Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

"Macché! Pleasure is never diminishing, ragazzo mio. It would not halve your reality, but double it!"

"But I can barely clothe and feed the reality I have now. What am I to do with twice as much?"

"Then I will double your income, sweet boy, with each doubling of your reality!"

"Ah, very good, direttore! And if I increased my reality, by, say, fifty percent?"

"Why, how would you do that?"

"Like this, master!" Truffaldino puts his feet on the deck of the launch, or seems to, and walks over to Eugenio, even while remaining sitting on the prow. He puts his hands under his chin and lifts his silhouetted head to arm's length — then the arms themselves seem to periscope upwards in the darkness, raising the head another foot or so in the night air.

"Che roba! And can you do that with all your parts, you wicked boy?"

"Only in the darkness, master," sighs Truffaldino, shrinking back into himself, leaving Eugenio snatching at air. "That's, as you say, the sadness of it…"

A moment of wistful silence descends then, through which, as though from some other time more than another place, come, across the dark waters from the other side of the island, the distant hollow reverberations of revelry: amplified voices, waves of laughter like sullen heartbeats, whistles rising into the night and muffled shouting, the beat but not the melody of music — the sounds of Carnival. The peace of his suite in the Palazzo dei Balocchi is not what it once was, but he dare not complain, for the recent restoration of the Venetian Carnival is virtually the invention, or reinvention, of Eugenio, yet another of his host's acts of homage to his legendary mentor, for whom Carnival existed twelve months of the year. Besides, the professor expects to move any day now into quieter quarters of his own, as soon as his new credit cards, checkbooks, and personal documents, requested for him by Eugenio, reach him through the anarchical Venetian postal service, though the bag of mail they saw floating in the Giudecca canal today made manifest the hazards.

The old scholar leans his head back and gazes up at the night sky. The hovering mist seems to be breaking up, letting a few stars shine through, scattered here and there in abject loneliness like chips struck from the moon. Star light, star bright, he thinks. But what is he to wish for? To be free from his disease? A death wish. To be free from his fear of death? A kind of madness, the dubious blessing of senility, a greater terror. Perhaps just to know. But he already knows so much and what good has it done him? No, no, he knows all too well what he desires, she has been on his mind all afternoon, she whose graven tombs once marked his passage like milestones. He wishes — it is quite simple — he wishes only to be held again. Taking them to the heretics' corner of the cemetery island this afternoon to show them where he hoped to enshrine the bones of Casanova, Eugenio led them all through a section devoted, it seemed, to those who had died young: children climbed stairs to heaven, youthful lovers sprawled erotically on marble deathbeds, babies reached for the arms of Jesus. And there, in the dim light, half buried amid the grander monuments, he saw, or thought for one heart-stopping moment that he saw, that selfsame little slab of marble which once announced the Blue-Haired Fairy's death of a broken heart: "Qui giace una bambina," he read, even from his bobbing portantina, "Here lies a child," and the words abbandonata and fratellino jumped out at him as though the stone itself were crying out. "Stop!" he gasped, and begged that he be taken closer. No, not her, he saw through teary eyes, some other little sister gone, and abbandonato, the brother, not the girl, deserted, but that was how he felt, too, and, no doubt startling Eugenio and the servants, he sobbed out his grief there on that stone, not for the dead child but for the little brother left behind, who was himself, exiled forever from the consolation of her hugs and kisses, her sweet embrace. O Fata mia!

"Look, direttore! Do you see — ?"

"Sshh! Come here, my child! Quickly!"

