Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

This glorious sight, for which, so recently, he was ready to throw away honor, dignity, life itself, steals his breath away, what little there is left for theft, and he feels riven (literally: he can hear the stifled creaking and snapping deep inside) with an unendurable yearning, not to fondle them — what would he fondle them with? — but simply to rest his dying head there, to hide himself, as someone has said, on the breast of the simple, the vast, the ineffable… "I see," he rattles drily, hanging on to his chair arms with both gnarled fists, "you are still wearing my ear."

"You better believe it, Daddy-o! It's my good luck charm!" She reaches up to finger the shriveled black brooch, making her breasts wobble teasingly. "So, hey, what'll it take to trade you for the rest, prof?"

"Certainly, you deceitful ogress, more than those puffed-up things you are flaunting so, a mask like any other. Put them away! The dead ear suits you better!"

She looks crestfallen, deflated, the rosette nipples withering to something more like smallpox vaccination scars, and he almost regrets his own deceit, hoping his nose is not giving him away. "You're right, teach," she says finally, perking up a bit, "I could use a good dressing-down! I've been really rotten, I admit it! A dirty dog! C'mon! You can treat me as rough as you please! I deserve it!" She hesitates, gazing at him hopefully ("That's a pretty good offer!" one of the puppets whispers in his ear, and another asks: "Do you think we could all have a go?"), but when he makes no move, she turns away sorrowfully and begins to rotate once more.

When she pivots around again, it is with her whole body, though the stool at the top of the steps remains in place. He is not quite sure how she does this because his gaze is fixed on the creature appearing before him. This he has not been prepared for. It is his mamma, to be sure, she could be no other, but she has changed. At first he thinks she must simply have aged, he hasn't seen her since the last century, but then he catches a glimpse of the Bambina's wicked smile, Bluebell's milk-fed complexion and fluorescent eye shadow, and hints, too, of a Hollywood starlet he once knew, maybe more than one, a colleague at university, several students, his interviewer on a television talk show, the doctor who removed the peculiar growth on his nose a year ago and prescribed a long voyage, an admiring museum curator who confessed to a platonic affection, his traveling companion in the limousine to the Nobel awards in Stockholm, even (the stray blue hairs on her chin perhaps, the ridge of her forehead) the blue-haired goat he passed on his way into Attila's gut. These features, or suggestions of features, seem to exist not simultaneously but sequentially (now it is the Bambina's waxen complexion he sees, Bluebell's gum-smacking cherry-lipped grin), in a kind of moving montage, flickering across her face like unstable film projections. It is like being under water in a Hollywood pool with naked starlets swimming by and his eyes full of chlorine. Or like trying to put a half-forgotten face together with a half-remembered name.

"Deceitful ogress — ?! How can you say all these horrible things about me, my child?" she asks with a forlorn sigh, and it is as though she has reached in, penetrating easily his fragile defenses, and pulled the little lever that floods his chest with guilt and regret, just as she always did in the old days. "That I cheated you or was unkind to you or abandoned you or misused my power or misled you or indeed did anything all your life long but love you with all my heart? 'Assassina,' you called me tonight in front of everybody! How could you do that, you wicked boy? Civilization's lackey! An avatar of Death! The Great Destroyer! Really! And, 'a son pregnant with his own mother,' what an idea!" She seems almost to be crying, but he cannot be sure, her eyes do not stay in one place long enough. Those fleeting traces of the familiar are now blurred by the strange. Claws on her fingertips. An iron tooth. Smoke curling out her nose, which seems to change shape with every breath. He has seen a scar grow, cross her brow, and rip vividly down her cheek and throat, then as quickly fade and vanish. A moment ago, her ears, peeking out from under hair twisting like thin blue snakes, seemed to be pointed, but now they look like his mamma's once more, the ones he snuggled against when she let him nuzzle his nose in her azure tresses, then — and now again — silky and soft as a passing cloud. "I am just a poor lonely fairy who fell in love with a stupid puppet's good heart and wanted to, well, make him beautiful. And happy." An eye slips out of a socket, she pushes it back. Or perhaps the socket moves to cup the errant eye. His fascination is such that he begins to worry: is this yet another seduction? "You are right about one thing, however. I have always wanted to be a good fairy. I was never one to suck navels or sour the cow's milk. I loved humans and wanted them to love me, even if they were pretty silly and didn't last long. I wanted to live among them in their nice little towns and villages, I never cared for the bog life, but somehow, even when I was being good, I was always scaring them. Maybe I had a way of doing things too suddenly, or maybe it was the holes in my armpits, I don't know, but they were always very nervous around me. I tried my best for a few hundred years, but I never managed to fit in. It was a kind of racism, as you'd call it now, I suppose, and probably I had grounds for complaint, but we fairies, as you know, are not much given to such tactics. We merely poison the wells, smash a few eggs and babies, and infest the beds with rectum snakes. My own response was to try to die. Dying seemed to carry a lot of weight with humans, I thought it might help. But it wasn't in my repertoire, really. I gave it all I had, but I just couldn't get the hang of it. Which disheartened me all the more. And then, just when my spirits were lowest, you came along…"

"I see it now," he says, not too appropriately, inasmuch as his tired old eyes, struggling in vain to fix the Fairy's face, which, if anything, is growing increasingly fluid and monstrous, have lost all focus and seem to be swimming in his head. "If dying carries weight with humans, so, if not more so, does mothering. If you couldn't win them over one way, you'd try another. I was just another trick to play, your surrogate, your convenient dummy, your marketable changeling."

"There! You're being cruel again! What have I done to deserve such an ungrateful son? When you came back here to our island looking for me now, I was so happy. I thought we could be together again. In the old way, like we used to be before you got changed and went off into the world. But you have disappointed me, my boy, slipping back into all your old habits, falling in with unwholesome companions, breaking promises, acting on impulse, running away, getting in trouble with the police, refusing advice — and now, to have degenerated into the theatrical arts — I ask myself, what was it all for?" As she scolds him, the floating ambiguities fade and she resolves into his mamma once more, firm, exasperated but loving, intimidating, beautiful… "And just look at you now! Flesh would no longer even stick to such a shameless ruin! Couldn't you at least keep your warm wraps on? How many times did I tell you — ?"

"It wouldn't have made any difference. Sooner or later, I would have ended up like this anyway. You didn't do a very good job…"

"I know, and that is why I have forgiven you." She sighs, settles back, casting a last quick loving glance at him before her features again melt into a pool of possible features, an inconstancy that now spreads to the rest of her body, causing all the edges to waver and blur. It is as though the idea of her is too big for her canvas. "The trouble is, though I always tried to be a good fairy, I wasn't quite good enough. In the end, proud as I was of the proper little man I'd made, I found I loved the naughty puppet more than I should have and was afraid of losing him, or at least his good heart, and couldn't quite let him go. So I left just the tiniest seed inside. A bit of the sneeze, as you might say, that got held back. I didn't think it would do any harm. And this way, I felt, we had a kind of bond between us…"