Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

"Devilish weapons, Pini my boy, especially for one with so free a kick as yours! Once — I swear! — I saw your leg whip clear around like a windmill, popping one boy on the chin on the way up, flattening another behind on the way down with a blow to the top of his head, and, still swinging on around, catching yet a third, trying to flee, right on his little culetto, delivering him such a stroke that it lifted the poor birichino five feet off the ground, as if he too were on strings!"

"But I was never on — !"

"No, it's true, my love! You can't deny it, I was there! How we feared — and coveted! — those bark-shod feet of yours! So stylish, too! And whatever happened to that amazing little breadcrumb cap you used to wear?"

"I don't remember. I think a dog ate it."

Sitting here today at his bedroom window, here in this ark of his own personal deluge, as he thinks of it, they have been reminiscing about those old school days together, about how they met and abused each other, and about all the wicked things they did, and with what consequences, and perhaps it is the seductive apparition of these reflected fantasies out in the flooded Piazza San Marco, or his old friend's soothing hands upon the back of his skull, or merely the miracle of his continuing survival, but the shame and disgust such recollections ordinarily arouse are today subversively commingled with nostalgia, disturbingly sweet. Eugenio has reminded him, for example, of the day he and the other boys cornered him in the school latrine and ripped off his wallpaper pants to see the little brass tap which Geppetto had plugged there between his wooden legs and which was, as Eugenio admitted, the envy of them all, despite their cruel taunts ("Your golden draincock, we called it!"), and what has come back to him most vividly from all that was not the humiliation he suffered but the comfortingly familiar pungency of those primitive open-air urinals and the warm sunlight that fell upon their innocent schoolboy curiosity. Just as Eugenio's account of that day at the beach when a math book thrown at him had missed and struck Eugenio instead, resulting in his arrest for murder (Eugenio had not been hurt at all, he confessed, he'd just been pretending, and when the two black-cloaked carabinieri had dragged Pinocchio away between them, Eugenio had sat up and thumbed his nose at them, laughing openly at his friend's distress: "That was very naughty of me, I know, dear Pini, but, eh, what can I say, io sono fatto cosě!"), has recalled for him not the terror of capture nor even the adventure of his famous escape — from the fire into the frying pan, as it turned out — but the delicious lure the sea had for him in those days and the way his disobedient truancy excited him and made his nose tingle.

"We were merely, after all, as one of our naughtiest boys here once said," murmurs Eugenio, his subtle caressing voice like that of a mewling cat rubbing at his ear, " 'cheerful creatures, whose most sinful deeds / Were but the overheating of the heart…' "

"Nonsense! We were lazy unruly ragamuffins, seduced into brutishness by our own profligacy, wretched little asses bought and sold…"

"Well, as the Little Man himself used to say to me at the livestock auctions over there in the courtyard of the Convertite, whilst squeezing my bum affectionately: 'The world, Eugenio my precious little arsewipe, is half to be sold, half to be loaned out, and all to be laughed at!' "

"So it's true then, as I've heard," the old scholar sighs, "you too went to Toyland!"

"I never left it, dear boy!"

"Hrmff. I would have thought when you got hit by that math book, it might have knocked some sense into you."

"That it did, amor mio! That it did!" laughs Eugenio tenderly, pulling on the servants' bell rope. "I vowed never to get close enough to a book to get hit by one of the nasty things again! And you were, you must remember, then as now, our leader, our moral guide, our great exemplar of insubordination and mad adventure, whither thou went we could but follow! And so we did, dear Pini, each and every boy! And laughing all the way! You would have been proud of us!"

The old professor snorts ruefully at this perversion of what he has called in The Wretch and elsewhere his "long-eared mission" to "cast out, cast as, the outcast," an unhappy fate all great ideas and actions seem to suffer in this heedless world — but somewhere behind this rueful musing, in fact more or less at that spot just behind his ear which Eugenio's plump warm hand is oiling just now, or perhaps a bit lower, deeper, closer to the core, he is experiencing an acute longing for the strange exhilaration of that eery nighttime ride on the back of the weeping donkey with the bitten ears, his best friend Lampwick snoring like a bear in the cart behind him, the donkeys clopping down the dark road in their fancy white leather boots, the cart following mysteriously on its padded wheels like a sleigh on snow. They'd arrived at dawn, harness bells jingling and L'Omino blowing his coach horn like an exultant little bantam, at what, to a child's eyes, was paradise itself, so beautiful that it seemed rather celestial than of this world

"Sports, cycling, acting, singing, reading, gymnastics — today we'd probably call it a kindergarten," chuckles Eugenio, giving another pull on the bell rope. "They even had us out there on the riva practicing soldiering! Ha ha! But how we loved it, eh? Gullible little gonzos that we were! Even our naughty graffiti was like an art class in finger painting, not so lasting a form perhaps as that of a Titian or a Tiepolo, but there's still a bit of it around, you know."

"I think I've seen some…"

"You asked us to a party, a kind of birthday party, you said, but when we turned up you weren't there! You'd gone prancing off, as I recall, with that dreadful boy Romeo — what did we call him — ?"

"Lampwick. You remember him — ?"

"Of course I do! Skinny and warped as that cue stick of his, very butch, with buttocks hard and red as a pair of billiard balls and a face like a knuckled fist, who could forget the vicious little mangiapane?! So, tell me, whatever happened to the dear boy?"

"He's… he's dead," gasps the old scholar, feeling afresh the loss and weeping now as he wept then. "He died as a… as a donkey. But — but why are you laughing — ?! It was terrible — !"

"I'm — whoo! hee! — sorry, my love, I'm sure it was, I, ah, missed all that, you see. But you must tell me what it was like — I mean, all those parts just engorging like that, stretching and filling so suddenly all by themselves, it must have been quite extraordinary!"

"It hurt."

"Oh, yes, I know what you mean! Ha ha! I did try one once, a lovely little salt-and-pepper thing we'd once called Lucio. The pain was… exquisite! Hoo, dear! If they hadn't shot him, I'd have died! Now where are those wretched servants?" he complains, jerking impatiently on the bell rope. "I do miss dear old Marten, you know, it's been absolutely impossible around this place since you made me dismiss him, Pini!" He rises, wiping his hands on a velvet cloth. "It's well past time for your morning infusione and my corretto, dear boy, so you'll have to excuse me. It seems I must take care of it myself! But when I come back, I want to hear all about the donkey life!"

Ah well, the donkey life. Poor Lampwick summed it up in the last few words he spoke, lying there in the farmer's stinking straw, dying of hunger and overwork: "I am… not… who I am… Those shits… have stolen my life…!" Early in his career, in a monograph entitled "Reply to an Errant Friend on his Deathbed," modeled on the Epistolae of Cicero and Petrarch and later reprinted as an appendix to the fifth edition of The Wretch, he chided Lampwick for blaming thieves for his own easy charity. "No one can steal what is only yours to give. Spiritual penury with its attendant despair is a willed choice, dear Lampwick, like any other. If a man were to lose his watch to pickpockets and then recover it, would he ever put himself at their mercy again unless he willed to do so? As Saint Augustine reminds his disciple in Petrarch's Secretum, 'The deceived is never separate from the deceiver.' " Perhaps he'd shown too little respect for outright villainy, as some argued, or too little awareness of what those of a popular heresy of the day called "the conditioning power of social forces," but he saw these objections as little more than sophistical dodges, using the seemingly objective otherness of "history," a mere illusion of language, after all, to deny or undermine the individual will and its responsibilities, a package he came to call "I-ness," the uncompromising defense of which has brought him where he is today. Or was a week or so ago, anyway