(1991) Pinocchio in Venice

by Robert Coover

  Before they can set off, however, they are interrupted by the clamorous arrival of Buffetto, Francatrippa, and Truffaldino, staggering down the alleyway, wailing and groaning, their clothes torn and bloodstained, their arms and heads bandaged, Buffetto and Francatrippa on crutches, little Truffaldino crawling toward them on all fours. "Ahi, direttore! What a terrible fight! We are dead!"

  26. THE STAR OF THE DANCE

  He knows everything now. What's happened to him. What happens next. Forget secret assignations. Forget dreams come true. Remember instead the words of Melampetta as attributed by her yesterday to luckless Pierre Abelard in his presumed exegetical marginalia upon Saint Bernard of the Cisternian beekeepers, "known in the underworld," as she (or perhaps he) put it, as "Doctor Mellifluus": "Honey in the mouth, amico mio, sting in the culo!" "But he has been so good to me!" he'd protested, and she'd growled back: "If I know the Little Man, compagno, you've been good to yourself!" That's right, he thinks now, staring out upon the demonically Carnivalized Piazza through the eyeholes of his donkey mask with increasing apprehension and terror, there's probably nothing wrong with the mails either. His retirement funds may well have just bought the Doges' Palace. His old classmate's "recent windfall" was a pinenut. He has probably lost everything but the clothes on his back. So to speak.

  Overhead, meanwhile, wisps of fog, like ghostly fish, twist and curl around crimson banners announcing the celebrated native son's Gran Gala top-of-the-bill performance tonight as the "Star of the Dance," and the stage toward which Buffetto and Francatrippa are rolling him is tented in strings of colored lights and decorated, even to a golden hoop, like the center ring of a circus. Eugenio as the Queen of the Night goes before them, switching his behind provocatively and calling out in his reedy falsetto: "Permesso! Permesso! Largo per il Ciuchino Pinocchio! La Stella della Danza!" On his back, Truffaldino, or whoever he or she is, does handstands and backflips, as the well-stung wayfarer, dismally at one with his freshly baked outer image, is paraded on his creaking carriage, to the hoots and cheers of the riotous multitudes, across the great square, which, notorious metaphors aside, is something less than the "sumptuous drawing room" his perfidious friend had led him to expect, though he is all too aware that his expectations have always been led less by the likes of Eugenio than by his own mad unrestrainable fancy, and that he deserves whatever he gets, insofar as getting and deserving have anything to do with each other, not much. Wretches are born, not made. Don't count on character. The grain goes with you, I-ness is an illness.

  Thus, with each fateful turning of the cartwheels, the venerable scholar's most abiding convictions fall away as lightly as those flakes of pizza crust, a truer tougher mask, kicked loose now by Truffaldino's acrobatics on his donkey back. It doesn't hurt. Neither the acrobatics nor the collapse of his precious ontology. He recalls (even as, on all fours, he is hauled through the bright lights and pressing mob) that solitary moment in his darkening office back at the university in America, when, left all alone on campus in the backside of the festive season (yes, he was feeling sorry for himself, a sure spur to folly) and despairing of a happy conclusion to his current, perhaps definitive work, he had been struck by the vision which propelled him here. He had been staring out of his office window, meditating upon his singular relationship to the Blue-Haired Fairy, as intuitively clear to him at that moment as had been the Trinity or the hypostatic union to Saint Thomas Aquinas, but also as resistant to formulation within language, a resistance which had thwarted his hopes of closing his epic tribute to his beloved preceptress with his latest chapter, just completed, "And The Wood Was Made Flesh and Dwelt among Us." He would have to try again. One more chapter. And the image that came to him then, as his thoughts floated back to that revelatory moment here on this island all those years ago when abjectly he dropped as though felled to hug, in joy and in sweet repentance, the Fairy's knees, no longer bony and childlike as when he'd played with them last, but now full-fleshed and maternally solid, was one not of absence and desolation (this was what he saw out his office window) but of generosity and abundance and throbbingly intense beauty. He seemed to be looking between her virtuous knees as between the two famous columns on the Piazzetta (perhaps two dead trees in the yard topped and amputated, had helped bring this image to mind), gazing in wonder upon that succulent composition of plump Christian splendor and lacy Oriental fantasy which, from a different angle and diabolically transformed, confronts him now, and he felt suddenly as if he were peering, his gaze drawn toward the dark labyrinth of the Merceria twisting its way into the distance beyond the radiant Basilica, into his very source. Yes, yes, the truth must be seen, he reminded himself then, the good felt (his hands, he saw, were pressed against the office windowpane, he was licking the glass). And so it was that, only hours later, as though compelled, with Petrarch's cautionary Epistolae seniles under his arm to curb his almost childish excitement (and what had happened to that book? he must have left it on the plane ) and his Mamma, seeking resolution, in his hastily packed bags, he had found himself on his way here, visions of climax dancing in his old wooden head like Bellini cherubs.

