Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

"What — ? Who is it — ?!" he gasps, peering into the dark blotch on the snow. "Can it be — ?!"

"Did you… did you ever find your father…?"

"Colombo! It is you! Yes, but that was long ago — !"

"I know, I know. At least the day before yesterday. I could still fly then…"

"But, dear Colombo — ! How can it be you're still…?"

"Alive? Don't exaggerate, my lad… As you see… But you're looking well…"

"Well — ! I am dying!" he groans. "Just look at me!"

"Ah, I wish I could, friend, but that's gone, too, I'm afraid. Fortune's not satisfied, as they say, with a single calamity…"

"I know…"

"Can't see past my bill, or coo either, if you know what I mean, can't remember if I ever did, that's going, too, my memory, I mean, and… and… What was I saying…?"

"That it was all going, your — "

"Going? No, no, I'm still… Ah, yes, your father! Well, at least I still have my memory! He was off in a boat somewhere… We stopped in a dovecote, do you remember, and feasted on birdseed…!"

"I remember, green tares, I had cramps for a week after, nearly drowned — oh, but it was wonderful up there in the sky with you, Colombo, galloping through the clouds! I've… I've often had dreams…"

"We flew all the way to Malamocco!"

"I thought… I thought it was farther…"

"It was far enough. What times those were! I can't believe I ever knew how…" The old pigeon, his dear strong friend of all those years ago, flutters a wing weakly, as though searching his memory with it. "What? Who's there…?"

"It… it's me, Colombo…" Tears have started in the corners of his eyes again, melting the ones that had frozen there. He feels something deep down give way, popping and snapping like the banners in the wind overhead, releasing a rising turmoil of grief. He has soldiered on through so much, "carrying through" in the old way, "holding fast," and now, on the very threshold of deliverance from all his terrible trials, he fears he may not be able to keep his chin up any longer. Assuming he still has one. Eugenio has returned and seems to be poking at the bird curiously with his booted toe.

"Oh yes… Pinocchio. I heard you were in town. Someone… someone was looking for you…"

"For me? What — what was she wearing — ?!"

"Ah, forgive me, dear boy!" exclaims Eugenio, snapping his fingers at the servants. "We must get you in out of this abysmal weather! Come along now!"

"Wearing? Nothing, so far as I could tell — "

"Nothing — ?! But — wait — !" he cries as his porters pick him up again.

"No dawdling, carino mio, your risotto's already cooking, can't let it get cold!"

"Just an old fleabitten dog by the smell of him… But… who — who is that with you, Pinocchio my child? Is that — ?"

"It's my old classmate Eugenio, Colombo! A true dear friend! He saved my — !"

"Ah, bada, Pinocchio — !" the pigeon gasps, trying to rise. "Take care — !"

"I've suffered so much, dear Colombo! If you only knew! And now — a real bed and doctors and — Eugenio knows everything I've ever — !"

The ancient pigeon gapes his gnarled beak as though to interrupt, but before he can manage so much as a peep, Eugenio, approaching the bird with a broad smile and full of loving kindness, steps on his head, crunching it into the stone pavement beneath the snow. The wings flop once and are still.

"What… what have you done — ?!" the professor squeaks in alarm.

"The tedious old thing had some kind of cricket in his head, as we say — qualche grillo per il capo, ha ha! — and I, as it were, got rid of it for him!" chuckles Eugenio, wiping his shoe in the snow. He waddles back to the sedan chair and caressingly tucks the blankets around his old friend once more. "But, dear fellow, you're trembling so! It's like you're trying to shake yourself out of yourself — !"

"You — you've killed him — !"

"Now, now, let's not make an elephant out of a fly, precious boy! There are too many of these little shit-factories in Venice as it is! The commissions we get on the tourist seed stalls may be good business in the summer, but this time of year the little bandits are just a drain on the economy! So, here we go, it's off to the Palazzo dei — Pini, my love! are you there? Pini — ? Speak to me!"

Across the ruffled lead-colored waters of St. Mark's Basin, poised between crenellated Gothic fantasy and High Renaissance exuberance, Andrea Palladio's masterful church of San Giorgio Maggiore, with its sagging cheeks, carbuncular dome, and stiff cone-capped campanile at its rear (his grumbling companion has likened it to a belled cat with its tail in the air), sits gravely at anchor like an ordered thought within a confused sensuous dream, this damp dream called Venice, "the original wet dream," as his dear friend Eugenio likes to call it. The church's pale façade, caught obliquely in the winter sun's angular light and framed now between the two absurd columns of the Piazzetta like a carnival mask hung in a window, peers out past the growling, bobbing water traffic upon this shabby but bejeweled old tart of a city, the mystery of reason confronting the mystery of desire, and what it seems to be saying is: history, true, is at best a disappointment ("It is a fairy tale full of wind, master, you are right, an empty masquerade, a handful of dead flies…"), but it is also, in spite of itself, beautiful

Not an easy idea for the old professor to accept, any more than that traditional Venetian notion of art as speech, as a discourse with time ("No, no," he is muttering now, his voice muffled by ruin and his thick woolen wraps, "that's not what I mean at all!"), a kind of ongoing dialogue between form and history, as Palladio, that Paduan Aristotelian, would have it. "Dialogue," after all, smacks of the theater and "history" of the storybook, and the professor, in his dedicated pursuit of ideal forms, has always rejected the theatrical, the narrative, indeed all arts with concepts of time other than eternity. This was, in his early days, his argument with Palladio, who drew echoes of Venice's corrupt and mongrel history into his designs even as he gently chastised the city with his intimations of a rational geometric ideal, a compromise the professor himself, schooled in the categorical imperatives of the Blue-Haired Fairy, was unable to make. Such an accommodation to the moment was, he felt then, both patronizing and delusory. Just as there were good boys and bad boys, there were, the artistic image being the form given to thought, pure thoughts and those contaminated by history. If art's endeavor, it being otherwise useless, was to express man's ceaseless striving for perfection, then history was what always went wrong.

"Yes, you have put your treacherous finger on the very sore, Excellency," snarls the old bewhiskered dark-visaged servant who, on Eugenio's orders, has wheeled him out here onto the balcony of the Torre dell'Orologio, muttering sourly at the time that he was "just tying the donkey, as they say, where the master wants." The balcony overlooks a Piazza San Marco decorously strewn this cold bright Sunday morning with the preparations for Carnival: raw yellow timbers, metal frames and scaffolding, duckboards and bunting, all stacked helter skelter below him amid the café tables laid out like chips in a board game and the souvenir stands with their fluttering bouquets of gondolier hats and the flocks of bundled-up tourists and feeding pigeons. It is a view of this glorious court, dizzying but thrilling, not unlike the one he enjoyed a century ago, long before the Age of Flight, when, clinging in joyous terror to the slippery pigeon feathers, he flew on Colombo's back in search of his father. Ah, the excitement of that flight! The freedom! He'd called Colombo his "little horse": "Galoppa, galoppa, cavallino!" he'd cried.