(1991) Pinocchio in Venice

by Robert Coover

"As you can see "

  "Ah, the poor little cock! I can hardly believe it! Why didn't you say so in the first place, you tedious fleabitten hothead, instead of standing out there and showing off for all the neighbors? Get in here and stop yapping like the damned fool mentioned by Saint Peter in his Epistle to the Cartesians, the one who claimed his farts were prayers and so got theophanically dumped on by what in effect he'd prayed for! Pinocchio, esteemed friend and comrade, you are welcome, for as Julianus the Chaldean once wrote in an oracle, Whoso shitteth not on the dead earneth access forevermore to the privies of the living, or sterling sentiments to that effect, and if this walking mange-farm had only announced you promptly, you would not have had to suffer such prolonged exposure to the seventy-some provisionally acknowledged elements, as well as all those not known but suspected, such as sewer gas and monads. In our family, if one can call such a bastardly plague of debauched egg-suckers a family, it has not been forgotten how you honored our great-grandsire Melampo with your eloquent silence when the poor beast, too dead to speak for himself, stood accused - and by a ruling class of lickerish unprincipled graspers born and spit - of the theft of his own meager sustenance. To wit, the odd chicken or two he'd been hired to guard. Some said that great-granddad was bent, others that he was an old prole ahead of his time, and a martyr to causes as yet unformulated, but your mute testimony shut all their pustulous faces and left the old sonofabitch to lie in peace at the bottom of whatever stinking well they dumped him in. You earned thereby our eternal gratitude, though you'll probably get somewhat less than that, memory being the garbagey stewpot of doodoo that it is, and certainly your presence, which, if I may say so in passing, seems a mite fragrant, honors my poor hovel. So come along now, good sir - and easy, Alidodo, you blundering beffardo! You must transport the gentleman with the same cunning tenderness with which God's chosen ass is said to have borne the gravid Virgin so as not to tear her gossamery maidenhead, the frangibility of which was likened by Thomas the Rhymer unto that of crisp silk, and whose rupture would have detheologized the Western World, catastrophically orphaning us all. Come, come! I'll put a fire on!"

  And thus it was that the exhausted pilgrim found shelter at last, swathed in the woolen blanket, the first thing he has stolen since those fateful grapes that landed him in the late Melampo's terrible brass-studded collar all those decades ago, and nested in sawdust and woodchips, his natural element - being, that is, the son of a carpenter. Melampetta immediately set to mothering him, digging a warm hole for him, feeling his pulse and touching his forehead with her dry nose, tucking rags and papers around him, stirring up a smoldering fire in a rusty oil drum, ignoring his protests and brewing him up some kind of pottage, scolding Alidoro for not taking proper care of him and directing the old dog in the construction of their little shelter against the winter storm, quoting various authors on the subjects of architecture, calefaction, climatology as related to nuclear accidents and flea sprays, and the general unpredictability of fate. "One never knows," she sighs, gazing down on him in wonder, "what might happen in this curious world," which is something his father might have said, though she attributes it to Alexander the Great at the time of his circumcision.

  "The Great Dane, no doubt," growls Alidoro drily, smashing up the beach chair to add to the pile of firewood. "What good does it do to put up all these walls? It's windier inside here than out!"

  "Sarcasm and parody," sighs Melampetta, "the final recourse of the mental defective. You can see, sir, what I've had to suffer all my life in this sunken and benighted haunt of farts and lechers. How I envy you your life in the real world!"

  In spite of all he's had to eat and drink, the soup - which Melampetta, as she tips it down him, compares to the curative "hand of a saint, such as that of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the Thaumaturge of the West, for example, or six-fingered Simon Magus, or Hermes Trismegistus who once lanced a boil with a mere spoonful of puree of mashed peas" - does indeed taste good, soothing lips, tongue, throat, and belly in its healing passage. The fire is crackling away in the old barrel now, turning it a glowing translucent red in spots and casting a soporific dance of light against the corrugated roof overhead. He is warm and sleepy and his bed of sawdust and wood chips is cozy and sentimentally familiar, for in such did he sleep as an urchin in a corner of his father's workshop. Alidoro, with a gaping yawn, has settled down beside him, jaws on paws. Everywhere there is a deep and heavy silence like a down quilt being laid over him. But

  "I - I can't sleep. I'm sorry - it's my my clothes "

  "Are they too tight, comrade? I thought you'd be warmer "

  "No, they "

  "He shat in them," Alidoro explains.

