(1991) Pinocchio in Venice

by Robert Coover

  "Yes," whispers the nun, her old head bobbing, "your water is very beautiful!"

  "They have, as we Veneti say," the priest is quick to add, "la zampata del leone, the paw of the lion, that is to say, the indisputable footprint of genius and caducity. We few, to whom such things still have provenance, from the bottoms of our unworthy souls, if indeed they have bottoms, exalted sir, and who would know better than you, thank you!"

  "You are welcome," replies the antiquated nun, then wheezes deeply as though suffering a sudden pain in her lower ribs.

  "I-I am not who or what you think I am, father," the old professor confesses abjectly.

  "You are not Professor Pinenut -?" asks the priest, peering closer. The nun, in seeming confusion, turns to hobble away, but the priest snatches her by her habit and draws her back.

  "Yes - no, I only meant -"

  "Ah. You speak metaphorically, of course, true to your majestic and incogitant stylus. We are all, souls masked by bodies, other than what we seem to be, and yet what we seem to be, in the soulless barter of the bodied world, we also are, and so, though not Professor Pinenut, you are he nonetheless! I trust then you will not deny us a trifling favor, good sir: to wit -"

  "Good, sir," says the nun. "Do it."

  "- To wit, to sign one of your noble and predacious tomes for our parish library, hoping that is not too magnanimous an imposture for such a gran signore -?"

  "No, of course not, but I'm afraid I don't -"

  "Have an opus at hand? Do not concern yourself, maestro, for we have traduced a little volume of our own. Psst! The book, you little turk's head!" The nun, he sees now, has a book clamped under one arm, but the arm seems disabled. Reaching for the book with her other arm, she drops the cane. Stooping for the cane, she drops the book. She feels around blindly for the book, but the priest steps crunchingly down upon her black-gloved hand and, sighing deeply, picks up the book himself, hands it to the professor with an uncapped pen.

  "Your - your colleague, she's -"

  "Yes, blind in all her two eyes, excellency, from too much devotion to the noble battologies of your ambagious texts. Now, if you would be so kind "

  Wearily, he opens the book to the flyleaf. He has signed millions of these things in his lifetime. The gesture is automatic. The book, however, is not an edition he recognizes. After signing it, he turns to the title page. For a moment he cannot comprehend what he is seeing. The letters stand there on the page like a row of rigid pine trees or the teeth of a saw. "Where - where did you get this -?!" he gasps, as the priest takes the book back and loses it in the voluminous folds of his cassock, the nun still whimpering under his planted foot.

  "Why, in the little bookstore by the Rialto bridge, dottore. Everyone is reading it. It is a worldwide success!"

  "But - but that's impossible -!"

  "Ah, you are too modest, signer professore. I insure you it has been festooned by the most fulsome praise and garlanded with the ambrosia of excessive honor!" grimaces the priest, holding back a wheezing cough. The nun, too, on her feet once more, is shaking so hard with inner convulsions, she has to lean against the priest not to fall down again. "Perhaps you would like to peruse some of the recent reviews from La Repubblica or the Corriere della Sera?"

  He takes with trembling fingers the clippings the priest hands him. "Mamma, the final opus magnum of the Nobel Prize-winning art critic and historian Dr. Pinenut," he reads through his blurring vision, a shudder shaking him violently from head to foot, "has been universally declared, upon its posthumous publication this week by the Aldine Press, in cooperation with the executors of the author's estate, to be, if not his greatest masterpiece, certainly his most revealing work. Although the unusual scrambling techniques of the early sections make them exceedingly obtuse, the patient reader will eventually find his reward in the clarity and simplicity of the final chapter, 'Money Made from Stolen Fruit,' with its extraordinary sentimental eulogies to his early mentors La Volpe and Il Gatto, from whom he admits most of his ideas were taken. 'They made me what I am today,' the great scholar confesses, providing fresh and startling new insights into the true sources of his peculiar, though now perhaps questionable, genius "

  "Mascherine!" the professor hisses between clenched jaws. He feels he is about to explode. Even this they have stolen! His work! His reputation! His very life! "Assassini!"

  "Are you all right, master?" asks Truffaldino softly, leaning close. "You don't look so well !"

