(1991) Pinocchio in Venice

by Robert Coover

  "That does it! I'm off!" cries Capitano Spavento del Vall'Inferno, letting go his side of the gondola chair and wheeling round. "You can only carry friendship so far!"

  "No! Stop!" the old pilgrim gasps, twisting around in the dropped chair, heedless of the wrenching and splitting within, but the mercurial Captain, sword drawn and striding as though into battle, is not to be held back. He charges full tilt at the doorway, now overgrown with blue brambles, slashing at the wiry thicket with his sword, and - FFRISST! - there is a sudden brief blaze in the shape of Captain Spavento, gone before seen. His ashes hang like a shadowy afterimage for a moment, then settle silently to the floor.

  Everything is changed. The curtain of blue bramble has vanished. The door is closed. The smooth bare walls, encrusted with precious marble the color of fresh air on a dull day, are merely walls now, holding in the solemn silence. The fifty Pennacchi portraits gaze down from above like the sober voyeurs they have always been, the altar lamps have stopped swinging, and the ancient painting displayed there is once more flat and lifeless, the Christ child's stare a bit askew perhaps with two dark holes where the fingers poked through, but otherwise, except for a streak or two of sticky pink, a work abused only by the passing centuries. Slender white tapers have been lit in front of it and throughout the chapel, and there is everywhere a great profusion of fresh-cut flowers, in all the pews and on the walls and statues and columns, in the pulpits and windows, and heaped up on the high altar like whipped cream and spilling into the choir galleries and through the ornamental balustrades and down the stairs and center aisle to where, clustered around the ancient figure in the gondola chair, the puppets press together in benumbed terror, their collective gaze riveted upon the strange person in the snowy white shift, her azure hair flowing down her back like a bridal train, sitting now, her back to them, on one of the two carved and upholstered stools before the altar. The other stool is empty.

  "Su da bravi, Burattini!" comes a voice from the front of the chapel, a voice he knows all too well, soft as canary down and sweet as panna cotta. It is the voice that changed his life, and its seductive power is undiminished. He feels his resolve crumbling like hot favette dei morti, the favette she always baked for him when he came home from school or mischief, saying tenderly as she popped them in his mouth: "You see how I love you, ragazzo mio? But if you want to stay with me, you must always obey me, and do as you are told!" With pleasure, mammina mia! Oh, with pleasure! Che bello! Che bello! "Do you see that poor half-dead puppet there?" the voice continues now. "Take him up gently, bring him to me, and sit him on this cushion here beside me. Do you understand?"

  "No!" he rasps, shaking off the terrorized puppets when, as though spellbound, knees rattling and eyes popping, they reach for him. It takes all his courage not to surrender to her immediately, such is the lure of her great power to one so powerless as he, and so desperately lonely, but he knows that, having lost everything else, the withholding of that surrender is the only expedient left him if he is to attain the end, or ends, he seeks. Or indeed any end at all, beyond abjection's shoddy but, alas, appealing joy

  "What are you muttering between your teeth?" asks the voice up at the high altar. "What is the matter now?"

  "So you lied to me again," he wheezes, speaking up as best he can. "You are not dead, after all."

  A deep echoey sigh flutters through the little church, making the flower petals tremble and the candles gutter briefly, and setting the stupefied puppets' knees to clicking like wind through a cane brake. "It seems not," admits the voice, so wistfully affectionate he almost cannot bear to prolong his separation from her.

  "All these years of mourning my precious mamma's early and tragic death! 'Poor Fairy! The victim of a thousand misfortunes and too poor to buy a crust of bread!' Do you remember your little joke? I have carried the harrowing sadness of it with me all my life! All that I have done or have not done has been confused and tempered by it. Even now, my final years have been devoted to its bewildering mysteries, it is why I am here, why I have suffered so - and it has all been just a farce! Ah, Fatina mia! Why have you done this thing to me?!"

  "Because idleness is a dreadful disease, my boy, of which one should be cured immediately in childhood: if not, one never -!"

