Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

He knows he should tell her the real reason he is staring at this stupid painting, just as he should have told that teary-eyed student in his office that day that she was not the Madonna and stopped her from licking his nose all over, but he hates, now as then, to break the spell. Bluebell has moved behind him and, taller than he, now stands looking down, their heads pointed in opposite directions, into his eyes, her blond hair falling in curtaining wisps, her soft breasts, unzipped from the windbreaker, resting snugly on his shoulders like a kind of furry foam rubber warming pad. It is wonderfully relaxing. He can feel the back of his neck unpopping, unsnapping, almost like magic. He squints up past her smiling eyes and wonders if he sees what he sees. "The — the roots of your hair — " he whispers hoarsely, as she blows a quivering pink bubble toward his forehead and at the last second sucks it back between her bright white teeth: "- are they — are they blue — ?"

"Oh yeah," she laughs lightly, giving her head a little shake to tickle his face with its strands, her breasts hobbling gently around his ear-holes. "Just a silly college stunt. A bunch of us girls thought it'd be neat to dye our hair some weird punk color, and I did mine in this funky blue to, like, you know, go with my sweater. Pretty dumb, hunh? Thank goodness, it's finally growing out — only the roots are left."

"Ah…" The stiffness in his neck seems to have melted away. He finds he can lower his chin at last and his headache has utterly evaporated, though his face feels flushed and pinched in a not unpleasant way. He wonders if, in some mysterious way, he has found the illusive closing image for his monograph

"Speaking of my sweater, prof," she adds, holding something strung on a gold chain in front of his nose, "you left this inside it last time." It is his ear, now blackened and shriveled up like a smoked oyster. He can feel his headache coming back. "I thought it was maybe kind of a present, you know, like a fraternity pin or something, so I've been — snap! ffpoop! — wearing it, but if you need it for anything…?"

"No — !" he squeaks.

"Gosh, thanks a million, Professor Pinenut," she whispers and gives him from behind a tender little hug. "I'll always wear it next to my heart, just where I found it! Right here — see?"

He turns his head, following the dangled ear, and, encouraged by her pointing finger, presses his earhole into the warm blue hollow where its dessicated outer shell is snuggled. As he listens to the accelerating thump within, nodding in concert with it, his nose stroking lightly the fleecy breast, he tells himself with an outburst of rapture that what he sees there before his crossed eyes is beauty's very essence: form as divine thought, the single and pure perfection which resides in the mind, of which an image and likeness, rare and holy and soft as a powder puff, is here raised up for adoration. He wishes to explain this to her, discreetly of course, never once forgetting that she is the student, he her teacher and moral exemplar, wishes to tell her that beauty, my dear Bluebell, beauty alone is both lovely and visible at once, and indeed touchable as well, it is all that we can know of the spiritual by way of the senses and is the discriminating person's route to it, if approached with the appropriate fear and reverence and without getting overexcited, if you can help it, just a matter, the route that is, of following your nose, so to speak — but before he can even get started on this little essay the servants Buffetto, Francatrippa, and Truffaldino come storming in with his portantina, shouting: "Come quickly, master! We have something to show you!"

"No, no!" he cries in alarm, as they snatch him up and strap him in. "I want to stay here!"

"There's nothing to see here, professore, it's closed for renovations, as you can see for yourself! Come now, we've got to run! There's a new Bellini at the Accademia!"

"But I don't care about — !"

"It's the Madonna of the Organs, dottore! II Conte Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo has brought it! A masterpiece! You have to see it to believe it!"

"A new acquisition!"

"A gift to the city!"

"He's the heir of eleven doges!"

"Twelve!"

"And he's brought the deed to the family palace!"

"We have to escort the Count back to the Piazza for his official reception! Hurry! There's not a moment to lose!"

"No! Stop!" he protests, tears coming to his eyes. "You can't do this! My — my life's work — !" But they have already bundled him out of there, not even time to glance back, and now they go clattering down the marble stairs and out onto the busy Bazzetta, past the diapered Ducal Palace and the stiffened digits of the patron saints twin monoliths, racing at full tilt toward the motor launch.

"Ah! casa mia, casa mia!" exclaims il Conte Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo, his old head thrown back, pointed gray beard thrust high in the wintry wind, his eyes closed his immense dripping phallus bobbing with the tremulous ecstasy of his wide-armed embrace of this city he calls his dulce domum and summum bonum, il suo paese, bell'e buono, first cause and final hope: "My fulcrum! My feedbag! My fetish! My fenny fount and fungous funiculus! Floating fleshpot of my fancy! My foolscap, fizgig, flophouse, and fantod! My foreskin! My fistulae!" Thus, to the cheers of his strange audience there on the Campo della Caritŕ, the Count glorifies the alleged city of his birth, exhausting the alphabet in his exaltation, or at least all the F's, prompting Melampetta to bark out finally from beside the professor's portantina: "Ma, fammi il favore! Va' a farti fottere, faccia da culo! "

Which, far from arousing the ire of the Count or the crowd only draws more cheers ("Viva! Viva! Go fuck yourself, buttface!" they chant lustily, led by Francatrippa, who conducts them with a candy-striped phallus of his own, Buffetto and Truffaldino bounding gaily about the campo doing handsprings and cartwheels: "Va' a farti fottere! Va' a farti fottere!") and incites the old graybeard to even loftier flights of grandiloquence: "Ah, Venezia! Mother of all my pleasure and profit!" he cries, striding about manfully, gripping his phallus with both hands to keep it from slapping the pavement as he goes, the onlookers ducking and scattering to make room for the monstrous engine. "Father to my glorious misdeeds! Uncle of my wild oats, sown and unsown, mother-in-law of my exile, and second cousin of my throbbing green-isled imagination! Great aunt by marriage of my melancholic flatulence! Grand nephew of my noble erections and half-sister to my sweet ruin! Venezia! Veni etiam! Your errant prodigal has indeed come again! And again! Clasp me close to your bosom as a scrotum clasps its restless testes, let me wander no more! Those of us who have changed our homes and pleasant thresholds, and sought a country spreading its legs beneath another sun, as a great Roman publicist was wont to say, ought to have our heads examined, if we can find them, stuffed up our irrespective rectums as they waywardly are. No, no, propria domus omnium optima, or oppressa, or obstupida, and/or words to that effect, home is where the hard is, he who lies everywhere, gets laid nowhere, eheu, eheu, sic passim!"

This oration draws more applause and cheers ("Bravo! Viva la faccia!" they shout: "Ipse dixit! Viva il Magnifico!") which the Count acknowledges by leaning back and raising his glitteringly decorated organ on high like a bejeweled flagpole, others in the assembly at the Accademia landing stage responding in kind as their constitutions permit, the monumental Madonna of the Organs for her part reaching into the scarlet folds of her glistening vagina with both hands and pulling out her ovaries which she proceeds to flick on their fallopian strings at the Count's shaft like little pink yo-yos. Her face, true, the professor has to admit, does, except for the hollow eyes and the fringe of ink-black beard peeking out from under her chin, resemble that of Giovanni Bellini's "Madonna of the Small Trees," but the rest of her is more like an oversized walking anatomy lesson, an elaboration of sorts upon the traditional Madonna of the Bleeding Heart, in that not just her heart (which is bright green) is outside her body, but all her glands and organs are dangling from her generous flesh like Christmas ornaments: her spleen, kidneys, liver, brains, bladder, stomach, larynx, pancreas, and all the rest, her lungs worn like water wings, her mammaries like shoulder pads, her intestines looping from her rear like a long spongy tail or a vacuum sweeper hose.