Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

"Wonderful! And so you woke up a real boy!"

"Not yet. When my head came out I found myself lying on her bed where she was reassembling me. I was still drenched from head to foot. What is all this wetness, I wondered? Why, it must be sweat, human sweat! I'd never sweated before, and I realized now that something truly grand was happening. When she put my hands back on, she lifted them up and pressed them to her nipples. I could feel her breasts puff up like spongy little balloons to fill them up, and she blew me a sly kiss and winked. I felt whole and happy, but vaguely frightened. Almost whole. There was one part still missing, forgotten until now."

"Ah! I see it! Your nose!"

"I was rather hoping it had gotten lost. I'd always hated it, it had caused me nothing but trouble and humiliation, and it seemed I might be free of it at last. I'd not lost the sensation of it, however. Wherever it was, it was encased in a plump fragrant warmth. As it turned out she was sitting on it. She plucked it out from beneath her and held it up between us, as though it might be a wicked secret we shared. Her azure hair was snarled and wild, her eyes strangely glazed, her lips twisted into a grin that bared her teeth, and, somehow aware that I was dreaming, I began to fear this might turn into a nightmare. She licked it all over, then blew on it teasingly. I watched it grow in her hands, felt it growing at the same time, felt her tongue on it, her lips, her breath, even though she was sitting far away from me at the foot of the bed. It was a very peculiar sensation. Perhaps this sort of thing happens in everybody's dreams, but for me it began to feel like something utterly new in the world, not unlike a sudden visitation of angels. As she put it in her mouth, wallowing it about with her tongue and sucking it deeper and deeper down her throat, I began to suffer a terrible tension around the hole gouged in the middle of my face, and my eyes and teeth felt like they were about to leap from their sockets. It was frightening, I was literally petrified, but I couldn't stop it, nor did I want to. When a little acorn appeared at the end of it and she nipped it off with her teeth, I nearly screamed with something compounded of both terror and delight, and then she put it up in that place where all the other parts had been. It was too much. I couldn't hold back anymore. 'Grow wise,' she said, 'and be happy.' I sneezed. I woke… I was covered in flesh…"

"Gee, Professor Pinenut," Bluebell exclaims, snapping her gum in his tender earhole, "that's a real masterpiece, hunh?" It is not. It is one of the most idiotic paintings he has ever seen. He cannot stop looking up at it, though. Chagrin would be his middle name, he thinks bitterly, if he had more than one in the first place. "I mean, when you look up at the ceiling and see a stark naked old man as ugly as that who's supposed to be, you know, 'The Universe,' it makes you realize what a mess we're in, right? Standing up there on that croc as though to say that's all it is, you know, just a big crock, see you later, alligator, whoo! That's really deep, man! I can see why you dig it!"

"He is not the Universe, that happens to be the River Nile he is standing on, and in any case that is not why I — "

"No? Hey, wait, don't tell me it's that cute tootsie with her big jugs spilling out like the Milky Way that's — crack! pop! — got your old eye, teach! Jiminy! I feel like I'm back in your classroom again, down mammary lane in the Beak's lecher hall, arse pimples, dix pix, cunny funnies, and all that!" That vulgar creature up there does indeed have his weary eye, but by the decree of — first, crack, then pop — Fate, as it were, not by election. Fate and Plato. That his beloved mentor should have helped to do this to him makes him feel doubly betrayed. "Whoa, speaking of your old clit classics," Bluebell whispers, her red windbreaker rustling as she leans down to press her warm cheek next to his, "I just realized! From where you're standing, you can see right up the little sweetie's ballooning sky blue skirts, can't you?! Wow, the art of introspective, just like you taught us! Dimples and all!" She gives him a conspiratorial squeeze. "Never know what you'll see if you just keep looking, right?"

