Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

"Nailing — ?!"

"The joints and hinges were all gone, nothing left to pin new limbs to, it was the best he could manage."

"It's all right."

"It's kind of fun!"

"Of course, back flips aren't so easy any more."

"What I miss most is not being able to clap."

"But we do a double act now."

"We've worked up some new lazzi, Pinocchio, you wouldn't believe!"

"The old Siamese twin gags, you know! With a new angle, as you might say!"

"With a bit of a twist!"

"Not everyone's got a woman's head in his crotch!"

"Not everyone's got an asshole behind her ears!"

"But… but the others — ?" he asks uneasily. "Brighella? Colombina — ?"

"Ah… well…"

"You know…"

"Where there's smoke…"

"It was a real horror show, friend…"

"Mass pupicide…"

"Poor Arlecchino… they used a hacksaw on him…"

"They drilled him full of holes…"

"They soaked him before throwing him on the fire…"

"You know, to make him burn longer…"

"His screams would have broken my heart, if I had one," sighs Lisetta from inside Pulcinella's pants, as Pulcinella reaches in to wipe the tears from her eyes. "Fortunately I've always been a bit wormy in that part…"

"At least you did what you could for him, dear Pinocchio!"

"Well…"

"At least you didn't turn your back on your dearest friend!"

To his horror, just as he is about to reply, in all honesty of course, as is his wont, if not indeed his onus, he suddenly sees the same flash of blue that he saw then: she is sitting out all alone on the bow of a battered old No. 1 waterbus lumbering up below on its way to the Accademia landing stage, seemingly oblivious to the excreta showering down upon her, gazing up through it as though in stunned disbelief at the professor, crowned ludicrously in Pulcinella's peaked coppolone, his nose hanging limply over the railing, still in its silky sheath, like that stupid character in the World War II graffiti. His heart plummets. "Forgive me!" he whispers in his pain and confusion as she slips past. His mortification is complete. "My… my love — !" And then she is under the bridge and out of sight, and he is, though numbed by shock and utter despair, under way again, the procession setting forth once more, Count Ziani-Ziani having just pulled up his crimson breeches and declared: "As the great Zan Bellini, painter of the famous 'Incontinent Fortune,' shown relieving herself blissfully from the side of a gondola with a granite blue globe in her fragrant lap, used to say, 'Forbirse el cul col sasso tondo, xe la piu bela cossa de sto mondo!' The loveliest thing in this world that's known is to wipe your ass with a round stone! And now, fellow citizens, it is time, as they say, to jump, having blessed it, the ditch! The city babbos await us! So soak your beak and let it leak, our solemn round proceeds!"

In a cramped busy campo like many others they have visited on their pilgrimage to the Fourteen Urinals of the Cross, the procession of Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo and the Madonna of the Organs (New Acquisition) is interrupted suddenly in the middle of one of the Madonna's bizarre purification rituals by the clamorous headlong arrival of the Winged Lion of Saint Mark, flapping in either to join or to assault the party, but, already well in his cups, seriously misjudging his approach, catching his forepaws on the tent top of a makeshift costume stall and somersaulting heavily into a marble wellhead, roaring out an alarming stream of drunken obscenities all the way. A human butterfly, pirouetting decorously on the convex lid of the wellhead, is sent flying when the yowling Lion slams into it, stone crashing upon stone, while from within the collapsed stall come cries of "Rape!" and "Earthquake!" and "Help! Murder! It's the Red Brigade!"

"Che cazzo — ?" bellows the Lion in his querulous stupor. "By the Virgin's verminous and fulsome cunt, I'll kill the turd who did that! Oh, I am fucked! Get me something to drink, you cretinous pricks! I am dying!"

The three servants hastily set the old scholar down in a quiet corner of the little campo, warning him not to run away or get into mischief or talk to strangers, and rush off to attend to the raging Lion, who seems prepared to eat the poor crumpled butterfly if he can just get on his feet again and if he hasn't lost all his teeth in the calamitous fall, Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo ordering that an entire barrel of wine be poured down the old fellow's throat as a kind of holy libation in recognition of the once-glorious empire and designating him Honorary Chaircreature and Despot of their entourage for their triumphal march into the Piazza San Marco.

Left alone, the professor, crushed by sorrow and chagrin, buries his veiled nose in his lap, the condom's red tip hanging forlornly from the end like a bloody drip, and fretfully twists his silvery watch as if he were telling his beads, gripping the skittish thing with both hands in the old way, before he had fingers, thinking bitterly: what a paltry bauble time is! He's had more than his share of it, and what good has it done him? He can't even see the face of it. All he can see is the shock and disappointment on Bluebell's innocent upturned face as she passed below him back at the Accademia bridge, a famous phrase from his early writings returning now to haunt him: "The bridge between It-ness," he wrote in The Wretch, elucidating a concept first introduced in Art and the Spirit, "and I-ness is character, whether staunch or frail, artfully made or haplessly jerry-built, and that which flows below is not Time, but the ceaseless current of implacable Judgment!"

As Buffetto and Truffaldino ported him down the broad wooden steps of the brdge, it recalled for him an earlier descent from another bridge, that night he first arrived here, full then of hope and joy and something like intellectual rapture, the city, silenced by snow, awakening in him an almost mythic sense, as it felt at the moment, of being a witness to eternity. He had plunged into the alluring labyrinth of the magical city that night on his damaged but still functional knees as a lover might enter the body of his beloved (speaking poetically of course), experiencing that rare creative communion between the spirit and the body that prophesied a happy conclusion to his final work-in-progress and thus to his long exemplary life as well. And now all that noble joy had come to this. That reckless eager plunge into the masked city had been his undoing. As they looped back toward the Piazza San Marco, whence this newest misadventure today began, he felt caught up in loops within loops, his fraudulent life a mad skein of recurrent self-deceptions, and he wished only, the tears streaming down the craquelure of his cheeks, to make it safely back to his room in the Palazzo dei Balocchi and to hide his terrible face there forevermore.

Around him, meanwhile, the Count and his followers celebrated with wine and song and wild abandon. Drums beat out a processional march as they wound their way from the site of one vanished urinal to another through the dreary Venetian labyrinth, the Count squirting his monstrous phallus on them all from time to time as though dispensing holy water, the Madonna waddling about seductively with her exaggerated Trecento dehanchement, wagging her intestines, her organs jouncing and bobbing like bangles, teasing passersby to give her parts a little squeeze. Feet went by with eyes and noses on the soles, an immense penis passed with semen dripping from a white mask at the tip, there were copulating rodents and horn-blowing bottoms and birdlike creatures with phallic beaks and pretty young novices with devils' faces winking from their bare behinds. But to the tormented professor, hunched over in his litter chair, they were all mere mourners at a wake, their revelry a dirge, their bawdy songs a last lament. Cast down in final defeat, he could only stare darkly at the recovered watch in his trembling hands, sinking ever deeper into that pit of inconsolable grief, regret, and bitter self-reproach into which he had fallen, or, as it were, been pushed. Most of the flesh had fallen away from the backs of his hands, and he noticed now how the grain stood out like reticulated tracery, the softer parts of the wood eaten away. It was as though its encasement of flesh had fed upon it like lichen. He tried to pick off a scabby piece of skin, but the pain, as ever, was harrowing, as if it were determined to hold fast, to carry through, even if he were not.