Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

"Yes, that's mine, too. The umbrella, I mean."

"Aha! Did you throw that through the window, too, you daft old geezer?"

"No…" But there is something confusing about this, too. When he burned his feet off, they felt as if they belonged to somebody else. Which is how his head is beginning to feel now… "There was a blind monk — "

"A blind monk — ! Madonna! What next — ?!"

"He's gone from God's grace, this one, Lido! He's completely pazzo!"

"Maybe," sighs Alidoro, nosing at a piece of candle wax. "But they were here, just the same."

"You mean — ?"

"I mean, gentlemen," rumbles Alidoro, stepping into the light from the doorway and rising to his full height, "that this distinguished visitor — and, indeed, more than a visitor, this native son returned here to his beloved homeland — has been the innocent and very nearly tragic victim of two of our city's most notorious felons. They have lured him here to this lonely site under false pretenses, no doubt playing upon his natural sympathies for the maimed and the infirm, for my friend is famous for his good heart, and here have robbed him of all his earthly goods. He's been sent for a walk, as they say in the trade, taken for a ride, put in the sack, he's been shorn, fiddled, landed, and gaffed. He's been worked like farm butter, boys, he's been had on toast. He's taken a crab and left his feathers in it, lost both lye and soap, do you follow? He was the pigeon, the pup, the one in the middle — am I right, my friend?"

"Yes! That's true, when we went to the Gambero Rosso, they made me walk between — "

"Then, having separated him from his possessions, they abandoned him to the elements — and on a night such as this! Gentlemen! The charge is not murder, not yet, but it might as well be! No hand was raised against him, true, but it was quite enough to lock all the doors. No hand, gentlemen, except your own!"

"Come on, mate, we were only doing our duty…"

"You're no shinbone of a saint yourself, Lido!"

"I know, I know, no one's paws itch for an occasional turn of tourist-bashing more than mine, you know that, boys, I'm not pulling your ear, I'm not hitting you with a paternale, I wouldn't think of it! All I'm saying is, you've done a duck here, this gentleman is not who or what he might seem, and you owe him an apology and a little courteous attention. I know him as a comrade, lads, I know his life, death, and miracles, as the expression goes, and believe me, he's good pasta, this one, a grand fellow and brave. When you're in over your head and it's drink or drown, when the fat hits the fire and the shit the fan, this is the man, speaking loosely, you want by your side! When Nature made him, as that old hound Ariosto Furioso once said, she broke the mold!"

"Yeah? Well, she might have waited at least until she was finished!"

"I'm not talking now just to give breath to my mouth, my friends! A serious crime has been committed here tonight! It's not just the theft of his luggage, you know me, I don't give a cabbage's fart for private property — it's the theft of his dignity! His honor! You can't restore that to him, you sadistic coglioni, but at the very least you should be trying to bring a little justice to bear! You should be trying to find the thieves and get those bags back!"

"All right, all right, we'll look for them, Lido — but do us the favor, enough of this cacca — !"

"And may I remind you, gentlemen, that you have been trying to clap those two rogues in a gattabuia since the last century? You and your fathers have always complained that they were too wily, you could never get the goods on them. Well, my boys, here's your chance, here's your case! In flagrante, ironclad, with ribbons and bows! If you grasp it by the hair, you'll be national heroes! In fact, come to think of it, it's probably worth a little reward to me and my — "

"But no, Lido! Falla finita! As far as we're concerned it's better to lose the little shit-machine than to find him, so if he's a chum of yours, do as you please with him, it doesn't do us hot or cold. But don't try to pass the plate, you old mutt, it won't go down! You're not getting the centesimo of a whore out of us!"

"Well, all right," says Alidoro with what might be a trace of a grin. "Give us a ride then." He puts a paw around the professor and leads him toward one of the launches. "Come along now, compagno, you've suffered enough. It's time to draw in the oars."

The benumbed wayfarer lies, swaddled in newspapers, blankets, and old rags like a wizened parody of the Christ child from a rigid Trecento nativity, on a bed of wood chips and sawdust under the umbrella of a corrugated tin roof, his back against an overturned gondola, his bundled feet pointed toward an old rusty barrel in which a fire is being stoked by the boatyard's watchdog, Melampetta. "Come Monday, they'll give me a rogue's thumping for letting thieves steal the firewood," she growls, "but cosě va il mondo, as the philosopher said, if it wasn't the poet — destiny's not to be tampered with unless the Party takes a hand in it, and the Party's hand nowadays is in its pants. So, nothing to do but face whatever comes with a good heart and stout buttocks, and if the evil beggars get carried away, the devil take them, I'll piss on their sandwiches." "That's letting them off easy," Alidoro rumbles from out on the lip of the old dock, where he is rummaging through a snowy heap of broken tiles and glass, bricks, rusted pipes, old paint tins and plastic bags, chain links, bottles, gas cans, and stiff old socks for any burnable bits of wood, rag, and paper. "You should piss in their wine, Mela, hit the tyrannical swillpots where it most hurts." "The wine they drink, cazzo mio, piss improves it, they'd be beating me for the profit in it," she replies. " 'When the masters drink pee and call it claret, the wretched of the earth must grin and bear it; but when the masters drink claret and call it pee, then hang the bastards from the nearest tree!' I think it was either Pliny or the blessed Apuleius who said that, or else it was Saint John of the Apocalypse."

"She's a quarrelsome old bitch, who fancies herself something of an argufier and a heavy thinker, she's got a mouth like a brass band, as they say, and a cunt like a mailbag, but she's a good compagna for all that, and I believe she will not shut us out on a night like this," Alidoro had explained on the way over, a way that was, in the end, too long for the collapsing traveler. Almost too tired and ill to know what he was doing, he had signed a general denunciation of the thieves, the police offering to fill in all the names, surnames, descriptions, alleged villainies, and formal criminal and civil charges back at the Questura, then he and Alidoro had hitched a ride in one of the patrol boats, Alidoro stealing a blanket as they got under way and stuffing it under the professor's coat, pretending to be buttoning him up. En route (and, yes, the railway station was just two steps away from the fraudulent hotel, that charlatan had taken him in circles: the police, annoyingly amused, promised to add this to his list of complaints), the old mastiff was the forbearant butt of a lot of more or less friendly banter about all his presumed mistresses, one or more of whom they were apparently about to visit, so the professor was alarmed to learn, when they were dropped off at the San Barnaba traghetto stop and the police had roared away, that the poor brute was broke and homeless ("I'm on the straw, old friend," he apologized with a woeful gaze, snow drifting down around his ears, "you've caught me between head and neck, to put it plain, I'm flat, I'm dry, I've neither bone nor bed. The last woman who, more in pity than in passion, took me in was on the prod and caught the plague from one of the fiendish instruments, sad to say, so I've been bedding down on my wits, what's left of them, ever since…"), and that their best hope was an old gondola repair yard at the backside of the island where he knew the watchdog.