Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

"You mean…?" Eugenio moaned, a pudgy hand clasped mournfully to his soft breast.

"Lamentably, sir, he is, as we say here," replied the first doctor, stepping forward, "truly between bed and cot! His hours are counted! He will soon be, morto e sepolto, making soil for the beans! That is to say — "

"On the contrary," interrupted the second, crowding in front of the first, "he is rather, sir, as the saying goes, more on the other than on this side! Č bell'e spacciato! Dead and done for! Furthermore — "

"Ah!" screamed the third, bounding about the room and banging his head vehemently on the walls. "But what's the moral? What's the MORAL?"

"Exactly!" exclaimed the first.

"For once I agree with my esteemed colleague!" put in the second.

"Ohi, povero diavolo!" sobbed Eugenio, rubbing his eyes with his rolled fists. "He is my dearest sweetest friend! Surely there is some remedy — ?!"

"Alas, I am afraid he is a tragic and more or less fatal victim of dermatological cytoclasis," sighed the first, stroking his beard, "for which no known cure has yet been found!"

"I am sorry to have to disagree once again with my distinguished colleague," argued the second, clutching his lapels firmly, "but the patient has clearly contracted a somewhat lethal dose of cytolysis of the epidermis, the cure for which remains, regrettably, a scientific mystery!"

"Idiots!" snapped the third, suddenly standing tall and composed beside the bed, staring severely down at — or into — the ancient traveler as though penetrating to the very core of his ignominy. "Can't you see? It is as plain as the face on his nose! This shameless ragazzaccio is turning back to wood again! Look at him! The little scoundrel is suffering from lignivorous invasions of all kinds, evil eruptions of xylostroma, probable sclerosis of the resin canals, peduncular collapse, weevil infestation, and galloping wet rot. He's starting to warp, too, disgustingly enough, and that offensive musty stench is unmistakable evidence that he's rotten to the very pith!"

"I resent your calling my colleague an idiot," complained the first doctor huffily.

"No, no," blustered the second, "it is I who resent your unwarranted abuse of my colleague!"

"But, gentlemen, gentlemen," pleaded Eugenio, "what can we do?"

"Very little," sighed the first doctor, and the second said: "Not much."

"The treatment is quite simple," responded the third doctor grimly. "The rot should be chopped out and burnt immediately, the remaining structures, if any, drilled and impregnated with fungicides and insecticides, using sprays or double-vacuum techniques to assure the deepest possible penetration, followed by total immersion of the subject in organic solvent-based preservatives for at least a week."

"Hmm, yes, I can see that," the first doctor conceded grudgingly, "but it's a stopgap measure at best."

"I am afraid my illustrious colleague is in error there," contended the second. "Such a treatment may be of temporary help, but only for a short time."

"Thereafter," concluded the third, "I recommend a restringing of all the joints, a thorough rubdown with fine sandpaper or steel wool, and finally repeated applications of linseed oil or else a few coats of yacht varnish!" Wherewith, he opened up his black bag and clapped it over his head, mashed his hat under his arm, and stalked blindly out, sending things rattling and crashing in the next room, his two colleagues following him in somber parade, quarreling about vocational dignity.

"This would be a most honorable profession," grumbled one, "if it were not for the wretched patients!"

"No, no, I must insist," objected the other, "it is precisely the patients who most dishonor this noble profession!"

During the days that have followed, as he slipped in and out of his feverish dreams, all too haunted by dark reminders of his recent folly, he has been lovingly cared for by Eugenio and his staff of servants and advisors and nurses in his private suite in the magnificent Palazzo dei Balocchi, which, as he came slowly to realize, looks out, here just below where he sits now, upon the Piazza, itself. He has slept upon satin sheets, drunk his medicine from golden goblets, been fed Venetian liver and onions and bigoi in salsa and golden polenta and risi e bisi and other curative delicacies from a jewel-encrusted silver tea tray, said to have been part of the plunder from the sacking of Byzantium — along with the four bronze horses rearing up over the door of the Basilica of St. Mark just in front of him now — by the Blind Doge in the Fourth Crusade, and has attended to his daily needs, minimal as they now are, upon a fur-lined bedpan made of the finest azure blue Murano glass, hand-blown to his exact dimensions. Not only has he enjoyed the comfort of a hot water bottle, it is amazingly like the very one he had taken to bed with him each night since he first left for America, until it was lost to thieves that fateful night of his arrival here. Nothing perhaps has made him feel more at home.

"When you described it in your delirium, Pini," Eugenio told him, "it reminded me of one I had had as a child. It took a lot of hunting, but I finally found it!"

Ah, the great Eugenio! Very dear and very deep! Soon, after Sunday Mass, he will join him here on the Clock Tower solarium, and they will talk about the city and about the old times when they were schoolboys together and about the professor's illustrious career. Eugenio has promised to have him ported about the island to see once more before he dies all the masterpieces he most loves and has written about (his entire bibliography seems to be at his great admirer's command) — and may write about yet again, for Eugenio has also promised to replace in some manner his stolen computer, perhaps even with a similar model, a feat not beyond his resourceful friend's capacities. Already he has found for him some foot snuggies with the identical pattern of his old ones, a half bottle of his personal French Canadian brand of pine-scented mouth wash, and a pair of spectacles that fit him better than the ones he lost. So much Eugenio has done for him, dedicating to him from the moment of their fortuitous reunion all the treasures of his vast wealth and experience and attending to his every need, not least of all his daily oil treatments, applied personally by his own soothing plump hands, treatments which seem to have helped wonderfully, for if his condition is no less critical, the pain has lessened and the stiffness eased.

"Probably the belladonna," growls old Marten behind his ear, fussing with the blankets.

"No, I wasn't even thinking about her," sighs the professor, though of course he was. He has been thinking of little else. As his life has ebbed, she has seemed to draw nearer, becoming once more the subtext, as it were, of all his thoughts, rational or otherwise. Even these musings on Palladio and Venice, eternity and history, purity and its pursuit have really been little more, he knows, than coded meditations on that guiding spirit of all his years, at least the fruitful and noble ones. She was, after all, his first healer, just a child then like himself with her waxen face and strange blue hair and cold but nimble fingers. She dressed and undressed him like a doll, called him her little brother, poured bitter medicine down his throat and laughed to see his little faucet work. Sister, mother, ghost or goat, he loved her madly and, dying, he loves her still.

"Coast or float, Excellency? In the strange blue air? Still thinking about flying, eh? Ebbene! Detto fatto! Your least wish, padroncino: my urgent command! For as il direttore so graphically put it to me: 'Let his every twig, Marten my man, become a branch!' "

"What — ?!" He realizes he has been pushed perilously close to the edge of the balcony and that his chair is beginning to tip forward. "What are you doing — ?!"