boy! And laughing all the way! You would have been proud of us!"

  The old professor snorts ruefully at this perversion of what he has called in The Wretch and elsewhere his "long-eared mission" to "cast out, cast as, the outcast," an unhappy fate all great ideas and actions seem to suffer in this heedless world - but somewhere behind this rueful musing, in fact more or less at that spot just behind his ear which Eugenio's plump warm hand is oiling just now, or perhaps a bit lower, deeper, closer to the core, he is experiencing an acute longing for the strange exhilaration of that eery nighttime ride on the back of the weeping donkey with the bitten ears, his best friend Lampwick snoring like a bear in the cart behind him, the donkeys clopping down the dark road in their fancy white leather boots, the cart following mysteriously on its padded wheels like a sleigh on snow. They'd arrived at dawn, harness bells jingling and L'Omino blowing his coach horn like an exultant little bantam, at what, to a child's eyes, was paradise itself, so beautiful that it seemed rather celestial than of this world

  "Sports, cycling, acting, singing, reading, gymnastics - today we'd probably call it a kindergarten," chuckles Eugenio, giving another pull on the bell rope. "They even had us out there on the riva practicing soldiering! Ha ha! But how we loved it, eh? Gullible little gonzos that we were! Even our naughty graffiti was like an art class in finger painting, not so lasting a form perhaps as that of a Titian or a Tiepolo, but there's still a bit of it around, you know."

  "I think I've seen some "

  "You asked us to a party, a kind of birthday party, you said, but when we turned up you weren't there! You'd gone prancing off, as I recall, with that dreadful boy Romeo - what did we call him -?"

  "Lampwick. You remember him -?"

  "Of course I do! Skinny and warped as that cue stick of his, very butch, with buttocks hard and red as a pair of billiard balls and a face like a knuckled fist, who could forget the vicious little mangiapane?! So, tell me, whatever happened to the dear boy?"

  "He's he's dead," gasps the old scholar, feeling afresh the loss and weeping now as he wept then. "He died as a as a donkey. But - but why are you laughing -?! It was terrible -!"

  "I'm - whoo! hee! - sorry, my love, I'm sure it was, I, ah, missed all that, you see. But you must tell me what it was like - I mean, all those parts just engorging like that, stretching and filling so suddenly all by themselves, it must have been quite extraordinary!"

  "It hurt."

  "Oh, yes, I know what you mean! Ha ha! I did try one once, a lovely little salt-and-pepper thing we'd once called Lucio. The pain was exquisite! Hoo, dear! If they hadn't shot him, I'd have died! Now where are those wretched servants?" he complains, jerking impatiently on the bell rope. "I do miss dear old Marten, you know, it's been absolutely impossible around this place since you made me dismiss him, Pini!" He rises, wiping his hands on a velvet cloth. "It's well past time for your morning infusione and my corretto, dear boy, so you'll have to excuse me. It seems I must take care of it myself! But when I come back, I want to hear all about the donkey life!"

  Ah well, the donkey life. Poor Lampwick summed it up in the last few words he spoke, lying there in the farmer's stinking straw, dying of hunger and overwork: "I am not who I am Those shits have stolen my life !" Early in his career, in a monograph entitled "Reply to an Errant Friend on his Deathbed," modeled on the Epistolae of Cicero and Petrarch and later reprinted as an appendix to the fifth edition of The Wretch, he chided Lampwick for blaming thieves for his own easy charity. "No one can steal what is only yours to give. Spiritual penury with its attendant despair is a willed choice, dear Lampwick, like any other. If a man were to lose his wat
ch to pickpockets and then recover it, would he ever put himself at their mercy again unless he willed to do so? As Saint Augustine reminds his disciple in Petrarch's Secretum, 'The deceived is never separate from the deceiver.' " Perhaps he'd shown too little respect for outright villainy, as some argued, or too little awareness of what those of a popular heresy of the day called "the conditioning power of social forces," but he saw these objections as little more than sophistical dodges, using the seemingly objective otherness of "history," a mere illusion of language, after all, to deny or undermine the individual will and its responsibilities, a package he came to call "I-ness," the uncompromising defense of which has brought him where he is today. Or was a week or so ago, anyway

  How differently their lives have turned out, his and Lampwick's! Of course it helped that he got sold to the circus instead of to some pig of a farmer to be starved and beaten and worked to death. Clearly, the Blue-Haired Fairy had been watching over him, even in his donkey days. That she had a box seat for his debut as the "Star of the Dance," for example, could not have been an accident. He was so startled to see her there, dressed in mourning garments and flashing her medallion with its portrait of a defunct puppet at him, that, jumping through the hoop, he fell and lamed himself, thus bringing on, as though spelled, his own execution, but maybe that too was a part of her pedagogy, his fall a mark of promised grace, her medallion not so much an omen as a vivid image for a little beast who'd not yet learned his letters to let him know that much in him still had to die before he could be hers again. Or so he learned to read those awesome trials in retrospect. His "Golden Ass" theory of redemption, as some have called it, and with reason, for there was much in Lucius Apuleius' youthful asininity, his bufferings and sorrows, and his eventual transformational rebirth (though he merely ate and was not eaten) into lifelong devotion to his protectress' sacred service, that paralleled the professor's own strange formation and contemplative career, and took him far from Lampwick.