Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

And yet, he thinks, the numbness in his feet having spread to his chest, is it really such a surprise? To what extent all these years, he must ask himself, has he truly believed in the physical separation of the Three Kingdoms because he wanted to? It was convenient, after all. His "psychogenetic geography," as he called it, to general acclaim — and he has liked the acclaim, liked being the famous professor and revered emeritus, whose exemplary pilgrimage moved the world. Would he have given all that up for so small a thing as the truth? He staggers, his knees sagging under the weight of his plummeting spirit. He squints up at the next bridge they must mount with a certain horror. He seems to see three bridges, piled on one another like a cartful of plague victims. Ah. No. Can't

"You remember Eugenio, that ragazzo you laid out with your math book the day they sent me chasing after you — ?"

"It — it wasn't me — !" he whispers faintly.

"He's running the show now. You should've killed him."

He stops. He can go no further. It's as though these revelations have peeled more of his skin away, exposing him yet more ruthlessly to the petrifying cold. He can hear the wood cracking and splintering in his limbs with each step. "Alidoro, my dear friend, I–I…" In his pockets, his hands are frozen like claws around ears now as hard as golden coins. And for some time now, he has been feeling something like loose marbles at his waistband. He shudders, and they rattle about down there. The dog gazes over at him from the foot of the bridge with his rheumy eyes. "Alidoro," he says, his chattering teeth clacking like wooden spoons, "I think I just froze my nipples off."

The monster fish that swallowed Jonah, sucking him up as a raw egg is sucked, was a pious creature devoted to virtue and orthodoxy, a kind of blubbery angel, conjured up by a God who liked to flesh out his metaphors. He — or she, the anatomy is uncertain, "belly" perhaps a euphemism — kept the runaway prophet dutifully in his or her belly or whatever for three days and three nights, long enough for Jonah to get a poem written and promise to do as he was told, and then, with a kind of abject courtesy, vomited him up, if that is not also a euphemism, on dry land. This is what Bordone's dark stormy picture, sitting like a mummy-brown bruise on the stone wall near the front entrance, is trying to show: Jonah disgorged like the metaphor's tenor emerging gratefully from its vehicle. He has often tried to see his own experience in the same light. In his now-lost Mamma chapter, "The Undigested Truth," for example, he has compared his brawling, boozing, recalcitrant father with the wicked Ninevites whom Jonah was reluctant to exhort, and from whom the prophet felt even more estranged once he'd saved them, has asked whether it was really truancy that landed Jonah in the fish's entrails, or whether God, like the Blue-Haired Fairy in her goat suit, might not somehow have lured the prophet into his crisis for reasons of pedagogy, and has indicated thereby how both his and Jonah's maritime adventures, often interpreted symbolically in Christian terms of baptism and rebirth, or else Judaic ones of exile and return (in Hollywood, quite literally: the raw and the cooked), might be understood more accurately — and more profoundly perhaps — as violent forms of occupational therapy. They were also living demonstrations of vocation's fount in the viscera: only he and Jonah — and perhaps poor Saint Sebastian up there, standing like a twisted tree with an arrow through his — could fully understand what a gut feeling really is.

Unfortunately, his own fish was not so decorous and accommodating as Jonah's. Attila was a decrepit, foul-smelling, asthmatic old tub of lard who slept heavily, snorting and eructating all night with his mouth open, airing his adenoids. Crawling out through his gorge was not so much dangerous as it was merely nauseating. His old man, he discovered, had been in and out many times. Old Geppetto had adjusted to the life and come to like it, brewing up his own lethal grappa in the fish's digestive juices, devising recipes for the tons of stuff the monster sucked up, one of his favorites being a cold porridge made out of mashed cuttlefish, live sea slugs, and walrus dung, and dressing up grandly in the uniforms of drowned sea captains. As far as he was concerned, he'd never had it so good. As a hobby, he'd taken up pornographic and religious scrimshaw, with which he decorated his chambers, ampler than any he'd ever known before. The place stank, but so had every other place he'd lived in. He'd fashioned playing cards out of bleached sea wrack, dice and pipes out of conches, smoked cured kelp. He'd developed, as though in imitation of his monstrous host, an Oriental pleasure in the swallowing of whitebait and polliwogs live to feel them tickle his throat as they died going down — that's what the old buzzard was doing when he discovered him in there and ran to give him a hug, getting in return a faceful of spat-up live fish and a smack on his tender nose. Mostly, though, his father just sat around hallucinating on his evil brew. It was this grappa that steeled his heart, as it stole his mind, and made him refuse to budge. He thought he'd never get the besotted wretch out of there. When he tried to plead with him, his father turned nasty, walloping him with an oar handle if he came too close and threatening to set him alight and smoke his herrings with him.

"This shit is magic, finocchio mio! It's the only magic I've ever known!"

"But what about me, babbino mio? Your little talking — "

"You, you little spunk, you sap, you sucker, you nutless wonder! You twist of tinder fungus! You're a thorn in my side! a splinter in my eye! a sprit up my ass! You stick in my craw! One step closer, knothole, and I'll make toothpicks out of you!"

Finally he had to pretend to go along with him, throw a party, tell stories, get him blind drunk and carry him out through the snoring fish on his back, the old stew by now completely demented and raving at the top of his voice about the snakes in Saint Peter's green beard and the treachery of stars and fink pigeons and about being impaled on the devil's nose, which he envisioned apparently as appearing miraculously on the Virgin's shiny cerulean and enigmatically uncleft behind, the poor brute having tried desperately at the last minute, when he realized what was happening, to drink up his entire production before having to abandon it forever. When he woke up in the Fairy's cottage three days later, he thought he'd died and it was the Second Coming. In fact, he never quite got this idea out of his crazed old head after, and insisted on being called San 'Petto ever after.

Maybe he should have just left the old ingrate in there. But already, unredeemed woodenhead though he still was, he had started reading his many trials as edifying metaphors, the didactic strategies of his blue-haired preceptress, and in their light he knew he had to bring his babbo out with him. Their light, with significance, has lit all his actions, without it his life would have been as dark and cold as this poor martyred church of a twice-martyred saint wherein, huddled in his tattered coat, shawled by his scarf, his ears in his pockets and his nipples at his belt, the old scholar sits, waiting for his friend Alidoro's return, frozen to the core and unsure even of his next minute — yet he can no longer say for certain whether the source of that imperiously guiding light was, all these years, without him or within. Did God, to put it another way, truly have plans for the Ninevites — they were spared, after all, nothing happened at all as Jonah said it would — or did Jonah, despairing of his own mortal condition, find himself invoking both God's plans and his own trials in reply, not to a luminous command from tempestuous skies, but to some inner storm of his own, his own career-engendering transformational wet dream, so to speak? A mystery frightening to ponder