(1991) Pinocchio in Venice

by Robert Coover

  "It's the oldest truth under the sun: life is a race that can't be won "

  Something like that. And moreover, the abuse is warranted, is it not? - a fit judgment upon his perfidious heart, his capricious and ultimately fatal betrayal of Her and thence of himself, a betrayal that no doubt began back in America with his decision (if it was a decision -? it's all like a dream he can no longer recall) to return to this sinking Queen, this treacherous sea Cybele "as changeable as a nervous woman," this "most unreal of cities, half legend, half snare for strangers," this home of the counterfeit and the fickle heart, this infamous Acchiappacitrulli. The zany jester is mincing about, miming the crippled antics of an old fool, wheezing and snorting and tossing out his jibes on the comical debilities of the aged ("When one grows old," he croaks, wobbling about knock-kneed with his rear stuck out, his back bowed, and his toes turned in, "he loses his renown! His legs go flabby and his stockings fall down!"), his mocking parodies in the Venetian dialect about "this heartless city of nervous strangers and old queens" and "untimely fetal decisions" ("Ay, ay!" the fool cries with a quavering voice, pulling his shabby felt hat down over his ears, "I can't think, I've got this damnable bone in my head!"), but he does not even approach the true depths of disgrace into which the old wayfarer knows he has fallen. Up at the foot of the cutoff bell tower, the other musicians, augmented now by electronic keyboard and guitar, harmonica, and a set of traps (over their heads, on the scaffolding of cloth and boards, there's a sign painted every color of the rainbow, but the colors run together and he can't read it - no doubt yet another obscenity), are singing, to the same tune as before, if such hoarse shouting can be called a tune, can be called singing: "El tempo, el culo e i siori, / I fa quel che i vol lori!" - Time, one's arse, and the moneyed few, / All do just what they want to do! - and they might as well be singing about "el tempo, el culo e i professori." When some within the jeering crowd pretend to come to his aid - "Now, now, remember that in this world, we must be kind to all such unfortunate creatures, that we ourselves may be treated kindly in our time of need - this poor old grillino, he really can't help it, you know!" - their patronizing remarks enrage him more than the abuse. No, no! he wants to tell them. I can help it, you idiots! But I'm a villain to the core! Believe me! A brute! An ass!

  "Ha ha! Che parlare da bestia! Give him a hand, everybody! In fact, give him two, he needs them!"

  But it's true! It's true! A fraud! A turncoat without even a coat to turn! I'm a vile unprincipled scoundrel through and through!

  "He may have a small mind, ladies and gentlemen, but he knows it from corner to corner!"

  Yet how can it have happened? A century of prudence and sobriety and effortful mastery blown away in a day, less than a day, vanished into the flux as though it never existed, leaving him not only the ludicrous dupe of charlatans, robbed of his every possession, arrested and humiliated by the authorities, stripped of his clothing as of his pride, indeed of his very humanity, enfeebled with illness and deprived even of his ears and nipples - "Lai, lai," the grimacing clown is crooning sourly to the rhythm of a child's taunt, "co se xe veci se xe buzarai! Ay, ay! Hugger-mugger! To be old is to be buggered!" - but now, having abandoned his only true friend in the world in mad pursuit of a vaporous fantasy, a true ignis fatuus, a most foolish fire, he is hopelessly paralyzed as well, frozen, lost, confused by fever and hunger, left to die in a trash bag, taunted by cretins and crushed by his own shame, and all because of a vulgar American coed with a soft blue sweater

  "Oho!" cries the jester, leaping into the air and clicking his heels. "So that's the rock you've split your decrepit buns on, old man! Ha ha! Rispettabile pubblico! Here is where the donkey has fallen!"

  He seems, alas, to have been talking out loud again. He doesn't know for how long, but fears the worst. It's almost as though he's forgotten how not to. Crowds of people, scarfed and booted, have gathered around, laughing and applauding and stamping their feet in the snow, whooping the prancing buffoon through his mocking routines - now, hobbling and cackling wildly, he is chasing all the young girls in the audience, making them squeal and clutch tight their coats and skirts. The venerable scholar has become, he sees through bitter tears, seeing little else, the very fool of fools. Butts' butt. But what, being four-fifths buried in refuse already and the rest soon to follow, does it matter? Oh, bambina mia, you little blue-jeaned and cowboy-booted barbarian, you twangy gum-popping red-white-and-blue siren! You have been my death!

