(1991) Pinocchio in Venice

by Robert Coover

  Well, of course, she was just a little girl. This was the happy time. She was as capricious as he. They played doctors together, jokes on one another, house. They took rides on her birds and animals. She let him poke his nose in her long blue hair. He showed her how he could kick his own head, front, back, or sideways. She laughed at the wooden knock it made and showed him how she could turn her head all the way around seven times in the same direction without getting a crick in her neck; he managed only three before feeling all twisted up inside, but deliciously dizzy when he unwound. It was the most fun he ever had in his life, not even Toyland or Hollywood came close. She wanted him to stay and be her little brother, she even said she'd fetch his father, which somehow pleased him and displeased him at the same time. But it was too good to last. His trials, as it turned out, had just begun. He was dragged off to Fools' Trap by the Fox and the Cat to bury his money in the Field of Miracles, and then years went by, or what were probably years. He was still a puppet then and didn't know much about time. Except that it had something to do with beginnings and endings, this he found out when, after innumerable misadventures, he finally made his way back to where her cottage had been and found nothing but a tombstone with an inscription saying that the little girl with the azure hair had "died of sorrow on being abandoned by her little brother Pinocchio." "It nearly broke my heart. I tried to tear my wooden hair out. That was before I had real hair, of course. Now that's gone, too. I was so proud of it. Hair made me feel so human. But it all fell out. First, from my head, then from my chest and armpits, and and on down " Only on his feet is something still growing, and that probably isn't hair. Nor are they really, at root, his own feet.

  The Fairy wasn't dead, of course. She who had taught him never to lie had lied, and not for the first or last time. Yet he accepted that. All part of his personal via crucis as he lightheartedly called it, though never in print. And, in a sense, she had died, for he never saw her as a little girl again. When next they met, here on the Island of the Busy Bees, she was suddenly old enough to be his mother, while he was still just a puny puppet. He didn't understand this. She pretended it was some kind of magic. Maybe it was, but he hated to get left behind. When he recognized her, he knelt and hugged her knees, and she gave him a glimpse of a possible future, more than one: he had to choose. Though his motives might have been mixed (there was something heady about having his nose there between her big tender knees), he chose boyhood, which meant he had to pass his examinations at school. But his classmates, hating him for the square peg he was, lured him to the beach and tried, as they put it, to knock his block off. Someone threw his own arithmetic book at him: it missed and struck down poor Eugenio, and the police came and arrested him for the crime. "That was when I met you, Alidoro. You chased me when I ran away."

  "Yeah, we really tore up the landscape! When I was a pup, they trained me by making me chase a stick. I must've got carried away by your smell and lost my compass, nearly lost my life when you took to the water. I forgot I didn't know how to swim. Never did get the hang of it "

  "Wait a minute," said Melampetta, licking the hairless hollow of his armpit, "let me get this straight -"

  "Careful! My ribs -!"

  "Yes, I see. Some exhibit, you are, old fellow! You're like one of those mythical inside-out creatures mentioned by Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia in his postural studies of metempsychotics. They could use you as a foldout in an anatomy book. But, listen, do you mean to say that this fairy with the weird locks who liked to keep a magical menagerie and play spooky games with little boys -"

  "Puppets "

  "Yes, well, like turning houses into tombstones and playing dead and conjuring up pallbearers and corpses and other such ectoplastic doodlings - do you mean to say that she gave all this up to pack school lunches and do the laundry, pick up toys and give baths -?"

  "Actually, she oiled me down "

  "She abandoned fairyhood to be a mamma -?!"

  "Well, my mamma. It seemed to be something she had to do. Though later of course she changed into a goat."

  "A goat "

  "Yes. With blue fleece. That's how I knew it was her."

  "Madonna! And udders hanging down the size of a theosophist's behind, no doubt?"

  "She stood on a white rock in the middle of the sea trying to stop me from getting sucked up into the maw of the monster fish. Or maybe leading me into it, I couldn't be sure. It was the last time I saw her. Alive, that is "

  "She died? Again?!"