He made some foolish remark then, to cover his greater foolishness ("But why should you be interested in a little thing like me, master, when you have a Nobel Prize-winner on full display?"), about life's cruel brevity, the stony permanence of death, and Eugenio, laughingly reminding him of the old wisdom, which he credited to Dante Alighieri, that "He who comes from tinche tanche, goes in the end to gninche gnanche," guided them all back to the gloomiest, remotest, most desolate corner of the island where bad boys, he said, were buried and where all the tombs were sinking and collapsing, the headstones broken, the busts and crosses cracked and fallen, the pieces scattered about like garbage floating in the canals. It was a strange, wild, darkly canopied place with spiky plants and stunted trees and thick beds of moldering leaves among the broken stones and rampant weeds through which fiendish little black and emerald lizards skittered while pale butterflies hovered in the coiling mists above like flakes of dead flesh. "I ta morti!" Francatrippa exclaimed, and Buffetto concurred, "Un merdaio, compagno, a veritable shithole," Truffaldino pointing silently to a sign at the entrance that read: DEAD END. Eugenio ordered them to set the sedan-chair down and to jump up and down as hard as they could. As they did so, whooping and grunting cheerfully, the entire area began to wobble in little waves that spread slowly out to the four walled edges. Tombs tipped and toppled, cracked apart, dumped their dead flowers, cast off ornament, and sank another inch or two, as the ground rippled under them like a shaken carpet. With a soft sucking noise, two or three of the graves disappeared altogether. Overhead, cypresses leaned and fell against one another like grieving or drunken friends, and the walls coughed out loose bricks that plopped softly to the earth as though falling into thick pudding. He could feel the tremors beneath his chair, which seemed as it shook to be tipping and sinking just like the tombstones, and the fright he felt was not unlike that he'd suffered as a puppet whenever the Fairy, in despair at his misbehavior, would go pale and cold and fall down with her eyes rolled back, showing only their whites, remaining like that until he hugged and kissed her and wet her all over with his tears, her limp lifeless body slowly vibrating beneath his sobs just as the earth was doing now, a kind of loose ripple that seemed to spread from the middle out and come bouncing back, building slowly until at last her body would be shaking him as much as he was shaking it and she started to come alive again, groaning and sobbing, or maybe laughing, it didn't matter, and hugging and kissing him as feverishly as he her

"Che sborro! What a cannon!"

"If we had a sail, we could use it for a mast!"

"Maybe we should put a light on it to warn low-flying aircraft!"

"Standing at attention like that, I can see why it got the Nobel for keeping the peace!"

"Though it won the Nobel Peace Prize," the professor sighs, gazing up at the bright star his nose is fingering and silently making his futile but heartfelt wish ("No request is too extreme," as that old hymn goes), "it itself has had no peace. It was cited at the time 'for standing for the truth in the age of the Great Lie.' This was on the eve of World War Two, the film had just appeared and was being viewed as a realpolitik fable, with Geppetto as a kind of Swiss neutral, Stromboli as a bearded Mussolini, Foulfellow and Barker the Coachman as fifth columnists, Monstro the Whale as the German U-boat menace, the Miss America-like Blue Fairy representing the wished-for Yankee intervention with their magical know-how, and my mystical nose as a mark of the divine, visible proof that we, not they, were the designated good guys. Like many a victim of the political repression of that time, it had been imprisoned, tortured, humiliated, reviled, and in countless other ways persecuted, and so stood as well for courage and integrity in the face of tyranny, even while exhibiting a peaceful, rather than warlike, stance. In the film it is shown sprouting a branch in which birds nested, and this was interpreted as being an olive branch. Of course all that changed when war came…" That was when the jokes began. The world was more aggressive then. Military units wore his nose into battle and fighter pilots painted it on their fusilages: "Always Hard." It appeared on condom packets sold in PXs and USO canteens. Still, he didn't figure it out. Or rather, he knew full well, had known since he'd become a boy, if not before, but kept forgetting, that truth elusive as a dream. The expanded version of his Nobel acceptance speech, Astringent Truth, which became a classic of moral philosophy, never mentioned it, and even in his more autobiographical writings such as The Wretch, Sacred Sins, and The Transformation of the Beast, works which won him his second Nobel, this was a truth, naked as it may have been in the world, which remained largely under wraps. With all the dignity of his great career he carried his nose through the world as though it were only a nose, he alone beguiled by his own pretenses. It might have been otherwise. There were students who wanted, who might have… but whenever they got too close his nose would start to smart and shrivel as if the Blue-Haired Fairy's woodpeckers were at it again, a painful humiliation far worse than any imaginable pleasure, at least any that he in his innocence could imagine, and so he distanced himself from them behind his professorial demeanor. Anyway, they were never his best students