Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

"You pontificate very learnedly upon our exotic but delusive city, signer canino canarino, but perhaps you have missed some of the detail. I would like you to become more intimately acquainted with it! Faccia a faccia, as one might say!"

"Canino? Canarino — ?! Stop! Don't you know who I am?"

"But of course, my devious little watchdog with the long nose, mister mock-Melampo, I know you well! For it has not been forgotten within our humble clan how, by your infamous theatrics, you did the shoes to our dear old nonno, betraying poor granddad and all his kinfolk to that ruthless henhouse tyrant, who not only had the entire brotherhood summarily executed, but had their earthly remains served up at the local inn disguised as stewed rabbit, a cruel and contemptible final indignity. 'Bů-bů-bů!' — do you remember, my little barked barker? No wonder you are so fascinated by duplicity!"

"But wait — !"

"Wait? As my own elders, then so innocent, waited through that calamitous night? 'We stayed up till dawn for the old fellow and the great chicken festicciole he so loved to provide,' my grieving babbo used to say, tearfully recalling that tragic event which left him forever orphaned, 'but our beloved papa did not come home that night, or — sob! — any night thereafter!' It was a wrong bound to his finger, as is said, and so bound to mine in turn, and now at last it is time to give back bread for pie! You have sung like a canary, now let us see if you can fly like one as well…!"

"But it's not so simple as that — !" he protests, slipping forward in his seat ("Oh oh," rumbles a familiar voice nearby, "looks like another Palazzo dei Balocchi credit card's run out!"), as that enchanted square below, that fabulous open-air drawing room, that landing place that takes the breath away tips toward him now to take his own. Cocooned in cashmere, he cannot even move his arms, would it do him any good if he could. "What about the chickens — ?!"

"Better strike the dinner hour, lads!"

"The chickens, master?"

"Yes, don't you see — ?!" he cries, as above him the Moors suddenly hammer the great bronze bell and great flocks of pigeons lift off the Piazza below and rise with a vast fluttering communal roar like a black cloud of gathering mourners, beating their wings into the air, swirling before him down there like the great chain of being itself. "What is a good boy? What is good?! Can one love the eaten and the eaters too — ?! Where is it all to end — ?!"

"For you, Excellency, this curious philosophical enigma is, as they say, purely epidemic," snickers the servant wheezily, as this son of Italy, lost, found, lost again, slides out, untethered, into space, "for you are, heh heh, being sent on holiday! Bon voyage, master! Galoppa, galoppa, and watch out below! Tim-BER — !!"

"If you think this is glorious, you should see it in the season of acque alte, Pini, when the sky blackens and the wind howls and the great foaming tides roll in," Eugenio rumbles wheezily in his ancient guest's earhole as they sit huddled together at his bedroom window in the palazzo, gazing out upon a more placid flooding, the celebrated lightness of the Piazza made doubly so this bright morning by its own crisp doubling in the square's limpid pool, this city of endless illusions seeming now to float in its symmetric fullness upon the reflected sky below. "Un tal pandemonio, as we used to say, un tal passeraio, un tal baccano indiavolato, you'd think, sitting here, you were in a ship on a boiling ocean! Waves crash against the columns and resound in the arcades below us, as if to loosen the palace from its very moorings and send us out to sea, the sunken street lamps standing then like rows of lilac-tinted channel markers out there showing us the way! Wastebins bob in the Piazza like buoys, inverted umbrellas tumble past like broken-winged birds, toothy predatory gondolas dart through the very porches of the Golden Basilica squatting helplessly in its stormy bath, and those red banners up there flap in the wind as though they might be wild wet sails, urging us upon our fatal course, as the entire trembling city seems suddenly intent on plunging downward to a watery doom!" Eugenio rakes up an emphysematous sigh from the depths of his sunken breast, no less ancient than the professor's, and, leaning back, exclaims: "Ah, Pini, Pini! This incomparable city, this most beautiful queen, this untainted virgin, as a celebrated whoremaster once said of her in his postcoital delirium, this paradise, this temple, this rich diadem and the most flourishing garland of Christendom — I do love her so!"

Although misfortune, most recently his being pitched from on high toward the stonier realities of this fantastic square, such mischief thwarted only by a spectacular rescue, which is already being referred to, he understands, at least here in the palazzo, as "the Miracle of the Mis-struck Hour," has conditioned the old scholar to see more of peril and duplicity in this mirrored doubling than any alleged paradisiacal beauty, he cannot entirely resist its shimmering appeal. Between his window and the Procuratie Nuove across the way, their stately arches now stretched in the reduplicating flood waters to slender O's, the skeletal half-built Carnival platforms and the stacked scaffolding and ladders and barrier fences rise out of their own pooled reflections like the scuttled wrecks of ancient ships, disturbing the more timeless illusions, and they seem in their gentle mockery to be counseling him to accept his peculiar fate, which could be worse, after all, if not much, and let all the accumulated bitterness and suspicion of these past days, so alien in truth to his deepest nature, be dissolved once and for all into the pleasant watery vision before him.

His dear friend Eugenio, now gently oiling his creaking nape, has more openly urged this, extending to him all the amenities of his vast estates, and, in return, asking only that he surrender to the great love he offers him and to the pleasures which that love and his Palazzo dei Balocchi can provide. He has protested — "No, no, and no again!" — at each of Eugenio's many generous gifts, but in the end, having little choice, he has accepted them all, and often as not with tears in his eyes; that he should have come to this and that, in such adversity, he should find so great and true a friend! Moreover, the situation is only temporary. With Eugenio's help, he has written off to America for new credit cards and checkbooks, bank and royalty and retirement fund statements, and all his professional credentials, insisting that, even should he decide to remain a guest of the palazzo, he would wish to pay his own way, Eugenio smiling at that and observing that he always did suffer, even as a puppet, from an excess of woodenheaded pride. Meanwhile, at Eugenio's wise suggestion, he has signed his stolen cards over to the charitable institution of which his friend is presently director, Omino e figli, S.R.L., which will assume full responsibility for any misuse of them by the thieves, and which will have the power, under the labyrinthine Italian law, to prosecute them if apprehended. Eugenio has submitted all the requisite papers for a new passport and local visa, has bought him two new silk suits and a handsome woolen Tyrolean duffle coat with a felt borsalino to match, as well as a pair of green knee-high rubber boots to splash about in, has provided him with liniments, medicines, toiletries, and even a wonderful old-fashioned cotton sleeping cap, and has replaced the cracked waterlogged shoes he came here in with three new pairs, custom made from the softest hand-tooled Venetian leather, remarking as he threw out the old ones that they reminded him of those strange stiff shoes made out of tree bark that he used to wear to school.