Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

"Ah, the donkey days…! It's been so long, I can barely…"

"That's right, barely and baldly, it's the naked truth we want, the unvarnished reality! Veritas in puris naturalibus — !"

"Scusa, Melampiccante, old suck, but I think this side's about done…"

"What? Oh yes, Alindotto, you're right, it's time to turn the spit and baste the other one — be careful, though, the little duck's as brittle as croccante and flaking like puff pastry!" They straighten his legs and tuck his arms in, then gently ease him over: "That's it — like folding an omelette!" Melampetta urges, her sudden rash of culinary metaphors no doubt betraying the effort to work up an appetite for the awesome feast she is about to face. He shudders to think of the spectacle he must now, in his procumbent attitude, present to his friends' eyes — and other senses ("He's shivering, Lido, go put some more wood on the fire!") — but at the same time, while being rolled, he's caught a glimpse of the snow falling thickly through the night sky outside their humble shelter, and it is as though the magical glow it seems to cast upon everything has fallen upon him as well, for he feels suddenly an intense flush of warmth penetrating his entire body: this is what it is like (the fire is crackling, the two dogs are nuzzling his thighs apart) to be among true friends! He had nearly forgotten. Junior faculty may be attentive, but rarely like this. "Aha, I think we've reached the font, Alidrofobo, you faithful old blister," Melampetta mutters (there is a cold nose poking at his rectum, perhaps more than one), "that which Aristotle the Wise termed in his treatise on The Classification of Dejecta the effervescent cause. We are at the source, the wellspring, the root, the core — or what the divine Duns Scrotum, confronted with the preserved contents of the Virgin's placenta, called in his nausea 'the very stone of the scandal,' the ultima realitas entis. We are, insomma, if I am not mistaken, at the drippings. So, will you taste the soup please?"

"My pleasure," grunts the old mastiff with gruff simplicity, "it just does for me."

"Mmm. Al dente. Though maybe we've let him lie in the sawdust too long."

"Careful. Shoulder blades look a bit dodgy…"

"Yes, I see." She laps around one, stroking his neck and the back of his bald pate with her broad stroke ("The hairs of your head are indeed numbered, comrade," she murmurs in his ear, "and the number is zero!"), and slides her velvety tongue down his crenellated spine, pushing at the knots, stiffens her tongue to prod at the small of his back, then slips on down the crack to the gap between his thighs like a skier on a downhill run, curls up around one thigh, and, as though congratulating herself or getting her wind back, laps generously at his near cheek. As she does so, he has a dim fleeting recollection of being combed and curried, back when he was still a performing donkey and being readied for a show, an experience so comforting it nearly reconciled him to his unnatural life, a life indeed more like a dream than waking life, and so all but lost now to his living memory… "You know, I can understand humans wanting to tart themselves up a bit," Melampetta pants. "I mean, I wouldn't mind a little lace shawl or some beads myself, if ever some whoreson should offer me such baubles — naked we're only cute for a day and after that we need all the help we can get. But why people leave all their other orifices gaping, then cover their assholes up in this cumbersome tailoring is beyond me."

"Huh. Some philosopher you are, Melone mia. It's a great attraction to flies, that's why. Maybe you need to lose your tail like the rest of us here, there seems to be something too abstract about your fundamental principles."

"The Blue-Haired Fairy told me," the professor mumbles softly into the blanket under his chin (what he remembers is the day he gained a tail, that day of the transformation: he was laughing, he and his dear friend Lampwick, they were so happy and having so much fun, and then suddenly there was a seizure in his chest and for a moment he couldn't breathe, and then the laughter became… something else…), "that little boys who do not wipe themselves properly not only grow leeks and cabbages back there and so become the village laughingstocks, they also lure rats into their beds at night and get bit in the behind with the plague." He sighs as a great soft tongue lathers a hip as though kneading pasta. Though the middle time is mostly gone, he can also remember the day he got changed back again, the day his new owner tried to drown him so as to make a drumhead of his hide, and instead the fish ate away his donkey flesh. It tickled more than hurt. It was liberating. Exciting even. Sensuous. It seemed to free him of a great weight. It was like the time the Blue-Haired Fairy sent a thousand woodpeckers to peck at his nose. It was like spring after a long dim winter. It was like… now… "She used to take me to the cemetery and show me the tombstones of all the little dirty-bottomed boys…" He yawns. As their tongues swab and massage his ancient hinderparts, he can feel the sleep that has been avoiding him since he left America steal over him like the caress of the Fairy's blue tresses. "Sometimes…"

"Yes…?"

"Sometimes my life seems more like it's been… ah!…!" It reaches deep into his inner core, suffusing him with a powerful satisfaction, and a great leavening of his spirit, as if he were being freed from some wretched imprisonment. Well, life itself, he thinks, I'm probably dying. They know this. They're preparing me. It's wonderful. It is like a magical transportation, like the intimate and golden repose of a Bellini, like a Hollywood ending. Never has he known such peace since the day he first became a boy… "It's been almost like a… like a movie…"

"It looks like you've indeed got that little something extra," is how Melampetta describes it in fond remembrance of the old fan magazines (they have just been discussing the big bang theory of the Hollywood star system with its dire implications, as Melampetta put it, of entropic twinkle), but what she is referring to is the clump of matted hair her excavating tongue has uncovered between his anus and the ridged seam of his backbone. "It's all coiled up here like the runout trailer from an old reel of film. Has it been there all the time?"

"When my father made me, all the hair was painted on," he explains, though he wonders if this is indeed an explanation, or more like a proposition — what his old friend Alidoro might call (and perhaps did, having just spat irritably and, muttering that "the old sporcaccione's barf is worse than his blight," wandered off on his own, leaving the ancient traveler and the faithful watchdog alone here on this sandy shore that slopes down to the sea, or else to a swimming pool) a "suppurating pustulate." What he has really wanted to say in reply to her question is, "Well, yes… but no…," but he has been unable (the very effort seems to have pushed the boat shed some distance up the slope away from them into a circle of unmanned booms and cameras) to find the words for it.

But it's as though she understands anyway (she has meanwhile spooled the hair out from under the end of his spine so that it fans out over his cheeks and thighs all the way to the back of his knees), for she says: "Ah yes, I see, your skin is, after all, as one might have supposed, nothing more than a cheap veneer," and proceeds to lather his whole body at once, ferreting out vast hidden thickets of clotted hair: on his head, in his ears and armpits, down his back and legs, on his belly, chest, and chin, between his fingers, thighs, and toes. No wonder he's been feeling so inhibited! Out it comes! "This explains your infatuation with paradox," she howls.