  "Oh, yes, yes, I've heard all that before! You always were the good little fairy, weren't you? Society's little helper! Civilization's drill sergeant! But I was free! I was happy! And you, with your terrifying heartbreaking parade of tombstones and canon, put strings on me where there were none. You cheated me! All my life," he squawks, lifting up the twisted splinters of his arms and rattling them at the blue-haired figure on the bridal stool, "I have been nothing but a puppet!"

  Slowly, though she keeps her back to them still, her head begins to rotate on her shoulders, and the waxen face of the little Bella Bambina of old appears with her strangely rigid smile and rolled-up eyes, bringing a startled gasp from his friends, pressed tight about him. "I love you," the Bambina stage-whispers, piercing him to the quick with her terrible intimacy. "Stay with me! You shall be my little brother, and I will be your darling sister!"

  The sight of the Bambina, the dearest playmate he ever had, gruesome as her games could sometimes be, makes his arms drop and would bring tears to his eyes if they had not all been spent, like everything else. How good she was, or seemed to be! How tender, even if she did leave him hanging all night in the oak tree, swinging in the wind like a bell clapper, her loving care! And does she not offer him what he now most wants: just to play again? "I have thought about your little white house, Fatuccia mia," he croaks at last, summoning up all his strength to resist her, "and how much pleasure you promised me in it. Yet when I tried to return to it, you took it away and put a tombstone in its stead! I went crazy with grief for a while, but I learned my lesson well."

  "So my medicine really did do you good?"

  "I can truthfully say, though I have been diligent, obedient, truthful, and circumspect, I have not had a wholly happy day since. I might somehow have found my way back to one little white house or another, but I was always too afraid. Pleasure was death and dissolution. That's what you taught me. Fun was fatal. No. I will not play with you."

  "My child, you will be sorry," sighs the Bambina as her grinning head recommences its slow grim turning. "You are very ill " When the next revolution begins, the head is joined by the upper torso, swiveling at the waist, and this time it is Bluebell. "Hey, wow, teach, you don't look so hot!" she laughs, snapping her gum in her bright white teeth. She reaches up with both hands to pull away the lacy shift and out pop her spectacular young breasts like fat rabbits from a hat, bringing fresh gasps of amazement from the puppets surrounding him. Those breasts, last seen on the Apocalypse, are dizzying alive, the scintillating rosettelike nipples, lightly gilded, throbbing as though with excited little heartbeats of their own. "You need some nourishment, Professor Pinenut! So, why don't you scoot your cute little boopie-doops up here and grasp, as you like to say, my 'civilizing principles?' "

  This glorious sight, for which, so recently, he was ready to throw away honor, dignity, life itself, steals his breath away, what little there is left for theft, and he feels riven (literally: he can hear the stifled creaking and snapping deep inside) with an unendurable yearning, not to fondle them - what would he fondle them with?- but simply to rest his dying head there, to hide himself, as someone has said, on the breast of the simple, the vast, the ineffable "I see," he rattles drily, hanging on to his chair arms with both gnarled fists, "you are still wearing my ear."

  "You better believe it, Daddy-o! It's my good luck charm!" She reaches up to finger the shriveled black brooch, making her breasts wobble teasingly. "So, hey, what'll it take to trade you for the rest, prof?"

  "Certainly, you deceitful ogress, more than those puffed-up things you are flaunting so, a mask like any other. Put them away! The dead ear suits you better!"

  She looks crestfallen, deflated, the rosette nipples withering to somethi
ng more like smallpox vaccination scars, and he almost regrets his own deceit, hoping his nose is not giving him away. "You're right, teach," she says finally, perking up a bit, "I could use a good dressing-down! I've been really rotten, I admit it! A dirty dog! C'mon! You can treat me as rough as you please! I deserve it!" She hesitates, gazing at him hopefully ("That's a pretty good offer!" one of the puppets whispers in his ear, and another asks: "Do you think we could all have a go?"), but when he makes no move, she turns away sorrowfully and begins to rotate once more.

