Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

How differently their lives have turned out, his and Lampwick's! Of course it helped that he got sold to the circus instead of to some pig of a farmer to be starved and beaten and worked to death. Clearly, the Blue-Haired Fairy had been watching over him, even in his donkey days. That she had a box seat for his debut as the "Star of the Dance," for example, could not have been an accident. He was so startled to see her there, dressed in mourning garments and flashing her medallion with its portrait of a defunct puppet at him, that, jumping through the hoop, he fell and lamed himself, thus bringing on, as though spelled, his own execution, but maybe that too was a part of her pedagogy, his fall a mark of promised grace, her medallion not so much an omen as a vivid image for a little beast who'd not yet learned his letters to let him know that much in him still had to die before he could be hers again. Or so he learned to read those awesome trials in retrospect. His "Golden Ass" theory of redemption, as some have called it, and with reason, for there was much in Lucius Apuleius' youthful asininity, his bufferings and sorrows, and his eventual transformational rebirth (though he merely ate and was not eaten) into lifelong devotion to his protectress' sacred service, that paralleled the professor's own strange formation and contemplative career, and took him far from Lampwick.

Whom, however, for all his waywardness, he has never ceased to mourn, for a friend, as Cicero said, is like a second self ("True, true," murmurs Eugenio, at his side once more and holding the cup of hot medicinal tea at his guests's cracked lips, "and old friends, dear Pini — like old wood, old casks, old authors — are always best, especially when they are — ha ha! — all one and the same!"), and moreover, in Lampwick's case, as he explained in his great prose epic, The Transformation of the Beast, a sacrificial second self whose death prepared the way for his own salvation: Lampwick, dying, was lying, so to speak, on the last straw, put there in his emblematic extremity, he came to feel, by the Fairy herself. As the light went out in Lampwick's eyes, the light came on in his puppet head, and he became forever after the very model of entrepreneurial industry and scholarly ambition, winning thereby the Fairy's ultimate blessing. "Despise not this lowly ass," he wrote affectionately, many years later, "though he be in appearance the most hateful beast in the universe, for, as William of Occam observed long ago, God could have chosen to embody himself in a donkey as well as in a man, and who is to say that he did not?"

"Ho ho! God in a donkey suit! I love it, Pini!" chortles Eugenio crossing himself hastily, then squeezing the old scholar's knee "Rather changes the holy manger scene, doesn't it, and makes one wonder just what the Holy Family had been up to, eh? But to answer your question, my boy, there's the testimony of our own precious Saint Mark, for one," he adds, gesturing with a sweep of his hand at the saint's great water-masked square before them.

"Who has no manger scene, honors the ass, and ends his evangel with the terror of his witnesses," replies the professor, sipping at the hot infusione held at his lips.

"Ah, is that so! Well, of course, I've never read it…"

The floodwaters in the Piazza are receding. A slate-gray line now cuts like a smudge through the reflected arches of the Procuratie Nuove, a kind of dry spine down the middle of the porous Piazza, higher than the rest, and there the pigeons and tourists gather as though on a crowded strip of beach, feeding each others' appetites, a scene he gazes upon this morning with a certain affection, for only yesterday those pigeons in their appetitive innocence saved his life. Pinioned in blankets and tipped out like a seedpod into space by the vindictive Marten, he could only, with that "horror of heart" said by Ruskin to have been this city's original creative principle, gaze helplessly down upon the pale blank countenance of stony Death, rushing upwards, when least expected, to kiss him cruelly face to face. Even as he began to plummet, however, Death's face was all at once darkly scrawled, as though moustachioed by a mischievous boy, as a massive swarm of pigeons rose up, roaring round like a sudden black tornado, alarmed, it seemed, by the striking of the great bronze bell above his head: twice, though it was not yet noon. He'd heard the Moors' two reverberant strokes as a personal knell, signaling, as did the Maleficio of the Campanile in the old days, his imminent execution, not knowing what the pigeons knew: that it was in truth a dinner bell, the city having traditionally fed its feathered mendicants, at public expense and for generations beyond number, each day precisely at nine and two, occasions that called for, in this ceremonial city, a ceremonial ascent, orbit, and processional descent to table. He fell, light as a cocooned moth, upon their arched backs and, bounced from one to another by their beating wings as though being blanketed, was lofted to within reach of the jaws of the stone Lion of Saint Mark on the clock tower — or perhaps the great creature, screened by the pigeons, left his pedestal and joined the flight, it was hard to say, certainly there was an awesome flopping about overhead, as though a helicopter might be hovering, and afterwards the old fellow, though poised as before with his paw on the book when next he looked, recognizing him now as the very beast that had pursued him through the snow his first night here in Venice, his nose flattened as though from hitting too many bell towers, did seem desperately winded, snorting and blowing like a beached walrus — and from the Lion's jaws, he was flung back into his wheelchair, or dropped there, much to his relief, having been, on top of his terror, nearly asphyxiated, just as Eugenio arrived, beaming sunnily, from Sunday Mass.

"Well, well!" he exclaimed with his jolly pink-cheeked smile, his slicked-back hair gleaming on his round head like a shiny plastic cap. "You're looking much better, my friend! So wide awake! The fresh air seems to have done you good!"

"I–I was thrown… out into the middle… the middle of it!" he squeaked clumsily, still dizzy from the vertigo of the fall, the pigeons' tossing, and the Lion's blindingly foul breath.

"In the middle? In the middle of what, dear boy?"

"I'm afraid, eh, the old fellow was actually asleep the whole time, direttore," growled Marten sotto voce. "He seemed to be having nightmares, so finally I woke him. You can see he's still confused — "

"No! There… I was out there …" he gasped, pointing, his arms bound, with his nose.

"What? You mean, in midair — ?"

"He speaks metaphorically, padroncino," chuckled the servant with a conspiratorial wink, trying to bundle the blankets around his mouth. "As Checco Petrarca from up the street once said, some of us scrape parchments, write books, correct them, illuminate and bind them, adorn their surface; superior minds look higher and fly above these mean occupations…"

"Ah! Quite so! Well said, Marten!"

"No!" he cried, gagged on cashmere, tears stinging his eyes. "He — choke! — threw me out there — !"

"Ah! See how he trembles, master. He may have a dangerous fever — !"

"He-he tried to kill me!"

"Who tried to kill you, dear boy?"

"This-this-this-that — !"

"He lies, direttore."

"Lies? My friend Pinocchio?" Eugenio exclaimed, arching his tufted brows and peering closer with his little eyes. "There, my good man, I think you may have overstepped yourself."

"The… the Lion — !" he managed to gasp, "- saved me!"

"Just protecting the citizens below," the Lion rumbled grumpily from his pedestal, still puffing and wheezing. "We Venetians welcome strangers with open arms, but not at thirty-two feet per second per fucking second."