Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

Then, as the mad ride continued, he began to find an anchor in that very motion. The earth was flying about them everywhere and they were being severely shaken still, but it was as though they were becoming one with the very forces that, so powerfully and so primordially, shook them. This: this is truth, he realized, with such a jolt of recognition, he knocked his head on her chin and set off another giddy burst of whooping and squealing: "You made me swallow my gum!" she yelled, and then suddenly they were upside down again and hanging on to each other for dear life. All these years, he thought as they plummeted, then shot upwards again, instead of riding with it, he had been trying to stop it in artificial freeze-frames, made lightheaded by anything that twitched, but now, suddenly, he began to feel most centered, most contented, when most ferociously flung about. "I feel alive," he gasped, as, headlong, they looped and dived and spun, "truly alive, for the — ahi!! — first time since the day I–I… grew up!" It helped of course to be held by and holding Bluebell and to be pillowed in her lovely bobbing breasts, whose nipples, he saw now, and this was just another amazing revelation among many, were exactly like the rosettes of Ca' Dario across from the Gritti Hotel where he used to take his grappas, but it was more than the breasts, more than the hugging and squeezing and bouncing against one another, and the glorious fragrances that wound him round, it was a true mystical communion with the Other, the most ecstatic and visionary moment in his life. And, well, even if it was just the hugging and the breasts, et cetera, one thing he knew without any qualifications: whatever it was, he didn't want it ever to stop

They are lost again. Truffaldino, whimpering, wants to go back to the palazzo, but Buffetto reminds him that, as they are lost, they don't know where that is either. They have just crept over another bridge, having almost missed it on the other side and fallen in, and now they find themselves in another open space in fog too thick even to see each other if they lean away. They set the portantina down and, holding on to each other, feel about them in the fog. The whole purpose of this hazardous journey is to procure a certain mask for the professor, who, though he plays no part in the servants' deliberations, is determined to carry on, per amore o per forza, as the saying goes. The plan is Eugenio's. "Leave it to me, Pini," he'd said with a sly knowing smile. "Yes, yes, tomorrow night, I can see it all! Trust me!" And so here, wherever it is, they are, preparatory to his night of nights, whatever the deceptions, whatever the costs.

On the Apocalypse yesterday, as he grew accustomed to the violent motion, he tried to speak to Bluebell about his affection for her, indirectly of course, joking abstractly about the laughable folly of old men and referring to certain scandals that had happened at his university over the years between professors and students, never to him needless to say, though who, ever, dear Bluebell, is wholly immune, and telling her about a movie star he once knew, quite famous, who kissed him once — for the cameras, of course — in a very special place, finding it difficult as he spoke to keep Bluebell's wildly bouncing breasts out of his mouth. This seemed to make her giggle, so he let it happen more and more until, his more reasoned approach abandoned, he was lapping at them and gumming them and scrubbing his nose on them quite shamelessly. She laughed at his clumsy gaiety, gasping as the Apocalypse whipped them about that she always thought of him as such a stuffy old bird, and he tried to correct this impression by bragging about running away from home all the time and about his bad-boy past in the Land of Toys. "We wuh' weawwy — shplurpp! glop! — wicked!" he squawked around his mouthful of convulsive breast. He offered to take her places in the motor launch, to Torcello or Chioggia, for example, wherever, it didn't matter, he was just hanging on, hanging on to everything, making desperate plans for the future, and she asked if they couldn't go out on an American Express "Venetian Night" package tour instead. "We'll go dancing! And to the Casino! No museums, no churches, just fun! We'll take gondolas! With singing gondoliers! It'll be wild!"

And then suddenly the ride ended and she carried him back to the Piazza and, the official ceremonies over and his portantina gone, deposited him in the palazzo doorway in the Sotoportego del Capello, took her sweater back, rang the bell, gave him a little kiss on the top of his head, popped a bubble, and said: "Well, in case we don't see each other again, Professor Pinenut, have a happy Carnival!"

He was shattered. He felt like he felt whenever the Fairy died. He turned, once he knew who he was, to Eugenio.

Police whistles blow not far away and there are shouts and the sounds of scuffling. "Per caritŕ, gentlemen! What are you doing — ?! A poor holy man! Ow! In nomine excelsis and de profundis gloria, have you no shame?" cries a gravelly old voice from out of the fog. "What ficcanaso has sent you here? Eh? What bad tongue in partibus infidelium has misled you? Ih! Ih! Ih! Mercy, gentlemen! A frustulum of indulgence, if you please! A bit of nunc dimittis and ite, missa est! I am no thief! Upon my faith! See, here is my money! Take it if you wish! I have made vows of poverty! Look at my hair shirt! Per amor del cielo, let me go and I will forgive you! See, it's only an old tail, not worth the novena of spades, as they say! Who would want to steal such a thing! Uf! Be reasonable, gentlemen!" There are heavy booted footsteps and the sound of something or someone being dragged, but the sounds seem to come from every direction at once. And, as suddenly as they began, they cease.

"Signori carabinieri…?" Truffaldino calls out hopefully into the murky silence. There is no reply. The little servant starts to cry.

"What — ? Who is that malcontented guttersnipe out there?" comes a waspish voice from out of the coiling yellow fog. "Unbutton yourself, you blubbering turd!"

"It's us!" wails Truffaldino. "Help! We are lost!"

"Lost! Hah! We should all be so lucky!"

"I'd give an arm and a leg to be lost!"

"Easy for you to say, dearie!"

"Please! We've walked all the way from Saint Mark's — !"

"Oho! The little pap-sucker walks! He talks! He's a bloody miracle!"

"He's probably even got one of those lumpish things between his head and his feet — what do you call them?"

"Let it all leak out, piss-brains, we're on burning coals…"

They take a step toward the voices and faces materialize around them in the fog. The old scholar recognizes them — the pink-cheeked sun, the angel with the cherry-red lips, the camel, the skull, the freckled face with red hood and yellow braids — "Hey! It's the mask-maker's!" cries Truffaldino. "We've found it!"

"It's found us, more like," mutters Buffetto, then falls silent as the towering figure of Mangiafoco with his fiery eyes and his rampant black beard like flung ink crowds into the doorway, filling it, his head half lost in the swirling mists high above. "Ma che cazzo fai — ?" he roars, making the masks rattle on the wall. Peering down through the fog with his glowering eyes, he spies the old professor. "Eh! What's this — ?!" He bends down to look more closely. A big toothy smile cracks his plaster-stained lips. "Oho! So this is our great Casanova, enh? Ebbene! Enter, signori! I have just the faccia for the little ciuco!"

The masks titter furtively as they enter, making the collective sound of mice scurrying through the walls. The old scholar is fully aware that he is the object of some ridicule. He doesn't care. There is not time left in his life to care. This American student will be his, whether the foolish milk-fed gum-popping creature knows it or not. Nothing will stand in his way. Not his long unyielding life with its heroic devotion to truth and art and virtue. Not his terrible fear of confusion and humiliation. Not all the "civilizing" precepts and ruthless pieties of his despotic blue-haired catechist. Nothing. "Nothing!" he tells the walls of brightly colored faces, all the red ones, white ones, green, black, leathery brown, and Venetian gold ones, the flesh pink ones and those of dreadful azure blue: turchino. Cassiodorus called this blue the "Venetian color." It was the color of the darkness which came over the sun at the time of the desolation of the Gothic kingdom. The color of his own desolated life. No longer. Eugenio has promised. "Tonight!" he declares, twisting round defiantly in his portantina.