  "Well, at least your life has not been in vain for nothing!" the comedian exclaims with insolent bravado, as though egged on by the raucous crowd. He seems brash as a child yet ancient at the same time, his features beardless yet furrowed with grimaces and depravity, marred by warts and pockmarks and an enflamed carbuncular growth on his forehead, and with two deep wrinkles standing arrogantly, harshly, almost savagely between his bushy brows, like something out of a repressed nightmare. "Hee ha! Isn't it wonderful!" he brays, launching a little bowlegged dance around the wastebin, the professor shrinking into his trash bag and solacing himself with the thought, which in his feverish misery he only half believes, that at least - surely - nothing worse can happen to him now. "Tutti quanti semo mati / Per quel buso che semo nati!'' the clown warbles out in a squeaky falsetto, rolling his eyes roguishly as he hops about. "It's crazy how we're all inflamed / By that little hole from which we came!"

  But why is he surprised? For didn't the Blue-Haired Fairy warn him? "Puppets never grow up," she said, wagging her finger at him all those years ago. "They are born puppets, live puppets, die puppets!"

  "Yes, well, dummy, that's show business! But do you mean to say -?!"

  What a terrible oracle! He'd thought she was presenting him with an alternative, a moral choice; she'd merely been pronouncing sentence upon him!

  "Hey now, here's a song and it isn't long: 'He who doesn't die in the cradle, / Will suffer for it sooner or later!' Hah! Who says there are no poets in Venice? Yes, at the end of the day, we're all just clay, give or take a sliver or two - we all bough down to the curse of events, you can't stave it off, speaking figuratively! So nothing to do, cavalieri e dame, but show a little spunk, as we say in the charade trade, brace up and stick it out as best you can, and let the chips fall where they may! But now tell me, old man," the entertainer murmurs, peering closer, the frown between his sunken eyes deepening, "what did you mean when you said - ye gods! Am I dreaming or ?" And - ka-POK! - he butts him suddenly in the head.

  O babbo mio! I am dying! There is loud laughter and shouting all around him, but the old traveler can hear it only intermittently through the reverberant clangor in his hammered head. What is this insane monster doing -?! "Oh please!" he wheezes, but this time no one hears him. "Help -!"

  "It might be ," muses the clown, leaning back, and then - WHAACK! - bangs heads again, hammering him brutally with the very knob of his carbuncle.

  "Abi! o povero me!" yelps the professor, whimpering in the old style, his head reeling, his eyes losing their focus. "Ih! ih! ih! " And the jester cries: "It COULD be "

  And then, even before the next blow comes, the distant memory returns and the old scholar recognizes his adversary - not an adversary at all of course but once his most beloved friend - a memory repressed to be sure, but not of a nightmare: rather of what was perhaps - before the glory of being human, that is, and all that shameful past was put behind him - the happiest night of his life! Pa-KLOCKK!

  "It IS! It IS! Pinocchio! It's PINOCCHIO!"

  "Arlecchino!" he gasps, his eyes still spinning around in his ringing head. Did he used to do this for fun? "My-my friend! Ow! Oh! It's you!"

  "Pulcinella! Pantalone!" Arlecchino shouts across the campo, leaping up and down like a mechanical frog. "It's Pinocchio! Colombina! Our dear brother Pinocchio is here! Flaminia! Brighella! Capitano!"

  "What -?!" cry the musicians of the rock band, dropping their instruments with an amplified clatter and bounding down off the stage. "Pinocchio -?! Can it be -?!"

&
nbsp; And he is suddenly engulfed in a great commotion as they swoop down upon him, everyone kissing him and hugging him and giving him friendly head-butts and pinches and all talking at once - "It is! It is really he!" "It's our brother Pinocchio!" "Evviva Pinocchio!" "Lift him out of his hamper there!" "Who has done this to him?" "Oh dear Pinocchio! Come to the arms of your wooden brothers!" "Give us a kiss, love!" "Easy! The damp seems to have got to him!" "Why have you been tormenting him so, Arlecchino? Our own brother!" "He saved your life!" "I didn't recognize him, he's been smeared with all this funny makeup!" "That's human flesh, you imbecile!" "Pinocchio, how did it happen?" "Why did you leave us?" "It's been so long!" "Careful, Brighella, don't drop him!" - and, trailing a litter of paper bags, old vaporetto tickets, and unspooled cassette tapes, he is lifted out of the trash basket, hoisted upon their shoulders, and paraded triumphantly around the campo, the puppets recovering their instruments and striking up a gay-spirited circus march quite unlike the pounding headachy noises they were making before. As they pass by the stage, the professor sees above it the psychedelically painted canvas he could not read before: GRAN TEATRO DEI BURATTINI. "That's us!" cries Pulcinella below his left buttock. "Welcome, dear Pinocchio, to the Great Puppet Show Vegetal Punk Rock Band!"

