(1991) Pinocchio in Venice

by Robert Coover

  Whom, however, for all his waywardness, he has never ceased to mourn, for a friend, as Cicero said, is like a second self ("True, true," murmurs Eugenio, at his side once more and holding the cup of hot medicinal tea at his guests's cracked lips, "and old friends, dear Pini - like old wood, old casks, old authors - are always best, especially when they are - ha ha! - all one and the same!"), and moreover, in Lampwick's case, as he explained in his great prose epic, The Transformation of the Beast, a sacrificial second self whose death prepared the way for his own salvation: Lampwick, dying, was lying, so to speak, on the last straw, put there in his emblematic extremity, he came to feel, by the Fairy herself. As the light went out in Lampwick's eyes, the light came on in his puppet head, and he became forever after the very model of entrepreneurial industry and scholarly ambition, winning thereby the Fairy's ultimate blessing. "Despise not this lowly ass," he wrote affectionately, many years later, "though he be in appearance the most hateful beast in the universe, for, as William of Occam observed long ago, God could have chosen to embody himself in a donkey as well as in a man, and who is to say that he did not?"

  "Ho ho! God in a donkey suit! I love it, Pini!" chortles Eugenio crossing himself hastily, then squeezing the old scholar's knee "Rather changes the holy manger scene, doesn't it, and makes one wonder just what the Holy Family had been up to, eh? But to answer your question, my boy, there's the testimony of our own precious Saint Mark, for one," he adds, gesturing with a sweep of his hand at the saint's great water-masked square before them.

  "Who has no manger scene, honors the ass, and ends his evangel with the terror of his witnesses," replies the professor, sipping at the hot infusione held at his lips.

  "Ah, is that so! Well, of course, I've never read it "

  The floodwaters in the Piazza are receding. A slate-gray line now cuts like a smudge through the reflected arches of the Procuratie Nuove, a kind of dry spine down the middle of the porous Piazza, higher than the rest, and there the pigeons and tourists gather as though on a crowded strip of beach, feeding each others' appetites, a scene he gazes upon this morning with a certain affection, for only yesterday those pigeons in their appetitive innocence saved his life. Pinioned in blankets and tipped out like a seedpod into space by the vindictive Marten, he could only, with that "horror of heart" said by Ruskin to have been this city's original creative principle, gaze helplessly down upon the pale blank countenance of stony Death, rushing upwards, when least expected, to kiss him cruelly face to face. Even as he began to plummet, however, Death's face was all at once darkly scrawled, as though moustachioed by a mischievous boy, as a massive swarm of pigeons rose up, roaring round like a sudden black tornado, alarmed, it seemed, by the striking of the great bronze bell above his head: twice, though it was not yet noon. He'd heard the Moors' two reverberant strokes as a personal knell, signaling, as did the Maleficio of the Campanile in the old days, his imminent execution, not knowing what the pigeons knew: that it was in truth a dinner bell, the city having traditionally fed its feathered mendicants, at public expense and for generations beyond number, each day precisely at nine and two, occasions that called for, in this ceremonial city, a ceremonial ascent, orbit, and processional descent to table. He fell, light as a cocooned moth, upon their arched backs and, bounced from one to another by their beating wings as though being blanketed, was lofted to within reach of the jaws of the stone Lion of Saint Mark on the clock tower - or perhaps the great creature, screened by the pigeons, left his pedestal and joined the flight, it was hard to say, certainly there was an awesome flopping about overhead, as though a helicopter might be hovering, and afterwards the old fellow, though poised as before with his paw on the book when next he looked, recognizing him now as the very beast that had pursued him through the snow his first night here in Venice, his nose flattened as though from hitting too many bell towers, did seem desperately winded, snorting and blowing like a beached walrus - and from the Lion's jaws, he was flung back into his wheelchair, or dropped there, much to his relief, having been, on top of his terror, nearly asphyxiated, just as Eugenio arrived, beaming sunnily, from Sunday Mass.

  "Well, well!" he exclaimed with his jolly pink-cheeked smile, his slicked-back hair gleaming on his round head like a shiny plastic cap. "You're looking much better, my friend! So wide awake! The fresh air seems to have done you good!"

  "I-I was thrown out into the middle the middle of it!" he squeaked clumsily, still dizzy from the vertigo of the fall, the pigeons' tossing, and the Lion's blindingly foul breath.

