Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

"Ah, while you are down there, dear boy, would you care to suck my lecca-lecca?"

"Eugenio — ?!"

"But of course! I don't know who you thought I was, sweetheart, but I am supposed to be the Queen of the Night!"

"I–I've been through so much I can hardly — !" His bewilderment was such that he could not even see, he felt numb and dry-mouthed, as though his senses were falling away with the rest of his bodily parts, maybe that wild ride had done more damage to the lignified mush in his brainpan than he'd thought. Only one thing was clear in all this dreadful blur. "Eugenio! Listen to me! Dear old friend! I–I know now what I want! You said I could have anything — !"

"Oh, I know. The American bambina, no? I thought you'd never ask, you wicked boy! But it goes without saying! I already have a plan!"

"You do — ?"

"Tomorrow night! I promise you! She is yours!"

And so this, this is the plan. He can feel the crust, like fate itself, hardening around him. Still, he clings, speaking loosely, his blistered arms spread beneath him, locked in stiffened pizza dough here in the meat cooler, to his one hope — absurd, abject, perverse, yet at the same time spiritual, and even, for he is after all who he is, venerable — because: what else is there left to believe in if not love? Yes, love is the word of the day, his word, his only one. Her mask shop confession rings still in his inner ear, the only sort he has left, like celestial music. She is, the sublimate of his otherwise vaporized concept of perfect beauty, all he can see. If she is expecting an ass tonight, he will, with all his smitten heart, be one.

When he saw her this morning, stretched out in her winding sheet in the barber's chair, her eyes rolled back and her blue lips slackly parted, he was not able to breathe. He had gaped his mouth, but no air entered. He felt like he was strangling. His gnarled fingers tore at the straps of the portantina. Feverish chills shook him, and guilt, dismay: Had his own demented desires done this — ?! Oh no! "I–I'm sorry!" he had gasped. He fell out onto the floor of the mask shop, bruising the patches of flesh that remained, crawled toward her. When he reached her boot, he kissed it passionately, wetting it with his tears, his nose pressed into her blue jean cuffs, then pulled himself up to hug her knees. "Oh, Bluebell!" he sobbed, abandoning all his greater learning for that simple and terrible formula, the abject confession of a stricken heart: "I–I love you! Don't die!" Gripping her belt buckle, he hauled himself up onto her lifeless body, blind to the danger of being caught in so mad an attitude, crawling over her sunken belly, her flattened breasts, pausing to weep there, his face buried in what, until a moment before, were his greatest joy on earth, shapers of his very destiny; then, using them as wobbly handles, he dragged himself on up to her precious face, ghastly in its ashen pallor, and kissed tenderly her cold lips, still faintly bubble gum-perfumed. Her lips moved beneath his lips. They stretched into a smile. A miracle! She opened her eyes, sighed, gave him a little smack on his behind, and said: "Now, now, teach! Be nice!"

He tried to speak. He could not. He felt cruelly deceived and impossibly jubilant at the same time. She lived still!

"C'mon, don't take it so hard, prof, just having a little fun! I saw you coming, I thought you'd get a kick out of it! You gotta admit it's a great costume, right? But down you go now, I've turned over a new leaf, no more spreading it around, I'm saving it for the man of my dreams!" She lifted him by his armpits and set him down dismissively in his litter chair again, as though clearing her lap of a minor nuisance. "I learned about him from a little fat man who has, well, you know, befriended me. He told my fortune, like, and said I'm gonna meet my true love tonight! In the most scrumptious drawing room in Venice! In a mask! It's all worked out! That's why I got this crazy costume! Jeepers, isn't it romantic?! Tonight! Who do you think he is — ?"

"Ah…!" What could he say? He felt a terrible weight upon him. He had never lied before. Not like this. But if he told her the truth, she wouldn't come. He would never see her again. He gazed upon this lovely apparition, now wriggling out of her grave clothes like a beautiful thought, softly bodied forth in denim and angora, his eyes delighted afresh by each familiar curve and hollow as it emerged, quiveringly alive, and he knew, drunk with mad desire, grateful merely that, this night at least, she lived, he lived, that (his nose alone would have told him this) he was lost. "He… alas…" he wheezed, desperately trying not to tell her what he could not but tell her, "it is only…!"

"Honest, you know what, prof?" she whispered then. She leaned down to press her warm cheek next to his, so dizzying him with fragrant memories of their fairy-tale ride on the Apocalypse he had to close his eyes, and, shyly, almost breathlessly, she added: "I hope it's you…!" When he opened his eyes again, feeling her cheek still pressed hotly on his own, he'd fallen out of his portantina and she was gone.

He has been, all day, since that confession, and until the costuming began, in a state of constant dreamlike euphoria, a state unlike any he has ever known, even as a puppet. "My, how perky you are!" Eugenio had laughed when they returned from the mask shop, by vaporetto this time, the fog beginning, much slower than his spirits, to lift, and in reply he had crawled out of his litter chair and performed a feeble little bowlegged jig, bowing afterwards to the general applause. Ah, the theater, the theater! he'd thought, blowing kisses to them all. Why have I turned my back on it all my life? It is time made real, it is movement, it is passion, it is life! All the rest, the dead paintings, the statuary, the tiresome books, all those pompous "images of eternity": just so much bullpoop, as his dearly beloved so eloquently put it. Perhaps, in spite of himself, he had taught her everything she knows! Eugenio, surrounded by a flock of clucking tailors and seamstresses making emergency repairs in his costume, the seams of which had largely given way under an excess of flattering tucks and "modelings," had smiled benignly at all of this and, fluttering his long false lashes, wheezed: "Dear boy, love is good for you!"

Oh yes! Oh yes! His heart is full, as they liked to say in Hollywood. (He adored Hollywood, why did he ever leave it?) All day he has been embracing everyone who came within range, the busy servants, the doddering and incontinent clientele of the palazzo, the police officers who came with the news of La Volpe's arrest, the seamstresses with their mouths full of pins, the Omino e figli, S.R.L. lawyers, laden with briefs and deeds, and the contessa offering to give up her claim to the Rialto bridge in exchange for an efficiency apartment in the new Palazzo Ducale, the maids stripping his bed down and emptying out his closets and drawers, building contractors with plans for converting the Bridge of Sighs into a love nest, even the electricians stringing up lights outside his windows and hanging the new red banners — he has so much love in him he has felt he must share it or die! Madness! But eagerly he embraced that, too! Let it come!

And he has forgiven everybody! His mean old babbo, all the tormenters of his youth and age, the bad painters and jealous reviewers, the Fairy, the upstart department chairman who tried to take away his second office and limit his franking privileges, the student who wrote THE BONG'S LONG, ART'S SNOT — SENECTA on the blackboard, even the old Fox, his ancient nemesis, apprehended at last today and jailed, held on the charges from the professor's own denunciation. Which he now regrets. She had apparently been trying to use the money from the piracy of his Mamma manuscript to buy back her old tail, now not much more than a ratty piece of frayed rope and no longer useful even as a fly swatter, her mistake being, as the police explained it, that for the first time in her life she was attempting to purchase something instead of simply stealing it, and, unaccustomed to legal barter as she was, she had gotten into a violent argument with the dealer complaining that the price was too low for so precious an object, the dealer finally calling the police, fearing he had a lunatic on his hands. The professor tried to persuade Eugenio to intercede for her, but to no avail: "Let the old reprobate stay there overnight," Eugenio snapped reedily, scarcely able to breathe in his tightly laced corset. "We'll all be richer for it!"