  14. GRAN TEATRO DEI BURATTINI

  "I want you stick to me, Pinocchio," Arlecchino rasps fiercely from beneath his stiff upper lip as he drags him off the back of the stage and down into the terrified crowds, "like shit to a shovel!"

  "But my knees! I can't even -!"

  "Don't argue, friend! This is serious!"

  Just like a puppet. Doesn't understand the limits and hazards of human flesh. Il Dottore, as his fellow musicians now call him, knows it's serious. He can smell the bonfires. He can hear the screams. He knows what happened to the last Dottore. He's frightened, too. But he still can't move. Shifting his body is like moving a refrigerator or a heavy log: he has to tip it from side to side, rock it forward all in one piece, every inch costs him almost unbearable pain and effort. And at the same time he's so frail, the tiniest jolt sends him spinning off in another direction, making him feel like one of those airy little balls in a whirling lottery basket, a walking (speaking loosely) paradox. So, inevitably, they are separated, shit and shovel. The metaphor was all too apt. Shit always gets left behind. He can hear Arlecchino shouting for him through the awesome pack-up, but the shouts grow more and more distant. He tries to shout back, but he keeps wheezing and coughing instead. The smoke is getting in his eyes and tearing at his throat, aggravating the itching there. He is being stepped on, elbowed, crushed between frantic bodies, kneed and pushed, they can't see him down here. He longs for the relative safety of the rubbish bin. Though those too, he can see, are being tipped over and flattened by the panicky mob. He strikes out for the awning of a greengrocer's stall, hoping for a refuge there, but it disappears before he can reach it. "Striking out" is perhaps not quite the expression: most of the time his feet are not even touching the ground. But he manages to stay afloat in the human flood, one of his more conventional talents, even if he remains somewhat below the surface.

  The last Dottore, he's been told, was taken apart stick by stick. The band's been outlawed, its members condemned, they're on the run, and the Dottore, too fat to run, got caught. The carabinieri were trying to get him to talk which was of course like inviting the hare to run, as Pulcinella put it, only they could not understand his garbled Latin, whoever could, so finally they had to torture him to stop him talking. Even as he was edifying his captors with his celebrated at iam gravi lecture about the wounded Queen and her raw sausages, they snapped the old philosophaster's limbs in two, split up the chunkier bits with hammer and chisel, then, with his own strings, tied all the pieces up in his big hat and shipped the lot off to Murano glassblowers for kindling. "But now you can be our new Dottore!" Flaminia exclaimed gleefully, meaning no irony at all, as they propped him up in front of the electronic keyboard, the newest member of the Gran Teatro dei Burattini Vegetal Punk Rock Band. "But I'm no musician!" he protested. "Neither are we!" they laughed. "Look! It's easy! Just hit this! Now this!" Arlecchino guided his hands and from the stiff poke of his fingers, frozen into gnarled little claws, vast sounds suddenly rocked the campo. "Now just keep repeating that!" The others picked up their instruments and gathered around him on the stage, improvising raucously upon his little phrase (which sounded suspiciously to him like "When You Wish Upon a Star"), electric guitars and theorbos, harmonicas, tambourines, flutes, lutes, and a set of amplified drums responding thunderingly to the touch of the virtuoso Burattini. Pi-pi-pi! they went. Zum-zum-zum! They made the whole square shake and tremble. It was fun, in a dizzying and anarchical sort of way, like the old days in Mangiafoco's mercurial puppet theater, and their friendship, however bruised he was by it, warmed his feeble heart.