  "Ah, well, why didn't you say so? All the time I thought this was your contribution to the unsavory atmosphere, old gutter-guts, ambulant orchard of dungballs and dingleberries that you are. Don't you know, as demonstrated by our spiritual but restless father Marx in the full blush of his prickly Grundrisse, that he who lies down in his own shit wakes up a sight for psoriasis? So what are you waiting for? We've had to listen to your drivel all night, let's put it to some practical use. For, as Jesus once preached to Mary Magdalene whilst she was anointing his bum, thereby freeing herself from at least seven nasty boogers: 'Blessed are the arse-wipers, Maggie, for they shall behold the Eye of God!' So let's make with the holy water, drizzle-chops, out with the tongue and into the pasta, as they say, for one must taste sorrow to appreciate happiness, and, once the bib's on, one might as well lick the plate clean!"

  "All my life," the old professor whispers abashedly as Alidoro rises with a weary grunt and commences to peel the blanket away, "I have searched for meaning and dignity, striving to be true to to her vision of me." He shudders, though not from the cold. He is anticipating their horror at what they are about to find. "But I have been so so lonely "

  "Her -?" mutters the old mastiff, tugging his shoes off him.

  He hesitates. He feels emptied out, shrunken, and more vulnerable and exposed than at any time since that half-remembered day when he first took rude shape under his father's knife and chisel. It is as though his insides and outsides were changing places, leaving his heart quite literally on his sleeve, and much worse besides, yet another bitter pill. "The the Blue-Haired Fairy," he gasps, flushed with shame.

  "Tell us about it," murmurs Melampetta soothingly, unbuttoning his clothes. "Make a clean breast of it, if you'll pardon the expression, empty the sack, let it all hang out, flat-footed, hair down, and no bones. Let it fly, sir. Trot it out. Spit the toad, as Saint Tryphone of Bythinia once said to the demon-possessed daughter of Emperor Gordianus, thereby bringing on the most awesome eructation and setting the bells to ringing." She licks him gently behind the ear. "Tell us about your life, old gentleman. Tell us about the Blue-Haired Fairy "

  7. A STRANGE BIRTH

  "Men, if lucky," he is quoting himself now, dredging up from what's left (not much) of his enfeebled memory this seminal line from his current work-in-progress, or once in progress, now perhaps arrested and lost forever, for he could never, not even with a final massive exertion of his notorious will, reconstruct the whole of it, not even with the magical assistance of that enigmatic creature upon whose intervention his own quotidian progress, also perhaps about to be arrested forever, has depended throughout his long career, a career and a dependency he has just, in his gathering (and altogether agreeable) stupor, been elucidating, or trying to, and which, by means of this allusive proposition which lies at the heart of the Mamma papers (if he can remember it), he is now attempting to sum up, "are graced in their lifetime by one intense insight that changes everything. Mine was the discovery that the Blue-Haired Fairy was pretending not to be dead, but to be alive, that in fact it was not she who had given me a place in the world, you see, but I who had called her into being. Grasping this seeming paradox altered my life forever "

  "Seeming -?" growls Alidoro indignantly, lapping his thighs, while Melampetta licks at his right nipple. "If Me
la and me aren't the real thing, old comrade, then you've beshit yourself with zabaglione!"

  "Oh, I do love paradoxes," Melampetta murmurs between strokes of her long wet tongue. It feels like oiled ebony paper, gently applied. She moves into the thoracic cavity now, pushing provocatively at his knobby sternum, then works her way slowly down the hollow between his ribs past his diaphragm toward what others, having one of the things, would call their navel. "It's like being in heat in a hailstorm, a kind of - slurp! slop! - ungratifiable arousal, as though the point of it all were not larking or litters but - thlupp! - mere longing itself. I believe it was Saint Catherine of the Festering Stigmata who wrote in one of her - sklorrp! - letters with respect to her peculiar inconvenience of having to menstruate out of a rip in her left - tbwerpl shloop! - side that paradox was like a half-laid egg, speaking theologically of course, as the pious lady was always wont to - ffrup! flawp! - do, even when the curse was on her and - sluck! - bespattering her farthingales." She pauses to lick at her own coat a moment as though to wipe her tongue there, before returning to his abdomen, now tingling with the chill of her evaporating saliva. Alidoro, having nosed his thighs apart, is pressing toward his knees, panting heavily. "But this is a strange birth indeed," adds Melampetta. "A son pregnant with his own mother!"