  When she pivots around again, it is with her whole body, though the stool at the top of the steps remains in place. He is not quite sure how she does this because his gaze is fixed on the creature appearing before him. This he has not been prepared for. It is his mamma, to be sure, she could be no other, but she has changed. At first he thinks she must simply have aged, he hasn't seen her since the last century, but then he catches a glimpse of the Bambina's wicked smile, Bluebell's milk-fed complexion and fluorescent eye shadow, and hints, too, of a Hollywood starlet he once knew, maybe more than one, a colleague at university, several students, his interviewer on a television talk show, the doctor who removed the peculiar growth on his nose a year ago and prescribed a long voyage, an admiring museum curator who confessed to a platonic affection, his traveling companion in the limousine to the Nobel awards in Stockholm, even (the stray blue hairs on her chin perhaps, the ridge of her forehead) the blue-haired goat he passed on his way into Attila's gut. These features, or suggestions of features, seem to exist not simultaneously but sequentially (now it is the Bambina's waxen complexion he sees, Bluebell's gum-smacking cherry-lipped grin), in a kind of moving montage, flickering across her face like unstable film projections. It is like being under water in a Hollywood pool with naked starlets swimming by and his eyes full of chlorine. Or like trying to put a half-forgotten face together with a half-remembered name.

  "Deceitful ogress -?! How can you say all these horrible things about me, my child?" she asks with a forlorn sigh, and it is as though she has reached in, penetrating easily his fragile defenses, and pulled the little lever that floods his chest with guilt and regret, just as she always did in the old days. "That I cheated you or was unkind to you or abandoned you or misused my power or misled you or indeed did anything all your life long but love you with all my heart? 'Assassina,' you called me tonight in front of everybody! How could you do that, you wicked boy? Civilization's lackey! An avatar of Death! The Great Destroyer! Really! And, 'a son pregnant with his own mother,' what an idea!" She seems almost to be crying, but he cannot be sure, her eyes do not stay in one place long enough. Those fleeting traces of the familiar are now blurred by the strange. Claws on her fingertips. An iron tooth. Smoke curling out her nose, which seems to change shape with every breath. He has seen a scar grow, cross her brow, and rip vividly down her cheek and throat, then as quickly fade and vanish. A moment ago, her ears, peeking out from under hair twisting like thin blue snakes, seemed to be pointed, but now they look like his mamma's once more, the ones he snuggled against when she let him nuzzle his nose in her azure tresses, then - and now again - silky and soft as a passing cloud. "I am just a poor lonely fairy who fell in love with a stupid puppet's good heart and wanted to, well, make him beautiful. And happy." An eye slips out of a socket, she pushes it back. Or perhaps the socket moves to cup the errant eye. His fascination is such that he begins to worry: is this yet another seduction? "You are right about one thing, however. I have always wanted to be a good fairy. I was never one to suck navels or sour the cow's milk. I loved humans and wanted them to love me, even if they were pretty silly and didn't last long. I wanted to live among them in their nice little towns and villages, I never cared for the bog life, but somehow, even when I was being good, I was always scaring them. Maybe I had a way of doing things too suddenly, or maybe it was the holes in my armpits, I don't know, but they were always very nervous around me. I tried my best for a few hundred years, but I never managed to fit in. It was a kind of racism, as you'd call it now, I suppose, and probably I had grounds for complaint, but we fairies, as you know, are not much given to such tactics. We merely poison the wells, smash a few eggs and babies, and infest the beds with rectum snakes. My own response was to try to die. Dying seemed to carry a lot of weight with humans, I thought it might help. But it wasn't in my repertoire, really. I gave it all I had, but I just couldn't get the hang of it. Which disheartened me all the more. And then, just when my spirits were lowest, you came along "

  "I see it now," he says, not too appropriately, inasmuch as his tired old eyes, struggling in vain to fix the Fairy's face, which, if anything, is growing increasingly fluid and monstrous, have lost all focus and seem to be swimming in his head. "If dying carries weight with humans, so, if not more so, does mothering. If you couldn't win them over one way, you'd try another. I was just another trick to play, your surrogate, your convenient dummy, your marketable changeling."