  No cherubs out here tonight, alas. Climax is happening without them. Everything but, however: he is encircled by a crazed menagerie of the impossible, massed up hundreds deep. The racket is deafening. There are bands playing, whistles blowing, flashguns popping, fireworks crackling, and the costumed revelers, the most terrifying of them wearing Pinocchio masks of their own, are dancing about drunkenly and shouting out his name: "Evviva Pinocchio!" "It's him! Č proprio lui!" "This is gonna be fun!" As he rolls through the bedlam of the square, lit up bright as day, he scans the crowds in vain for a friendly face, even the hint of a friend behind a face. Not even the Count or the Madonna, perhaps dead or chased off after all. Ah, this, this, my poor dear Fox, is the devil's very flour, he laments as paper streamers and confetti flutter overhead like tossed seasoning, and I am in it

  "Yes, you are truly buggered, my tender friend, becco e bastonato, and worse to come," Buffetto, who is perhaps not Buffetto after all, murmurs in his donkey ear. "But, as we say here, 'Zoga el coraggio a l'ultimo tagio!' Play your nerve at the final serve! At the last hand, old man, take a stand!"

  He had hoped for a moment, back in the darkness behind the Palazzo dei Balocchi, that Buffetto, Francatrippa, and Truffaldino might be coming to his rescue, or at least to whisk him off, as planned, to his assignation with little Bluebell, but this was not to be. "Ohi, direttore, what a terrible fight, we are dead!" they had cried, staggering up the alleyway on crutches, all bruised and bandaged, Truffaldino crawling along on all fours, and Eugenio, slapping his palm impatiently with a folded fan, had snapped fiercely: "If not, you soon will be, you worthless louts, unless you come with the news I want to hear! The hour is late! Quickly! What has happened to the Count!"

  "We apprehended him, master!"

  "We seized him!"

  "We surrounded him!"

  "Good!"

  "But he escaped!"

  "Escaped -?! I warn you -!"

  "Tried to escape, direttore! We pursued him!"

  "Ah!"

  "But he got away!"

  "What -?!"

  "But we caught him again! By the very throat! What a battle!"

  "You can't imagine, direttore! That retinue! We were up against witches and wiverns and hundred-armed fiends from outer space!"

  "Gryphons and ghouls!"

  "Hellhounds and harpies, master!"

  "Yes, yes, and so -?"

  "Enh, what could we do against such an army?"

  "They were merciless!"

  "They drove us back!"

  "They what -?!"

  "Then we drove them back!"

  "Aha!"

  "Into the sea!"

  "The sea?"

  "Well, into the canal!"

  "Very good! And -?"

  "They had gondolas waiting!"

  "They were swept away before you could blink an eye!"

  "But
surely, mere gondolas, you must have been able -"

  "Motorized gondolas, direttore! One minute they were all drowning, the next they were roaring away!"

  "Into the fog!"

  "You couldn't see them -!"

  "You let the Count get away, you imbeciles -?!"

  "No!"

  "No! We, uh "

  "We ?"

  "We chased him in the motor launch!"

  "That's it!"

  "Aha! Then finally you -"

  "They sank it with their submachine guns!"

  "They sank the motor launch -?!"

  "We fired back and sank the gondolas!"

  "It was frightful, direttore! There were bodies everywhere!"

  "The canals were full of them! You could walk right across without getting your feet wet!"

