Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

What was here unfolding, he felt, or rather was already in full bloom, was what one might call, as another who died here once did, the "miracle of regained detachment," that ingenuous but contemplative state of mind from which all true creativity flows. This detachment was difficult to sustain, however, with that rude din just outside his windows, it was worse than those head-butts the puppets had given him, so he decided to escape the palazzo altogether and, in preparation for that spiritual task which, like a kind of artist's holy purgation, awaited him, to embark upon his long-planned pilgrimage to the works of Giovanni Bellini, poetic painter of Madonnas, whose many masterpieces anchored the city in that high serenity for which it was named and kept it from floating off through Ricci's and Tiepolo's silly ceilings. And where better to start than in the Accademia with the painting that had changed his life, "The Madonna of the Small Trees"?

But Eugenio, in a pink-faced dither, would have none of it. "Out of the question, dear boy! I need everyone here! My costume has to be completely remade, the bodice just won't do! Then there are the masked balls, the decorations, and I haven't even started on my introduction speech for the Gran Gala! Tomorrow night! Martedě Grasso! Can't you see?" The palazzo staff was indeed in great turmoil, the servants scuttling about feverishly, racing hither and thither on Eugenio's screamed orders, out one door and in another, crashing into each other on thresholds and tumbling down stairs, though it was not certain anyone was actually doing anything. "And now Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo is on his way here with the deeds to the Palazzo Ducale! I told you I had something extravagant boiling, Pini! The Count is the direct descendant of nine doges, but he's at the green, as the saying goes, and we've got the gold! Think of it! The central building in the world! This is a chance that comes only once every Pope's death! But we have to grasp luck by the hair and the bull by the horns, my boy, a botta calda, while the drum's pounding — !"

"But you promised! You said I could have anything I wanted!"

"But, Pini, all the way to the Accademia — ?! Be reasonable! I have five Madonnas right here in the palazzo. One of them might even be by Burloni!"

"Bellini."

"Bollini, Ballone, I simply can't do it, my dear! The Count is due here any moment! History is being made! Buffetto! Quickly! Take the professor to the Gritti and buy him a Picolit grappa!"

"I don't want to go to the Gritti!"

"Ahi, what a plague you are, Old Sticks! You always were such a restless thing, I did think you'd learned better!"

"It's not restlessness, it's my life's work! My Venetian monograph! I insist — !"

"Believe me, the worst thing you could possibly do, amor mio, is write another book about Venice!"

"But it's not about — !"

"Wait! How about the Biblioteca Marciana? Eh? Just the other day you were complaining that it was easier for you to visit a distant island than the Marciana across the way!"

"But there aren't any Bellinis — !"

"Tomorrow the sodding Bellinis! Today Petrarca! Cicero and Pliny! Marco Polo's will and Era Mauro's map! The Grimani Breviary! The Bessarion Codexes! A million precious volumes, Pini, if we haven't sold them! Not to mention the 'Wisdom' of Tiziano hanging up there someplace, and the immortal 'Philosophers' Gallery' in the Great Gilded Hall! How can you resist?"

"Well… but — "

"Francatrippa! Buffetto! Hurry! Transport the professor across to the Sansovino Library immediately! This is important! Can't you see the dear man is waiting? His life's work depends upon it! And come back at once! Count Ziani-Ziani is on his way! The future of Venice awaits us!"

"Back in a crack, direttore!"

"In a pig's whisper, direttore!"

"In quattro e quat — !"

"Non fare il coglione, you impertinent blowhards! Get your feet out of here, or it's off with your heads! And I don't mean the ones with ears on them!"

And so they'd not even gone for his litter chair, they'd just swept him up by his armpits and gone clambering madly out of the palazzo as though escaping a burning building, bustling him, feet dangling, down the back stairs into the alleyway behind with its stale kitchen odors, clinking of dishes, and BLOWING GLASS FACTORY ENTRANCE sign, then through a tiny sottoportico past camera, clothing, and junk shops into the Piazza itself, startling the patrons of the Laverna as the three of them collided with the marble tables and sent the yellow café chairs tumbling; then, his feet fluttering behind him like a wind-whipped flag, they went racing pell-mell across the open end of the Carnivalized Piazza, under the rearing bronze horses and past the towering Campanile, colossal father figure of all bell towers, now sounding from on high its throaty five-mouthed alarums, putting white-masked tourists to flight as they charged down upon them and churning up clouds of terrified pigeons, barreling finally at full gallop through a doorway flanked by a pair of caryatids, massive and glossy as body builders on steroids, and bearing the legend: BIBLIOTECA NAZIONALE MARCIANA: LIBRERIA VECCHIA; without pause, he was hauled on up the marble stairs, now under workers' scaffolding, the vaulted ceilings and precious gilded grotesqueries hidden behind tented sheeting, and deposited hastily in the barren Great Hall, stripped of its display cases and undergoing restoration, no book in sight, not a person either, and there, without so much as a brief farewell, abandoned, his protest — "Wait! Stop! Damn you, take me back!" — unheard.

Stand there he could, but little more than, his knees shaky but holding, just, there in that cold empty hall, surrounded by a kind of cartoon gallery (he recognized Tintoretto's facile ink-stained hand) of ancient philosophers mocking him with their robust good health and their evident immunity to folly. Not a one with a wooden head. He felt cruelly judged. Was one of them his master Petrarch? No doubt. Perhaps that one in the golden robe, teetering on a loose pile of books, piercing him through with his dark sagacious gaze. Petrarch had bequeathed to Venice his entire library, the most splendid private collection of its time, launching the idea of this building in which to house it, and then had taken the whole lot back again. The professor had flown here from America with the poet's Epistolae seniles under his arm, and it might now be said their roles had been reversed, he now (it was the dank sad smell of the place perhaps that suggested this) in the great man's armpit. Francesco Petrarca, alias Petrarch, Petracchi, Petracco, Petraccolo, and Petrocchio: like himself the most celebrated scholar of his age, one who also blended art and theology, promoted the classic vision, opposed folly and deceit, and became an exemplar in his lifetime for all humanity, the old professor not excluded. He had stopped short of producing bastard children, but had otherwise emulated in all ways the noble life of his fellow Platonist and Tuscan, even in ways unpremeditated, for Petrarch had also, upon becoming a boy (this is said to have happened when he saw Dante in Pisa at the age of eight), lived a pious and studious youth, suffered a Hollywood-like period of dissipation on foreign soil (Petrarch's faucet worked better, there were consequences), then found his true vocation through an idealized love, abjuring lust and devoting himself thereafter to a lifetime of scholarship, writing, and tenured self-denial. They both had wandered the world in pursuit of truth and beauty, and had both ended up finally here in Venice, though Petrarch had lived long enough to die elsewhere, something the old professor doubts will be granted him. They both struggled their lives long against Aristotelians (Sophists they scorned outright), Petrarch finally driven from this city on that score, no wonder he took his books back. And they both were, it could be said, composers of tombstones