Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

Eugenio gave each cheek a misty-eyed farewell kiss, pocketed the rosary which he'd been fingering with his free hand, then, on the way back to the motor launch, took the professor on a quiet meditative tour of the cemetery island, describing for him as he waddled along, the old scholar ported at his side by the three servants, his long and happy life in Toyland, which he still held to be the most beautiful place in the world, a land of dreams, un paese benedetto, the very goal of human civilization, and he the preserver of its sacred flame, becoming over time L'Omino's dearest beloved, subjecting the adorable man in his declining years to his least whim and fancy, including his signature on the documents that created Omini e figli, S.R.L.

"I was a good little boy, Pini, loving and obedient, and everything came true for me, just as the Little Man promised!"

The professor, somewhat befogged and guilt-ridden, as was his wont in the midst of tombstones, did not know what to answer to all of this, and finally, as they were making their way back to the landing stage, twilight by now dimming the sky and darkening the hovering cypresses, what he said was: "I–I have never known the careless freedom of youth…"

"Ah, poor Pini!" smiled Eugenio, taking over the controls as they reboarded the motor launch. "And now with your little thingie gone…"

"Well, it's — it's not exactly gone…"

"No? But when I was oiling you, I saw nothing there but a — "

"I mean 'it' wasn't… it …"

Whereupon, the others urging him on as the launch, growling softly, slides out into the wet dreamy lagoon, the ancient wayfarer commences to tell them, with all the candor that the day has inspired, the tale of the world's only Nobel Prize-winning nose

"So it's all true, then," murmurs Eugenio in the echoey darkness, "all those old jokes…?"

"Yes, all the pornographic films and comic books, the sex magazine cartoons, the party songs and burlesque routines, just pages really out of a depressing case history. The boy who had to wear on his face what other people hid in their pants. Watch it misbehave. Watch it get punished. I always felt insulted by the names you called me in school, not recognizing at the time that it was not much worse than calling me 'Faceface' or 'Footfoot.' And people laughed at it, but they were afraid of it, too. It took a lot of abuse. What was old Geppetto's assault on it that day he made me, after all, but…?"

"My thoughts exactly, dear boy! An attempt to emasculate his own son! But that you should remember it all so vividly is most extraordinary!" Eugenio and the servants have become just faceless shadows hovering over him, faintly silhouetted against the distant glow of the city. The boat motor is off, the lights as well, and they bob silently now on the lap of the black lagoon, the cool night mist having gathered round them with a motherly embrace, as though to soothe away the anxieties aroused by their visit this afternoon to the island of the dead. "For the rest of us, our beginnings remain forever a strange unfathomable mystery. A bit terrifying in fact…"

"Actually, I forgot most of this when I became a boy. Only lately has it been coming back to me…" Not all of it, there are vague scary bits for him, too, mysteries he too cannot penetrate. But he does have a clear and precise memory of his babbo's clumsy affectionate strokes as he carved and fluted his wooden hair and whittled out eyes for him to see by, eyes he rolled mischievously at the old fellow just to make him jump and reach for his grappa, and he can almost feel still the impatient hewing and hacking up and down his body as Geppetto roughed out the rest of him: a mouth with its own mocking tongue, thumbed but fingerless hands with which to pincer away the old boy's yellow moth-eaten mop of a wig, feet for kicking him in the nose, and then a nose of his own, fashioned from scraps chopped out between his new legs and wedged into a hole gouged in the middle of his face, a nose that started to grow as soon as it was plugged in, a trick he had no control over and which frightened him nearly as much as it did the old man, who erupted into a kind of blind squeaky rage, accusing the thing of insolence and deviltry and slashing at it wildly with his rude tools, sending splinters flying about the room, bits and pieces of him lost forever, alas, he could use them now to patch up his losses. And still the perverse thing kept shooting out in front of his startled eyes, irrepressible as that infamous beanstalk, stretching and quivering, the tip of it sore where his father whacked madly away at it, but somehow itchy and tingling with fresh raw excitement at the same time, insisting upon its prefigured but ludicrous length even as Geppetto went on lopping it off. Even as he wept, loudly disclaiming it, he could feel himself coming to identify with it in some odd way, as though it were somehow, in its unruly defiance, expressing his own deepest and truest nature, as though it were, in a word, taking a stand in his behalf, or rather, taking a stand that would become his own, he in the end, until the Blue-Haired Fairy taught him how to master it, the captive appendage of the obstreperous nose.

But though he can remember all that as though it had just happened, can indeed remember his entire birth right down to the beveling and pegging of his articulated joints, the drilling of his bottomhole, chased decorously with a chamfer bit, and the planing of his belly which made him whoop and giggle, there are also things he cannot recall, and which cause him deep disquiet when he tries to think about them. His earlier life on the woodpile, for example: When did it begin and where did he come from? Was he always just an impudent log, a sentient chip from a dead block, nature's freak, a useless piece of yaltering driftwood, as his father called him when he washed up inside the fish's belly, or did he have, so to speak, a family tree out in the world someplace, its amputated limbs a lost brotherhood? And then, when Maestro Ciliegia found him there on the stack of firewood, how did he, without eyes, see, and, without a mouth, how speak? Still enclosed in his thick bark, how did he, when presented to Geppetto, shake himself free of Maestro Ciliegia and strike Geppetto on the shin, setting off the free-for-all that so delighted him? How did he know "delight?" And if, as a log, he had no ears, no legs, how distinguish what was "between" them? Or, put another way, all those pieces chiseled away, the slivers and shavings and even the sawdust: were they nothing more than the dead crust of the hidden self within, discovered by Geppetto, mere packing material, as it were, or were they lost fragments of a being once whole, monadic scraps of his original wooden integrity, now tragically scattered?

"Such as those splinters that he hacked away from your nose like a great harvest of foreskins, you mean?" Buffetto asks softly.

"Yes — "

"Were they dead as clipped fingernails, you mean," adds Francatrippa, marveling, "or did they think? Did they feel?"

"Did they talk back?"

"Were they naughty?"

"Yes, and, if so, do they, are they, somewhere, still…?"

"Woo! Spooky!" whispers little Truffaldino from the prow, perched out there beyond Eugenio's reach. "It makes you wonder if anything is really what it seems to be!"

"Nonsense, my little marinaio," replies Eugenio, sitting anchored in his dark shadow behind the wheel. "Everything is exactly what it seems to be. That's the sadness of it. Now, come and sit here on my knee, my child, and let us explore reality together while we still share in it!"

"I am afraid if I did, master, I would lose my share to you! I would be in only half of my reality, you would be in the other half!"