  The dizziness he suffered in their midst was not so much from the loud music or the smothering attention or even the fever which no doubt grips him still, but from all the head-butts he'd endured by which they'd first, ecstatically, recognized him. Indeed, down here in the desperate press and jostle of the fleeing multitudes, his head is still ringing from those blows, making it difficult for him to maintain any sense of direction, little good it would do him if he could. He sees the four public security police drag Corallina away, hears her screaming, but a moment later he cannot be sure whether she's in front of him or behind him. Arlecchino's fading shouts have seemed to spiral around him like a ball on a stretching string, almost as though the campo were expanding and he were being screwed deep into its tangled center. When Captain Spavento comes creeping by on all fours between the legs of the crowd, having just crept abjectly past in the opposite direction, the professor can no longer be sure, in his throbbing vertigo, that these are two separate events.

  "Long live our brother Pinocchio!" they'd all cried on discovering him and the hugging and pinching and head-thumping had begun, everyone had a turn, he couldn't even speak it hurt so, he could only weep, and then they wept, too, but for joy, as they supposed he did, and kissed him some more and pinched him even harder as though to try to pluck him clean and banged heads again and crushed him with their wild loving hugs. And, in truth, for all the pain, he was happy, delirious even, it was as if, as they transported him out of the trash bag and onto their shoulders and paraded him through the snowswept square and up to the makeshift bandstand, he'd been suddenly and miraculously rescued, not merely from a lonely ignominious death, but from a whole lifetime of misguided exile and isolation, it was as if this was what he had come back for, this place, these friends, it was as if, as if a hundred years had never happened !

  "Remember the party that night? We danced till dawn!"

  "Dancing wasn't the half of it! We all stripped and swapped parts and got our strings in a delicious tangle! Then Arlecchino stole Mangiafoco's swazzle and started playing it through his bumhole!"

  "If it was his bumhole - might have been anybody's, things were pretty mixed up by then!"

  "Listen, Pinocchio had just saved my can from the fire, the least I could do was sing through it!"

  "As Arlecchino said at the time, he was thanking Pinocchio from the bottom of his heart and from the heart of his bottom!"

  "I remember!"

  "What a blast!"

  "Then Rosaura challenged everybody to a pelvis-cracking contest with her polished cherry pudendum, and ended up splitting Colombina's mound and breaking Lelio's little thing off, not that he ever had any use for it!"

  "She called it hardass cunny-conkers!"

  "It never healed, I've still got a crack there!"

  "It was a crazy night!"

  "I was so happy !"

  "That party is a legend now!"

  "But when was it? I don't remember it!"

  "You weren't there, Flaminia. Must have been a century ago, maybe two."

  "You were still just a gleam in old Mangiafoco's chisel!"

  "And Rosaura," he asked then, craning his he
ad about above the sea of faces, "where is Rosaura?"

  "Ah, poor Rosaura, bless her wormy little knothole, has gone the way of all wood, I'm afraid, all except for her hardwood hotbox which Pierotto here inherited for a head when his old one got damp rot and fell apart!"

  "It's made him a bit strange, but he's got a new lazzo with a chamber pot and a monocle you wouldn't believe!"

  "But there are plenty of others here, you old rogue! Here, meet Corallina and Lisetta and Diamantina !" They lowered him into the arms of these gay soubrettes with their bright-colored skirts and aprons tucked into leather leggings, their purple and magenta butch cuts, and safety-pin earrings through their wooden ears. "Evviva Pinocchio!" they laughed and they kissed him again and pinched and squeezed him and, just for fun, knocked heads some more.

  "But why did you go away, Pinocchio? We were having so much fun! Why did you leave us when you said you loved us so?"

  "Well, I - ow! - my father -"

  "Loved us? Loved us?" roared Capitano Spavento del Vall'Inferno, rearing up then in sudden choler, his plumes quivering and waxed moustaches bristling. "He loved us as the wolf loves the sheep! As the whip loves the donkey! As the woodman loves the tree! No, no, let us say bread to the bread and bugger-my-ass to bugger-my-ass! This abominable imitation of humanity, this vile hodgepodge, this double-dealing French-leave-taking skin artist deserted us!"

  "Ahhh!" gasped the three servant girls in unison and, tossing him in the air, shrank away as though from a bad odor. He would have crashed disastrously to the stage floor had not Arlecchino and Colombina deftly caught him, Colombina whispering behind what had once been his ear: "Is it true you left us because of a woman, dear Pinocchio? A painted woman with a mysterious past ?"