(1991) Pinocchio in Venice

by Robert Coover

  "It's not an infatuation!" he screams, as though in pain, but really just to be heard, for she sits alone by his blanket now, far down the sunny slope below him, her head cocked archetypally, still as a plaster casting. Or perhaps that is a plaster casting. He in his elegant new pelt, which unfortunately is already attracting flies and ticks, is back up under the corrugated roof of the boat shed, where, as he was about to explain to Melampetta, they are making a movie of his life. "A new treatment," he says aloud, and seems to hear Alidoro laugh at that, or else the porter, that villain, though he, or she, is not to be seen, nor is anyone. The shed, for the purpose, has been fitted out like a sort of manger with heaps of straw, painted cutout animals, an imitation fire flickering in an old brazier. ("That's where I burned my feet off," he explains to Melampetta, or would have were she still beside him), white cotton on the roof, and Christmas presents secreted about like Easter eggs, but, though light streams spiritually through the broken rafters in imitation of, or homage to, the great Tintoretto, or perhaps dear old Veronese, the general appearance is one of artifice and desolation, the manger, suffused with barnyard odors and missing two of its four walls, uninhabited within except for a cheaply made wooden stick-figure lying in the straw and, without, surrounded by silhouetted camera gear looking about as reassuring as grave markers. It is as though those responsible have stopped in here only long enough to drop the little creature and hasten on, leaving behind nothing more personal than a yellow wig and a broken water jug.

  "My mother died in the fire," the little wooden figure reminds him as they step out through the jaws of the smoldering doorway into the blazing but frigid sun, and, remembering, tears come to his eyes again, though whether of sorrow or exasperation, he can't be sure. He is, as it were, if he understands the storyline correctly, carrying himself on his back, having been awarded the role of the ass in recognition of his abundant hairiness and his recent achievements in the school metaphysics and polka examinations. Or at least this is, though its source forgotten, his understanding, an understanding beclouded somewhat by his uncertainty as to where they are supposed to be going and by the numbing pressure inside his head, a pressure he recognizes from previous experience as the donkey's stupid brain weighing heavily upon his own, a weight he had, in the intervening near-century, all but forgotten. "It doesn't matter where we are going," the little creature on his back tells him as if answering a question he might actually have asked, "what's important is to stay inside the frame."

  "Hee haw," he replies, meaning: Is that all there is, then, this monotonous dynamics of inclusion and extrusion, of presence and absence (of pretense and abscess, he is thinking, or perhaps the little wooden man, mocking him, is saying this), this timid seizure of shadows, this insensible shying from the edge, and what the wooden man responds is:

  "The public, oh holy ass, is never wrong."

  Ah well, the public, he brays in reply, struggling against donkey-brain takeover (sometimes, he remembers now, this happened to him in his real donkey days, a kind of sudden slippage, or displacement, as if from one room into another, a synaptic leap not easily reversible, each brain aware of the other only as the mattress and the pea could be said to be aware of each other in that story of the fastidious princess, an alarming though not altogether unpleasant metastasis provoked, often as not, by the erecting of that outsized dangle between his legs, which is back, he is amused to note, slapping his thighs animatedly as he plods along under his chattering burden, the topic from the saddle now being the Renaissance use of the ass motif as a prototypical theophanic icon: the reluctant gait a trigger of passionate spiritual response, the upright ears emblems of devotion and orthodoxy, and the haunches, radiant as halos, more emotionally reverberant than angels' wings - one of the portentous themes of his own brazen youth, he is quick to recognize), the public - the public is always dying on you!

  "Ah, where would we be," sighs the man on his back, who has been growing heavier and heavier with the weight of his discourse, "without the script?" And, as though to pursue the inquiry, he flings it away from him, the sheets scattering and tumbling in the air like sinners at the Last Judgment. Though they have made little enough actual progress (the boat shed, he feels certain, is still nearby), they have maintained the illusion of it by passing - or being passed by - revolving stages with painted backdrops representing the scenes of his childhood: the Tuscan village where his carpenter father lived, his fairy mother's cottage in the woods, the city of paupers known as Fools' Trap where all who came there lost their hair and plumage and other valued parts, the infamous Toyland, though here labeled "Pleasure Island" and looking a bit dated, even the little hill and coastal towns he toured as a marionette and dancing donkey, all gleaming and decorous as the backgrounds in a Bellini altarpiece. Now, however, they have arrived, by way of a gated and treeless city on an arid plain, desolate as a Western ghost town (a film set, of course: watching cameras no doubt lurk, unseen, behind the ruined walls), at a massive marble rock, white as candle wax and rearing ominously into the intense azure sky above them like one of Paolo Veneziano's primitive crags. Has he been here before? Alas, unlike the scenes on the revolving backdrops, this one has not been tagged. Gone, it's all gone. Or going. He can't remember yesterday. He shouldn't have thrown away the script. "What's the point," he cries bitterly, "of all these strenuous accumulations, if we only, in the -"

  "Don't," groans the withering beast between his legs, limping now as it labors up the impossible rise, "give away the ending !"