  "It's not easy to explain," the bared wayfarer sighs, gazing up at the corrugated tin roof, where still the flames' light dances as though to tease away the distance between reality and illusion, not to mention that between (he yawns) sleeping and waking.

  "Nor to believe," harrumphs Alidoro. "Though I once had a cousin who fucked his own grandmother and so fathered his mother's half-sister who in turn -"

  "Ow -!"

  "Sorry, slip of the tongue," apologizes the old mastiff. "I think I touched wood."

  "Yes, ah it's tenderest just at those places where it's it's pulling away "

  There are these moments of sudden pain when the edges are lapped (Melampetta has earlier sent an excruciating shock up from his elbow when she peeled his tailored shirt away), but they are only momentary deflections from the immense peace that has been settling upon the ancient scholar since he put it in the piazza, as they say here, and surrendered his body and its terrible truths, until now his solitary burden, concealed from all the world, to the intimate attentions of his two friends. "Come now," Melampetta had urged him when embarrassment momentarily stiffened his limbs and made him shiver, "there's no shyness in shit, as the saying goes, a saying straight from the Textus Receptus, otherwise known loosely as the Beshitta, it speaks volumes where farts do but slyly pretend, and now we must answer frankly with tongues of our own, keeping in mind that God so loved a clean behind that, having given his only begotten faeces, as they say in French, he invented the downy angels for bumfodder as humble examples for us all. So come along now, dear friend, you'll soon feel like a newborn babe. Off with those old rags, it's time for the divine services, for complines and eucharists, for libations, oblations, and ablutions, oralsons and lickanies, for leccaturas from the book of life -"

  "They aren't rags!" he protested in his foolish confusion, clinging to his jacket hem as it was pulled away. "That's a seven-hundred-dollar suit from Savile Row!"

  "Mmm," grumbled Alidoro, tugging his trousers down. "Smells like it, too."

  "He said 'savio,' you suppurating imbecile, not 'sulfurco'!" Melampetta scolded. "Now give me those things, I'll put them to soak."

  As she trotted out into the snow and down the beachlike slope to the water, the old professor, stripped to his shorts and socks, the wisps of cold wind leaking into their shelter making the frayed nerves at the edge of his skin tingle, literally pricking him on the living edge, closed his eyes and whispered miserably: "I feel like such a wretched ass, old friend. Sick, as my body is, I am far more sick at heart. You should have let them take me away."

  "Better a live donkey, partigiano, mio partigiano, than a dead doctor," replied the mastiff, peeling his socks off with his ruined gums. "What my tinpot employers lack in subtlety, they compensate for in diligence."

  "What does it matter?" he erupted crankily. "Listen to me. For nearly a century, I have lived an exemplary life. There have been trials, temptations, torments, but I have won through. I have earned the respect of the entire world. I am living proof of the power of redemption through education, endeavor's paragon, candor's big name. Do you understand? I have received not one Nobel, but two. I am a household word. I am the ornament of metaphors, the pith of aphorisms, what's liked in similes - in some languages, Alidoro, a very verb! My father would be proud of me, the Blue-Haired Fairy would! And now " He shuddered as his shorts were pulled down. "Now I have lost everything. Even my pride."

  "Ah, look at the poor old fellow, it's enough to make the stones weep," sighed Melampetta, having quietly returned, bringing with her the ashy odor of fresh snow. "He's thin as a nail, he's lost all his hair except whatever that is that's sprouting there on his feet, and he looks like he's wearing the tatters of old wallpaper where his hide should be. Even his nose has gone limp. What a scene he makes! Enough to make the jaded scuff in the galleries lose their suppers! And he's still no bigger than a piece of cheese, just a lick and a smell, you could stuff him in a matchbox if it weren't for the nose."

  "In small casks, Melata, good wine."

  "Yes, Alidote, if, alas, the cask is tight. But why is he sniveling like that?"

  "He's embarrassed."

