Robert Coover - Pinocchio in Venice

He emerges, dangerously, into an open square, no place to hide, the huge wings paddling away overhead — but in the nick of time he spies a low underpass, and he ducks down it. He can hear his pursuer roar with alarm ("Vaffanculo!" he seems to hear the beast cry) before slamming into the walls and bringing down chimney pots and roof tiles in its frantic climb. The sottoportico, shorter than he might have hoped, leads him to another clumsy bridge, the bridge to a riva edging a canal full of docked boats sheeted with white snow, the riva to more streets and side streets past metal-shuttered shops and snow-topped heaps of garbage bags, the streets to other bridges and courtyards and passageways and squares, while, just above and behind him, the pounding wings bear down relentlessly, his assailant losing him and finding him in all these mazy turnings, as though it might be a game it's playing, like a cat toying with a trapped mouse. The old professor is not exactly running, but he's not walking either, it would be hard to say what he's doing, but he's picking them up and putting them down, all four of his wasted limbs at once and not in any special order, his head ducked for fear of having it snatched away, his torso bouncing along erratically like unwieldy luggage.

But then he finds himself again in an open campo, probably one he has been in before, and though his mind is racing down the next alleyway, his body is on its knees. It just does not want to go any farther. He crawls dutifully ahead, carrying through in the old way, holding fast, hauling his resistant carcass through the snow like a dull plow, a thing heavier even than his abusive old father was the night he had to wrench the old brute, hallucinating wildly on grappa he had made from seaweed, fish eyes, and ship wreckage, and fermented in his erstwhile host's digestive juices, a grappa too good, he kept blubbering insistently, to leave behind, out of the giant fish's belly. Which is where he is again, swallowed up as one sucks up an oyster and waiting to be digested, only now his daddy's not here and there's no escape. He can hear his assassin flapping fiercely in the wind above him, circling round as though, at last, to pounce. Well, let it, whatever it is, come. He curls up against the wall. It is not the wall of the painted fire and steaming kettle, but it will have to do. He can go no further. His opus magnum will remain unfinished. Our worst fears, he thinks, are always justified. He is going to "sleep like the Pope" all right, but not the present one. Above him, what looks for all the world like a flying lion is thrashing about in the snowstorm, roaring lustily and batting the snow away from its eyes with its massive paws. But it may be his own dizziness, his poor sight, his indigestion which delivers to him this vision. "PAX TIBI — wurrp! — EXCREMENTUM MEUS!" the fiendish creature bawls: "Hic! — REQUIESCET CORPUS TUUM!" and, its great ghostly wings churning up the snowy air theatrically, it circles a bell tower once to commence its murderous descent.

But then something quite unexpected happens. The winged monster dips and swerves erratically as though confused or blinded by the snow and (are its eyes crossed?) heads straight for the bell tower — or else the bell tower, which has been floating treacherously in and out of the whirling snow, sways suddenly and leans into the storm; from the stricken traveler's position in the nauseous pit of the orchestra, so to speak, it is hard to tell. The lion lifts its paws and spreads its wings, but too late: there is a thunderous earth-shaking ear-splitting clangor, followed by a frantic scattering of astonished pigeons, fleeing groggily from they know not what, the light fall of stone teeth and feathers upon the little campo, and a series of mighty reverberations that sound and resound through the frosty night as though a giant cymbal has been struck, a throbbing metallic clamor that seems to set all the bells in Venice ringing.

Behind the repercussions rippling out into the night, the professor can hear, up in the campanile where the din was launched, a great moaning and puling and thick-tongued cursing in the Venetian dialect: ''You turd! Rotto in culo! Oh! Ah! I'm dying! You head of a prick! I piss in your mother's cunt! Oh, my head! My ears! Shut up, will you, sfiga di cazzo? By the leprous cock of Saint Mark, you asshole of God, I'll have you melted down and turned into souvenir gondolas! Where are my teeth — ?! Oh, you whore! I come on you, you sack of shit, on you and all your dead!" And then, head in its paws, tail adroop, the pale beast goes flapping off sorely into the night, growling its oaths and imprecations, disappearing into the blowing snow and the fading tintinnabulation of tolling bells.

Left alone, the abandoned wayfarer, huddled miserably against the wall, accepts this melancholy tolling as his own knell. To be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully is more than simple endurance, he knows, it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph, but he also knows such triumphs are now beyond him. He just wants to cry. There are always endings, but there are not always conclusions. If you're out of candles, as his father used to say with a tired shrug, enh, you'll go to bed in the dark. These simple truths come to him, along with all the memories. But what is it he remembers? His own life or the film of it, the legends? This life of his: it has been like a kind of dream — but who was the dreamer? He cannot think. His brain is frozen. He tries to remember his own famous dream, the one that made him what he is today, that might warm him up; but all that comes to him there under his helmet of iced scarf is what he saw that awesome day when she spread her knees as though to reveal to him his fate. Ah, dear lady, and where are you now? He looks up, hoping for another miracle, even another flying lion, company at least. But there's only a ghastly white all around him as in the house of the dead. Except for the wall itself: a flaking ochre red softly reminiscent of the Trecento masters like Paolo Veneziano. It encourages him that he can remember Paolo Veneziano. I'm not dead yet, he thinks, or perhaps says, his cheeks pressed against the wall, I can still remember Paolo… Paolo What's-his-name. What was I thinking about? Already gone. Over his head, he sees now, there is something written. It seems to say "JESU." He's a sucker for words, he'll read anything, afraid of missing something if he doesn't. Might be a message, a final message (all my life, he thinks, I've been waiting for a message). He clutches at the snow-rimmed bricks of the wall, dragging himself up. Not "JESU," but "JUVE." And, yes, he brushes away the snow, here's the "VIVA," written like two birds in flight, their wings crossed in happy omen, and next to it the other one: "ABBASSO LARIN METICA!" — "Down with Larin Metica!" "Viva abbasso!" he cries. He laughs. He knows where he is now. He's almost there!

He scrapes the crust of ice and snow off his glasses, glances round. Right! There's the bridge, there's the narrow underpass! The joints of his knees are locked up, frozen solid, he has to totter ahead stiff-legged, rocking from side to side, his eyes watering, his nose running: but, yes, through here and turn right — and there it is! The long fondamenta, now a ghostly white and daintily pricked out with cat tracks, the stately palazzo rising through the eddies of swirling snow, the blackened doorway! He scrambles over the last bridge, more or less on all fours, volere č potere, his mind thawing now with glowing anticipations of pillows and eiderdowns and his own flannel nightshirt, his liniments and antacids (his stomach, he realizes, is in a ferocious turmoil), his computer, his books, his Mamma (he will find that climactic metaphor, maybe in fact he has already found it!), his earplugs and blindfold and sleeping pills and his hot water bottle. The thought of a hot water bottle alone propels him down the last stretch from the bridge to the door.