  At the summit, he is met (the fatally lamed donkey has crumbled away, turning to dust beneath him like a doused witch, he has had to scrabble up the last sheer face, hand over hand, alone) by a bearded ape in the scarlet robes of an opera buffa judge who, excoriating him for arriving so late ("But my poor knees-!" he protests, unheard over the strings of the studio orchestra), condemns him in an aria not unlike a love song ("The Picture That Could Change Your Life" is its title) to be rolled in flour and crucified.

  He turns to address the gathered multitudes ("Blessed are they who turn the other omelette!" he cries), but snarling gendarmes swarm over him, strip him of his imported finery, lather him up with flour paste, and dress him for the party in his tattered old suit of flowered wallpaper, with a silver sash bedizened with bright ribbons bound round his waist and white camellias tied to his ears. Children are invited up from the audience to hammer the nails in, some of whom he recognizes as old schoolchums, who take pleasure in reviling him in the old style, calling him a stick-in-the-mud, pencil-peter, and a woodenhead, pulling his nose, covering his paper suit with graffiti ("HOORAY FOR TOYS!" they scrawl, "DOWN WITH ARITHMETIC!"), and tying strings to his hands and feet to make him dance, as though he were still a puppet and without the dignity of flesh and history. This is what it means, he realizes in his suffering, to be, of anything, incarnate. The children are clumsy and impatient, driving nails in randomly, some crooked, others only halfway, sometimes missing the nails altogether and hammering his flesh, and complaining all the while about the hardness of his bones and the wood, solid holly, of the cross beneath, which keep bending the nails and making their little hands sting.

  Finally, a charge against him bearing the inscription "THE STAR OF THE DANCE" is nailed over his head and, to the accompaniment of fifes and drums, the cross is levered erect into the posthole prepared for it, the very hole, he sees, that he once dug in the Field of Miracles to plant the gold coins as seed for his magical money tree, he now rising as his own fruit, as it were, all of this taking place in exquisitely painful slow motion (there are so many nails in him, he hardly sags at all) as though they were overcranking the scene for erotic effect. "Rispettabile pubblico, cavalieri e dame!" bellows a voice from below: "Your attention, please!" He feels dizzyingly high, almost face to face with the sun itself, yellow as a patty of polenta there in the brilliant blue sky blanketing him. "Oh babbo mio-!" he whimpers as though cued. "Direct from the burning mountains and savage highways of wildest America, we b
ring you now in living color, speaking loosely, our feature attraction, in a performance more thrilling than the deeds of man, more beautiful than the love of woman, more terrifying than the dreams of children- " the children hoot and holler delightedly at this and heave their hammers at him, "- the final stirring episode in the Passion of Pinocchio! You will see before your eyes the farewell dance of the world's most notorious bad boy, this improbable son of an impotent carpenter and a virgin fairy, baptized by a chamber pot and circumcised by woodpeckers, part flesh, part spirit, and a legend in his own lifetime! Right this way!"

  "Looks like this time you have, to make a phrase, barked up the wrong tree, dottore," remarks, amid all the burlesque whistling and cheering, a sour voice at his side: it is La Volpe, still in her porter's costume - he has been hung in the middle, he discovers, between her and her blind Gattino, now cackling on his other side with senile laughter. "You got the short stick, as one might say, you're out on a limb - you are, in a word, up the pole!"

  "Up the pole!" wheezes the Cat, covering his mouth with the stub of his right foreleg: he hangs by one paw only, an empty black glove nailed up on the other side. "In a in a ?"

  "Word."

  "Word! Hee hee hee!"

  "You two seem cheerful enough," gasps the butt of their badinage in his transfixed pain, beginning to worry that the movie of his life might suddenly have turned into a documentary.