  "Now, now, my pet, no need for that. It's not modesty that answers the call of nature, remember. And we dogs are great ass-lickers, as our comrades are all too quick to point out, we have a special aptitude for it. Not for nothing are we known as man's beast friend, his licking lackey. So, as Origen once said, whilst castrating himself in devotional zeal in the company of Saint John the Theophagist, 'When in a kennel, my peckish old bellybag, one must do as the curs do - the country you go to, as our epistles say, the custom you find - so, take eat, Zan Juan, these are my original ballocks, do this in mnemonics of me, good fork that you are, and buon appetito!' "

  "Speaking of such matters, old friend," muttered Alidoro then, poking around in his thighs, "what happened to your own affair? There's nothing down here but a peehole."

  "I don't know, it fell out one day. I didn't notice. It may have got sent out with the laundry."

  "El desparŕ xe sempre castrŕ," murmured Melampetta, licking at it speculatively as though sampling an antipasto: "The destitute lose their balls to boot. But not to worry, for as La Volpe said after she sold her tail for a fly swatter: 'Who gives a fig, there's that much less acreage for the planting of whelks and buboes, may I soon be shut of the rest of it, speaking figuratively of course.' "

  "You're touching a painful key, Mela, when you bring her up. It was those two old codgers who did him out tonight."

  "What -?! Again?! But wasn't it you, dear Pinocchio, who bit the old Cat's paw off? You must have recognized them!"

  "Well, they looked familiar. But then, with my eyes, who doesn't?" For a moment, he felt the abuse of it again, the indignity, and the bile rose in his throat. He felt stupid, outraged, humiliated, frightened, crazed, and embittered all over again and all at the same time. What would they say back at the university if they could see him now, lying here in a shabby boatyard, stripped of all his earthly goods, letting two old mongrels lick his devastated peehole? It infuriated him and shamed him, but what could he do about it, he was powerless. And, besides, it was beginning to feel good. "Anyway, that was in the last century."

  "True. One forgets the power of such a life to seem coetaneous and omnifical, speaking in the grand manner, like Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, for example, who once said, or was said to have said, while declaiming upon the angels in much the same highbrow pantological style, bless his gray-green heart, that the reason the little atemporal beasts were sexless was because if they ever started fucking each other eternity itself might find itself in the family way, a superfetation, as he called it in the classical tongue - at
which he, whoever he was, was clearly no slouch - a superfetation that could well make twins of the Apocalypse, leaving God biting his own tail, so to speak, if he had one, and if he didn't, well, we're back where we started, like the universe itself in its tedious mechanical turnings, less acreage for buboes and all that." All this, though largely incomprehensible, was quite soothing, especially accompanied as it was by the soft warm strokes of the two tongues, gently bathing his body, poking into this crevice and that, unknotting the tight strings of muscle, swabbing away the foul incrustations, husking him, as it were, desquamating him (ah, the words, the words!), and he felt himself slowly slipping toward what that same Dionysius, so masked, called, if he remembered correctly, "the darkness of unknowing." Whence all truth. "But tell us," Melampetta was whispering in his ear, the one she was licking with a tongue almost eellike now in its subtle acquatics, "tell us about the Blue-Haired Fairy."

  And so he did, starting from the beginning ("It all began," he began), when, one terrifying night, running from murderers, he came upon a snow white house set in the deep dark woods and, knocking frantically with feet, fists, and head, aroused a little girl with sea-blue hair and a waxen white face who would have been quite beautiful had she not been completely dead. She couldn't open her eyes, much less the door, so the two assassins caught him and, after shattering a couple of knives on his hardwood torso, hung him from an oak tree, where, after crying for his daddy, he died. "I still have nightmares about it," he told them, succumbing gradually to the rhythm of their lapping tongues. "I was up there for hours, blowing about like a bell-less clapper, till at last my neck broke and my joints locked up and my nose went stiff. And all the while that dead girl was watching me with her eyes closed, don't ask me how I know this, but it's true." Eventually, eyes wide open and grinning like old Maestro Ciliegia on a toot, she staged an elaborate rescue with a bunch of circus animals and some crazy doctors (he has a vivid memory of waking briefly inside an airy coach padded with canary feathers and lined with if whipped cream and custard, and thinking, in his unredeemed puppetish way, that Heaven was a sticky place that made him queasy, and he hoped they'd let him out soon), but why, he wondered, even as he described it for his friends, praising the Fairy for her ingenuity and her amazing remedies ("She brought me back to life again!"), did she wait so long?