Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

Overhead, meanwhile, wisps of fog, like ghostly fish, twist and curl around crimson banners announcing the celebrated native son's Gran Gala top-of-the-bill performance tonight as the "Star of the Dance," and the stage toward which Buffetto and Francatrippa are rolling him is tented in strings of colored lights and decorated, even to a golden hoop, like the center ring of a circus. Eugenio as the Queen of the Night goes before them, switching his behind provocatively and calling out in his reedy falsetto: "Permesso! Permesso! Largo per il Ciuchino Pinocchio! La Stella della Danza!" On his back, Truffaldino, or whoever he or she is, does handstands and backflips, as the well-stung wayfarer, dismally at one with his freshly baked outer image, is paraded on his creaking carriage, to the hoots and cheers of the riotous multitudes, across the great square, which, notorious metaphors aside, is something less than the "sumptuous drawing room" his perfidious friend had led him to expect, though he is all too aware that his expectations have always been led less by the likes of Eugenio than by his own mad unrestrainable fancy, and that he deserves whatever he gets, insofar as getting and deserving have anything to do with each other, not much. Wretches are born, not made. Don't count on character. The grain goes with you, I-ness is an illness.

Thus, with each fateful turning of the cartwheels, the venerable scholar's most abiding convictions fall away as lightly as those flakes of pizza crust, a truer tougher mask, kicked loose now by Truffaldino's acrobatics on his donkey back. It doesn't hurt. Neither the acrobatics nor the collapse of his precious ontology. He recalls (even as, on all fours, he is hauled through the bright lights and pressing mob) that solitary moment in his darkening office back at the university in America, when, left all alone on campus in the backside of the festive season (yes, he was feeling sorry for himself, a sure spur to folly) and despairing of a happy conclusion to his current, perhaps definitive work, he had been struck by the vision which propelled him here. He had been staring out of his office window, meditating upon his singular relationship to the Blue-Haired Fairy, as intuitively clear to him at that moment as had been the Trinity or the hypostatic union to Saint Thomas Aquinas, but also as resistant to formulation within language, a resistance which had thwarted his hopes of closing his epic tribute to his beloved preceptress with his latest chapter, just completed, "And The Wood Was Made Flesh and Dwelt among Us." He would have to try again. One more chapter. And the image that came to him then, as his thoughts floated back to that revelatory moment here on this island all those years ago when abjectly he dropped as though felled to hug, in joy and in sweet repentance, the Fairy's knees, no longer bony and childlike as when he'd played with them last, but now full-fleshed and maternally solid, was one not of absence and desolation (this was what he saw out his office window) but of generosity and abundance and throbbingly intense beauty. He seemed to be looking between her virtuous knees as between the two famous columns on the Piazzetta (perhaps two dead trees in the yard topped and amputated, had helped bring this image to mind), gazing in wonder upon that succulent composition of plump Christian splendor and lacy Oriental fantasy which, from a different angle and diabolically transformed, confronts him now, and he felt suddenly as if he were peering, his gaze drawn toward the dark labyrinth of the Merceria twisting its way into the distance beyond the radiant Basilica, into his very source. Yes, yes, the truth must be seen, he reminded himself then, the good felt (his hands, he saw, were pressed against the office windowpane, he was licking the glass). And so it was that, only hours later, as though compelled, with Petrarch's cautionary Epistolae seniles under his arm to curb his almost childish excitement (and what had happened to that book? he must have left it on the plane…) and his Mamma, seeking resolution, in his hastily packed bags, he had found himself on his way here, visions of climax dancing in his old wooden head like Bellini cherubs.

No cherubs out here tonight, alas. Climax is happening without them. Everything but, however: he is encircled by a crazed menagerie of the impossible, massed up hundreds deep. The racket is deafening. There are bands playing, whistles blowing, flashguns popping, fireworks crackling, and the costumed revelers, the most terrifying of them wearing Pinocchio masks of their own, are dancing about drunkenly and shouting out his name: "Evviva Pinocchio!" "It's him! Č proprio lui!" "This is gonna be fun!" As he rolls through the bedlam of the square, lit up bright as day, he scans the crowds in vain for a friendly face, even the hint of a friend behind a face. Not even the Count or the Madonna, perhaps dead or chased off after all. Ah, this, this, my poor dear Fox, is the devil's very flour, he laments as paper streamers and confetti flutter overhead like tossed seasoning, and I am in it

"Yes, you are truly buggered, my tender friend, becco e bastonato, and worse to come," Buffetto, who is perhaps not Buffetto after all, murmurs in his donkey ear. "But, as we say here, 'Zoga el coraggio a l'ultimo tagio!' Play your nerve at the final serve! At the last hand, old man, take a stand!"

He had hoped for a moment, back in the darkness behind the Palazzo dei Balocchi, that Buffetto, Francatrippa, and Truffaldino might be coming to his rescue, or at least to whisk him off, as planned, to his assignation with little Bluebell, but this was not to be. "Ohi, direttore, what a terrible fight, we are dead!" they had cried, staggering up the alleyway on crutches, all bruised and bandaged, Truffaldino crawling along on all fours, and Eugenio, slapping his palm impatiently with a folded fan, had snapped fiercely: "If not, you soon will be, you worthless louts, unless you come with the news I want to hear! The hour is late! Quickly! What has happened to the Count!"

"We apprehended him, master!"

"We seized him!"

"We surrounded him!"

"Good!"

"But he escaped!"

"Escaped — ?! I warn you — !"

"Tried to escape, direttore! We pursued him!"

"Ah!"

"But he got away!"

"What — ?!"

"But we caught him again! By the very throat! What a battle!"

"You can't imagine, direttore! That retinue! We were up against witches and wiverns and hundred-armed fiends from outer space!"

"Gryphons and ghouls!"

"Hellhounds and harpies, master!"

"Yes, yes, and so — ?"

"Enh, what could we do against such an army?"

"They were merciless!"

"They drove us back!"

"They what — ?!"

"Then we drove them back!"

"Aha!"

"Into the sea!"

"The sea?"

"Well, into the canal!"

"Very good! And — ?"

"They had gondolas waiting!"

"They were swept away before you could blink an eye!"

"But surely, mere gondolas, you must have been able — "

"Motorized gondolas, direttore! One minute they were all drowning, the next they were roaring away!"

"Into the fog!"

"You couldn't see them — !"

"You let the Count get away, you imbeciles — ?!"

"No!"

"No! We, uh…"

"We…?"

"We chased him in the motor launch!"

"That's it!"

"Aha! Then finally you — "

"They sank it with their submachine guns!"

"They sank the motor launch — ?!"

"We fired back and sank the gondolas!"

"It was frightful, direttore! There were bodies everywhere!"

"The canals were full of them! You could walk right across without getting your feet wet!"

"The gondolas couldn't move even if we didn't sink them!"