  "In the middle? In the middle of what, dear boy?"

  "I'm afraid, eh, the old fellow was actually asleep the whole time, direttore," growled Marten sotto voce. "He seemed to be having nightmares, so finally I woke him. You can see he's still confused -"

  "No! There I was out there " he gasped, pointing, his arms bound, with his nose.

  "What? You mean, in midair -?"

  "He speaks metaphorically, padroncino," chuckled the servant with a conspiratorial wink, trying to bundle the blankets around his mouth. "As Checco Petrarca from up the street once said, some of us scrape parchments, write books, correct them, illuminate and bind them, adorn their surface; superior minds look higher and fly above these mean occupations "

  "Ah! Quite so! Well said, Marten!"

  "No!" he cried, gagged on cashmere, tears stinging his eyes. "He - choke! - threw me out there -!"

  "Ah! See how he trembles, master. He may have a dangerous fever -!"

  "He-he tried to kill me!"

  "Who tried to kill you, dear boy?"

  "This-this-this-that -!"

  "He lies, direttore."

  "Lies? My friend Pinocchio?" Eugenio exclaimed, arching his tufted brows and peering closer with his little eyes. "There, my good man, I think you may have overstepped yourself."

  "The the Lion -!" he managed to gasp, "- saved me!"

  "Just protecting the citizens below," the Lion rumbled grumpily from his pedestal, still puffing and wheezing. "We Venetians welcome strangers with open arms, but not at thirty-two feet per second per fucking second."

  "Aha. So that explains the mischief of the bells "

  "Don't mind your drowning these wormy old dog-cocks out behind the Arsenale," the Lion went on, "no one gets hurt that way, but dumping the turds in my Piazza is going to get some fat little sporcaccione stepped on!"

  "Now you see the trouble you've caused, Marten? The next time this happens, I am going to have to discipline you most severely -!"

  "The next time -!" squawked the professor in disbelief, his blood rising, or his sap, whatever: "The next time I'll be dead!" Then, before he could stop himself, he blew up into a wild unseemly temper, screaming indignantly about "assassins and murderers" and "depraved prevaricators," castigating the entire city of Venice and all of its duplicitous and tyrannical history, accusing the grizzled old servant of everything from imposture, insurrection, and criminal neglect to pigeon poaching and senicide, even raging about Palladio and the cruelty of the climate and the Lion's halitosis, he'd never so lost control of himself since they'd tried to curb his franking privileges back at the university. It was shameful, really, a throwback to the ill-mannered tantrums of his days as a woodenhead, but effective. Though Eugenio was clearly reluctant to let his longtime servant go ("He doesn't steal from me, Pini, he steals for me -!"), two policemen finally appeared on the balcony and, at a snap of Eugenio's fingers, hauled Marten away between them. "All right, Pini, calm down, you've had your way," sighed Eugenio wearily when they were gone. "I hope you realize only a true friend would render such a great service! For you, of course, Old Sticks, it was a pleasure, but," he added, leaning toward him with a sly forgiving wink, "just don't eat rabbit in Venice for a while "

  Now, his grappa-laced espresso finished, his great friend and benefactor snores contentedly at his side. There are traces of rouge in his ancient cheeks and a dusting of powder around his eyes, a tender vanity. His thin slicked black hair catches light from the
Piazza almost as a mirror might, hard and glittering. Out there, the dry spine in the middle has become a broad isthmus, once more populated by the familiar crowds of clicking and posing tourists, many of them already in Carnival masks and costumes. There are devils out there and royal couples, wild beasts and butterflies and ghostly spectres. The Caffč Quadri below him and Florian's across the way are setting out their tables again, and the orchestras are tuning up. At the edge of the receding waters and reflected in them, a camera, seemingly without an owner, stands on its tripod, the colorful film-advertising cloth thrown over it hanging silently in the bright still day, as if in its spindly solitude to speak to his condition or else perhaps to mock it. An illusion, of course. Nothing is being said. Not far away, a Harlequin approaches, hobbling on a cane, so fat his hairy behind sticks out from the rear of the costume, and accompanying him is a squat bent-backed Columbine with a moth-eaten tail who entertains the crowd by walking into stacked platforms and falling over café tables. Sooner or later, they will hit the camera and knock it down, he knows, and that, too, will have a certain meaning, and at the same time, none at all.