  "There! You're being cruel again! What have I done to deserve such an ungrateful son? When you came back here to our island looking for me now, I was so happy. I thought we could be together again. In the old way, like we used to be before you got changed and went off into the world. But you have disappointed me, my boy, slipping back into all your old habits, falling in with unwholesome companions, breaking promises, acting on impulse, running away, getting in trouble with the police, refusing advice - and now, to have degenerated into the theatrical arts - I ask myself, what was it all for?" As she scolds him, the floating ambiguities fade and she resolves into his mamma once more, firm, exasperated but loving, intimidating, beautiful "And just look at you now! Flesh would no longer even stick to such a shameless ruin! Couldn't you at least keep your warm wraps on? How many times did I tell you -?"

  "It wouldn't have made any difference. Sooner or later, I would have ended up like this anyway. You didn't do a very good job "

  "I know, and that is why I have forgiven you." She sighs, settles back, casting a last quick loving glance at him before her features again melt into a pool of possible features, an inconstancy that now spreads to the rest of her body, causing all the edges to waver and blur. It is as though the idea of her is too big for her canvas. "The trouble is, though I always tried to be a good fairy, I wasn't quite good enough. In the end, proud as I was of the proper little man I'd made, I found I loved the naughty puppet more than I should have and was afraid of losing him, or at least his good heart, and couldn't quite let him go. So I left just the tiniest seed inside. A bit of the sneeze, as you might say, that got held back. I didn't think it would do any harm. And this way, I felt, we had a kind of bond between us "

  "We were both monsters, you mean." She smiles, or seems to, her mouth spreading to her ears, dispersing her teeth like fence stakes, her eyes at the same time receding deep beneath her brows and flaring up as her head flattens to her shoulders, the rest of her turning shaggy and ballooning out in all directions, but only for a moment, just long enough to give him a glimpse of something beyond mere rhetorical flourish and make him catch his breath. "Ahimč! Fata mia! How can I resist you?"

  She seems to blush at that, though the colors are ambiguous and none of them pink, and a light comes to her eyes, or her eyes to the light, and she spreads her knees a little, causing the banks of flowers on the steps and in the aisle between them to rise and fall softly as though mice were running through them. He too feels a vague stirring somewhere, nothing prurient, more like more like getting shifted on the woodpile "Come, my child!" she croons in a voice so resonant with desire it sets the organ pipes to humming. "Burattini! Bring him to me!"

  His puppet friends stagger out of their weak-kneed crouch around him to take a fearful grip on his gondola chair, but, though dizzy with the intensity of his own peculiar desires, he stays them with a restraining gesture. "Dear Fairy, I am yours," he says in his thin scratchy voice. "But first I have three small requests, which I am sure you will grant me."

  "Ah!" She draws back,
her colors changing (frustration perhaps, rage, he can't be sure), and the flowers close and shrink flat as a woven carpet between them. The light in the chapel may also have just dimmed, though it may be he who is losing the light. "What's wrong with humans? Why is there always this haggling -?"

  "The first is that you let my friends leave here unharmed. I don't want anything more to happen to them."

  "Oh, is that all," she sighs, and Bluebell's healthy complexion returns, the Bambina's rigid smile. "Yes, of course they can go, peace and prosperity to them, but, well, don't be mad, but "

  "But -?"

  "I was afraid they'd take you away. So I sank the gondolas."

  "Ah " He turns to his companions. Pierotto sniffs. Colombina shrugs. "Megio no aver bezzi / che el cul in diese pezzi," mutters Brighella, apparently quoting a Gran Teatro dei Burattini routine, for the others pick it up like a murmured antiphon: "Better broke than your arse / broken up in ten parts!"

  "Thank you, my friends. The second request, dear Fairy, is a little more difficult, but I believe you can do it. When I was turned into a boy, something happened which, though at the time I thought little of it, has troubled me increasingly all my life. I have written about it, but not well. Too much guilt maybe. When I woke up a boy, the straw cottage had been transformed into a beautiful house, I had brand-new clothes and a purse full of gold pieces, my dying babbo was suddenly healthy as a fish and back at his lathe, and -"

  "Well, that is because when children who -"

  "No, no, that's not the part I mean. What bothered me was that the wooden puppet I once was was still there, outside of me, the old Pinocchio, I saw him, collapsed against a chair in my father's workshop with his legs doubled up under him and the rest unstrung and dangling."

  "Oh yes "

  "I want you to let that puppet live again. Do that, and my friends here will bring me to you."