(1991) Pinocchio in Venice

by Robert Coover

  Eugenio is mistaken about not feeling a thing. The intense heat actually soothes his inner wooden parts, penetrating like muscle balm to the damp rot lodged deep there, but the burning dough expands around his outer fleshly remains with all the blistering ferocity of a red-hot iron maiden, piercing him through with the most agonizing pain and squeezing the breath right out of him, making him gasp and scream and beg for mercy. Even as he bawls to be let out - "Ih! Ah! Please!" - his breath seizing up in his chest and his cries emerging like raw heaving croaks ("Let him cry," Eugenio urges the startled kitchen staff with a tender chuckle, "the little ass can laugh when he gets laid!"), he has a sudden total recall of the dream he had while burning his feet off on his father's brazier all those years ago, a simple dream about leaping. At first it was only common everyday real-life leaping, over hedgerows and thorn bushes and muddy ditches - he'd only been a puppet for a little while, his legs were new to him, but already, barely able, with Geppetto's help, even to walk, he had gone bounding off, full of short-lived joy, leaping as high as he could, but running straight into, as though ordained, the nose-grabbing fist of the constabulary (such troublesome impetuousness, already on the move even as a shapeless lump of wood, where had it come from?) - but gradually, while his feet, as remote from him in his sleep as if they belonged to someone else, blackened and turned to ashes on the brazier, he felt himself in the dream growing lighter and lighter, he could suddenly leap over carts and houses and could even leave the world behind altogether, and as he rose above all the rooted trees and planted houses far below, he was overwhelmed by an intense sense of freedom, of being truly alive, his nose out of the reach of all earthly constraints and rising even higher than the rest of him rose. But then, as he soared higher and higher, he had a thought. A very simple thought, one of his first: that his freedom only made sense, only truly was freedom, if he could get back down there whenever he wanted to. With that, he began to fall. Feet first at the beginning, then head, finally just tumbling wildly, nose over heels and out of control. It was terrifying. He was screaming like he is screaming now. He fell with the awesome clatter of a sack of wood thrown from the top of a house, scaring even himself. When he awoke, his feet were gone. He thought they'd been eaten and blamed the cat.

  "Stop carrying on so, Pini! You are out!"

  So he is. But he is still burning up. Inside and out, baked to a turn. "Innamorato cotto," as the faces on the maskmaker's wall mocked, tittering and hooting (he didn't care) when his little American student left him all agape and askew on the shop floor, chewing gum stuck to the side of his earhole, their ridicule now becoming prophecy: an old fool literally cooked in love. His darling Bluebell, too, had prophesied: "cute as a blister," she'd called him on their Carnival ride. He is crying so hard he cannot even get his breath. His surface is bubbling and the salami between his legs has shriveled and is dripping hot grease.

  "Ahi, what a nuisance you are, carino mio!" shouts Eugenio over his desperate howling. "Chetati! You are drying me up!" He sniffs appetitively at the professor's sizzling hindquarters, reaches in with a bejeweled finger, plucks a meatball stringy with melted cheese. "Roll the tedious beast into the meat locker and cool him off!" he commands irritably, popping the hot meatball in his mouth with a loud smack. "Ow! Yum! See what you get for doing someone a favor!"

  He has asked for it, it is true. He'd had a terrible shock after his ride on the Apocalypse yesterday when Bluebell had abandoned him so abruptly, dropping him in the palazzo doorway like an old unwanted toy, and an even worse one when the door opened: for there, towering above him like an avenging angel, her arms folded majestically over her bosom and her face half in shadow, was she whom he'd thought dead these hundred years, returned as it were from the grave, or graves, his sister, mother, bedtime hair-raiser, drillmaster, and erstwhile benefactress: "O Fata mia! Forgive me!" he'd cried, utterly stupefied and undone (where was he?), and he had tumbled to his knees there to hug hers, sobbing out his confession together with an account of his many and ghastly trials, and not excluding his most recent truancy and all his sinful thoughts while buried in his beautiful ex-student's rosette-nippled breasts, shameless recreant that he incorrigibly was, but regretting this even as he did so: perhaps perhaps, even with her strangely fat knees, she could help -?

  "Ah, while you are down there, dear boy, would you care to suck my lecca-lecca?"

  "Eugenio -?!"

  "But of course! I don't know who you thought I was, sweetheart, but I am supposed to be the Queen of the Night!"

