Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

"I'm sorry…"

"At one point you got free of your blanket somehow and stood up, naked as a worm in the winter storm, and rendered a fair approximation of the Sermon on the Mount, blessing the weepers and winegrowers, throwing pearls to the dogs, thank you very much, doing unto thieves and profligates as they would do unto you, honking your nose, turning your cheeks, unfolding your throat, and swearing against oaths and blind men, salting the lilies of the field from your peehole, prophesying against the foundations of the city which you said were of rusty unleavened sand, giving advice on how to stay out of the hands of the carabinieri, Romans, and other footstools of iniquity, plucking logs out of eyes and thistles out of figs and proverbs out of the air like Simon Magus himself conjuring up heresies. And all of it at full split, you were really telling it big! A logomaniac of the first water! Where did you learn to speechify like that?"

"I don't know. I can't recall when I wasn't speaking. I was speaking before I was born…"

"It took both Alidoro and me to wrestle you back into your blanket again, you were really making fire and flames, you were climbing on all the furies, outside yourself, a devil in each hair, as one could say if you had any. You kept screaming something about rusty nails, hairy asses, and the forbidden fruits of firewood — what did you mean by all that?"

"I don't remember…"

"And your mamma, as you called her, was in it, too."

"She always is…" Last night, by the light of the fire, he'd thought the old watchdog quite beautiful. Now, by the harsher light of day, he could see she was a rather stubby and jowly old crossbreed with droopy ears and thick matted hair, mostly white — off-white — with a black Rin-Tin-Tin patch over one eye that made her face look hollowed out on that side. Nevertheless, he felt comfortable around her, he felt she was someone he could open his heart to, so, though he might have preferred to talk about his life as an art critic, philosopher, and theologian, and to discuss with her such topics as his concept of "I-ness," his definition of the soul, and his views on reality and illusion, beauty (the only form of the spiritual we can receive through the senses, as he has often declared), nasology, and the veracity principle, he did not really object now when she led him back, by way of things he had supposedly said in his sleep last night ("You kept crying for her floppies, it was some kind of mad infatuation, you said, and there was something about a missing hard dick…"), to his final crisis with the Blue-Haired Fairy and his sudden flight, a central theme after all of his work-now-once-more-in-progress, to Hollywood. Indeed, he would probably, if he had his computer here already, and if there were an electrical outlet he could trust, be taking notes

"They asked me out there to be an advisor to a film they were making about me, based on one of my early books. I knew better of course, even then the place was notorious for its venal disregard for the truth, but they caught me at a weak moment, and I decided to go. I thought that maybe if I got away from this place, I could get away, finally, from her. From her and all her tombstones. At least long enough to think things out. Get a new perspective. And it did seem different over there somehow…" All those starlets, the auditions, they all wanted to take him home and play with him. There were beach parties and drunken nights by orchid-strewn swimming pools and wild drives to Mexico. They taught him how to mix American cocktails and drink champagne by the slipperful, though it tended to run straight through him, even as a human. They asked him to unzip their evening gowns. He lit their cigarettes for them. They cradled him in their arms and let him suck their pillowy breasts. They used him as a kind of bathtub toy. He was in all the gossip columns. Indeed, only his ignorance of his own anatomy saved him from fatal mistakes out there. He kept trying, at their urging, to put his penis in them, and it wouldn't go. It was more like a limp faucet. "It even looked like a faucet, my putative father's putative sense of puttanaio humor no doubt." The girls all thought it was cute. Only later did it suddenly occur to him… "But then the fights at the studio began…" The scriptwriters and storyboard people changed everything of course. The producers insisted on it. There were reasons: the need for metaphoric coherence and condensation, the temporal and technical limitations of the medium, the metaphysical riddle of the frame itself, the alleged infantilism of the American public, studio contracts with actors and artists, a growing dissatisfaction with Fascist Italy and with theology in general, the tight shooting schedule. "But the main points were there, I felt, even if the Americans did confuse beer and billiards with sin, redemption with technological ingenuity. And if they'd turned my heavy-handed ill-tempered father into a cuddly old feeble-minded saint, well, as I once said about your great-grandsire, Melampetta, the dead are the dead, and the best thing is to leave them in peace. And meanwhile I was the toast of the town, my face, as Jiminy said, on everybody's tongue, I was having too much fun really to argue about anything, doing interviews, judging bathing-beauty contests, turning up at premieres in the arms of the stars, trying to make my faucet work. So I took the money they threw at me, told them the truth whether they wanted to hear it or not, because what else could I do, and otherwise stayed away from the lot. Until it came to the Blue-Haired Fairy. There, finally, was the sticking-point."

"So she found you after all."

"She'd never lost me…" Even if he'd nearly lost himself. She was everywhere now, he'd realized, vast and immediate as the ocean outside his Malibu window or the blue sky overhead. The house he'd returned to after rescuing his father from the belly of the monster fish — her house, though the Talking Cricket claimed he'd got it from the blue-haired goat — had expanded to become the entire universe. He'd been a fool to think he could get away

"Yet last night you said," she says, bringing over his washed underclothes and suit, and helping him out of his cocoon of blanket, "that without you she wouldn't even exist."

"It's our own creations that most possess us," he replies, pleased to be able to quote himself again, and thus, as it were, to clothe in some fashion his naked decrepitude.

"Yes, true, like blind Father Didymus in the demonic grip of the Holy Trinity, or poor old Pope Innocent the Eighth, who, populating Hell for the faithful, found himself nightly in the fiends' amorous clutches, a consequence, I take it, you have not suffered…?"

"Not… not in that sense, no, I have never, so far as I know," he says, choosing his words carefully (his underwear is fresh and crisp, but his suit seems to have shrunk and is pocked, as though in imitation of his diseased flesh, with burn holes), "seen her again. Not since the night I… I became a boy…" He scrubs his itchy nose, holds his suit up to the dull light of the snowy day. "But what — ?"

"Sorry about that. Must have been cheap material, dear friend — old sheep's hair of some kind, I suspect. I put it to dry on the barrel last night and it couldn't take the heat. I don't have much else to — "

"It's all right," he says, feeling very generous this glittery morning. "I've gotten by with less. There was a time when I had nothing better than wallpaper or a beanbag to wear, and stale bread on my head. And anyway I still have the overcoat."

"Yes, well, most of it… But wait!" She raises her snout to the air and sniffs expectantly, then barks: "Here comes Alidoro!"

"Ah, noble friend!" the grateful professor cries, stumbling forward, tears in his eyes, to embrace the great mastiff as he comes lumbering into the boatyard. "You have saved my life — again! And my life's work! How can I ever thank you? How can the world thank you?!" Lido does not immediately return his embrace. His old eyes droop rheumily. What — ? A chill runs through the old scholar. He staggers back. "Is something — ? Were the bags not found? Were they someone else's — ?!"