Robert Coover: Pinocchio in Venice

"How's that, signore? You have lost something?"

"Ah! No, I said, I feel fine! Another round, my friend — while we wait!"

Though he shouldn't, of course. Thinking out loud like that, always worse when he's had a couple, but the magic of this moment and this place has him utterly entranced, and he wants to prolong the moment, to reach, if he can, the very dizzying heart of that enchantment. This, this, is what I have come back for, he thinks, sipping the pale grappa with its stalky aroma, its harsh green flavor, faintly reminiscent of winter pears and vanilla, his father's favorite drink. The old man brewed it himself, aging it under the stairs in an old oak barrel black with antiquity, and every week Maestro Ciliegia, as they called him because of his notorious love for grappa and the cherrylike nose it conferred upon him (he can't remember his real name, it doesn't matter), would drop by with a little something for them, some fried pastry or a basket of figs or a few scraps of firewood, and his father would invite him in then for "a drop of riserva," as he called it, dignifying it in that way, Maestro Ciliegia protesting all the way to the barrel. Then they would pull the broken-down table up to the cot and the rickety old chair up to the table, and commence a game of bazzica with cards as soft as empty pockets, or sometimes a chess match with little pegs and splinters only they knew how to identify, Maestro Ciliegia reminding his father each week that if he would only bring the table over to his workshop he would put a new leg on it, his father replying each week that the last time he visited that place he got pregnant, he would rather live with a ruined table than a ruined reputation. There would be more trips to the grappa barrel and sooner or later a piece would seem to move by itself on the chessboard or a card would magically turn up twice in one round, the joking would turn to insults, the words to pokes and punches, and soon the room would be a shambles, both men scratched and bruised, their ears and noses bit, their buttons torn off and their wigs scattered, and then from somewhere under all the rubble, his father would say: "Another drop, Maestro Ciliegia?" "One more spot perhaps before I go."

The Gambero Rosso landlord, yawning, fills his glass once more. Is this a gift or has he just asked for it? In either event, he thanks him, returning his yawn and feeling somewhat abashed. What is happening to him? It is as if the force of his reason and of a discipline which he has practiced since youth has suddenly abandoned him. In his time, it is true, he was young and raw; and, misled by his greenness and his admittedly peculiar identity crisis, he blundered in public. He lumbered about, he stumbled, he exposed himself, he offended against caution and tact. He has written about all this in The Wretch. But he renounced vagabondage and rebellion and idle amusements, and so, through discipline, has acquired that dignity which, as all the world insists, is the innate good and craving of every moral being; it could even be said that his entire development has been a conscious undeviating progression away from the embarrassments of idleness and anarchy, not to mention a few indelicate pratfalls, and toward dignity. Indeed, he is one of the great living exemplars of this universal experience, this passage, as it were, from nature to civilization — from the raw to the cooked, as one young wag has put it — or, as he himself has described it in his current work-on-hard-disk in the chapter "The Voice in the Would-Pile," "from wood to will." And now, suddenly, that voice has returned to haunt him, as though to avenge its long confinement by reclaiming, as his own powers weaken, its mischievous autonomy. Nor is that the worst that has beset him. What is most alarming is that — pain, sorrow, and the door on top, as the porter might say: if it's not one thing, it's another — he is turning back to wood again. It is poking out now at his knees and elbows, he can see it, bleached and twisted and full of rot, maybe even a worm or two. He can also see the osteria landlord standing in front of him with his camelhair coat over his arm and a long piece of paper. He stares up at him quizzically, lowering his sleeves and pantlegs.

"You said something about paying, signore, and to show you the door."