  The priest and nun are long since gone, of course. As is, once more he notes, his watch. "Take me home," he whispers hoarsely, his whole body trembling. It is all over. Like his beloved San Petrarca before him, he is tired in body and soul, tired of everything, tired of affairs, tired of himself "I have lived long enough. I am ready to die."

  But then, just when ("Why not," he can hear Truffaldino saying with a shrug, "we're going that way anyway ") all hope vanishes, something occurs that reminds him forcibly of his old babbo's favorite saying. "One never knows, carogna mia," he would say, tipping his dirty yellow wig slyly down over one eye and sucking wickedly at his grappa jug, "what might happen next in this curious world "

  24. LA BELLA BAMBINA

  It is to be believed, as Father Tertullian once said, leaping from paganism to the Apocalypse in a single bound, because it is absurd. It is certain because it is impossible: Tonight he is to have her at last! In his case, too, the miracle has owed something to the Apocalypse, though he can hardly be said to have leapt, and the Apocalypse in his tale of redemptive grace was a Carnival ride on the Riva degli Schiavoni: no mere mystical vision, that is, but an extraordinary and dizzying reality. Even now, he seems to lose his balance whenever he thinks of it, an experience he has never felt when contemplating something relatively so frivolous as the end of the world - and that magical ride was as nothing compared to what is yet to come before this day is over! "At last, tomorrow," Eugenio promised him yesterday, after making the arrangements, "your biggest wish will come true!" His mind cannot even quite take it in, though the rest of him is certainly more than ready, his whole body trembling in anticipation of that which, for his staggered imagination, remains ultimately unimaginable. As Bluebell put it on the Apocalypse yesterday, begging him to hug her close: "Wow! I'm so excited, teach, I feel like I'm about to wet my doggone pants!"

  "Easy, master! You'll tip us over!"

  "We'll be there soon enough!"

  Yes, they are rocking dangerously, standing huddled there together in the frail gondola in the middle of the Grand Canal, both shores now lost to view in the damp cold fog of this wintry Mardi Gras morning, lost to his view anyway, but it doesn't frighten him, nothing frightens him since his wild ride on the Apocalypse, he feels reckless and manly and heroic, invulnerable even, and he responds to their silly fears with devil-may-care laughter, which unfortunately comes out more like deranged cackling, no doubt making him sound to the servants porting him completely fazzo, as they'd say - as indeed, in love, he is. Stark staring.

  "Brr! What a cold stinking soup this is!"

  "It's like the old Queen let one and it froze!"

  "If this caeca gets any thicker we'll have to shovel our way across!"

  For the professor, the dense fog which rolled in last night is full not of threat but of tender promise, an obliging curtain dropping upon the past, dissolving its regrettable angularities, so harsh and obstinate, in the sensuous dreamlike potential of the present. It is as though the city were masking itself in buoyant anticipation of secret revels of its own, hiding its shabbiness and decay behind a seductively mysterious disguise which is not so much a deception as an amorous courtesy. "The important thing about Carnival," he wrote recently in a note intended as part of his monograph-then-in-progress, "is not the masking, but the unmasking, the revelation, the repentance, the re-establishment of sanity," but, as always in all the days before yesterday, he was wrong. The important thing is the masking. What is sanity itself, after all, but terror's sweet foggy disguise? And love the
mask that shields us from the abyss, art its compassionate accomplice?

  These poignant thoughts come to him unbidden, full-formed already in a language, though chaste, clearly steeped in Eros's ennobling power (only now could he write that monograph which now he knows he will never write), swirling through his quickened mind as easily as do the coiling twists of fog here upon the still gray surface of the Grand Canal. This fog has caused the suspension this morning of all motorized water traffic and so forced upon them this slow labyrinthine journey to the mask shop by foot and now traghetto, a journey whose purpose is, in effect, to initiate a healing, providing him the means, designed by Eugenio, by which to rejoin, after the misguided century, his life's lost theater. He will put a new face on and, in love's name, learn to lie again, free at last from the tyranny of his blue-haired preceptress with her "civilizing" mania, her cruel tombstone lessons. The long oar splashes softly behind him as the black-snouted bark carves its perilous way across the silent waters, drawing a line erased as soon as drawn, thus celebrating, not the line, dull as death itself, but the motion that has made it. The others stand in a cluster in the rocking gondola like passengers on a crowded bus, holding him up between them, chattering nervously and peering intently through the purling mists for a glimpse of a landing, as though afraid that what they cannot see might not exist. Though impatience grips the old scholar, fear does not, and, least of all, the fear of movement, once such a bugbear that even melody's traveling line offended him and his gardens all were paved so as not to have to witness growth. No more. Movement, after all, was his very raison d'ętre, he was made for it. "To dance and fence and turn somersaults in the air," as his father advertised. His concept of I-ness, as he tried to explain yesterday to his former student, aboard the whirling Apocalypse, was never more valid: he could not, without doing violence to himself, be other than what, at the core, he was. "And only here, dear Bluebell, right now, where I am, am I truly what I truly am!"