  "Well, she just became something else." How could he explain this? That, in effect, she became the house he lived in, the social order he embraced, even, in a sense, the universe itself at its most ineffable, its most profound "But before that, I found out she was dying in hospital, too poor to buy a crust of bread. I sent her all my money. Everything I had. And with that she came to me at last sort of It was in a dream " He was feeling very dreamy right now. Alidoro was tonguing vigorously the insides of his thighs as though to urge them back to youth again, while Melampetta was sliding up and down between hip and armpit with long soothing strokes, carefully circling the sore spots, making him feel almost like a ship at sea, awash in an airy foam. "It was beautiful "

  "I don't know," sighed Melampetta. "All this melancholical hello and goodbye, all this gruesome hide-and-seek over an open grave, tombstones popping up like mushrooms - it sounds to me like either she was trying to cork up your ass with a motherlode of guilt, my dear Pinocchio, or else she had a terrific scam going."

  "I know. That's how it seemed to me at times. And I haven't told you everything, either." He offered the old watchdog a replying sigh, and mostly in gratitude, for her tongue seemed to have spread out and was lapping him all over now like a warm wet towel. "Whenever I was a bad boy, for example, she seemed to go limp and cold and fall down with her eyes rolled back. It was really scary!"

  "Oci bisi, paradisi ," snorted Alidoro from between his thighs. "Remember that one, Mela? 'Gray eyes, paradise ' "

  " 'Black eyes, hot romance ' "

  " 'Blue eyes make you fall in love ' "

  " 'White eyes make you shit your pants!' I know, I know - but how many times will it work? Once? Twice? This babau, this bugaboo, must have pulled her routine as often as she brushed her fangs. If I may say so, it seems to have taken you forever to eat the leaf, my friend!"

  "I was a slow learner, Melampetta, as the world knows. But I'd suffered a lot of births and rebirths myself, I was used to the idea. I was a very lively piece of wood, you know, before the man I called my father - my primum mobile, as you might describe him - turned me into a puppet. Then the assassins hung me and the Fairy brought me back to life again. After that I became a dancing donkey and, when the fish ate all my donkey flesh away, I was reborn a puppet from the corpse, though naturally I'd hoped for something better."

  "A dancing donkey! Do tell -!"

  "Later, my father and I were delivered together from the belly of the monster fish, if that's what it was. Finally I died as a puppet and was reborn a boy. And now well, you can see, it might not be over yet "

  "The 'miracle,' as a tourist here once defined it in a fine piece of Christian idiotology, 'of reborn ingenuousness,' a wonderful thing in principle no doubt, but you're like some kind of wind-up demonstration model. Round and round you go! Still I'm surprised you didn't get fed up finally with all this crazy vampire's pernicious horse-plop and just plant hut and puppets, if you'll pardon the expression, and walk out! Why didn't you send her to get fried?"

  "Oh, I did grow to resent it, to resent her, Melampetta, I did walk out. I was a good boy, after all, obedient, hard-working, studious, truthful - but then what? I'd done everything I was supposed to do, I'd become a famous scholar and exemplary citizen, the whole world loved me, I felt I deserved to have a little fun. But whenever I let myself go a little, I'd see her tomb again: 'Here lies who died because ' I couldn't get rid of it, it was worse than athlete's foot, and it ruined everything. Why did I want a boy's body in the fir
st place, I began to wonder, if I couldn't use it? So I tried to run away again. This time to Hollywood -"

  "Ah, Hollywood!" rumbled Melampetta, moving eagerly toward his nipple, which she circled playfully with her tongue. "Here comes the good part!"

  "Not so good as all that," he replied, flushing with shame. "I suffered a kind of relapse out there, I even became a bit reckless " His heart gave a little regretful leap under his breast which Melampetta was swabbing, and his nose began to itch in admonishment. "I became something of an ass again, another sort of well Until one day " And he told them then about his revelation, his sudden quite stunning perception that the Blue-Haired Fairy was not alive and pretending sometimes to be dead, but was truly dead, only pretending sometimes, when he helped her, to be alive. "It was not she who had given me a place in the world, you see, but I who had called her into being!" This explained the way she first appeared to him, her sinking spells, her desperate messages: goodness, she was trying to tell him, could die in the world. It was not an absolute, not a given, but something that got re-created from day to day, from moment to moment, by living and dying men. Either they kept it alive or it disappeared. Maybe even forever. "It gave me a mission. Her power was really my power, I had but to exercise it. 'I-ness,' I called it in a famous essay: the magical force of good character. My virtue, I felt, my decency, my civility, my faithfulness, might save the world!"

