Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

"They also say that life's short, but talk's long," snaps the professor irritably as he watches the porter heave his luggage clumsily onto the trolley. "Be careful now, that's a computer — "

"There is time enough for paying and dying," the porter insists, picking up the computer and dropping it. "Ahi! Bad luck! Now you see where all your hurrying has got us! But let it be, dottore, don't make a big story out of it — we must take things as they come, life is not a path through the orchard, as the old proverb goes! Come along now!"

The professor, too exasperated to reply, follows the porter as he shuffles lamely, bent nearly double with the weight of years and heaped-up luggage (the years seem to have settled chiefly in his hindquarters), through the empty station, now echoing hollowly with recorded pop music and the porter's squeaking trolley wheels, toward the yellow tourist bureau sign at the far end. Where he has every intention of reporting the insolent scoundrel. He dropped that computer on purpose! Certain indignities are not, in a civilized world, to be tolerated, even if committed by the infirm. He is not thinking of himself, of course, a poor wretch like any other man, speaking loosely, but rather of that irreplaceable work of art, literature, and social thought of which he has been merely the medium and transmitter, as it were, the porter its temporary custodian — a work of major significance as has already been widely acknowledged, even before its publication, and one deserving of at least a minimum of care and respect. Moreover, if an insurance claim should be necessary, a report will have to have been filed; he has no choice.

But the tourist office is closed — or closing: the woman at the door is just locking up!

"Stop!" the professor cries out, stumbling foward in alarm. "A room — !"

The tourist bureau clerk, startled, drops her key, which clatters to the floor like a coffee spoon. "A room — ?" she gasps huskily, her long auburn curls fluttering in confusion. Then she drops to a squat and fumbles about frantically for the key with one black-gloved hand, blinded by the mask she wears, which seems to have been knocked askew by her sudden movements.

"Allow me, signorina," says the porter, kneeling and poking his long curled snout under her skirts, startling the professor perhaps even more than the squatting clerk, who, when the porter shouts out from beneath her, his voice muffled by the heavy canopy around his ears, "Aha! I have it!" merely echoes wheezily, "You have it?" and lurches clumsily to her feet, stepping on her hem as she does so (there is an audible rip and, as she snatches desperately at the lowering waistband with her left hand, the professor observes that the poor woman is apparently deprived of its companion) and perhaps on the porter as well, who emits a coarse muffled grunt, something about the unclean hinder parts of benighted blockheads, then emerges with his paper nose bent sideways.

There is an awkward moment then with the tourist bureau clerk looking pale and abashed (of course, this is the expression fixed upon her mask, but the professor supposes this to be a true instance of art reflecting the reality beneath the surface) and holding her skirt up with her one hand, thereby having none with which to receive the key that the porter, seemingly unable to straighten up after his long stoop, is painfully holding out to her, and it is a moment, fleetingly rigid as an old photograph (except that all three of them are trembling faintly as though in horror and acknowledgment of that very rigidity), in which the weary voyager suddenly feels, like a cold wind down his back, the terrible vulnerability of his present situation. Perhaps this is, in all its irony, the end, he thinks, perhaps I shall die here, here in this deplorably vulgar hall with its resonant banalities, its aura of meaningless departures. And this thought is not an idle one, not a self-pitying one, but a simple recognition of his failing powers, his overwhelming debilities, among which he must now include, there being no other explanation for the sheer madness of this impulsive journey, the onset of galloping senility. Oh, a fool! A fool! And soon, perhaps even, only steps short of achieving his goal (home, he is thinking, I only wished to come home!), a dead fool

"Don't tell me, cara mia," exclaims the porter suddenly, rearing up and stuffing the key, if it is a key, fiercely down the tourist clerk's frock, "that the office is closed!"

"Ah, yes, that's it!" cries the startled clerk, her curls bouncing off her shoulders as the key plummets into her bosom. "The office is closed! Closed!"

"But surely," insists the porter, "is there nothing available in all of Venice? Not a room to spare? It's the middle of winter and — "

"It's wintertime, you see, and there's nothing available," responds the clerk gruffly, clutching her skirts still, but recovering somewhat her composure. She pauses. She clears her throat, turns her head one way, then the other. "In all of Venice. Not a room to — "

"Yes, yes, I see. Which is no doubt why you were just closing up, you stupid creature," sighs the porter, bobbing his head dolefully, as though the dreadful foreboding that has overtaken the professor might just have gripped him as well.

"Er, I was just closing up," the clerk concludes as though inking in the final period, and for the exhausted traveler it is as if the entire world were closing its doors around him. In his thickening gloom, he finds himself leaning toward his luggage, as though his life were there and he wished once more to embrace it before being separated from it forever. "Because…"

"Ah, well!" exclaims the porter, suddenly perking up and lifting the professor to his feet again. "Un po' di cuore, professore, the devil is not always as ugly as he is painted! Volere č potere, as they say, what you wish shall be yours, for as fortune would have it, I heard only today of one of the great palazzi of our city being converted into a splendid new hotel, especially appointed for gentlemen of culture like yourself."

"Yes! Appointed! Culture!" echoes the tourist bureau clerk, then hobbles back a step or two as though the porter might have kicked her.

"Well, it's not perfect, of course, the renovations are still in progress," the porter says soothingly in his gravelly old voice, peering down at the ancient traveler over his bent nose, "but, given the circumstances, it seems to be a matter of eat the soup or out the window, if you know what I mean, unless you're wanting wet stones tonight for a pillow. And, as the proprietor is a friend of mine, I am certain I can, eh, pull a few strings, if you'll pardon the expression. Tomorrow something better may be found, but for tonight, professore: better an egg…"

"Yes…" Yet the old scholar seems rooted to the spot. This is not hesitation, not doubt — what choice does he have, after all? — but a simple loss of that willed power the porter, in his obliging way, has wished upon him. He feels hollowed out — unstrung, as he might have said in a former time (he shudders to think of it), his limbs loosened by fatigue and deep foreboding. He fears now that that metaphor he has come all this distance to find is to be one not of encapsulation but of erasure, not of summation but of irony and absence. He has envisioned a circle, traveling its circumference as though enacting an oracle, but he now finds himself falling helplessly through the hole in its middle. I have failed her, he thinks. I have failed her after all!

The porter takes his elbow. "All right, signore, don't stand there with your hands in your belt! Let's put the road between our legs. Or a bridge or two, as the case may be! A little need makes the old woman trot, as they say!" They bid arrivederci to the tourist bureau clerk, who for no apparent reason turns and, with great haste, walks straight into a wall. Then, together, they step out, the professor and the porter, into the bitter night. "Courage, dottore! It's just two steps away! Soon you'll be sleeping like the Pope!"