Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

They roared away from the Molo, sending gondolas bobbing and flopping and vaporetti grinding into reverse and blowing their horns, out into the magnificent Bacino di San Marco, Buffetto at the wheel, swerving wildly at full throttle between the strapped posts which serve as channel markers and which looked to the professor like grieving old men consoling one another, but which Buffetto compared to ball players in a huddle, Francatrippa to stacked rifles, Truffaldino to clasped lovers, and Eugenio to cazzi incatenati, as he called them, chained cocks, each then shouting out his own interpretation of the black tips or hoods of the posts and the little white gulls perched on each of them as though by assignment from the Tourist Office. They flew next up the Giudecca canal, slapping against the water churned up by other craft escaping their path, the encircling faces of the Palladian churches glowering at them in gape-mouthed disapproval, but Eugenio responding with squeals of unabashed joy — "Ah, this thrice-renowned and illustrious city! This precious jewel, this voluptuous old Queen, this magical fairyland! Love of my life and forger of my soul! I wish only to clasp it to my bosom! Una vera bellezza! Ah! Ah! Mother of God, I think I am coming! Faster, my boy, faster!" — while Truffaldino entertained them all with astonishing acrobatics on the cabin roof, even as they tipped and swerved and bounced through the busy canal. "Ah, life, life!" Eugenio cried, hugging his belly as though he had just named it. "It's so much fun!"

With like and in truth infectious delight, his round appley face flushed and black eyes twinkling, he pointed out to the professor his many projects for the lagoon, beginning with his desire to tear down the Giudecca and rebuild the entire island in the old aristocratic style of rich villas and exotic pleasure gardens that had characterized it in the time when Michelangelo stayed there, perhaps converting the old Stücky mill at the far end into a private academy or university to be named after the professor himself ("No, no, do not object! You deserve no less, my friend!"), and certainly reclaiming the famous Convent of the Converted Ones, now a women's prison, and restoring it as it was at the turn of the century when the Little Man used it as a marketplace for auctioning off his donkeys. "Our friends at Disney are definitely interested!" he exclaimed secretively above the roar of the speeding boat, clapping his little fat hands.

Whipping around by the Lido, Francatrippa now gleefully at the speedboat's controls, Eugenio pointed out the projected location of the new lagoon entrance tidegates, told him of his plans to seek commercial sponsorship of the gondolieri and sell advertising space on their shirts and straw hats, and described for him how, by digging between Malamocco and Marghera a channel deep enough for sixty-thousand-ton tankers, they could create what he called the Third Industrial Zone, making the Veneto region the rival of Osaka, Manchester, and New Jersey, though he admitted that, having done much the same thing twice before, even though the project would be immensely profitable, worth more perhaps than all their other investments put together, his heart really wasn't in it. "Besides, it would only increase the size of the working class, un fottio di cazzi as it is, God knows, a veritable plague, my dear, which is ruining the democratic process and turning the world into a fucking dungheap — no, no, I ask very little of this world, being at heart a modest man, only let me live the rest of my days, the few that remain, among the superrich! That's who this noblest of cities, sole refuge of humanity, peace, justice, and liberty, is truly for and they are the only ones who will save it! But just the same, my love," he added, leaning close and wrapping an arm around his old friend to wheeze into his earhole: "if you're looking for a hot real estate tip, you could do worse than to buy in to Malamocco!"

"I used to think it was the end of the world…"

They were now barreling through the triumphal arch of the Great Gateway, past the statue of a lioness, strangely elongated like stretched taffy, and into the main canal of the Arsenal Vecchio, and, as they went ripping past the huge brick barns and rusting drums and the thick bunkers skulking like cement elephants, spray flying from the prow, Eugenio explained to him how he hoped to convert this great Renaissance workshop, once civilization's most famous shipyard and now little more than a rotting hulk, into a vast eighty-acre marina for the world's most luxurious private yachts: "It has a bigger basin than Monaco, Pini! Think of it! It will create a whole new generation of seagoing pleasure craft! Venice will again rule the waves! It will take money, of course, but not only are we rich in public funds right now, we also have the whole world's hearts in our pockets and our hands in theirs, and, so long as our Socialist Party stays in office, I can promise you, we shall not lose sight of this noble goal!"

As they came plowing out through the low arch cut into the crenellated wall at the back end, Francatrippa and Buffetto now fighting like schoolboys over the wheel, Truffaldino at the same time hugging it head downward and arse high and, feet kicking, demanding his own turn, the launch reeling drunkenly through the lagoon and slicing a straying gondola clean in two ("He'll drown!" the professor cried in alarm, craning around to watch, but Eugenio only laughed and said: "Nonsense, my boy! You forget how shallow the lagoon is — he can walk home!"), the cemetery island of San Michele with its trim brick walls and cypress canopy suddenly loomed into view, and Eugenio, taking over the boat's controls so as to avoid hitting it, leaned over toward the professor and, Truffaldino having barely escaped getting bit on the bottom before scrambling away, stage-whispered above the motor's diminishing roar: "I have something to show you over here, Pini… something special…"

They moored next to the vaporetto landing stage and, after stopping to buy flowers just inside the cemetery walls, Eugenio led them in a little procession down the long cypress-lined gravel paths to the far end of the raftlike island where the route became increasingly mazy as though in imitation of the neighboring island these dead once called home. Along the way, women, carefully tending graves as though they were pieces of heirloom furniture, washing them, brushing them, shining up the photographs, changing the flowers and the water in the pots, paused to greet Eugenio as he passed, a regular visitor here, it would seem, and taken as one of their own. The professor could not help remarking how dry-eyed they all were, by contrast to his own wild unrestrained grief at the tomb of the Blue-Haired Fairy. In fact, he felt it again now, churning up inside afresh, that old graveyard fever, punctual as saliva.

"They are making their husband's beds," Eugenio murmured, his voice hidden behind the labored rumble of heavy earth-moving equipment digging somewhere nearby, "the beds they had in truth been making for them all their lives. They are happy now, this is their true vocation. When I am feeling morbid, Pini, I sometimes wish I had one of the dear things…"

The twisting path, leading them down narrow labyrinthine passageways between stone condominiums of the dead, stacked five deep and sometimes two or three to a niche, opened out suddenly upon a splendid little campo, lined with cypresses and rosebushes and dominated by an immense yet graceful semicircular mausoleum built like a kind of marble stage with a raised platform, ceremonial central stairs, shielded wings protected by poised angels, and a recessed proscenium arch supported by fluted Corinthian columns like a ring of folded curtains. In the middle of the stage was the tomb of the Little Man, an ornately decorated marble sarcophagus, laden with fresh flowers piled up sumptuously around a perpetually burning oil lamp in the center. Above the sarcophagus hung a crucified Jesus with the familiar sloping hips, smooth feminine limbs, and soft pierced abdomen, his face turned heavenward in agony, or perhaps in ecstasy, while around him plump naked cherubs played in melancholic abandon. The legend on L'Omino's tomb was that famous line of his which every little boy along his route had heard sooner or later, and one which even now caused the professor's heart to sink: "Are you coming with us or staying behind?" "Vieni con noi, o rimani?"