Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

When they got back to the Palazzo, the three servants having unstrapped him from the Count's giant penis and carried him gingerly up to his apartments, they found a glass coffin in the hallway outside his rooms, the rooms themselves stripped of his personal possessions, and a wizened Third World monarch, still wearing his crown, sleeping in his bed. They poked and prodded the ancient potentate but he seemed to be brain dead, so Buffetto and Francatrippa, peeling off their human masks to reveal themselves as his old Gran Teatro dei Burattini colleagues Brighella and Capitano Spavento del Vall'Inferno, dragged the royal person out onto the floor, while Colombina, whose head had popped up to replace Truffaldino's severed one, prepared now to remake the bed. "Yes, it's me, dear Pinocchio!" she laughed when she saw him staring up at her. "One of my most successful roles ever, though it hasn't been easy! I had a hard time keeping the Director from grabbing at something that wasn't there!" And she lowered her breeches to show him her hard hairless pubis, slightly cracked, knocking on it — bok! bok! — with her wooden fist. "Come in!" Brighella shouted ("In emergencies, I had to use everything from clothespins to broom handles!" Colombina was laughing), and the Captain muttered ominously: "Cazzo! Il tristo nominato e visto!"

"What are you doing, you idiots?!" screamed Eugenio, storming in in his disheveled Queen of the Night costume, no doubt red-faced under all the smeared paint. "Why is His Royal Puissant Majesty lying on the floor in his nightshirt? Are you mad?! I come back to powder my nose and freshen my lipstick and what do I find — ?!"

"Easy, easy, direttore," urged Brighella, hastily pulling on his noseless Buffetto mask. "There was someone in the professor's bed — "

"Of course there was someone in his bed, you cretinous scoundrel! He doesn't live here anymore!"

"No? But then — ?"

"Traitor!" the abused pilgrim squawked feebly from where he lay. "Monster — !"

"What? Ah, so there you are, Pini! How on earth did you get here, dear boy? I couldn't believe my eyes! There you were, in the middle of the crowded Piazza, quite the center of attention, and then suddenly a puff of smoke and: vanished! Into thin air! I thought they must have eaten you up! How ever did you manage that?"

"Murderer! See… what you have done … to me — !"

"What's that? Speak up, Pini," Eugenio complained, turning to primp in a gold-framed mirror, "I can't hear a word you say! As for your room here, if that's what you're mumbling about, I regret to say, your credit has run out, dear old chum, and I must ask you to leave. No hard feelings — "

"Run out — ? Credit — ?"

"Yes, credit — did you think it was Cuccagna around here? In the real world, things cost money, my dear, as a Nobel Prize-winner you should at least know that much!

"But all my savings — !"

"Your bank accounts are as empty as a Venetian well, your credit cards are used up, your properties sold or seized, your royalties bequeathed to, eh, charity, there's simply nothing left."

"My retirement funds…?"

"Tsk tsk. I am afraid they're gone, too, Pini. You've been a very expensive guest!"

"You took even my — ?!"

"Everything, carino mio. I am nothing if not thorough, as the Little Man himself would have told you long ago." Applying fresh ruby red lipstick, Eugenio puckered his lips in the mirror and winked coyly at himself. "And, please, I didn't take those little baubles, you forgetful old thing, you gave them to me. Still," he added, adjusting his wig, then turning away from the mirror and snapping his purse shut, "for old time's sake, if you stop fussing, I will let you stay on one more night. I'm certainly not coming home tonight, I'm having the most delicious time, so you or this grand imperial nabob here may use my rooms for the time being, whichever one of you promises to be continent. "

"But — but what about tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow is a lifetime away, amor mio. We will take off our shoes, as we say here, when we come to the water! Those of us who still have them, that is. Now, now, don't put on such a face! I do love you, you know. And just to prove it, I have a little present for you! You there without the nose! Go to the library immediately and bring me what you find there on the Cinquecento papal secretary! Snap to it, you unsightly rogue!"

Almost before he had left, Brighella/Buffetto was back, cradling an all-too-familiar portable computer. "That's mine!" the old scholar croaked as the puppet-servant set it on his old writing table by the window. "You've — you've had it all the time!"

"Have I? Well, how should I know?" snapped Eugenio petulantly, turning away from the window where he had been throwing kisses and hallooing in his teasing falsetto to someone down in the Piazza below. "I buy and sell things all the time, that's what I do. I can't keep up with all the details! Now, really, I must get back to my party. We only live once, you know! Be a good fellow and don't disturb the other guests! And get something on, dear boy, you look a fright!"

"Wait! The — my student — how did — ?"

"Ah, sorry about that, Old Sticks. I'm afraid she stood you up."

"No! I mean, what did she — did you — ?" But Eugenio, with a flamboyant swish of his brocade skirts and jangling his jewelry like little beggars' bells, was gone, squealing: "Here I come, you naughty boys, ready or not!"

So he would not know. Perhaps he did not want to know. Knowledge, he has written somewhere, leads to the abyss. Knowledge is the abyss. How proud he had been to take that notorious path and, beating his breast for all to see, to walk the perilous rim, failing to perceive the true abyss opening up behind him with every footstep he took! One look back, and — !

And, well, here he was.

On his writing table sat the most recent instrument of his own daily acts of self-deception and — destruction. The very sight of it filled him suddenly with an indescribable loathing, a hatred of what Eugenio had done to him, of what he had done to himself, and of his long wretched life so wrongfully spent. Feeble as he was, he lurched to his feet, desiring to reach the thing, and it was then that he discovered his feet were gone. The clatter he made on the marble floor alarmed the puppets.

"Ahi! Be careful, dear Pinocchio! You're splintering!"

"There's not much holding you together!"

"It's the climate, you know! You must — !"

"Take me… over there!" he gasped.

"What? To your table?"

"You wish to write, dear friend?"

"You should be in bed!"

"Now! Please! While I'm still able…"

Reluctantly, Colombina rolled his leather swivel chair over to the table and Brighella and Captain Spavento set him in it, propping him up tenderly with goose-down pillows as they'd always done. "Great artists must always work when inspiration strikes them, I suppose," Colombina said dubiously, pulling a blanket off the bed to tuck around his shoulders. It took every last ounce of strength left him, but, summoning up all his rage to assist him in the final thrust (it didn't help that the infernal chair was on casters), he managed to push the computer out the open window, feeling as he did so the weight of a century lift from his frail weather-beaten shoulders.

"Free at last!" he rasped bitterly.

There was a sickening k-thuck! sound and then screams and shouts rose up from the square below. Oh no. He had forgotten about the Carnival crowds. He gripped, gripped by dread, the sill and, wishing not to see what he feared he must see, pulled himself forward to peek over, the three puppets squeezing around him to gape over his shoulder. At first he thought he had struck a woman. There at the mouth of the little underpass beneath his window, she lay lifeless, limbs outflung, wearing the fallen computer like a large square cartoon head. But then he recognized the tender butterball knees splayed out beneath the tossed brocaded skirts, the plump bejeweled hands. Blood pooled out richly around the computer, as though the Piazza were flooding from below. This time there was no mistake, Eugenio was as dead as he could be.