(1991) Pinocchio in Venice

by Robert Coover

  There was much, as the launch lurched away like a runner breaking out of the starting block and went roaring, right through a red light, down the narrow rio, darting in and out among the slower gondolas, barges, and the honking express vaporetto, snow-thickened spray flying from the bounding prow and water slapping stone and wood along the sides, that was troubling the dying scholar, the smoke in the air, for example, the remarks of that infernal Fox and then the money that had passed hands, the very coincidence that had brought Eugenio to just that little square beside the water at just such a moment on such a day and made his rescue possible, but all of this was far at the back of his bruised and water-soaked head, and it disappeared altogether when Eugenio, declaring how sweet it was to go simply mad over a lost friend found again, proceeded to recite, as proof of his uninterrupted love and devotion to his old prepubescent pal, all of the grants, awards, fellowships, degrees (earned and honorary), prizes and publications, chairmanships, medals, titles, professional and honorary society memberships, special commissions, anthologizations, trusteeships, presidential citations, distinguished visiting professorships, biographies, eulogies, monuments, festschrifts, film credits, book and children's park dedications, and every single Who's Who entry of the professor's long and illustrious career, even mentioning the establishment, in his honor, upon the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first edition of The Wretch, of "The Annual 'Character Counts' Award" by Rotary International, and his more recent (politely refused) nomination as honorary president of the national "Nuke the Whales" campaign.

  Whether it was this extraordinary exhibition of his boyhood companion's lifelong loyalty and admiration that set him off, or the sudden pungent awareness of the distance between that glorious past and his present misfortunes, the old wayfarer burst into tears and, taken generously into Eugenio's open arms, proceeded to unburden himself upon his dear friend's plump silk-shirted breast. Sobbing and wheezing, he has gasped out, as they've come spanking down the Grand Canal, engines wide open and sirens bleating, his terrible tale, in fragments only and in no particular order, getting blind monks confused with drunk lions, trash bags with turncoats, and grappa with graffiti, calamity tumbling upon calamity and all mixed up

  "And - sob! - he stole my computer!"

  "The gondolier -?"

  "Yes, but not -!"

  "But, my dear boy, what were you doing jumping into the canal with a computer?"

  "No, you don't - and the police! It was terrible! You saw -!"

  "Now, now, boys will be boys, Pini "

  "But - wah! - my best friend! It was only music -!"

  "We weren't afraid of a little music, ragazzo mio, we were worried about you in the hands of those Puppet Brigade terrorists! We were rescuing you from a possible kidnapping -!"

  "Was that a rescue -? I was - boohoo! - in a trash bag -!"

  "I know, I know, let it all pour out, my love "

  And maybe not even entirely audible over the speedboat's wail and roar, but it hasn't mattered, Eugenio has seemed to understand and forgive everything, hugging him close, assuring him that his nightmare was over, truly over, he was with trusted and altogether human friends now ("And in Venice we value friendship dearer than life! I would be unworthy of the name of Venetian if I did not follow the example of my brave fellow citizens, who are the soul of honor!"), and consoling him with promises of the luxuries and unstinting cordiality that await him. "This is not only the world's most beautiful city, as has often been said, it is also, in case you have forgotten, amor mio, its most civilized and opulent host. Indeed, there is no other city quite like it! It is a kind of paradise, una cittŕ benedetta, set like a golden clasp, as someone has said, on the girdle of the earth, a boast, a marvel, and a show, magical, dazzling, perplexing, the playground of the western world, the revel of the earth - the Masque of Italy! Una vera cuccagna! Pleasure, Pini, is its other name! I love it, almost as much as I love you! So stop crying now, you silly creature, life here is like a perpetual holiday, and you are its guest of honor! Oh, I have such plans for you, my friend! What good times we shall have together!"

  "But - for the love of God, Eugenio! Sob! I-I am dying -!"

