Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

A moment ago, crossing the square, the old professor, much honored for a fleshly condition he now abhorred, that condition's alleged wisdom not excluded, had the impression, trusting that fleshly wisdom as he knew he should not and thinking, as usual, about himself, about his present fate and how he got here, all on his own, in the old way, bad company, drifting attention and all that, that he knew everything now. He was, once again — oh, how he weeps! — mistaken. For, with the platform's slow turning amid the mounting lunacy of the Piazza, he has seen his love again, somber amidst the maddened merrymakers, dressed in mourning and wearing his ear like a memorial medallion on a long gold chain around her neck, only the whites of her eyes showing and her head slowly spinning on her shoulders as though in derisive parody of his revolving platform. Around and around it goes, seven times, then stops and goes the other way. And so, though her curls are still mostly blond, he knows her now, a new and bitter knowing that makes all other knowing the merest trifle. He feels his heart shrink to the size of the deathwatch beetle gnawing at it. He waits for the platform to bring him around again that he might, though it be his last breath and unheard in the thunderous furor, cry out his loathing of her, that all the world might know her for what she truly is: assassina!

"You all know his story, he's held nothing back, his life as they say is an oaken book, he's logged it all! You know how he came to this island all those years ago, brought here then by donkey cart, soon to become a donkey himself, headed for the circus life as the Star of the Dance, trained to play dead, jump through a hoop, and dance the polka on his hind feet! You know how he lamed himself, was sold to a peasant for his hide, and thrown into the sea to drown, but was rescued by a school of fish that nibbled away his donkey flesh, revealing the puppet still within like the stick in a lollypop! Well, we had hoped to have the radiculose little peckerwood here in his glorious person tonight — in the bark, as it were — but, by juniper, wooden you know it, as you can see, the little sucker has done it again!'"

Whoops and howls muffle the hour being struck hollowly up on the illuminated Clock Tower, a nebulous blur in the high rolling fog, as the platform slowly wheels him round again toward the Blue-Haired Fairy, she who, whipping him with guilt and the pain of loss, has broken his spirit and bound him lifelong to a crazy dream, this cruel enchantment of human flesh. In effect, liberated from wood, he was imprisoned in metaphor. Even his shabby career has been a sham, for, all these years, he has really only had an audience of one. Millions have read him, only because they too were all puppets like himself, hapless creations of the insidious Blue-Haired Fairy. But, though on his last legs, all four of them, trapped in pizza dough and confronting, he knows full well, an imminent horror, he will at last repudiate her. He will, though crushed by chagrin and sorrow, be free! He will do, dying, what he — but what's this — ?! Too late! She is gone! Vanished. And her being gone is worse than all the things she has done to him, a final devastating punishment. She has lured him to his terrible fate, then mockingly abandoned him. His heart, still there after all, withered raisin though it be, is agonizingly wrenched, his eyes fill with tears, his mind with a blackness deep as the midwinter night beyond the fog

"But alas, my hale, hellish, and hearty friends, there are no little fish here tonight, it is we who must eat the little ass out of his sorry plight! We must be of good mouth and do the little shoe, as they say, we must lick the poxy platter clean! Don't be shy! Dig in! You know the saying: If you touch wood, it's sure to come good! So come now, my ostrich-bellied butchers, and put your fangs into it! A capriccio! He's as good as bread, as they always said, da cima a fondo! Ammiratelo! And judge for yourself! Al passo! Al trotto! Al galoppo, you crapulous maniacs! Let the feast begin!"

The guest of honor, unable even to flinch in his cumbersome infrumentation, can only gape in wide-eyed terror at the mayhem that erupts at the edge of the stage and gradually closes in upon him, as the revelers, many with painted faces or their masks flung aside, their eyes aglow with a bestial appetite, their sharp teeth bared, battle each other for first bite. There is only one pizza pie. There are thousands of snapping and laughing and frothing mouths. Eugenio stands rooted in the crazy melee, a bit alarmed by the anarchy he has unloosed, but giggling so hysterically he seems about to pop his corset stays, his colorful wig bouncing gaily on his sleek round head. The professor catches only the briefest glimpse of all this — and then he is upside down, there are hands grabbing at his legs, trying to tear them from his body, he is dragged one way, then another, is tossed and thrown, he sees someone eating his papier-mâché mask, another with her mouth full of half-chewed camellias, others rabidly biting each other, and then he is lost in the sea of rending teeth. It is not like the time with the little fish. This time there is no sensation of his body wanting to rise from within. No delicious nibbling, no thrilling tingle, no ecstasy of release. And the fish at least knew when to stop.

"In the old days, I never even knew little piss-pockets like this existed in the city, but probably they were here all along, dark and filthy as an old whore's cunt, the swampy cold creeping up through the cracked flagstones like death sticking a finger up your asshole, and so quiet you can hear a pigeon shit," rumbles his companion, stretching his stony wings briefly and fluttering them to shake the damp out. The rattle they make bounces off the crumbling brick wall facing them and then slowly dies away through the black labyrinth of canals in a fading echo that sounds like dry cackling laughter. "But now I know better. I know now this is the real Venice, has been all along, ever since that first desperate wanker, pissing himself with fright, nested here like a marsh bird a couple of millennia ago — no, fuck all the famous pomp and grandeur, the bloody glorious empire and all the tedious shit that went with it and made such strutting ninnies of us all, all that was just for show, a kind of mask the old Queen put on to hide her cankers and pox pits, her true face was back here all the time, just like the devil's true face is on his arse. And you know what, my little cazzo buffo? It's fucking beautiful. I love it!"

The old Lion takes a long meditative suck from the grappa bottle and hands it to what remains of the senescent professor, now huddled, shivering, in the great beast's gritty fossilized mane, and naked as Saint Mark himself at the arrest of Jesus, nothing left but a few bloody tatters of flesh and flakes of pizza dough still clinging to his wooden frame. The grappa is cheap raw stuff, but, vile as it is — "Good for clearing the passages," the Lion growled, pressing it on him, "burns the moss out of your throat and kills off the vermin that crawl in…" — he soaks it up, fuel against the bitter nighttime chill, deadener of the ache in his heart. What's to happen next, he does not know. That he is still here at all is a miracle in itself, short-lived as its effects are apt to be. And, except for his "new feet," as he has always called them, the ones Geppetto made for him when the original ones got burned off and now nothing more than raggedy gnawed-off stubs, he is still amazingly "all of a piece," as his old friend Captain Spavento del Vall'Inferno put it, helping to smuggle him out of harm's way, Colombina responding: "True enough, compagno, but a piece of what?" But then, no sooner rescued and he was in trouble again, terrible trouble, and now they are on the run, having escaped here to this secluded little corner after flying hastily out of the uproar of the Piazza just before the police arrived to arrest him. It was Brighella's idea: "Get him as far as the Teatro Malibran! We'll take it from there!" So here they crouch, the decrepit puppet and the venerable marble Lion, outlaw and monument, pressed together in the wet shadows and dense eery silence under the unadorned pediment at the back entrance of a derelict theater with a plaque on its wall commemorating another wayfarer of mixed fortunes who allegedly once lived here, the two of them sharing a half-liter flask of his winged redeemer's fiendish spirits and waiting for he knows not what.