  "Enh," shrugs the Fox, as best, in her own pinned state, she can shrug, "you get used to everything in this world, professore, familiarity breeds consent, as the saying goes, though I do miss being able, what with all my blebs and buboes, to scratch my tormented old arse. If perhaps you have a hand free -"

  "Don't even listen to those bandits, Pinocchio!" warns a voice at his back. He twists around to seek out the source, but there is no one back there, just empty space, blue, vast, and inscrutable. "If you lend those scoundrels a hand, they'll steal it!"

  "Cross words," grumbles La Volpe sardonically, resolving the puzzle.

  "Words!" repeats Il Gatto, sniggering hysterically into his empty cuff.

  "Avoid evil companions, my boy, or you'll be sorry!"

  "How could I be sorrier than I already am?" he groans, his wounds stretching as, losing strength, he slumps lower.

  "You could be," replies the cross with a tremulous sigh, "like me."

  "Ah well. As to that, there was a time when -"

  "I know, I know, they send us dossiers, resumes, we get the publicity handouts. You're a famous case, a model for us all, you've - if you'll pardon the expression - crossed over. This is a big honor for me, I know that, I've got the star of the dance, top billing, I shouldn't complain. But do you remember what it was like before? Do you remember how it felt to be a piece of talking wood?"

  So long ago. A time of darkness. He was innocent then. And innocence, as his long life has taught him, is a form of naughtiness. Yet "I had no pain no fear I was free "

  "Free to get used for a chair leg or a clapboard! Free to soak, rot, and burn! Free to get chopped, hacked, whittled, split, and pulped! Hey, look at me! A tree made out of a tree! A joke! They gave me arms, I can't use them. Am I mad? Hell, I'm cross as two sticks, that's what the children say, but I don't know what 'mad' is, I don't know 'cross.' 'Pain,' you say, 'fear': it all sounds like magic to me - or it would, if I knew what magic was. I even envy that old Fox over there with her itches and scratches - I say, 'her,' but what do I know, right? I don't know 'knowing'! While you, you've had a life! You've had everything!"

  "You don't know. Men's lives are short and stupid."

  "Stupid? You tell me stupid? What's two and two, you ask. I don't know. I don't know what's two! But you know, you're smart, you've got brains, whatever they are. You've got - I don't know, I can only imagine - which is difficult, I don't even have an imagination - but what? You've got charm, right? Dignity. Serenity. You've got - correct me if I'm wrong - hauteur, glamour, class, talent - how'm I doing? - dash and daring. And tenderness. Smoothness. Authority. Have I got the picture?"

  "Well, I guess so - but how did you -?"

  "I read it on a movie poster."

  "You did?"

  "You caught me. I'm lying. I can't read. I'm dumb as a stump, I'm thick as a plank, I'll never make my mark, or any other. Oh, I wasn't born yesterday, but that's just it. I wasn't born at all. Not like you, Mr. Star of the Dance! And I can't take steps to do anything about it, I can't keep my nose to the grindstone or listen to reason or kick the problem around, so what chance have I got? I'd be down in the mouth about it if I had a mouth. I can't even put my foot in it. I can't show my hand or beat around the bush or face the music. I don't even know where it is, the music, I mean, or the bush either, I'm too stupid. If I had a heart, I'd be wearing it on my sleeve, if I had a sleeve. So what have I got? A routine. A lumber number. A dumb show, a curtain dropper, an act with nails, halfway between a hanky twister and a creepie. But I'm a pro, a reliable standby, an understud, a support who never lets you down, I'm an old hand who hasn't even got one. People like to wear me on their chests. I'm vaguely sexy. I have a good silhouette. I stick out, as you might say. And I stick it out. I'm solid, I'm always there. And we're not talking lifetimes here, are we, we're not talking mere centuries - you remember!" But maybe he doesn't. The old boy seems to be hanging lower, his head drooping as if sniffing his armpits. "But you know what?" he whispers down his nape. "I like the blood! I soak it up! I can't get enough of it! I think: this must be what 'tasting's' like. Am I right? This must be 'appetite.' I like the writhing and the sweat: it oils me up. And I like the crowds!"

  "Why are you telling me all this?" gasps the dying figure pinned to his crossbeam. The wretch seems to have gotten thicker and hairier, as though death were filling him up and leaking out in coarse filaments at all the pores. Below, he can feel a tail curling around his upright where the feet are nailed. There is a bad smell. "We were such good friends! We had such wonderful adventures! I showed you how I could pee longer than anybody. We used to make bets with the other boys. You showed me how your nose could grow "

  "What -?! Lampwick? Is it you -?!" The miserable creature lifts its long ears feebly, then drops them again. "Oh no!" He tries to throw his arms around his long-lost friend, but he cannot move them. "Lampwick!"