"Ah." His grappa is gone, though he doesn't remember drinking it. His stomach is not turning to wood, it feels like a soft collapsing bag, burbling indelicately now from under his napkin. "Of course." He stands, bumping the table, but luckily there's nothing on it left to spill. He'd rather sit for a while longer, it's quite peaceful here really, but he's too humiliated to admit it. "That's exactly what I said." But he can hardly say even that. Said, he said "said," he heard that part himself, it's still ringing in his mind, but he is not sure about the rest. He is reminded, as he stands there weaving from side to side, of certain particularly odious faculty luncheons of the past. Yes, I could use a digestive walk, he thinks, hoping he is only thinking it. He reaches for the bill, but the landlord seems to be waving it about. He pauses, studying its movements, the patterns (he has always been particularly skillful at discerning patterns), then, with an abrupt lurch that sends his chair flying, snatches it: "Got you!" he laughs. But he can't read it. Must have the wrong glasses on. He asks the landlord to explain it to him. "Just the general principles," he says with a generous wave of his hand. It seems he is paying for all three suppers. The figure is astronomical. Of course all sums expressed in Italian lire are astronomical. You have to take off three or four zeros, he can't remember which. And his hotel bill will be credited, the landlord says. That's his understanding. The landlord removes the requisite banknotes from his wallet, which the professor seems to have given to him for this purpose. There is apparently just enough to cover the bill, which is a good thing because he left his credit cards and traveler's checks back at the hotel. His good friends had not wanted to pay the bill for fear of implying he was not at liberty to have all he wanted to eat and drink, the landlord explains, handing the empty wallet back. It might have been an insult to a gentleman like himself. "I would not have minded the insult," the professor says grandly. He has one arm in a sleeve of the coat but cannot find the other one. The other sleeve, that is. He knows where the arm is. "In fact, it would have given me — bwrrpp! — scusi! — considerable pleasure." He has found the sleeve, but now he has lost the arm. This is because the first arm is in the wrong sleeve, or anyway that is the landlord's interpretation of the dilemma, an interpretation that proves functional if perhaps overly simple, for no sooner is it enunciated than both arms and both sleeves appear in their proper places. Whereupon a certain magic ensues: the professor finds himself, seemingly without transition, out in the snowy campo, all alone, bundled up in his coat and muffler, the Gambero Rosso behind him locked and dark, and such an immaculate silence all about that he can actually hear the snow falling upon other snow.

He is lost. Lost, frightened, bewildered. And freezing his bark off. Somehow he has left his German fedora with its little bluebird feather in the headband back at the osteria, and his head, bald as an egg and becoming, alas, even balder, went completely numb under its peaked bonnet of snow before he discovered it. He brushed away the snow and wrapped his frozen pate then in his Andean llama-wool scarf, tying it under his chin like an old woman's shawl, and that has left his flimsy chest exposed. Ah, what misery! His calfskin gloves are gone, he knows not where. His twice-imported Italian shoes — he has always joked back in America that he liked to keep both feet in the homeland — have proven useless in this weather, leaving his feet soaked and aching from the cold, the thin leather taking a no doubt terminal beating. He might as well be barefoot. Hadn't someone he once knew died of fatal chilblains of the feet? Forsaking his pride finally and throwing himself upon the charity of his fellow creatures, he has rung a doorbell in a deserted campo, crying out in his despair for help or a warm hat or at least the loan of a city map, only to have a window open up and a bucket of water, or what he hoped was water, be thrown on him as if he were a potted geranium. Others in the square shouted out obscenities from behind darkened windows like a hostile audience from behind the footlights, even threatening to bring the police, and he screamed back at them, calling them all a lot of bloody assassins and murderers, shrieking and squawking in an altogether undignified manner unfortunately, overtaken momentarily by a fit of blind fear and rage. Or perhaps not so momentarily, for his heart still feels caught in the grip of that icy fist as he goes staggering through the white night, up and down the steps of bridges he cannot even see, across barren squares and through frighteningly narrow defiles, pursued by a fierce wind that whips around him from all directions, his spectacles frosted over and his wet clothes crackling now with ice crystals, unable to remember very clearly anymore exactly what he's looking for, even if he could see it should he miraculously come upon it. Something about a blackened doorway. But under the blown snow, all the doors look blackened. He feels utterly abandoned in a world without mercy or even logic. How he wishes he had left the osteria together with his "dear friends," as they liked to flatter themselves, instead of lingering for that last glass of grappa!