Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

"Looks like this time you have, to make a phrase, barked up the wrong tree, dottore," remarks, amid all the burlesque whistling and cheering, a sour voice at his side: it is La Volpe, still in her porter's costume — he has been hung in the middle, he discovers, between her and her blind Gattino, now cackling on his other side with senile laughter. "You got the short stick, as one might say, you're out on a limb — you are, in a word, up the pole!"

"Up the pole!" wheezes the Cat, covering his mouth with the stub of his right foreleg: he hangs by one paw only, an empty black glove nailed up on the other side. "In a… in a…?"

"Word."

" Word! Hee hee hee!"

"You two seem cheerful enough," gasps the butt of their badinage in his transfixed pain, beginning to worry that the movie of his life might suddenly have turned into a documentary.

"Enh," shrugs the Fox, as best, in her own pinned state, she can shrug, "you get used to everything in this world, professore, familiarity breeds consent, as the saying goes, though I do miss being able, what with all my blebs and buboes, to scratch my tormented old arse. If perhaps you have a hand free — "

"Don't even listen to those bandits, Pinocchio!" warns a voice at his back. He twists around to seek out the source, but there is no one back there, just empty space, blue, vast, and inscrutable. "If you lend those scoundrels a hand, they'll steal it!"

"Cross words," grumbles La Volpe sardonically, resolving the puzzle.

"Words!" repeats Il Gatto, sniggering hysterically into his empty cuff.

"Avoid evil companions, my boy, or you'll be sorry!"

"How could I be sorrier than I already am?" he groans, his wounds stretching as, losing strength, he slumps lower.

"You could be," replies the cross with a tremulous sigh, "like me."

"Ah well. As to that, there was a time when — "

"I know, I know, they send us dossiers, resumes, we get the publicity handouts. You're a famous case, a model for us all, you've — if you'll pardon the expression — crossed over. This is a big honor for me, I know that, I've got the star of the dance, top billing, I shouldn't complain. But do you remember what it was like before? Do you remember how it felt to be a piece of talking wood?"

So long ago. A time of darkness. He was innocent then. And innocence, as his long life has taught him, is a form of naughtiness. Yet… "I had… no pain… no fear… I was free…"

"Free to get used for a chair leg or a clapboard! Free to soak, rot, and burn! Free to get chopped, hacked, whittled, split, and pulped! Hey, look at me! A tree made out of a tree! A joke! They gave me arms, I can't use them. Am I mad? Hell, I'm cross as two sticks, that's what the children say, but I don't know what 'mad' is, I don't know 'cross.' 'Pain,' you say, 'fear': it all sounds like magic to me — or it would, if I knew what magic was. I even envy that old Fox over there with her itches and scratches — I say, 'her,' but what do I know, right? I don't know 'knowing'! While you, you've had a life! You've had everything!"

"You don't know. Men's lives are short and stupid."

"Stupid? You tell me stupid? What's two and two, you ask. I don't know. I don't know what's two! But you know, you're smart, you've got brains, whatever they are. You've got — I don't know, I can only imagine — which is difficult, I don't even have an imagination — but what? You've got charm, right? Dignity. Serenity. You've got — correct me if I'm wrong — hauteur, glamour, class, talent — how'm I doing? — dash and daring. And tenderness. Smoothness. Authority. Have I got the picture?"

"Well, I guess so — but how did you — ?"

"I read it on a movie poster."

"You did?"

"You caught me. I'm lying. I can't read. I'm dumb as a stump, I'm thick as a plank, I'll never make my mark, or any other. Oh, I wasn't born yesterday, but that's just it. I wasn't born at all. Not like you, Mr. Star of the Dance! And I can't take steps to do anything about it, I can't keep my nose to the grindstone or listen to reason or kick the problem around, so what chance have I got? I'd be down in the mouth about it if I had a mouth. I can't even put my foot in it. I can't show my hand or beat around the bush or face the music. I don't even know where it is, the music, I mean, or the bush either, I'm too stupid. If I had a heart, I'd be wearing it on my sleeve, if I had a sleeve. So what have I got? A routine. A lumber number. A dumb show, a curtain dropper, an act with nails, halfway between a hanky twister and a creepie. But I'm a pro, a reliable standby, an understud, a support who never lets you down, I'm an old hand who hasn't even got one. People like to wear me on their chests. I'm vaguely sexy. I have a good silhouette. I stick out, as you might say. And I stick it out. I'm solid, I'm always there. And we're not talking lifetimes here, are we, we're not talking mere centuries — you remember!" But maybe he doesn't. The old boy seems to be hanging lower, his head drooping as if sniffing his armpits. "But you know what?" he whispers down his nape. "I like the blood! I soak it up! I can't get enough of it! I think: this must be what 'tasting's' like. Am I right? This must be 'appetite.' I like the writhing and the sweat: it oils me up. And I like the crowds!"

"Why are you telling me all this?" gasps the dying figure pinned to his crossbeam. The wretch seems to have gotten thicker and hairier, as though death were filling him up and leaking out in coarse filaments at all the pores. Below, he can feel a tail curling around his upright where the feet are nailed. There is a bad smell. "We were such good friends! We had such wonderful adventures! I showed you how I could pee longer than anybody. We used to make bets with the other boys. You showed me how your nose could grow…"

"What — ?! Lampwick? Is it you — ?!" The miserable creature lifts its long ears feebly, then drops them again. "Oh no!" He tries to throw his arms around his long-lost friend, but he cannot move them. "Lampwick!"

"And now… you're leaving me… hee haw!… to die alone…"

"I'm not leaving you, Lampwick! I'm here! I'll stay human! I promise!" But even as he protests, he can feel the place where they've nailed the charge twitch and stretch. A darkness is spreading everywhere like the darkness of unknowing. The sun seems to be falling from the sky. "Don't die, Lampwick! Don't die — !"

"Goodbye, Pinocchio…!"

"No — !" He struggles against the rigidity of his wooden arms to embrace the dying donkey, no matter what the consequences. All his heart is in it. He has a heart. He has always had a heart. And now he is straining it to the breaking point. He can feel the creaking and bending, the terrible splintering within. "Lampwick — ?" And then the sky seems to tear like a curtain, there is a great roar (it is in his own throat), and he awakes to find himself grappling through his twisted blanket with Alidoro, his nose buried in the old mastiff's filthy coat, and bawling like a lost lamb.

"There, there," soothes Alidoro, breathing sleepily down his neck. He peels away the tangled blanket, then wraps him up again.

"It was Lampwick! He was dying! I could have saved him, but — !"

"It was a nightmare," says Alidoro gently, easing him back into the wood chips next to Melampetta, who watches him drowsily with one half-cocked eye. "It's all right, old friend. Nothing you can do now…"

"No, I mean," he mumbles tearfully, curling up inside the blanket, his shoulders aching still from his recent struggle, "I could have saved him when he… when he died the first time…" Gripped by this painful truth, unassuaged by all the intervening decades, the old professor snuggles down between his two companions, closes his eyes once more and, with the kind of diligence he once applied to scholarship and basket weaving, chooses to dream that, while his colleagues sit behind him on the stage, gravely exhibiting their noses, he is giving a ceremonial address to the American Academy of Arts and Letters on the uses, proper and improper, of somatic metaphor, a dream which is, he recognizes, even as he embraces it, a dream of, a surrender to, oblivion