  "The gondolas couldn't move even if we didn't sink them!"

  "What do you mean? Did you sink them or didn't you?"

  "Well, the fog "

  "All those bodies "

  "It was confusing "

  "If you didn't, you fools, it's Marten's fate for you!"

  "We did!"

  "Pum! Pof!"

  "Blew them right out of the water!"

  "The canals were running with blood, direttore!"

  "And guts! Blood and guts, direttore!"

  "It was a fight to the death!"

  "It was hand-to-hand!"

  "And foot-to-foot!"

  "I was killed at least eleven times, master!"

  "But the Count, the Count, you damnable wretches -?!"

  "Who?"

  "Don't 'who' me! I'll have your heads -!"

  "Ah, the Count! He's dead."

  "The Count's dead? You're sure -?"

  "He must be! Everybody was dead!"

  "But you didn't see him -?"

  "What did he look like?"

  "Short fellow with a bald head and a wrinkled -?"

  "Enough! Enough!" Eugenio screamed, his mascaraed eyes flashing in fury. "You'd better take confession tonight, you insolent vermin, your afterlife begins tomorrow!" And he turned sharply on his high heels to stamp out into the noisy and luminous Piazza San Marco, crying: "Now follow me, you little shits! And bring that wretched thing there on the wagon with you!"

  The three servants, anxious to please, threw away their crutches and, with Buffetto pulling, Francatrippa pushing, and Truffaldino helping at the side, they rolled the little wine cart into the tiny underpass leading to the Piazza. In the momentary darkness there, before the light and roar beyond, Truffaldino hopped nimbly up onto the professor's donkey back, then leaned down to whisper into his pointed ear: "La Volpe is dead, dottore!"

  "What -?! Dead -?!"

  "Hanged herself. With her own tail. Isn't that funny? When they told her about Il Gatto. And your charges against her."

  "Ah "

  "She left a note for you. In her pocket. Shall I read it?" The old scholar could not reply. He knew the nausea overwhelming him was human nausea, associated with his human flesh, what was left of it. " 'To my dear friend Pinocchio,' it says. 'Do not judge your old traveling companions too harshly. Remember that it is more shameful to distrust friends than be deceived by them.' " He hated the tears running down his cheeks, the lump crowding his less than wooden throat. He wanted no more of it, he wanted it all gone, wanted to be free of this appalling human sickness once and for all. Why did he ever want to be a boy? Why did he let them do this to him? Who talked him into it? Running away with Lampwick, though they didn't run far enough, was probably the wisest thing he ever did. Even being a donkey, a real one, was better than this. " 'As proof of my love for you,' she writes, 'I would like to return your watch, but, worse luck, Gattino was wearing it when he made his final blunder. All I have left is my old tail, which is yours, dear friend, as soon as I am no longer using it.' Signed, 'Yours in the bran, La Volpe.' "

  He was bawling by now, his heaving sobs catching in his imbreaded throat. He knew what it sounded like. He knew what he was.

  "Poor Pinocchio, I am really sorry for you," whispered Truffaldino in a voice suddenly familiar to him. "Be brave, dear friend. Whatever happens "

  "Colombina ?" But his voice was drowned out by the tumultuous uproar that greeted them as they emerged from the underpass and, under a blazing explosion of floodlights, filed out here into the eerily transformed Piazza: "Pinocchio! It's Pinocchio! Here he comes!" they screamed, and scream still, raising their voices above the din. "Č Pinocchio davvero!" "Hooray!" "It's the Star of the Dance!"

  As they rumble along now in the gaudy tumult, headed for the circus ring, they pass two tall caped carabinieri, mustachioed and thin as sticks, perhaps the same ones who chased him during the puppet band bust, now helping to keep the crowds back for his grand entry. Between them, on a leash, is a dog, masked by a steel muzzle: it is Melampetta, a friend at last! He aches to reach out to her, but he cannot move inside his bready cast. On seeing him, or perhaps, more correctly, on smelling him behind the pizza, the old watchdog throws her muzzled head back and lets out a pathetic wordless howl, for which she receives a whistling slash of a horse crop from one of her trainers. "Stop! Don't -!" the professor gasps, but of course he cannot be heard in the demented cacophony of the square, nor would they listen to him if he could be. Melampetta's miserable howl continues, as do the dialectical whip strokes, fading into the general pandemonium that fills in around him as they lift him off the cart and onto the stage. He is passed ceremonially through the great golden hoop, stretched with tissue crisp as old silk - pfUFff! - and, to a crescendo of applause and wild howling cheers, is deposited finally on a little round platform, rotating slowly in the center of the ring.

