Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

And then he sees her. Just behind him in the middle of the room. Tipped back in a barber's chair in a winding sheet with only her blue jean cuffs and fringed white boots sticking out, hands crossed, face waxen, eyes rolled back, lips slack and parted. Dead. Dead — ?! He feels faint. His vision blurs. He cannot breathe. There is something so dreadful about this sight that his mind will not take it in, but continues, stubbornly, even angrily (what has she done — ?! ), to contemplate a future now utterly erased: She will come to him. (She cannot.) He will have her. (There is nothing to have.) She will love him forever. (Forever is over.)

The august professor emeritus, embedded in molded pizza dough, has an uneasy premonition, as they back him into a bread oven with only his head sticking out ("Don't worry, Pini, you won't melt!" Eugenio assures him, beaming ruddily from beaded ear to beaded ear: "Just like baked Alaska! You won't feel a thing!"), that this night is not going to turn out exactly as he had so ardently hoped. He had asked for a proper philological costume, a mysterious and somber bauta perhaps with ruffle and tricorn and wig and cape — he had practiced taking short steps about his room in the palazzo, more or less erect, imagining the cape fluttering majestically yet secretively around him as he staggered along — but, as Eugenio explained when they opened up the box from the maskmaker's and, to his wailing dismay, found instead the donkey mask inside: "Now, now, a bauta mask would not even fit correctly over your… you know, your thing — and besides, there will be thousands of capes and bautas out there tonight, dear boy! How will she find you if you are not somehow different from the rest?"

"Find me? I thought we were to be alone — !"

"Well, er, of course! But not at first…"

"You mean it's some sort of masked ball?"

"Precisely! A masked ball! Is it not Martedě Grasso? What did you think? So now stop being such a little fusspot, Pignolo my darling! I promise you, it's going to be beautiful! A night you will remember for the rest of your life! Trust me!"

And so they have brought him to the kitchen, stripped him of his fine clothing, his silk suit and monogrammed hand-tailored shirt and his satin underthings, and wrapped him in layers and layers of heavy pizza dough, stuffing in prawns and olives and onions and pepperoni and wild mushrooms and tuna and golden pimientos and eggplant, with a whole garlic salami wedged up between the thighs, a stiffened mane made of wild asparagus beribboned with prosciutto curls, and with anchovies and artichoke hearts and extra cheese on the hind portions — "Best bits for last!" Eugenio enthuses, patting the enriched rump, his plump cheeks flushed with excitement and an overly tight corset (he doesn't look at all like the person the professor mistook him for yesterday, he must have been reeling still from that mind-churning ride) — and now, six cooks all helping at once, they ease him on backwards on a little trolley into the bread oven.

Eugenio is mistaken about not feeling a thing. The intense heat actually soothes his inner wooden parts, penetrating like muscle balm to the damp rot lodged deep there, but the burning dough expands around his outer fleshly remains with all the blistering ferocity of a red-hot iron maiden, piercing him through with the most agonizing pain and squeezing the breath right out of him, making him gasp and scream and beg for mercy. Even as he bawls to be let out — "Ih! Ah! Please!" — his breath seizing up in his chest and his cries emerging like raw heaving croaks ("Let him cry," Eugenio urges the startled kitchen staff with a tender chuckle, "the little ass can laugh when he gets laid!"), he has a sudden total recall of the dream he had while burning his feet off on his father's brazier all those years ago, a simple dream about leaping. At first it was only common everyday real-life leaping, over hedgerows and thorn bushes and muddy ditches — he'd only been a puppet for a little while, his legs were new to him, but already, barely able, with Geppetto's help, even to walk, he had gone bounding off, full of short-lived joy, leaping as high as he could, but running straight into, as though ordained, the nose-grabbing fist of the constabulary (such troublesome impetuousness, already on the move even as a shapeless lump of wood, where had it come from?) — but gradually, while his feet, as remote from him in his sleep as if they belonged to someone else, blackened and turned to ashes on the brazier, he felt himself in the dream growing lighter and lighter, he could suddenly leap over carts and houses and could even leave the world behind altogether, and as he rose above all the rooted trees and planted houses far below, he was overwhelmed by an intense sense of freedom, of being truly alive, his nose out of the reach of all earthly constraints and rising even higher than the rest of him rose. But then, as he soared higher and higher, he had a thought. A very simple thought, one of his first: that his freedom only made sense, only truly was freedom, if he could get back down there whenever he wanted to. With that, he began to fall. Feet first at the beginning, then head, finally just tumbling wildly, nose over heels and out of control. It was terrifying. He was screaming like he is screaming now. He fell with the awesome clatter of a sack of wood thrown from the top of a house, scaring even himself. When he awoke, his feet were gone. He thought they'd been eaten and blamed the cat.

"Stop carrying on so, Pini! You are out!"

So he is. But he is still burning up. Inside and out, baked to a turn. "Innamorato cotto," as the faces on the maskmaker's wall mocked, tittering and hooting (he didn't care) when his little American student left him all agape and askew on the shop floor, chewing gum stuck to the side of his earhole, their ridicule now becoming prophecy: an old fool literally cooked in love. His darling Bluebell, too, had prophesied: "cute as a blister," she'd called him on their Carnival ride. He is crying so hard he cannot even get his breath. His surface is bubbling and the salami between his legs has shriveled and is dripping hot grease.

"Ahi, what a nuisance you are, carino mio!" shouts Eugenio over his desperate howling. "Chetati! You are drying me up!" He sniffs appetitively at the professor's sizzling hindquarters, reaches in with a bejeweled finger, plucks a meatball stringy with melted cheese. "Roll the tedious beast into the meat locker and cool him off!" he commands irritably, popping the hot meatball in his mouth with a loud smack. "Ow! Yum! See what you get for doing someone a favor!"

He has asked for it, it is true. He'd had a terrible shock after his ride on the Apocalypse yesterday when Bluebell had abandoned him so abruptly, dropping him in the palazzo doorway like an old unwanted toy, and an even worse one when the door opened: for there, towering above him like an avenging angel, her arms folded majestically over her bosom and her face half in shadow, was she whom he'd thought dead these hundred years, returned as it were from the grave, or graves, his sister, mother, bedtime hair-raiser, drillmaster, and erstwhile benefactress: "O Fata mia! Forgive me!" he'd cried, utterly stupefied and undone (where was he?), and he had tumbled to his knees there to hug hers, sobbing out his confession together with an account of his many and ghastly trials, and not excluding his most recent truancy and all his sinful thoughts while buried in his beautiful ex-student's rosette-nippled breasts, shameless recreant that he incorrigibly was, but regretting this even as he did so: perhaps… perhaps, even with her strangely fat knees, she could help — ?