Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

Yet how delightful it had seemed at first! He had stood for a moment in the radiant little square in front of the Gambero Rosso, one of those enchanting and forsaken places which lie in the interior of Venice as though within a secret fold, accessible only to intimates, his own interior aglow still from the generous infusions, thinking how right he had been to come back here! Here to this "vast and sumptuous pile," as a famous militarist once called it, this "peopled labyrinth of walls," magical, dazzling, and exquisitely perplexing, this "paradise of exiles!" She who called herself the Serenissima. Only hours before, he had been sitting in his lonely office back at the university at the end of the Christmas break, struggling to come to grips with the realization that his epic tribute to his beloved shepherdess and cynosure, thought concluded, was not. The "final" chapter was not the final chapter, after all. Something was missing. It was, like the stark New England landscape outside his office window, too cold, too intellectual, too abstract. Too empty. In his intransigent pursuit of the truth he had somehow neglected — virtue, truth, and beauty being, in the end (which was where, in the book at least, and in life too no doubt, he was), one and the same — the senses. Whereupon he was suddenly struck by a most remarkable vision, sensuous yet pure, of this very place, which his mentor Petrarch, who had preceded him here as though to show the way, rightly called the "noblest of cities, sole refuge of humanity, peace, justice, and liberty, defended not so much by its waters as by the prudence and wisdom of its citizens," and which appeared to him in that moment in flesh tones as delicious as those of Giorgione or Tiziano. He reached out and, seemingly without transition, by the miracle of flight, here, his hands still outstretched, he was! He felt so happy just then that tears came to his eyes, tears now frozen on his face and pricking him like vicious little thumbtacks, but then warm and titillating as they ran down his cheeks and nose, and as purifying as the snow frosting the delicious little campo, turning the stone cylindrical wellhead in the middle into a kind of large pale lantern. "Ah! Che bel paese!" he cried aloud. If his knees hadn't been hurting him so, he might have knelt down and kissed it.

He had easily discovered the route back to the hotel and set off, expecting at every turn to meet the bent back and broken beak of his lugubrious guide, returning for him, and meanwhile enjoying his digestive walk, as he thought of it, rejoicing in the luminous spectacle of Venice in the snow and laying plans for the morrow when he might encounter once again — in the flesh, as it were, the unblighted flesh — his old friends Giambellino and Giorgione, Titian and Tintoretto, Carpaccio, Lotto, Veronese, and all the rest. For it was with them it all began. Once all the other beginnings were over, that is. Now he is better known for intellectual works of a tougher order such as Sacred Sins or Art and the Spirit, his devastating indictment of theatricality and amateurism in the plastic arts, but it was through the great masters of the Venetian school that his scholarly career, then as an art critic and historian, originally — as they say in the Other World — "took off" (here only the pigeons would understand such an expression, and they would not mean the same thing by it), with his seminal studies on illusionism, transfiguration, and the motif of the ass in Venetian paintings of the life of Christ.

He was first drawn to the study of art, being self-taught in this as in all subjects, by a painting on the wall of his father's little room under the stairs. His father was a poor man, unable to afford even a fireplace or a kettle, so he had painted one, or had had one painted, on the wall, with a fire lit under the kettle that looked just like a real fire, a cloud of steam coming out of it that looked just like real steam, and a kettle lid so convincing he nearly splintered his fingers trying to take it off before he discovered the illusion. Locked in often by his loving but, it must be said, ill-tempered father, and with little more to eat than pear cores and his own hat, he had ample time to study this trompe l'oeil, learning something therefrom about the function of appetite in scholarship (he has often argued that more interesting than the things that are studied by mankind is the infinite catalogue of things that are not), the implications of the wall (surfaces are not passive!), and the power of raw color upon the imagination: he found, on bitter days, he could actually warm himself by that painted fire, and indeed, even now, it might comfort him and still the rising panic in his heart.

For he does not want to die. Not yet. Not with just one more chapter to go. But the choice may not be his. He is nearing exhaustion. He no longer knows if he is walking or crawling. He cannot feel his hands and feet. The snow is everywhere, in his face, down his back, inside him as well as out — snow and the deep night, for the world is weirdly white and pitch black at the same time, just as his mind has gone blank and his spirits horribly dark. Somehow he has made a wrong turn. Probably more than one. He climbed that last bridge, expecting to see the old palazzo and its charred doorway, all warmly lit up and waiting for him, but it was the wrong bridge. He retraced his steps, but soon they disappeared under the fresh snow. He tried to find his way back to the Gambero Rosso, but the fold had closed. So his search became more random, more frenzied. His knees began to give way. Passages beckoned that, like his father's trompe l'oeil, were not ones, and he smacked his face on them. Or they let him in, then dead-ended in mazelike traps occupied by prides of mad squalling cats. He hobbled painfully over slippery bridges that led only to locked and darkened doors. He cried out for help, got doused, reviled.

Now he wants to stop but he cannot, he is too afraid. It is as though he is running not toward something, but from it. If he bumps into something, he jumps back as though struck; if he stumbles toward the edge of a canal yawning out of the swirling white night below him, he feels pushed. All the old childhood traumas have returned and he recalls with renewed terror that night in the woods when he was set upon by murderers who chased him, caught him, knifed him, hung him, a night that has haunted him all his life and haunts him now, driving him through this befuddling network of alleyways and squares like the pursued heroines in gothic movies. Except that he lacks the heroines' youthful strength. When he was just a little sliver, as his father liked to call him, he used to be able to run all day like a hare before hunters, to zip up and down trees, scale cliffs, leap hedgerows at a single bound — indeed, on that "Night of the Assassins," as it has come to be called, he delayed his capture by leaping a wide canal of filthy water the color of a cold cappuccino just like these, his would-be killers falling in — patatunfete! — when they tried to follow — but now, far from leaping one of these wretched ditches, he cannot even pull himself over their bridges. He can barely walk. He is feeling, oddly, seasick. His head is pounding. He is beginning to turn in smaller and smaller circles.

But wait! What was that — ? Something behind him? He stops dead in his tracks, stooped over, his knees knocking, sour breath tearing from his ancient ill-made lungs, afraid to turn around and look. All about him there is a deep hush, almost as though the whole island were frozen up, holding its breath, he can hear nothing but his own desperate snorting and the tormented creaking of his knees — and then suddenly a terrible flutter as of a thousand assassins comes roaring up out of the night, swooping down over him and away, and he screams and nearly jumps out of his skin, what's left of it. As his scream dies away, he can hear them, or it, circling back, so, terror reviving him — this is real! — he takes off down a narrow calletta, praying only that the little alley doesn't end in watersteps. Whatever it is that's after him — just a bevy of desperate pigeons caught out in the snow, he tells himself, but he doesn't believe it, pigeons aren't that stupid, for this kind of stupidity it takes a Ph.D. - chases him right down it, he can hear it, or them, bearing down on him, bellowing mightily, or maybe cursing (it sometimes sounds like belching), wings slapping and scraping the crumbly old brick walls, sending loose chips raining down, rattling the drawn wooden shutters, jostling flowerpots out of window boxes — no wonder this place looks so beat-up!