  "I-I've been through so much I can hardly -!" His bewilderment was such that he could not even see, he felt numb and dry-mouthed, as though his senses were falling away with the rest of his bodily parts, maybe that wild ride had done more damage to the lignified mush in his brainpan than he'd thought. Only one thing was clear in all this dreadful blur. "Eugenio! Listen to me! Dear old friend! I-I know now what I want! You said I could have anything -!"

  "Oh, I know. The American bambina, no? I thought you'd never ask, you wicked boy! But it goes without saying! I already have a plan!"

  "You do -?"

  "Tomorrow night! I promise you! She is yours!"

  And so this, this is the plan. He can feel the crust, like fate itself, hardening around him. Still, he clings, speaking loosely, his blistered arms spread beneath him, locked in stiffened pizza dough here in the meat cooler, to his one hope - absurd, abject, perverse, yet at the same time spiritual, and even, for he is after all who he is, venerable - because: what else is there left to believe in if not love? Yes, love is the word of the day, his word, his only one. Her mask shop confession rings still in his inner ear, the only sort he has left, like celestial music. She is, the sublimate of his otherwise vaporized concept of perfect beauty, all he can see. If she is expecting an ass tonight, he will, with all his smitten heart, be one.

  When he saw her this morning, stretched out in her winding sheet in the barber's chair, her eyes rolled back and her blue lips slackly parted, he was not able to breathe. He had gaped his mouth, but no air entered. He felt like he was strangling. His gnarled fingers tore at the straps of the portantina. Feverish chills shook him, and guilt, dismay: Had his own demented desires done this -?! Oh no! "I-I'm sorry!" he had gasped. He fell out onto the floor of the mask shop, bruising the patches of flesh that remained, crawled toward her. When he reached her boot, he kissed it passionately, wetting it with his tears, his nose pressed into her blue jean cuffs, then pulled himself up to hug her knees. "Oh, Bluebell!" he sobbed, abandoning all his greater learning for that simple and terrible formula, the abject confession of a stricken heart: "I-I love you! Don't die!" Gripping her belt buckle, he hauled himself up onto her lifeless body, blind to the danger of being caught in so mad an attitude, crawling over her sunken belly, her flattened breasts, pausing to weep there, his face buried in what, until a moment before, were his greatest joy on earth, shapers of his very destiny; then, using them as wobbly handles, he dragged himself on up to her precious face, ghastly in its ashen pallor, and kissed tenderly her cold lips, still faintly bubble gum-perfumed. Her lips moved beneath his lips. They stretched into a smile. A miracle! She opened her eyes, sighed, gave him a little smack on his behind, and said: "Now, now, teach! Be nice!"

  He tried to speak. He could not. He felt cruelly deceived and impossibly jubilant at the same time. She lived still!

  "C'mon, don't take it so hard, prof, just having a little fun! I saw you coming, I thought you'd get a kick out of it! You gotta admit it's a great costume, right? But down you go now, I've turned over a new leaf, no more spreading it around, I'm saving it for the man of my dreams!" She lifted him by his armpits and set him down dismissively in his litter chair again, as though clearing her lap of a minor nuisance. "I learned about him from a little fat man who has, well, you know, befriended me. He told my fortune, like, and said I'm gonna meet my true love tonight! In the most scrumptious drawing room in Venice! In a mask! It's all worked out! That's why I got this crazy costum
e! Jeepers, isn't it romantic?! Tonight! Who do you think he is -?"

  "Ah !" What could he say? He felt a terrible weight upon him. He had never lied before. Not like this. But if he told her the truth, she wouldn't come. He would never see her again. He gazed upon this lovely apparition, now wriggling out of her grave clothes like a beautiful thought, softly bodied forth in denim and angora, his eyes delighted afresh by each familiar curve and hollow as it emerged, quiveringly alive, and he knew, drunk with mad desire, grateful merely that, this night at least, she lived, he lived, that (his nose alone would have told him this) he was lost. "He alas " he wheezed, desperately trying not to tell her what he could not but tell her, "it is only !"

  "Honest, you know what, prof?" she whispered then. She leaned down to press her warm cheek next to his, so dizzying him with fragrant memories of their fairy-tale ride on the Apocalypse he had to close his eyes, and, shyly, almost breathlessly, she added: "I hope it's you !" When he opened his eyes again, feeling her cheek still pressed hotly on his own, he'd fallen out of his portantina and she was gone.