  "And now you're leaving me hee haw! to die alone "

  "I'm not leaving you, Lampwick! I'm here! I'll stay human! I promise!" But even as he protests, he can feel the place where they've nailed the charge twitch and stretch. A darkness is spreading everywhere like the darkness of unknowing. The sun seems to be falling from the sky. "Don't die, Lampwick! Don't die -!"

  "Goodbye, Pinocchio !"

  "No -!" He struggles against the rigidity of his wooden arms to embrace the dying donkey, no matter what the consequences. All his heart is in it. He has a heart. He has always had a heart. And now he is straining it to the breaking point. He can feel the creaking and bending, the terrible splintering within. "Lampwick -?" And then the sky seems to tear like a curtain, there is a great roar (it is in his own throat), and he awakes to find himself grappling through his twisted blanket with Alidoro, his nose buried in the old mastiff's filthy coat, and bawling like a lost lamb.

  "There, there," soothes Alidoro, breathing sleepily down his neck. He peels away the tangled blanket, then wraps him up again.

  "It was Lampwick! He was dying! I could have saved him, but -!"

  "It was a nightmare," says Alidoro gently, easing him back into the wood chips next to Melampetta, who watches him drowsily with one half-cocked eye. "It's all right, old friend. Nothing you can do now "

  "No, I mean," he mumbles tearfully, curling up inside the blanket, his shoulders aching still from his recent struggle, "I could have saved him when he when he died the first time " Gripped by this painful truth, unassuaged by all the intervening decades, the old professor snuggles down between his two companions, closes his eyes once more and, with the kind of diligence he once applied to scholarship and
basket weaving, chooses to dream that, while his colleagues sit behind him on the stage, gravely exhibiting their noses, he is giving a ceremonial address to the American Academy of Arts and Letters on the uses, proper and improper, of somatic metaphor, a dream which is, he recognizes, even as he embraces it, a dream of, a surrender to, oblivion

  A BITTER DAY

  9. THE DEVIL'S FLOUR

  "Impossible really," he says, describing for Melampetta the film studio's futile attempts to cast the part of the Blue-Haired Fairy, "like a painter trying to paint the color of air, or a composer reaching for the sound of grace -"

  "Yes, or a theologian trying to imagine the taste of manna, which has been likened severally unto angel breath, Orphic eggs, the froth on a virgin's milk, pressed mistletoe, dream jelly, lingam dew, fairy pee, the alchemical Powder of Projection, and the excreta of greenflies on tamarisk leaves. I know what you mean. It's like going after the ineffable with a butterfly net, or trying to catch time in a teaspoon. Or, as the immortal Immaculate Kunt once said, in an attempt to describe by way of the practical reason the odor of sanctity: 'Toe-cheese is only the half of it.' "

  "That's right, there are approximations, metaphors, allusions - but nothing close to the real thing." The aged professor emeritus, sipping his coffee and staring out quite blissfully on the little boatyard, blanketed this morning in newly fallen - and falling - snow, muses in this oblique manner upon reality and illusion, pursuing his own themes, as it were, even as the watchdog's salacious appetite for gossip seeks to deflect him from them. The front of the boat yard slopes down from the sheds to the canal like a beach, now completely white except for a few dog tracks and a yellow patch or two, and, though it's no bigger than a Boston back garden, its covelike nature takes him back to California and his once-upon-a-time passage through Filmland, where the two concepts in question - reality, illusion - were truly inseparable: even he could no longer tell them apart, and so he nearly lost his way again. "Finally they gave the role to a blond ingenue who looked like a highschool cheerleader from Iowa dressed up for the junior prom. She wore lipstick and blue eyeshade and plucked her eyebrows. Her complexion was nice, though I happen to know she had pimples back where her swimsuit covered them. And she refused to dye her hair blue, so they put her in a kind of slinky blue nightgown and shortened her name to the Blue Fairy. Instead of living in the forest in the house of the dead, she presumably came from some distant star as an answer to my father's wish - my father, who might have wished for the cheerleader, had he known about such beings, but never for a fairy or even, for that matter, a talking puppet. He always called me his 'little accident.' "