Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

"Men, if lucky," he is quoting himself now, dredging up from what's left (not much) of his enfeebled memory this seminal line from his current work-in-progress, or once in progress, now perhaps arrested and lost forever, for he could never, not even with a final massive exertion of his notorious will, reconstruct the whole of it, not even with the magical assistance of that enigmatic creature upon whose intervention his own quotidian progress, also perhaps about to be arrested forever, has depended throughout his long career, a career and a dependency he has just, in his gathering (and altogether agreeable) stupor, been elucidating, or trying to, and which, by means of this allusive proposition which lies at the heart of the Mamma papers (if he can remember it), he is now attempting to sum up, "are graced in their lifetime by one intense insight that changes everything. Mine was the discovery that the Blue-Haired Fairy was pretending not to be dead, but to be alive, that in fact it was not she who had given me a place in the world, you see, but I who had called her into being. Grasping this seeming paradox altered my life forever…"

"Seeming — ?" growls Alidoro indignantly, lapping his thighs, while Melampetta licks at his right nipple. "If Mela and me aren't the real thing, old comrade, then you've beshit yourself with zabaglione!"

"Oh, I do love paradoxes," Melampetta murmurs between strokes of her long wet tongue. It feels like oiled ebony paper, gently applied. She moves into the thoracic cavity now, pushing provocatively at his knobby sternum, then works her way slowly down the hollow between his ribs past his diaphragm toward what others, having one of the things, would call their navel. "It's like being in heat in a hailstorm, a kind of — slurp! slop! — ungratifiable arousal, as though the point of it all were not larking or litters but — thlupp! — mere longing itself. I believe it was Saint Catherine of the Festering Stigmata who wrote in one of her — sklorrp! — letters with respect to her peculiar inconvenience of having to menstruate out of a rip in her left — tbwerpl shloop! — side that paradox was like a half-laid egg, speaking theologically of course, as the pious lady was always wont to — ffrup! flawp! — do, even when the curse was on her and — sluck! — bespattering her farthingales." She pauses to lick at her own coat a moment as though to wipe her tongue there, before returning to his abdomen, now tingling with the chill of her evaporating saliva. Alidoro, having nosed his thighs apart, is pressing toward his knees, panting heavily. "But this is a strange birth indeed," adds Melampetta. "A son pregnant with his own mother!"

"It's not easy to explain," the bared wayfarer sighs, gazing up at the corrugated tin roof, where still the flames' light dances as though to tease away the distance between reality and illusion, not to mention that between (he yawns) sleeping and waking.

"Nor to believe," harrumphs Alidoro. "Though I once had a cousin who fucked his own grandmother and so fathered his mother's half-sister who in turn — "

"Ow — !"

"Sorry, slip of the tongue," apologizes the old mastiff. "I think I touched wood."

"Yes, ah… it's tenderest just at those places where it's… it's pulling away…"

There are these moments of sudden pain when the edges are lapped (Melampetta has earlier sent an excruciating shock up from his elbow when she peeled his tailored shirt away), but they are only momentary deflections from the immense peace that has been settling upon the ancient scholar since he put it in the piazza, as they say here, and surrendered his body and its terrible truths, until now his solitary burden, concealed from all the world, to the intimate attentions of his two friends. "Come now," Melampetta had urged him when embarrassment momentarily stiffened his limbs and made him shiver, "there's no shyness in shit, as the saying goes, a saying straight from the Textus Receptus, otherwise known loosely as the Beshitta, it speaks volumes where farts do but slyly pretend, and now we must answer frankly with tongues of our own, keeping in mind that God so loved a clean behind that, having given his only begotten faeces, as they say in French, he invented the downy angels for bumfodder as humble examples for us all. So come along now, dear friend, you'll soon feel like a newborn babe. Off with those old rags, it's time for the divine services, for complines and eucharists, for libations, oblations, and ablutions, oralsons and lickanies, for leccaturas from the book of life — "

"They aren't rags!" he protested in his foolish confusion, clinging to his jacket hem as it was pulled away. "That's a seven-hundred-dollar suit from Savile Row!"

"Mmm," grumbled Alidoro, tugging his trousers down. "Smells like it, too."

"He said 'savio,' you suppurating imbecile, not 'sulfurco'!" Melampetta scolded. "Now give me those things, I'll put them to soak."

As she trotted out into the snow and down the beachlike slope to the water, the old professor, stripped to his shorts and socks, the wisps of cold wind leaking into their shelter making the frayed nerves at the edge of his skin tingle, literally pricking him on the living edge, closed his eyes and whispered miserably: "I feel like such a wretched ass, old friend. Sick, as my body is, I am far more sick at heart. You should have let them take me away."

"Better a live donkey, partigiano, mio partigiano, than a dead doctor," replied the mastiff, peeling his socks off with his ruined gums. "What my tinpot employers lack in subtlety, they compensate for in diligence."

"What does it matter?" he erupted crankily. "Listen to me. For nearly a century, I have lived an exemplary life. There have been trials, temptations, torments, but I have won through. I have earned the respect of the entire world. I am living proof of the power of redemption through education, endeavor's paragon, candor's big name. Do you understand? I have received not one Nobel, but two. I am a household word. I am the ornament of metaphors, the pith of aphorisms, what's liked in similes — in some languages, Alidoro, a very verb! My father would be proud of me, the Blue-Haired Fairy would! And now…" He shuddered as his shorts were pulled down. "Now I have lost everything. Even my pride."

"Ah, look at the poor old fellow, it's enough to make the stones weep," sighed Melampetta, having quietly returned, bringing with her the ashy odor of fresh snow. "He's thin as a nail, he's lost all his hair except whatever that is that's sprouting there on his feet, and he looks like he's wearing the tatters of old wallpaper where his hide should be. Even his nose has gone limp. What a scene he makes! Enough to make the jaded scuff in the galleries lose their suppers! And he's still no bigger than a piece of cheese, just a lick and a smell, you could stuff him in a matchbox if it weren't for the nose."

"In small casks, Melata, good wine."

"Yes, Alidote, if, alas, the cask is tight. But why is he sniveling like that?"

"He's embarrassed."

"Now, now, my pet, no need for that. It's not modesty that answers the call of nature, remember. And we dogs are great ass-lickers, as our comrades are all too quick to point out, we have a special aptitude for it. Not for nothing are we known as man's beast friend, his licking lackey. So, as Origen once said, whilst castrating himself in devotional zeal in the company of Saint John the Theophagist, 'When in a kennel, my peckish old bellybag, one must do as the curs do — the country you go to, as our epistles say, the custom you find — so, take eat, Zan Juan, these are my original ballocks, do this in mnemonics of me, good fork that you are, and buon appetito!' "