Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

So Alidoro wrapped the professor up in the blanket they had stolen off the patrol boat ("How did you recognize me?" he asked, and the old mastiff, cope-and-cowling him, replied: "You're the only one I've ever known, my friend, who gave off the smell of holm-oak." "So you've noticed then…" "Noticed — ?") and they set off to come here, Alidoro plodding heavily ahead through the snow, the professor, hungover and weak-kneed, staggering along behind, afraid only of dying alone. What had been a partial misgiving back in America, a faint doubt as to the advisability of his expedition, had now become a bitter conviction that his own nature was somehow fatally betraying him. That dignity which has taken him nearly a century to cultivate and sustain had vanished in an instant, as though his very pursuit of a meaningful life were itself depriving him of it. He once stated quite plainly in some remote place (in his published lectures, perhaps, on "The Curse of Irony"?) that nearly everything great which comes into being does so in spite of something — in spite of sorrow or suffering, poverty, destitution, physical weakness, depravity, metamorphosis, the plague, being born a puppet — but he has never really considered the lingering power of that spite…

"What's that noise?" Alidoro had paused to ask. They were in a dark narrow street. The old dog sniffed the air, squinted blearily about him. "Sounds like an old rusty sign, swinging in the wind…" The ancient professor emeritus slumped, creaking, against a shop window. "It's — it's my knees," he gasped. "Something awful is happening, Alidoro! I'm — I'm turning back to wood again!" He felt tears pricking his eyes again and trickling down his nose. He'd never told anyone before, not even a doctor. "And this weather — sob! — the joints are seizing up. I'm so ashamed…" The shop, if his eyes did not deceive him, sold wooden puzzles. Such a gratuitous irony, which might have once offended him, now, in his deplorable humiliation, made his heart ache. "I don't think I can… go any farther." "Poor old fellow," Alidoro said then with a deep rumbling sigh, and he hoisted him up and carried him the rest of the way here on his broad bony back.

The old mastiff reenters their shelter now, rump first, dragging in a weathered beach chair, its torn canvas seat wrapped around a load of firewood. He has rigged up a green plastic tarpaulin on the windward side of the projecting tin roof to keep out the blowing snow, built short walls out of overturned gondolas on the two lee sides, the fourth wall provided by the rustic repair shed, then feathered their nest with sawdust, newspapers, and wood chips. "Here's a few more arguments for your fire, you old Jesuitical tart," he pants now, hauling the firewood up to the barrel, and the watchdog barks back: "Those aren't arguments, buttbrain, those are the a priori and assumptive conditions - axiomatic, absolute, and apodictical — of the argument, which hasn't even heated up enough yet to make your piss sizzle, so before you open your yap to answer back, just keep in mind I've only started on the As, there's at least twenty-seven or twenty-eight more letters to go, if I remember rightly, and the soup's not on yet." Alidoro winks drily down at the professor and shakes the snow off his coat. "With all that hard thinking you do, Mela, I'm surprised your rectum doesn't fall out."

This was how they'd got in here, the two of them scrapping like strays, it was a kind of code between them, as though recognition depended on insult and invective, affection upon rhetorical display. On the way, rocking between Alidoro's shoulder blades in his stolen wool blanket like a withered seed pod, the old scholar had drifted off momentarily, dreaming of the little Tuscan village by the sea where he was born, with its one main street running from home to school and crossed by another leading to… to…? He couldn't remember, but what he found when he turned down it was a little cottage as white as snow, or perhaps white with snow, except for its blackened doorway, where he was met by some junior faculty, blocking his entrance, to whom, when they suggested that with all due respect they desired to hang the distinguished visitor from the nearest oak tree, he was obliged to explain that he could not accept their offer at this time because he was still teaching at one of the East Coast I.V.'s, so named, he pointed out, because of their innovative method of education by intravenous feeding. They seemed to admire this insight, if that's what it was, an insight, and not an encyclopedia entry he'd been paid to provide, nodding their heads solemnly in unison, and they went on to ask him (though by now he might have been hanging, for the north wind seemed to be blowing and whistling, and he was swinging back and forth like a bell clapper on a wedding day), if, in his renowned wisdom, he might be able to elucidate a mysterious inscription on the back of a famous work of art attributed to one Paolo Venereo, or Venerato (a portrait of a cross-eyed yellow-haired Pope whose fat round face was dripping like candlewax), which read: "ABBASSO LARIN METICA." He understood the inscription instantly, and in fact was startled by the lucidity of his perception, but when he was jolted awake suddenly by Alidoro shouting out something about a black fart ("Melampeto!" he had bellowed — only later did the professor understand that this was a rude play on the watchdog's name), he found he could no longer remember what the perception was. Nor, for a moment, could he even remember where he was, he thought he might be on a ship at sea, bundled up in a deck chair or lashed to the mast, certainly he was feeling seasick -

"Melam puttana! Open the door, you ungrateful diabolectical sesquipedalian windbag, and let me in!"

"Aha! Is that you, Alidildo, you shameless eudemonist ass-licking retard? Everything I've got you to thank for I have to scratch! Let you in? Don't make the chickens laugh! You can go suck the Pope's infallible hind tit, as attested to by Zoroaster and the sibylline Teresa of Avila, for all I care! Addio, Alido! My regards to your worms and chancres!"

"Hold on, drooping-drains, don't put on airs, on you they smell like the farts of the dead! Remember who you're talking to! Your asster will be a whole lot sorer if you don't drag your vile syphilline cunt-flaps over here and open this gate up! Do you hear me, twaddle-twat? We're freezing our nuts off out here!"

"Oh, I do remember who I'm talking to, Alidolce, my sweet little bum-gut. I'm afraid your theoretical nuts were harvested years ago, if you feel something down there, it's probably just boils on the ass, for which cold compresses are highly recommended, vide Aesculapius' Principles of Mycology, and as for threats of violence, remember who you're talking to, you preposterous old humbug! I could split your hollow toothless skull quicker than Saint Thomas could split a hair from the Virgin's hemorrhoidal behind in four, in or out of the catechism! No, you can sing all you want, squat-for-brains, you're just pounding water in your mortar, as Leucippus of blessed memory once said to William of Ockham over an epagogic pot of aglioli, there's no room at the inn nor in this shithole either, and that's conclusive, absolute, categorical, and a fortiori finito in spades! So go spread your filthy pox among your misses of the opiates, fuckface! Arrivederci! Ciao!"

"I think she's weakening," Alidoro muttered then over his shoulder, and the professor, alarmed at all this vicious howling and barking, gasped: "Is this the right way to go about it — ?" The storm had worsened, he could hardly see for the swirling snow — it was as though he were being pushed out of the world at full blow.

"Patience, old friend, it's part of the dance. For her all these citations, enthymemes, postulates, and premises are like a warm nose on her clit, the wormy old gabbler won't spread without them."