  In that fractional moment, somewhere between the first stroke of the bell and the second, when, tossed from his chair, he hovered up there in the icy air as though afloat, the Piazza below appeared to him as an open book, a book he'd read a thousand times before, or perhaps a thousand books he'd read before compressed to one, its text dizzyingly complex yet awesomely simple, readable at a glance, yet somehow illegible, and it recalled to him his first terrifying encounter, when still a puppet, with his abbiccě, which (the Fairy said) promised him the world and more but gave him (under "N" of course, and this was the page he'd come to once again) niente. Nothing. And this, he thinks, slipping peacefully into a nap of his own, snug in his silk pajamas and monogrammed velvet robe, was the Miracle of the Mis-struck Hour: the pigeons rose and turned the page.

  19. AT L'OMINO'S TOMB

  "It's it's a long story," he replies hesitantly.

  "What do you say?" Eugenio calls out over the start-up roar of the motor, as they lower him into the launch.

  "He says it's quite long!" shouts Francatrippa.

  "Aha! And I suppose, Pini, it gets longer the more it goes on "

  "I'd say it stands to get harder the more it goes on, direttore!" laughs Buffetto.

  "No, no, the more it goes on, direttore," pipes up Truffaldino in his squeaky voice, hopping aboard, "the more it grows on you! The more the tension rises and the plot thickens!"

  "Ha ha! Very good, my child!" laughs Eugenio, holding on to the wheel with one hand as they pull away from the island and out into the lagoon, reaching behind him for Truffaldino's backside with the other.

  "But even when he stretches the truth, direttore," adds Truffaldino, backing down into the cabin and holding out his fist in a sailor's cap for Eugenio to pinch, "his moral is always rigidly upstanding!"

  "He gives it to you straight, direttore!"

  "With a hard snout!"

  "Right in your ear!"

  "But tell me, dear boy, please do," Eugenio has just pleaded, the immediate cause of all the raillery, "tell me the tale of your nose," the professor himself having just previously remarked in a rare moment of candor, touching upon that subject which has always remained, though unhideable, hidden: "It was as obvious, you could say, as the nose on your face. I was probably the last person in the world to figure it out, slow learner that I am - I mean, I was fifty-seven years old before I suddenly realized other people had nostrils!" Not true, though, that he's a slow learner. No, he's more like a fast learner and a fast forgetter

  It has been a day for candor, spent upon the moody emptiness of the wintry lagoon, touring Eugenio's varied enterprises, and lastly upon San Michele, the Island of the Dead, where Eugenio has taken him to visit the mausoleum of the Little Man and to lay fresh flowers there. "I've something special to show you, Pini," he'd said, and so he had, and there in that somber place, surrounded by vast gardens of graves and walls of stacked tombs like immense stone filing cabinets, there before an image that brought tears to his eyes, Eugenio has opened his heart to his old friend, telling him all about his long active life on these islands, his relationship with L'Omino, the Little Man, and his own boyhood experiences in Toyland. Which were different from his.

  Before that, a day that began cheerfully enough, with Eugenio, in an ebullient mood quite out of keeping with the dour misty weather, or perhaps in resistance to it, offering to take him on a tour of his many civic projects, an offer inspired in part by his heated telephone negotiations before lunch with the government of Czechoslovakia, Eugenio seeking to recover the bones of Venetian native son Giacomo Casanova in time for reburial next week during the climax of Carnival, which was already well under way in the Piazza outside his windows. "If I don't get those bones for our Gran Gala, Eccellenza, siamo fottuti!" he'd shrieked wildly, slamming the phone down when he got disconnected, but then as quickly, spying the alarm on the professor's face, he'd broken into a warm ruddy smile and added: "Ah, but why make it a cause for war, eh? Where you cannot climb over, as the Little Man himself used to say, you must crawl under, there are other fish to skin, after all, other cats to fry - if we cannot retrieve that sinner's wormy remains, we might still have time, per esempio, to wrest dear Santa Lucia's eyes from the Sicilians to go with the rest of her we have here, steal them if we have to, pop them in place perhaps at the very moment of the midnight unmasking! Why not? Indeed, the world of scattered holy relics offers us an infinitude of opportunities! Even with what we already have here in Venice, we might be able to piece together a kind of saint of saints to preside over the festivities, and to the devil with that quasi-Bohemian minchione's disloyal and profligate bones! Eh? And, besides, in this dark solstitial season, are we not more than amply enriched by your own luminous presence, my friend?"