  He has been, all day, since that confession, and until the costuming began, in a state of constant dreamlike euphoria, a state unlike any he has ever known, even as a puppet. "My, how perky you are!" Eugenio had laughed when they returned from the mask shop, by vaporetto this time, the fog beginning, much slower than his spirits, to lift, and in reply he had crawled out of his litter chair and performed a feeble little bowlegged jig, bowing afterwards to the general applause. Ah, the theater, the theater! he'd thought, blowing kisses to them all. Why have I turned my back on it all my life? It is time made real, it is movement, it is passion, it is life! All the rest, the dead paintings, the statuary, the tiresome books, all those pompous "images of eternity": just so much bullpoop, as his dearly beloved so eloquently put it. Perhaps, in spite of himself, he had taught her everything she knows! Eugenio, surrounded by a flock of clucking tailors and seamstresses making emergency repairs in his costume, the seams of which had largely given way under an excess of flattering tucks and "modelings," had smiled benignly at all of this and, fluttering his long false lashes, wheezed: "Dear boy, love is good for you!"

  Oh yes! Oh yes! His heart is full, as they liked to say in Hollywood. (He adored Hollywood, why did he ever leave it?) All day he has been embracing everyone who came within range, the busy servants, the doddering and incontinent clientele of the palazzo, the police officers who came with the news of La Volpe's arrest, the seamstresses with their mouths full of pins, the Omino e figli, S.R.L. lawyers, laden with briefs and deeds, and the contessa offering to give up her claim to the Rialto bridge in exchange for an efficiency apartment in the new Palazzo Ducale, the maids stripping his bed down and emptying out his closets and drawers, building contractors with plans for converting the Bridge of Sighs into a love nest, even the electricians stringing up lights outside his windows and hanging the new red banners - he has so much love in him he has felt he must share it or die! Madness! But eagerly he embraced that, too! Let it come!

  And he has forgiven everybody! His mean old babbo, all the tormenters of his youth and age, the bad painters and jealous reviewers, the Fairy, the upstart department chairman who tried to take away his second office and limit his franking privileges, the student who wrote THE BONG'S LONG, ART'S SNOT - SENECTA on the blackboard, even the old Fox, his ancient nemesis, apprehended at last today and jailed, held on the charges from the professor's own denunciation. Which he now regrets. She had apparently been trying to use the money from the piracy of his Mamma manuscript to buy back her old tail, now not much more than a ratty piece of frayed rope and no longer useful even as a fly swatter, her mistake being, as the police explained it, that for the first time in her life she was attempting to purchase something instead of simply stealing it, and, unaccustomed to legal barter as she was, she had gotten into a violent argument with the dealer complaining that the price was too low for so precious an object, the dealer finally calling the police, fearing he had a lunatic on his hands. The professor tried to persuade Eugenio to intercede for her, but to no avail: "Let the old reprobate stay there overnight," Eugenio snapped reedily, scarcely able to breathe in his tightly laced corset. "We'll all be richer for it!"

  But then, when the sad news came that poor blind Gattino, without his companion, had walked off the wrong side of a vaporetto in the fog ("When the tipo hollered out the stop, Il Gatto repeated it loudly and stepped off the other side! He never came up, master, all they found was his white cane "), he made another urgent appeal for La Volpe's release, fearing for her when she got the news, begging Eugenio to help him drop the charges, but his friend threw up his hands in despair, crying: "Madonna! We've worked so hard to catch the infamous whore! How can you ask for such a thing after all she has done to you -?!"

  "I forgive everybody! I forgive even you, Eugenio!"

  "How nice, dear boy, I forgive you, too - but this is completely bizarre! And look at the hour! I can't do anything now!"

  "But -!"

  ''Tomorrow, Pini! Maybe! For now, I tell you, we haven't a minute to lose!"

  He had to accept that, his own costume was not even begun, and already the bands were playing in the Piazza and the darkening square was filling up with masked revelers, exciting him with a sense of romance and adventure not felt since he first heard the pi-pi-pi and zum-zum-zum of Mangiafoco's magical marionette theater in the last century. He had sold his primer then for a ticket and he would sell it again now, together with all his degrees and books and honors, only to have Bluebell's cheek next to his once more.