"The details in this instance are insignificant, Miss," he snaps in his old tutorial manner, his irritability provoked not by her, for in truth he has been longing all the while, though he had forgotten this, to see her again, but by his present predicament, disconcertingly pathognomonic, preferring an aesthetic explanation for it, however contrived, to the humiliation of the mechanical one. Or, more precisely, the wooden one. "What matters is the, ahem, overall composition." Which doesn't matter at all. What matters in a cheap ham-fisted pastiche as bad as this one is who commissioned it and why that cretin and the painter weren't both gibbeted in the Piazzetta or hung out to dry in a cage at the top of the Campanile. But, given his seemingly intense scrutiny of the wretched thing (what is worse, he can feel his incorrigible nose acting up again, even as he speaks), what he says is: "That and its position, both in, eh, historico-cultural time and in physical politico-geographical, as you might say, space."

"Oh yeah, I get it! You don't have to point! Like, right beside it there's that painting of 'Modesty,' right? And so that whole bare-assed scene of the Universe or whatever it is up there becomes like an assault on — splupp! crack! — decency itself, a case of aggravating rape by a dirty old man, you might call it! I love it! And then in this one up here — gee, I'm sounding just like you, Professor Pinenut! I told you you taught me everything I know! — in this one we got this gorgeous hunk in the red bikini holding up the earth, or else maybe the mother just came down and — squit! fpooff! — bopped the sucker in the neck, and right over there we got Fortune — am I warm? — with her naked buns spread like fat on lean on a round dead stone, same size as the world on the hunk's back, as though to say that that's — spopp! — what this whole ball o' wax is gonna come to, right? Diddly-squat and let's hope her rectum's clean!"

As far as this blue Monday is concerned, it has been pretty much diddly-squat from the beginning. There were masked Carnival revelers whooping it up outside his windows all night until the early hours, and then, after an hour or two of vague stifling nightmares about interminable tenure committee meetings back at the university, which he couldn't escape because the chairman, an old crab, had his claw clamped on his elbow, warning him to "void evil companions," he awoke to the shrill squealing of schoolchildren in St. Mark's trying to hold up armloads of feeding pigeons, a "Ladies' Marching Band" made up of bearded and mustachioed men dressed in pinafores and blowing trumpets and tubas, and the hammering together of the viewing stands for the Mardi Gras Gran Gala on the other side of the Piazza. He had a pounding headache, his backside felt as if it had been coarsely sandpapered all night, and there was a fresh weevil infestation in his right elbow, telltale sawdust in the soiled sheets. On his return from the cemetery island of San Michele, he had resolved to press on immediately with his life's work — if he hoped to recover his discipline and integrity, it was now or never — and his worsened condition this morning made that resolution all the more urgent.

Of course he had to gauge his remaining strength. Though never afraid of the difficult, willing to confront challenges few other men of letters would even contemplate, he had never undertaken the impossible, knowing that was just another form of cowardice. His great Mamma opus was irretrievably lost, he knew that, and he also knew he could never reconstruct it, much less rewrite it, an effort as useless as trying to make an omelette out of a hatched chicken, but he believed he could capture something of its intent in a concentrated monograph, and such a project he might well have the time and energy to complete. In effect, he would write that final chapter that had brought him here in the first place, summarizing the salient points of the lost book and incorporating his recent Venetian experiences as paradigmatic fables of a sort, much as Saints Augustine and Petrarch used their own more vulnerable moments to provide dramatic contrast to their eventual unwavering commitment to higher principles, a commitment he intended, rejecting folly now once and for all (as though he had not done so many times before, but never with such a prospect of looming finality), to emulate. As his body weakened, he felt his spirit strengthening, as if being purified by the very impurity of his physical decay: home at last in the figurative lap of virtue, so to speak, all of a piece or not. This would be his theme, together perhaps with Wagner's dream of "dying in beauty," a dream which that musical impresario eventually realized upon this very island, though probably, as always, sooner than he'd hoped. With that in mind, then, he thought he might conclude the essay with the image of that tombstone on San Michele, the one he thought for a moment was hers, an artifact hard as an idea but pulsating with transcendent emotion, and ultimately something other (more abstract, in effect, more indefinite) than it appeared to be, an image that would thus reveal much that was at the very core of his personal aesthetic, he who, dying in beauty, had always lived in it as well, though more in the abstract than in the particular.