  "A relic intact, you mean," he'd replied, adding gloomily: "More or less," and Eugenio had laughed his honeyed laugh and said: "You exaggerate, dear boy! To put you together again would be beyond even my considerable powers! Nor, were it possible, would I wish it so, for to tell the truth, dear Pini, I love you more each day, the less of you there is! But come now, let us escape these vaporous old stones and make our way out upon the open waters, and I will show you the empire that Toyland has built!"

  But before they could even get started the palazzo was thrown into an uproar. Buffetto and Francatrippa, sent to the private hospital owned and operated by the Sons of L'Omino to bring back the personal effects of a deceased client, brought back the patient instead, very much alive, grinning dippily and still wired up to all his medical paraphernalia, which looked suspiciously like something made out of Lego blocks, colored balloons, a Meccano set, and birthday party straws. "No no, you fools, you went too soon, he wasn't ready yet!" Eugenio screamed, and in his rage he heaved an antique bejeweled chalice from Thessalonica at Buffetto, who ducked, the chalice striking the patient on the head instead, widening his witless smile and setting his ancient dilated eyes to spinning. "Must I do everything myself?!"

  It was the sort of uproar all too frequent since the arrival at the Palazzo dei Balocchi of the new servants, hired to replace Marten and his brothers, summarily dismissed, if not worse (just yesterday Buffetto said to him: "Eh, professor, I saw my predecessor the other day!" "Marten? How - how was he -?" "Tasty "), such that hardly a day has passed without Eugenio erupting with fresh fury and complaining about the loss of his beloved old valet and reminding the professor bitterly of his own instigating role in that unfortunate decision. Indeed, this morning's incident was not unlike that of a day or two ago, when an English lord, who had supposedly drowned after slipping off the walkway at the back of the Arsenal walls and whose tragic and untimely death had been duly lamented in the evening newspaper, found his way back to the palazzo in time for supper after wandering the city all day in senile confusion, expounding thunderously to all the gondoliers upon the greater glory of the British fleet and
declaring that if this was NATO, he'd have none of it, little Truffaldino meanwhile returning draped in sewage and seaweed and bawling like a baby, having fallen in in the nobleman's stead, an event that would have elicited even more wrath than it did, had not Truffaldino with his sweet musical voice and soft winsome ways so swiftly become Eugenio's newest favorite.

  The Palazzo dei Balocchi, the professor has come to understand, is operated by Eugenio on behalf of his charities as a sort of aristocratic retirement hotel, catering to banking magnates, oil barons, the nobility, former munitions makers and Third World presidents, gambling czars and diamond miners, all the successful diggers and owners and traders of the world, now purchasing for themselves in their final days a foretaste of paradise in paradisiacal Venice, he himself being housed in the royal apartments of this generous establishment, though as a friend of course, not a client. Not only are all the creature comforts provided, but much more besides, and always with Eugenio's characteristic touches of elegance and serendipitous anticipation of every need and appetite. Thus the professor, for example, while having little interest in the theaters and nightclubs, restaurants, regattas, shops, casinos, masked balls, and gondola serenades so sought after by the others, has discovered that sitting on the Grand Canal under the blue-and-white-striped awnings of the Gritti Palace terrace bar, across from the sweet golden serenity of the incomparable Ca' Dario, dressed in a clean silk suit and an ascot tie puffed up like a cloud at his throat, his feet dangling in their new shoes and his macabre condition otherwise hidden behind hat, scarves, and soft kid gloves, sipping a small glass of the official papal grappa made in the Picolit region while watching behind subtly tinted spectacles the water traffic go rumbling by, a book in his lap and pen and fresh paper before him, is precisely what he has wanted to do all his life and was in fact the very reason, though he may not have expressed it in just this way, for his decision to return here in the first place, something only Eugenio could have, tacitly and wonderfully, intuited and, without asking, acted upon. "Whatever you want, dear boy," Eugenio has insisted over and over, "I can arrange it. Trust me." And who, so blessed, not merely with comforts but with such fraternal understanding, would not?