  His excitement was evidently contagious, the entire Palazzo dei Balocchi has seemed abuzz with it all day, the staff, the clientele, the visitors, and its Director, too, alias the Queen of the Night, giddy as a schoolchild about his big party this evening (he has been dropping hints he may have acquired Casanova's bones for his great Mardi Gras Gran Gala tonight after all, for he is also laying plans for elaborate Ash Wednesday obsequies on the morrow, inviting, it would seem, the whole world to them, as though reluctant to let the glorious season come to an end) and priding himself on being the new owner and resident-soon-to-be of the Doges' Palace. He has already ordered up new stationery. When the professor expressed his doubts about the authenticity of Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo's deed, Eugenio replied that "a country which has happily accepted the legitimacy of fantasy titles purchased by mail order from a remote German king, my love, can as easily accept the legitimacy of this entertaining document!" Various charges have been brought against the Count by the city meanwhile, including "the illicit erection of a public display intended to violate the true Christian meaning of Carnival" and "contributing irresponsibly to an increased risk of acque alte," and Buffetto, Francatrippa, and Truffaldino have been sent out this afternoon to supervise his arrest by the authorities, Eugenio assuring them that, if by some unfortunate circumstance the Count should be martyred in the course of his pursuit, an appropriate plaque would be mounted on a wall of the Ducal Palace, commemorating his historical visit here and specifically honoring all emissaries of the occasion.

  By the time they roll the old scholar out of the meat locker, his new hide, as it might be called, has cooled as firm as a body cast, though he is stinging all over as if his cauterized flesh might have become suffused somehow with the baked pizza dough. His head hangs limply from its weary neck like a turtle's dangling from its shell, and his breaths are coming in short dry patches as though they might be his last. "Ah, that's better!" gushes Eugenio, lifting his former school-chum's drooping chin up and wiping his tears with a scented handkerchief. It is dark outside, bands are playing, and the crowd noises have mounted: there are shouts and screams coming in through the windows, and bursts of wild laughter and, underneath it all, the intense rumble of anticipation, as in a stadium before a big match. "It is almost time now for your great adventure, you old rogue! She is already out there waiting for you!"

  "Out -? Out where?"

  "In t
he city, dear boy, where else? That fabulous house of pleasure, that opulent place for perfect licentiousness, that lubricious refuge of love with its illusion of the incredible, its wondrous aura of fairyland -!"

  "But you said a salon -!"

  "But of course, Old Sticks! Have I ever said otherwise? And look at you! Beautiful! I am in love with you myself! Ah, but one last thing to make you perfect!"

  Eugenio, whistling a happy little tune, bores a hole in his rear with an apple corer and works in a jauntily upright tail made of long crisp cannoni, filled with sweet ricotta. Then, following the Director's instructions, the kitchen staff move him from the trolley onto one of the wine carts from yesterday's procession, perhaps the one the old Lion slept on, it smells like it, securing him to it by way of ropes around the neck and butt of the creature in whom he now resides. Earlier today, the old professor was convinced he was ready for this. Now he is not so sure. Only Bluebell's whispered wish sustains him. But if this is how she expects to find him, what is it she expects to do? He tries to conjure up stimulating memories of his ride on the Apocalypse, his snuggle with her in the mask shop, but it is as though, in his present position, his memory has plummeted into his sinuses somehow, closed to recall, merely making his head heavier on his tired neck. Carnival, perhaps, is not meant for everyone

  They lower the professor, imbedded in his donkey-shaped pizza loaf, to street level in the freight elevator, joined by two bleary-eyed old ladies who squat in a corner to pee, and at the bottom they roll him out into the Sotoportego del Capello, the dimly lit alleyway behind the palazzo. Through the narrow underpass there, he can see the bright lights and the massed crowds of the decorated Piazza San Marco, but back here it is damp and silent, like the darkened wings of a musty theater. He has supposed they would be heading down an obscure calle or corte somewhere: isn't that where assignations are always held? Eugenio, however, bubbling with excitement, seems prepared to march them all out upon the raucous Piazza. This is not good news. Does he mean to inaugurate the Bridge of Sighs tonight? The two ancient ladies, a Russian princess and the heiress to a rubber fortune, clients of the palazzo, have exited the elevator with them and wandered confusedly off into the night, somewhat shackled by their drawers, and now two soft splashes are heard at the far end of the Sotoportego del Capello where the gondolas dock at night. Eugenio sends instructions out into the square to commence the fanfare and then carefully fits the donkey mask over his old friend's face, attaching fresh white camellias behind the upright ears. "And now, my dear little mammifero," he says, peering in at him through the eyeholes with a look full of loving kindness, his voice like honey oozing from the comb, "the rest depends on you!"