Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

"Aha. So that explains the mischief of the bells…"

"Don't mind your drowning these wormy old dog-cocks out behind the Arsenale," the Lion went on, "no one gets hurt that way, but dumping the turds in my Piazza is going to get some fat little sporcaccione stepped on!"

"Now you see the trouble you've caused, Marten? The next time this happens, I am going to have to discipline you most severely — !"

"The next time — !" squawked the professor in disbelief, his blood rising, or his sap, whatever: "The next time I'll be dead!" Then, before he could stop himself, he blew up into a wild unseemly temper, screaming indignantly about "assassins and murderers" and "depraved prevaricators," castigating the entire city of Venice and all of its duplicitous and tyrannical history, accusing the grizzled old servant of everything from imposture, insurrection, and criminal neglect to pigeon poaching and senicide, even raging about Palladio and the cruelty of the climate and the Lion's halitosis, he'd never so lost control of himself since they'd tried to curb his franking privileges back at the university. It was shameful, really, a throwback to the ill-mannered tantrums of his days as a woodenhead, but effective. Though Eugenio was clearly reluctant to let his longtime servant go ("He doesn't steal from me, Pini, he steals for me — !"), two policemen finally appeared on the balcony and, at a snap of Eugenio's fingers, hauled Marten away between them. "All right, Pini, calm down, you've had your way," sighed Eugenio wearily when they were gone. "I hope you realize only a true friend would render such a great service! For you, of course, Old Sticks, it was a pleasure, but," he added, leaning toward him with a sly forgiving wink, "just don't eat rabbit in Venice for a while…"

Now, his grappa-laced espresso finished, his great friend and benefactor snores contentedly at his side. There are traces of rouge in his ancient cheeks and a dusting of powder around his eyes, a tender vanity. His thin slicked black hair catches light from the Piazza almost as a mirror might, hard and glittering. Out there, the dry spine in the middle has become a broad isthmus, once more populated by the familiar crowds of clicking and posing tourists, many of them already in Carnival masks and costumes. There are devils out there and royal couples, wild beasts and butterflies and ghostly spectres. The Caffč Quadri below him and Florian's across the way are setting out their tables again, and the orchestras are tuning up. At the edge of the receding waters and reflected in them, a camera, seemingly without an owner, stands on its tripod, the colorful film-advertising cloth thrown over it hanging silently in the bright still day, as if in its spindly solitude to speak to his condition or else perhaps to mock it. An illusion, of course. Nothing is being said. Not far away, a Harlequin approaches, hobbling on a cane, so fat his hairy behind sticks out from the rear of the costume, and accompanying him is a squat bent-backed Columbine with a moth-eaten tail who entertains the crowd by walking into stacked platforms and falling over café tables. Sooner or later, they will hit the camera and knock it down, he knows, and that, too, will have a certain meaning, and at the same time, none at all.

In that fractional moment, somewhere between the first stroke of the bell and the second, when, tossed from his chair, he hovered up there in the icy air as though afloat, the Piazza below appeared to him as an open book, a book he'd read a thousand times before, or perhaps a thousand books he'd read before compressed to one, its text dizzyingly complex yet awesomely simple, readable at a glance, yet somehow illegible, and it recalled to him his first terrifying encounter, when still a puppet, with his abbiccě, which (the Fairy said) promised him the world and more but gave him (under "N" of course, and this was the page he'd come to once again) niente. Nothing. And this, he thinks, slipping peacefully into a nap of his own, snug in his silk pajamas and monogrammed velvet robe, was the Miracle of the Mis-struck Hour: the pigeons rose and turned the page.

"It's… it's a long story," he replies hesitantly.

"What do you say?" Eugenio calls out over the start-up roar of the motor, as they lower him into the launch.

"He says it's quite long!" shouts Francatrippa.

"Aha! And I suppose, Pini, it gets longer the more it goes on…"

"I'd say it stands to get harder the more it goes on, direttore!" laughs Buffetto.

"No, no, the more it goes on, direttore," pipes up Truffaldino in his squeaky voice, hopping aboard, "the more it grows on you! The more the tension rises and the plot thickens!"

"Ha ha! Very good, my child!" laughs Eugenio, holding on to the wheel with one hand as they pull away from the island and out into the lagoon, reaching behind him for Truffaldino's backside with the other.

"But even when he stretches the truth, direttore," adds Truffaldino, backing down into the cabin and holding out his fist in a sailor's cap for Eugenio to pinch, "his moral is always rigidly upstanding!"

"He gives it to you straight, direttore!"

"With a hard snout!"

"Right in your ear!"

"But tell me, dear boy, please do," Eugenio has just pleaded, the immediate cause of all the raillery, "tell me the tale of your nose," the professor himself having just previously remarked in a rare moment of candor, touching upon that subject which has always remained, though unhideable, hidden: "It was as obvious, you could say, as the nose on your face. I was probably the last person in the world to figure it out, slow learner that I am — I mean, I was fifty-seven years old before I suddenly realized other people had nostrils!" Not true, though, that he's a slow learner. No, he's more like a fast learner and a fast forgetter

It has been a day for candor, spent upon the moody emptiness of the wintry lagoon, touring Eugenio's varied enterprises, and lastly upon San Michele, the Island of the Dead, where Eugenio has taken him to visit the mausoleum of the Little Man and to lay fresh flowers there. "I've something special to show you, Pini," he'd said, and so he had, and there in that somber place, surrounded by vast gardens of graves and walls of stacked tombs like immense stone filing cabinets, there before an image that brought tears to his eyes, Eugenio has opened his heart to his old friend, telling him all about his long active life on these islands, his relationship with L'Omino, the Little Man, and his own boyhood experiences in Toyland. Which were different from his.

Before that, a day that began cheerfully enough, with Eugenio, in an ebullient mood quite out of keeping with the dour misty weather, or perhaps in resistance to it, offering to take him on a tour of his many civic projects, an offer inspired in part by his heated telephone negotiations before lunch with the government of Czechoslovakia, Eugenio seeking to recover the bones of Venetian native son Giacomo Casanova in time for reburial next week during the climax of Carnival, which was already well under way in the Piazza outside his windows. "If I don't get those bones for our Gran Gala, Eccellenza, siamo fottuti!" he'd shrieked wildly, slamming the phone down when he got disconnected, but then as quickly, spying the alarm on the professor's face, he'd broken into a warm ruddy smile and added: "Ah, but why make it a cause for war, eh? Where you cannot climb over, as the Little Man himself used to say, you must crawl under, there are other fish to skin, after all, other cats to fry — if we cannot retrieve that sinner's wormy remains, we might still have time, per esempio, to wrest dear Santa Lucia's eyes from the Sicilians to go with the rest of her we have here, steal them if we have to, pop them in place perhaps at the very moment of the midnight unmasking! Why not? Indeed, the world of scattered holy relics offers us an infinitude of opportunities! Even with what we already have here in Venice, we might be able to piece together a kind of saint of saints to preside over the festivities, and to the devil with that quasi-Bohemian minchione's disloyal and profligate bones! Eh? And, besides, in this dark solstitial season, are we not more than amply enriched by your own luminous presence, my friend?"