  Or words, in his cross-eyed, thick-tongued, mouth-stuffed delirium, to that effect

  "Ecco!" cries Francatrippa as the gondola strikes its dock, unseen till hit, and slides, bumping and scraping, into its berth. "We're here!"

  "Where else," asks Buffetto impatiently, stepping onto the bobbing dock and reaching back to help with the portantina, "could we be?"

  "Well, if I were here and you were there," replies Francatrippa, as the two of them lift him out, "and vice versa, then we'd be, both, both here and there, would we not?"

  "And if I were here and you were there," pipes up Truffaldino, following them ashore, "and he were neither here nor there, then we'd all be both here and there and neither either, too!"

  "Hrmff. And yet here is where we'd each still be for all that," insisted Buffetto. "Isn't that so, professore? But now come along, if you are to find the romance and adventure that you seek, we must find the guise for it. Am I right? Tonight's the night!"

  Yes, so he believes, though twenty-four hours ago he would not have thought it possible. Nothing seemed possible then. His desire to go on living, guttering out, had dimmed to nothing more than the simple wish to be able to die in his bed at the palazzo beside his hot water bottle, and even that wish was more like the memory of a wish than the thing itself. Moreover, as he thought about that hot water bottle, there, surrounded by Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo's raucous court with their drunken taunts and fountaining organs, dunce cap on his lowered head and condom on his nose, bereft, grieving, his manuscript pirated and his watch stolen for the second time, the realization slowly invaded his consciousness like a last lethal wounding that it was his hot water bottle, the snuggies, too, also his the bent spectacles, the half-empty bottle of pine-scented mouth-wash, and certain very grievous patterns began to emerge, not least the lifelong pattern of self-deception: he had known all along that was his own hot water bottle, there could not be two of them.

  The procession had reached the Bocca di San Marco. Through the columns and beyond the temporary stands and stages built for Carnival, a vast assembly of the island's smart set and power elect could be seen congregated together in full regalia under the Clock Tower, prepared to receive the venerable Count Ziani-Ziani, now poised arm in arm with the Madonna of the Organs, his free hand tucked in his vest of crimson velvet ŕ la the builder of this final wing of Venice's so-called "open-air drawing room," his chin high and pointy gray beard fluttering in the gusty wind, his immense phallus held aloft with the help of little Truffaldino. On a cart being pulled along beside him, the Winged Lion snored drunkenly, a sign around his neck reading "THE GOOD SOVEREIGN." Il Zoppo, as Pulcinella and Lisetta were - or was - now called, stepped forward from the crowd and raised a horn to Lisetta's lips, prepared to lead the multitudes into the Piazza, and just at that moment he heard it again, as though in fulfillment of some grim brassy oracle: "Oh my Ga-ahd! Lookit this! What a lotta crazy lolly-pops! Ding-dong, man! It's like a - ffpupp! squit! - little girl's dream come true!"

  The professor sank even deeper into his litter chair, wishing there were a hole in it he could fall right through. The American strutted, hips swaying, through the spellbound crowd in her fringed white boots and wet blue jeans, tweaking organs and peeking into empty eyeholes and slapping the smirking faces on bared behinds, cracking gum between her dazzling white teeth and blowing fleshy pink bubbles, hooting and wisecracking ("Hooboy, I love those little faces down there, fellas! Is that what you call - ssffPOPP! - 'masked balls' -?!") and circling inevitably around to the cringing scholar in his portantina. "Hey, wow, prof! This is a surprise! What are you doing here -?!"

