Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

"Commendatori — ! Are you making fun of us, you turd?"

"Your Excellencies!" Pulcinella bows deeply, his rear in the air, his beaked nose at his toes. From this exaggeratedly abject position he winks soberly at the downed scholar and, while clucking like a chicken to mask his whisper, urges sotto voce: "Run, Pinocchio! Run!"

"Aha! I recognize you!" cries one of the carabinieri, grabbing the puppet by the scruff and hauling him to his feet. "You're one of those terrorist musicians!"

"Off to the fire with you, pricknose!"

"Wait — !" gasps the professor, rising, with difficulty, to his knees.

"Yes, wait!" echoes Pulcinella from under his raised beak. "My shoes!"

"What — ?"

"The laces! I'll never burn with loose laces, gentlemen, I'll piss right through them and put the fire out!" he exclaims and, freeing his arms, stoops as though to tie them. The carabinieri reach down to collar him again, and he grabs an ankle of each to throw them down and run away: an old lazzo from the Commedia days. Only this time it doesn't work. Pulcinella grunts and strains, but he cannot raise either foot so much as a hair's breadth off the paving stones. "Made a frittata out of that one, I guess," he shrugs, as they lift him by his hump, his long arms dangling limply at his sides, "but that's how it goes in show business, Your Excellencies, no point in crying over spent milk, as they say, what's done has a head, so farewell, dear public! Your faithful servant Pulcinella is off to get his heart coddled and his buns toasted!"

"Stop! You can't do that — !" the old professor protests, but before he can even unlock his old knees and clamber to his feet, another policeman, dressed like a Cuirassier of the Guard in a steel helmet with brass ornaments and a black horsehair plume, a double-breasted blue tunic with silver buttons and red piping, the red cuffs and standing collar embroidered in silver wire, a sky blue sash with sky blue tassels hanging from the hip, silver epaulettes with silver bullion fringes, white breeches, and black jackboots, and carrying a rifle with a fixed bayonet, arrives and claims jurisdiction over the prisoner, asserting the divine right of kings.

"Kings? What kings? We have no kings, you fool!"

"The divine right of fools, then!" rejoins the Cuirassier and lays hold of Pulcinella to drag him away. "He who takes, has!" he laughs, a dry roguish laugh that can belong only to the band's lead guitar Brighella. "Possession, as the belly said to the nose, masters, is nine tenths of the law!"

"That still leaves one tenth!" the carabinieri reply, snatching at the slippered feet just disappearing into the roiling mob, whereupon a terrible tug-of-war begins with Pulcinella's body, Brighella at the head end, the carabinieri at the feet, Pulcinella whooping and yelping pathetically, sounding more like a chicken now than ever. Suddenly, the legs snap off at the groin, there's a frightful howl, the carabinieri tumble backwards into the crowd, tangled up in their capes, and the puppets vanish.

The professor knows he should do the same, but he is rooted to the spot. The crowds have shrunk back, he is suddenly all alone at the wellhead, center stage, the carabinieri, in a crimson rage, scrambling to their feet again, their sharp teeth bared, Pulcinella's sundered legs gripped in their fists like clubs — !

"Pinocchio! At last!"

"Arlecchino — ! But you shouldn't have come back! They're setting fire — !"

"Tell me about it later, my friend! We have to split before these shits do the splitting for us! Come on — ! "

Once, many years ago, in one of his less genteel embodiments, he had been sold for a few farthings to a bungling rustic who wanted to make a drum for the village band out of his hide. The lout tied a rope to a hind leg and a stone to his neck and kicked him into the water, then sat back with a pipe waiting for him to drown. Instead, a shoal of fish came along and ate him right out of his predicament. It was a strange sensation. Dragged down by the stone and donkey weight, he had sunk to the bottom, feeling all the while as though his body wanted to rise from within. Then, suddenly, there was this thrilling pain, a delicious nibbling away at his entire being, he has never felt anything quite like it before or since, not even what the starlets did with him in Hollywood came close, though he always had hopes, and his body, his new one, as though trying to express its exhilaration, popped like a seed from its old encrustations and floated exuberantly to the surface.

This time it is different. There is, as before, that same eery feeling of wanting to rise from inside even while the outer body, weighted down with coat and suit and flesh and shoes, steadily sinks, but this time there are no fish, nothing living at all so far as he can see, which isn't far, it's like trying to peer through cold bean soup down here in this quagmire of twigs and wattle upon which, improbably, an empire arose, nothing but curdled garbage, thin twists of opaque plastic, children's ruined copybooks and old sanitary napkins, lottery stubs, the occasional drowned cat, and otherwise just shapeless streamers of coagulated muck that wind around his limbs and grease his face as though to smear away that expression of joy and surprise painted there only a moment before by the unexpected sight of that which he has been, with such awesome consequences, seeking. Ah, with what fugitive, mad, passionate hopes did he go clattering ludicrously down that fatal underpass, his preposterous movements inspired by the demon whose peculiar pleasure it is to trample human reason and dignity underfoot, even when so finely nurtured and honed as his own, his giddy mind in abject travail, his senses so focused on the object of his quest that only now, deep in the fallen Queen's murky bowels and sinking fast, can he hear the cries he could not hear then.

That he has been able to complete this humiliating fall, out of the frying pan and into the pot, so to speak, is thanks only to Arlecchino, who came to his rescue back in the campo, popping theatrically out of the turbulent crowd, felt hat pulled down over his pinpoint eyes as though he were trying to hide inside it, just as the two carabinieri struggled to their feet and, wielding Pulcinella's broken-off legs like truncheons, turned, enraged, on the transfixed professor. "Hey, looking for you, old man," his brave friend laughed, "has been like trying to find a pearl in a hailstorm! Quick! Hop on my back! A cavalluccio!"

"Hop — ?! I can't even — !"

Whereupon Arlecchino backed into him, reached down, and grabbed him behind the knees, and they were off, galloping clumsily over the icy stone flagging, the tall thin carabinieri in hot pursuit. "Hold it! Stop those two! They're dangerous criminals!"

He could feel bits and pieces flaking off as they jounced along, escape was costing him dearly, he knew, but Arlecchino was quick and cunning, leaping benches and wellheads, dodging in and out of the crowds, he had a thousand tricks, and it was working, they seemed to be losing their two pursuers, the pounding of their boots fading, their angry shouts gradually getting swallowed up in the larger uproar of the smoke-filled campo. He tried to tell Arlecchino as they galloped along how grateful he was and how much he loved him, and also about poor Corallina and Pulcinella and Flaminia and all the rest, but all he could do was wheeze and snort, his head bobbing loosely, his chest slapping Arlecchino's wooden back, popping the wind from his antique lungs. "Oh dehea-hea-hea-hear Har-Har-Harle — !"

And then, through his tears, like a miracle, he saw it: a flash of blue! That blue! "Stop! STO-HOP — !"