Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

The crescendoing sobs are interrupted by a sudden bang as the bubble explodes like a firecracker, splattering the faces of the Madonna and Child, and indeed some of the painting's fiery background as well, with pink bubble gum. A breathless quivering hush seems to grip the little wedding chapel. Even the music has stopped. The Virgin, blinking through the impasto of gum as though through thrown pie, pushes her hand deep into her son's body, then pokes out the eyes from within, waggling two long rosy fingers at her awestruck audience like insect feelers. Her own mouth gapes, webbed by moist streaks of gum, and the damp windy voice wails: "Birba d'un burattino! Are you not afraid to die?"

"That does it! I'm off!" cries Capitano Spavento del Vall'Inferno, letting go his side of the gondola chair and wheeling round. "You can only carry friendship so far!"

"No! Stop!" the old pilgrim gasps, twisting around in the dropped chair, heedless of the wrenching and splitting within, but the mercurial Captain, sword drawn and striding as though into battle, is not to be held back. He charges full tilt at the doorway, now overgrown with blue brambles, slashing at the wiry thicket with his sword, and — FFRISST! — there is a sudden brief blaze in the shape of Captain Spavento, gone before seen. His ashes hang like a shadowy afterimage for a moment, then settle silently to the floor.

Everything is changed. The curtain of blue bramble has vanished. The door is closed. The smooth bare walls, encrusted with precious marble the color of fresh air on a dull day, are merely walls now, holding in the solemn silence. The fifty Pennacchi portraits gaze down from above like the sober voyeurs they have always been, the altar lamps have stopped swinging, and the ancient painting displayed there is once more flat and lifeless, the Christ child's stare a bit askew perhaps with two dark holes where the fingers poked through, but otherwise, except for a streak or two of sticky pink, a work abused only by the passing centuries. Slender white tapers have been lit in front of it and throughout the chapel, and there is everywhere a great profusion of fresh-cut flowers, in all the pews and on the walls and statues and columns, in the pulpits and windows, and heaped up on the high altar like whipped cream and spilling into the choir galleries and through the ornamental balustrades and down the stairs and center aisle to where, clustered around the ancient figure in the gondola chair, the puppets press together in benumbed terror, their collective gaze riveted upon the strange person in the snowy white shift, her azure hair flowing down her back like a bridal train, sitting now, her back to them, on one of the two carved and upholstered stools before the altar. The other stool is empty.

"Su da bravi, Burattini!" comes a voice from the front of the chapel, a voice he knows all too well, soft as canary down and sweet as panna cotta. It is the voice that changed his life, and its seductive power is undiminished. He feels his resolve crumbling like hot favette dei morti , the favette she always baked for him when he came home from school or mischief, saying tenderly as she popped them in his mouth: "You see how I love you, ragazzo mio? But if you want to stay with me, you must always obey me, and do as you are told!" With pleasure, mammina mia! Oh, with pleasure! Che bello! Che bello! "Do you see that poor half-dead puppet there?" the voice continues now. "Take him up gently, bring him to me, and sit him on this cushion here beside me. Do you understand?"

"No!" he rasps, shaking off the terrorized puppets when, as though spellbound, knees rattling and eyes popping, they reach for him. It takes all his courage not to surrender to her immediately, such is the lure of her great power to one so powerless as he, and so desperately lonely, but he knows that, having lost everything else, the withholding of that surrender is the only expedient left him if he is to attain the end, or ends, he seeks. Or indeed any end at all, beyond abjection's shoddy but, alas, appealing joy

"What are you muttering between your teeth?" asks the voice up at the high altar. "What is the matter now?"

"So you lied to me again," he wheezes, speaking up as best he can. "You are not dead, after all."

A deep echoey sigh flutters through the little church, making the flower petals tremble and the candles gutter briefly, and setting the stupefied puppets' knees to clicking like wind through a cane brake. "It seems not," admits the voice, so wistfully affectionate he almost cannot bear to prolong his separation from her.

"All these years of mourning my precious mamma's early and tragic death! 'Poor Fairy! The victim of a thousand misfortunes and too poor to buy a crust of bread!' Do you remember your little joke? I have carried the harrowing sadness of it with me all my life! All that I have done or have not done has been confused and tempered by it. Even now, my final years have been devoted to its bewildering mysteries, it is why I am here, why I have suffered so — and it has all been just a farce! Ah, Fatina mia! Why have you done this thing to me?!"

"Because idleness is a dreadful disease, my boy, of which one should be cured immediately in childhood: if not, one never — !"

"Oh, yes, yes, I've heard all that before! You always were the good little fairy, weren't you? Society's little helper! Civilization's drill sergeant! But I was free! I was happy! And you, with your terrifying heartbreaking parade of tombstones and canon, put strings on me where there were none. You cheated me! All my life," he squawks, lifting up the twisted splinters of his arms and rattling them at the blue-haired figure on the bridal stool, "I have been nothing but a puppet!"

Slowly, though she keeps her back to them still, her head begins to rotate on her shoulders, and the waxen face of the little Bella Bambina of old appears with her strangely rigid smile and rolled-up eyes, bringing a startled gasp from his friends, pressed tight about him. "I love you," the Bambina stage-whispers, piercing him to the quick with her terrible intimacy. "Stay with me! You shall be my little brother, and I will be your darling sister!"

The sight of the Bambina, the dearest playmate he ever had, gruesome as her games could sometimes be, makes his arms drop and would bring tears to his eyes if they had not all been spent, like everything else. How good she was, or seemed to be! How tender, even if she did leave him hanging all night in the oak tree, swinging in the wind like a bell clapper, her loving care! And does she not offer him what he now most wants: just to play again? "I have thought about your little white house, Fatuccia mia," he croaks at last, summoning up all his strength to resist her, "and how much pleasure you promised me in it. Yet when I tried to return to it, you took it away and put a tombstone in its stead! I went crazy with grief for a while, but I learned my lesson well."

"So my medicine really did do you good?"

"I can truthfully say, though I have been diligent, obedient, truthful, and circumspect, I have not had a wholly happy day since. I might somehow have found my way back to one little white house or another, but I was always too afraid. Pleasure was death and dissolution. That's what you taught me. Fun was fatal. No. I will not play with you."

"My child, you will be sorry," sighs the Bambina as her grinning head recommences its slow grim turning. "You are very ill…" When the next revolution begins, the head is joined by the upper torso, swiveling at the waist, and this time it is Bluebell. "Hey, wow, teach, you don't look so hot!" she laughs, snapping her gum in her bright white teeth. She reaches up with both hands to pull away the lacy shift and out pop her spectacular young breasts like fat rabbits from a hat, bringing fresh gasps of amazement from the puppets surrounding him. Those breasts, last seen on the Apocalypse, are dizzying alive, the scintillating rosettelike nipples, lightly gilded, throbbing as though with excited little heartbeats of their own. "You need some nourishment, Professor Pinenut! So, why don't you scoot your cute little boopie-doops up here and grasp, as you like to say, my 'civilizing principles?' "