  "Oh my !" Both tongues were sloshing around in his groin now. "Aren't we the little Redeemer!"

  "Or if I couldn't manage that," he has added, somewhat abashedly, "there were always the tombstones waiting to be done "

  "Whew, I haven't had such a workout since my last litter, bless their long-forgotten little hearts!" Melampetta exclaims now, panting heavily. "I think I have some idea now how John the Baptist felt, coming up for air amid the repentant multitudes after loosening all their laces, as he liked to put it: 'You have to swallow the toad,' said he, speaking about knowledge, of course, that bitter pill, 'to shit pearls'! Or as Jesus himself, that notorious pearl-pooper, once declared, shouting out over the screams of the rich man he was trying to thread through the eye of a needle, this not being one of his better numbers: 'Hey, compagni, you can't suck an egg without making a hole!' So don't hide your recklessness and edifying relapses under a bushel, my venerable friend, don't skip over the beastly bits - the seen, as they say in Hollywood, separates us from what we long to see! Let's hear about the donkey days!"

  "Ah, the donkey days ! It's been so long, I can barely "

  "That's right, barely and baldly, it's the naked truth we want, the unvarnished reality! Veritas in puris naturalibus -!"

  "Scusa, Melampiccante, old suck, but I think this side's about done "

  "What? Oh yes, Alindotto, you're right, it's time to turn the spit and baste the other one - be careful, though, the little duck's as brittle as croccante and flaking like puff pastry!" They straighten his legs and tuck his arms in, then gently ease him over: "That's it - like folding an omelette!" Melampetta urges, her sudden rash of culinary metaphors no doubt betraying the effort to work up an appetite for the awesome feast she is about to face. He shudders to think of the spectacle he must now, in his procumbent attitude, present to his friends' eyes - and other senses ("He's shivering, Lido, go put some more wood on the fire!") - but at the same time, while being rolled, he's caught a glimpse of the snow falling thickly through the night sky outside their humble shelter, and it is as though the magical glow it seems to cast upon everything has fallen upon him as well, for he feels suddenly an intense flush of warmth penetrating his entire body: this is what it is like (the fire is crackling, the two dogs are nuzzling his thighs apart) to be among true friends! He had nearly forgotten. Junior faculty may be attentive, but rarely like this. "Aha, I think we've reached the font, Alidrofobo, you faithful old blister," Melampetta mutters (there is a cold nose poking at his rectum, perhaps more than one), "that which Aristotle the Wise termed in his treatise on The Classification of Dejecta the effervescent cause. We are at the source, the wellspring, the root, the core - or what the divine Duns Scrotum, confronted with the preserved contents of the Virgin's placenta, called in his nausea 'the very stone of the scandal,' the ultima realitas entis. We are, insomma, if I am not mistaken, at the drippings. So, will you taste the soup please?"

  "My pleasure," grunts the old mastiff with gruff simplicity, "it just does for me."

  "Mmm. Al dente. Though maybe we've let him lie in the sawdust too long."

  "Careful. Shoulder blades look a bit dodgy "

  "Yes, I see." She laps around one, stroking his neck and the back of his bald pate with her broad stroke ("The hairs of your head are indeed numbered, comrade," she murmurs in his ear, "and the number is zero!"), and slides her velvety tongue down his crenellated spine, pushing at the knots, stiffens her tongue to prod at the small of his back, then slips on down the crack to the gap between his thighs like a skier on a downhill run, curls up around one thigh, and, as though congratulating herself or getting her wind back, laps generously at his near cheek. As she does so, he has a dim fleeting recollection of being combed and curried, back when he was still a performing donkey and being readied for a show, an experience so comforting it nearly reconciled him to his unnatural life, a life indeed more like a dream than waking life, and so all but lost now to his living memory "You know, I can understand humans wanting to tart themselves up a bit," Melampetta pants. "I mean, I wouldn't mind a little lace shawl or some beads myself, if ever some whoreson should offer me such baubles - naked we're only cute for a day and after that we need all the help we can get. But why people leave all their other orifices gaping, then cover their assholes up in this cumbersome tailoring is beyond me."