  "I - kaff! - it's not what -! A-a monograph I'm working on !" he stammered helplessly down between his knees, and felt his shameless nose bounce and waggle goofily in its latex wrapper.

  "Jeepers, teach, that freaky rig is beautiful!" she exclaimed, clapping her gaudily ringed and bangled hands together. "I hadn't seen you as such a fun-loving guy!"

  And then she did something quite extraordinary. She peeled the condom away, pulled it on over her wet blond curls like a shower cap, and, leaning over, her red windbreaker rustling between them like a whispered secret, gave his nose a tender lingering kiss, tonguing it at the tip and pinching it gently between her soft lips before letting it go. He felt for an alarming but exquisite moment that he might be going blind. "Yum!" she sighed, her breath warm on his ravaged cheek, then added: "But gee whillikers, prof, look how you're shivering! You must be freezing to death!" Cold was what he did not feel. But he could not argue. He could not speak. He could not even close his gaping jaw, but could only stare in stunned amazement as she tossed her windbreaker over his knees, stripped off the azure blue angora sweater, and, while blowing a huge rosy bubble, the only thing his bedazzled eyes could see, tucked the sweater around his chest and shoulders. Then she pulled the windbreaker on again, leaving it unzipped, and grabbed Francatrippa's grand candy-striped phallus away from him: "Hey, gimme that, man! Whoopee! I always did want one of these doodads!" She gave it a squeeze and a jet of milk spurted out the end of it, making those nearby duck and shriek. "Yipes! Whaddaya know! It even works! C'mon, gang! Let's go!"

  And so, with condom-capped Bluebell in the vanguard, carrying her particolored phallus over her head like the troop ensign and switching her behind provocatively, they all paraded triumphantly on into the great open light of the Piazza, unloosing in those delicate symmeteries a mad cacophony of shouts and squeals, honkings and blarings and other rude noises: Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo il Magnifico behind Bluebell with his long nose in the air, his much longer organ on little Truffaldino's shoulders, and his flouncing Madonna on his arm; the slumbering Lion on the wine cart alongside him, wearing his crumpled sign like a belled cat; the bearded Ladies' Marching Band, led by Il Zoppo blowing a trumpet out the flies of his/her white pantaloons; the old professor, sugarloaf-capped and shawled in blue and ported by Buffetto and Francatrippa in his litter chair, his astounded gaze locked helplessly on their bewitching bare-breasted standard-bear
er; the Count's royal attendants with their inverted anatomies, dragging along the now much lighter barrels of wine; and finally the multitudinous throngs of zany and improbable creatures who had joined the procession along the way, Melampetta yipping and barking at the periphery, first on one side, then the other, like a sheepdog rounding up the drunken strays. At the far end of the square, the awaiting dignitaries arose en masse, either in homage to the visiting Count or else aghast at the apparition descending upon them through the Mouth of the Piazza, while overhead the terrified pigeons, displaced by the clamorous invasion, let their frantic droppings fall upon the Piazza like confetti.

  They emerge now from a narrow passageway so tight they have been scraping the walls into a campo too broad and thick with fog to make out its shape or exits. "Which way now?" asks Truffaldino tremulously as the other two set the professor down. "I'm afraid -!"

  "Don't be stupid! That way, of course!" reply Francatrippa and Buffetto more or less in chorus, one pointing to the left, the other to the right. Glancing at each other, they quickly switch directions, pointing at each other, then switch back again, and Truffaldino bawls: "Help! We're lost!"

  Just then the heavy silence is broken by a scratchy two-way radio announcing something about a thief in a junk store, and a moment later two carabinieri materialize out of the fog, clattering past at full trot, their black capes fluttering behind them, rifles gripped at the ready in their white-gloved hands. "Wait!" the three servants cry out as one: "Mangiafoco's -?!"

  "This way!" shouts one of the policemen as both are swallowed up once more in the swirling fog, the smacking of their boots on stone fading slowly away to a distant ticking sound like an animal's claws on glass, and then everything is submerged once more in a dense muggy silence.

  "Ebbene," sighs Buffetto as he and Francatrippa pick up his litter chair again. "We'll never get there by standing still! Andiamo subito!"