  "Rispettabile ed irrispettoso pubblico!" cries the Director, stepping to the microphone and raising his pale plump arms, glitteringly bangled. "Welcome! Welcome, my dear fiends! All of you beastly boys and ghastly ghouls! Welcome to the Pizza San Marco!" The sudden roar is deafening and disturbingly appetitive. The professor cannot turn his head, can only stare straight ahead at the strange masked faces slowly circling past as he rotates on the little platform. "Ah, what a moment, my noble and nubile congregation! Here we are in Venezia, the most magical city in the world! And it is Carnevale, Martedě Grasso, the most magical night of the year! Magic squared in the magic square! What cannot happen?" The din of the Piazza seems not to diminish when Eugenio speaks but to mount from phrase to phrase like the heavy steps of an approaching monster. "And oh! oh! what a banquet we have for you tonight! A subtle delight, like our voluptuous metropolis itself, for all the tender senses! For at this time I, the Queen of the Night, debauched trollop that I am, have the inestimable honor and license, as well as the infinite pleasure, naughty and otherwise, to present to you for your admiration and delectation, the feature attraction of our Gran Gala: our own Marco the Pole come home to us like so much drifting flotsam stumping back to his deepest roots!" Around him the deadpan masks blankly circle, belying the savage frenzy boiling up behind them. The three servants seem to have disappeared. He is alone on stage with the mellifluent Eugenio, who, with a sleight-of-hand flourish, has turned his fan into a little scarlet whip which he cracks now above his donkey rump to the rhythm of his exhortation: "A mere sprout of native undergrowth when he left here, a green little sap pegged for the pen, he penned his way, as he grew alder, to become the world's most distinguished woodenknob, spunkily taking on all the knotty problems of the wormy world, branching out into his-tree, sophis-tree and rudiment-tree ribal-tree, a hack of all trades, and now, au currant, a seasoned sage laureled, lacquered, and lionized!" Snap! crack! goes the whip with each phrase, as Eugenio goads his delirious audience on, many of them now pressing toward the stage, leaping and bobbing and throwing themselves about like fiendish ecstatics. "So here he is, this most poplar fella and perennial favorite, for whom two's company and tree's a crowd, this legno da catasta who became a man of many letters, nine to be exact, the evergreen fantoccino who is nobody's dummy, with a cherry before and a cork be
hind, shy o'veneer but with balsa walnut and a peach of an ash, the puncheon from Puncheon Judy, our very own boneless bosky-boy, yew all know him of gorse: the one and only, the world-renowned, the great, that inimitable old chestnut, nose and all, Pinocchio!"

  A moment ago, crossing the square, the old professor, much honored for a fleshly condition he now abhorred, that condition's alleged wisdom not excluded, had the impression, trusting that fleshly wisdom as he knew he should not and thinking, as usual, about himself, about his present fate and how he got here, all on his own, in the old way, bad company, drifting attention and all that, that he knew everything now. He was, once again - oh, how he weeps! - mistaken. For, with the platform's slow turning amid the mounting lunacy of the Piazza, he has seen his love again, somber amidst the maddened merrymakers, dressed in mourning and wearing his ear like a memorial medallion on a long gold chain around her neck, only the whites of her eyes showing and her head slowly spinning on her shoulders as though in derisive parody of his revolving platform. Around and around it goes, seven times, then stops and goes the other way. And so, though her curls are still mostly blond, he knows her now, a new and bitter knowing that makes all other knowing the merest trifle. He feels his heart shrink to the size of the deathwatch beetle gnawing at it. He waits for the platform to bring him around again that he might, though it be his last breath and unheard in the thunderous furor, cry out his loathing of her, that all the world might know her for what she truly is: assassina!