  "Huh. Some philosopher you are, Melone mia. It's a great attraction to flies, that's why. Maybe you need to lose your tail like the rest of us here, there seems to be something too abstract about your fundamental principles."

  "The Blue-Haired Fairy told me," the professor mumbles softly into the blanket under his chin (what he remembers is the day he gained a tail, that day of the transformation: he was laughing, he and his dear friend Lampwick, they were so happy and having so much fun, and then suddenly there was a seizure in his chest and for a moment he couldn't breathe, and then the laughter became something else ), "that little boys who do not wipe themselves properly not only grow leeks and cabbages back there and so become the village laughingstocks, they also lure rats into their beds at night and get bit in the behind with the plague." He sighs as a great soft tongue lathers a hip as though kneading pasta. Though the middle time is mostly gone, he can also remember the day he got changed back again, the day his new owner tried to drown him so as to make a drumhead of his hide, and instead the fish ate away his donkey flesh. It tickled more than hurt. It was liberating. Exciting even. Sensuous. It seemed to free him of a great weight. It was like the time the Blue-Haired Fairy sent a thousand woodpeckers to peck at his nose. It was like spring after a long dim winter. It was like now "She used to take me to the cemetery and show me the tombstones of all the little dirty-bottomed boys " He yawns. As their tongues swab and massage his ancient hinderparts, he can feel the sleep that has been avoiding him since he left America steal over him like the caress of the Fairy's blue tresses. "Sometimes "

  "Yes ?"

  "Sometimes my life seems more like it's been ah! !" It reaches deep into his inner core, suffusing him with a powerful satisfaction, and a great leavening of his spirit, as if he were being freed from some wretched imprisonment. Well, life itself, he thinks, I'm probably dying. They know this. They're preparing me. It's wonderful. It is like a magical transportation, like the intimate and golden repose of a Bellini, like a Hollywood ending. Never has he known such peace since the day he first became a boy "It's been almost like a like a movie "

  8. THE MOVIE OF HIS LIFE

  "It looks like you've indeed got that little something extra," is how Melampetta describes it in fond remembrance of the old fan m
agazines (they have just been discussing the big bang theory of the Hollywood star system with its dire implications, as Melampetta put it, of entropic twinkle), but what she is referring to is the clump of matted hair her excavating tongue has uncovered between his anus and the ridged seam of his backbone. "It's all coiled up here like the runout trailer from an old reel of film. Has it been there all the time?"

  "When my father made me, all the hair was painted on," he explains, though he wonders if this is indeed an explanation, or more like a proposition - what his old friend Alidoro might call (and perhaps did, having just spat irritably and, muttering that "the old sporcaccione's barf is worse than his blight," wandered off on his own, leaving the ancient traveler and the faithful watchdog alone here on this sandy shore that slopes down to the sea, or else to a swimming pool) a "suppurating pustulate." What he has really wanted to say in reply to her question is, "Well, yes but no ," but he has been unable (the very effort seems to have pushed the boat shed some distance up the slope away from them into a circle of unmanned booms and cameras) to find the words for it.

  But it's as though she understands anyway (she has meanwhile spooled the hair out from under the end of his spine so that it fans out over his cheeks and thighs all the way to the back of his knees), for she says: "Ah yes, I see, your skin is, after all, as one might have supposed, nothing more than a cheap veneer," and proceeds to lather his whole body at once, ferreting out vast hidden thickets of clotted hair: on his head, in his ears and armpits, down his back and legs, on his belly, chest, and chin, between his fingers, thighs, and toes. No wonder he's been feeling so inhibited! Out it comes! "This explains your infatuation with paradox," she howls.