Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

"It's the oldest truth under the sun: life is a race that can't be won…"

Something like that. And moreover, the abuse is warranted, is it not? — a fit judgment upon his perfidious heart, his capricious and ultimately fatal betrayal of Her and thence of himself, a betrayal that no doubt began back in America with his decision (if it was a decision — ? it's all like a dream he can no longer recall) to return to this sinking Queen, this treacherous sea Cybele "as changeable as a nervous woman," this "most unreal of cities, half legend, half snare for strangers," this home of the counterfeit and the fickle heart, this infamous Acchiappacitrulli. The zany jester is mincing about, miming the crippled antics of an old fool, wheezing and snorting and tossing out his jibes on the comical debilities of the aged ("When one grows old," he croaks, wobbling about knock-kneed with his rear stuck out, his back bowed, and his toes turned in, "he loses his renown! His legs go flabby and his stockings fall down!"), his mocking parodies in the Venetian dialect about "this heartless city of nervous strangers and old queens" and "untimely fetal decisions" ("Ay, ay!" the fool cries with a quavering voice, pulling his shabby felt hat down over his ears, "I can't think, I've got this damnable bone in my head!"), but he does not even approach the true depths of disgrace into which the old wayfarer knows he has fallen. Up at the foot of the cutoff bell tower, the other musicians, augmented now by electronic keyboard and guitar, harmonica, and a set of traps (over their heads, on the scaffolding of cloth and boards, there's a sign painted every color of the rainbow, but the colors run together and he can't read it — no doubt yet another obscenity), are singing, to the same tune as before, if such hoarse shouting can be called a tune, can be called singing: "El tempo, el culo e i siori, / I fa quel che i vol lori!" — Time, one's arse, and the moneyed few, / All do just what they want to do! — and they might as well be singing about "el tempo, el culo e i professori. " When some within the jeering crowd pretend to come to his aid — "Now, now, remember that in this world, we must be kind to all such unfortunate creatures, that we ourselves may be treated kindly in our time of need — this poor old grillino, he really can't help it, you know!" — their patronizing remarks enrage him more than the abuse. No, no! he wants to tell them. I can help it, you idiots! But I'm a villain to the core! Believe me! A brute! An ass!

"Ha ha! Che parlare da bestia! Give him a hand, everybody! In fact, give him two, he needs them!"

But it's true! It's true! A fraud! A turncoat without even a coat to turn! I'm a vile unprincipled scoundrel through and through!

"He may have a small mind, ladies and gentlemen, but he knows it from corner to corner!"

Yet how can it have happened? A century of prudence and sobriety and effortful mastery blown away in a day, less than a day, vanished into the flux as though it never existed, leaving him not only the ludicrous dupe of charlatans, robbed of his every possession, arrested and humiliated by the authorities, stripped of his clothing as of his pride, indeed of his very humanity, enfeebled with illness and deprived even of his ears and nipples — "Lai, lai, " the grimacing clown is crooning sourly to the rhythm of a child's taunt, "co se xe veci se xe buzarai! Ay, ay! Hugger-mugger! To be old is to be buggered!" — but now, having abandoned his only true friend in the world in mad pursuit of a vaporous fantasy, a true ignis fatuus, a most foolish fire, he is hopelessly paralyzed as well, frozen, lost, confused by fever and hunger, left to die in a trash bag, taunted by cretins and crushed by his own shame, and all because of a vulgar American coed with a soft blue sweater

"Oho!" cries the jester, leaping into the air and clicking his heels. "So that's the rock you've split your decrepit buns on, old man! Ha ha! Rispettabile pubblico! Here is where the donkey has fallen!"

He seems, alas, to have been talking out loud again. He doesn't know for how long, but fears the worst. It's almost as though he's forgotten how not to. Crowds of people, scarfed and booted, have gathered around, laughing and applauding and stamping their feet in the snow, whooping the prancing buffoon through his mocking routines — now, hobbling and cackling wildly, he is chasing all the young girls in the audience, making them squeal and clutch tight their coats and skirts. The venerable scholar has become, he sees through bitter tears, seeing little else, the very fool of fools. Butts' butt. But what, being four-fifths buried in refuse already and the rest soon to follow, does it matter? Oh, bambina mia, you little blue-jeaned and cowboy-booted barbarian, you twangy gum-popping red-white-and-blue siren! You have been my death!

"Well, at least your life has not been in vain for nothing!" the comedian exclaims with insolent bravado, as though egged on by the raucous crowd. He seems brash as a child yet ancient at the same time, his features beardless yet furrowed with grimaces and depravity, marred by warts and pockmarks and an enflamed carbuncular growth on his forehead, and with two deep wrinkles standing arrogantly, harshly, almost savagely between his bushy brows, like something out of a repressed nightmare. "Hee ha! Isn't it wonderful!" he brays, launching a little bowlegged dance around the wastebin, the professor shrinking into his trash bag and solacing himself with the thought, which in his feverish misery he only half believes, that at least — surely — nothing worse can happen to him now. "Tutti quanti semo mati / Per quel buso che semo nati!'' the clown warbles out in a squeaky falsetto, rolling his eyes roguishly as he hops about. "It's crazy how we're all inflamed / By that little hole from which we came!"

But why is he surprised? For didn't the Blue-Haired Fairy warn him? "Puppets never grow up," she said, wagging her finger at him all those years ago. "They are born puppets, live puppets, die puppets!"

"Yes, well, dummy, that's show business! But do you mean to say — ?!"

What a terrible oracle! He'd thought she was presenting him with an alternative, a moral choice; she'd merely been pronouncing sentence upon him!

"Hey now, here's a song and it isn't long: 'He who doesn't die in the cradle, / Will suffer for it sooner or later!' Hah! Who says there are no poets in Venice? Yes, at the end of the day, we're all just clay, give or take a sliver or two — we all bough down to the curse of events, you can't stave it off, speaking figuratively! So nothing to do, cavalieri e dame, but show a little spunk, as we say in the charade trade, brace up and stick it out as best you can, and let the chips fall where they may! But now tell me, old man," the entertainer murmurs, peering closer, the frown between his sunken eyes deepening, "what did you mean when you said — ye gods! Am I dreaming or…?" And — ka-POK! — he butts him suddenly in the head.

O babbo mio! I am dying! There is loud laughter and shouting all around him, but the old traveler can hear it only intermittently through the reverberant clangor in his hammered head. What is this insane monster doing — ?! "Oh please!" he wheezes, but this time no one hears him. "Help — !"

"It might be…," muses the clown, leaning back, and then — WHAACK! — bangs heads again, hammering him brutally with the very knob of his carbuncle.

"Abi! o povero me!" yelps the professor, whimpering in the old style, his head reeling, his eyes losing their focus. "Ih!… ih!… ih!…" And the jester cries: "It COULD be…"

And then, even before the next blow comes, the distant memory returns and the old scholar recognizes his adversary — not an adversary at all of course but once his most beloved friend — a memory repressed to be sure, but not of a nightmare: rather of what was perhaps — before the glory of being human, that is, and all that shameful past was put behind him — the happiest night of his life! Pa-KLOCKK!