  "Then, sweet boy, we shall have obsequies the likes of which have not been seen here since the ninth century when those two mercantile body snatchers brought Saint Mark's stolen corpse back in a perfumed basket from Alexandria, an entrepreneurial coup the world has envied ever since! Ah, what a delicious funeral that must have been! Think of the crowds! The marketing possibilities! And they've never stopped coming! Those fragrant bones, planted in a mausoleum unequaled in splendor till our own age of the movie palace, seeded an empire! Indeed, the odor of sanctity bestowed upon these islands by the ever-ripe Evangelist, is, when the wind turns, with us still, a daily reminder of the debt we all owe to those two quick-fingered traveling salesmen, bless their shameless little hearts! And now, Pini, if it's your turn, I can promise you a send-off unmatched in modern times! I see a glass coffin, a single transparent bubble, hand blown around the dear departed by Murano craftsmen like a bottle around a model square-rigger! You will lie in state on silken cushions the color of biscuits and cream, trimmed with the finest Burano lace and stuffed with canary feathers, surrounded by candlelit displays of memorabilia, souvenirs, articulated miniature replicas, death's masks, and other spin-offs, in the ballroom of one of the great Venetian palaces - the Casa Stecchini perhaps, yes, why not? The House of the Little Sticks - just over there, do you see it? On the left -!"

  "I-I - choke! - can't see anything -!"

  "I'm sure it can be arranged, and if not, we'll simply buy it for the occasion, the media will love it! When word gets out, there will be lines to view the body from here to Verona! It will take weeks! And right in the middle of the off-season, too, what a golden opportunity! We'll have screenings and readings, concerts, lotteries, public tributes from your fellow laureates, art exhibits of your portraits from around the world, fund-raising auctions and funny nose competitions, special travel packages for little children, cruises for the elderly and the handicapped! Then, on some feast day, such as that of Saint Paul the Simple, or Gabriel the Incarnating Archangel, or even, if the condition of the mortal remains permits such a delay, that of another Saint Mark, he of Arethusa, who was stabbed to death, back in the perilous days before felt tips, by the nasty little penpoints of his mischievous students -!"

  "Oh, please, Eugenio -!"

  "No, wait, Pini, this is the best part! On that day, a flotilla of black gondolas, the largest ever assembled in Venice and all of them heaped with sage, narcissus, and laurel, along with bouquets of bleeding hearts and woodbine, bachelor buttons and elderberry, dog roses, fairy ferns, cat's paw and foxglove, and sprinkled with a touch of wild oats, sea wrack, bitterroot, and rue, will bear your crystal casket up the Grand Canal, the opposite way we've just come, under the Accademia Bridge back there, which will be closed off that day of course, leased to all the world's major television networks, and on to the vaporetto landing at the Ramo del Teatro. There, greeted by the orchestra of the Fenice Opera House playing "Siegfried's Funeral March" from our own dear Riccardino's Götterdämmerung, it will disembark the entire cortege, composed of the greatest scholars, artists, politicians, theologians, bankers, carpenters, movie stars, self-made millionaires, and social reformers of the world, which will then make its ceremonious way down the Streets of the Tree and the Lawyers to the Rio Terra degli Assassini, chased thence up the Fuseri Canal to the Calle dei Pignoli, the Street of the Pinenuts - henceforth, my friend, in memoriam, your street! I love it! Meanwhile, in the Piazza San Marco - ah! a proposito, dear boy! Here we are!"

  And so they have disembarked there on the stormy Molo, the ancient sojourner solicitously chaired in a traditional Venetian portantina, and made their way into the Piazza, Eugenio shouting: "Make way! Make way! Largo per un gran signore!" - though he cannot be sure, buried in blankets and blinded by the freezing wind, that there is actually anyone out in this wretched weather b
ut themselves. He seems to hear voices and is dimly aware of passing under lamps and illumined façades, perhaps the Basilica itself, but his senses, he knows, can no longer be trusted, for he also seems to hear the murderous cries of squealing assassins, angels fluttering and making rude windy noises overhead, and a little whistlmg sound inside his skull as though something might be boring away in there, and the blur before his eyes is throbbing as though his pulse were beating on him from without. Even inside all his blankets, he is trembling violently, and his tears, shed on his dear friend's breast, have frozen on his face, threatening to split the exposed parts of his cheeks open. He feels light-headed and heavyhearted all at once, as though his bodily parts were trying to go in two different directions at the same time. It is not unlike the sensation he had while drowning in the canal, and he wonders, in his feverish confusion, if he might not still be down there, sinking into the slime, this rescue but a dying dream.

  Or worse. Perhaps his whole rational human life has been nothing more than the dying dream of that poor drowned donkey, maybe he has only imagined that conveniently ravenous shoal of mullets and whiting, all the heroics thereafter and the transfiguration and the lonely century that has followed being just so much wishful thinking, certainly it all seems to have passed in the blinking of an eye, yes, maybe, all illusions aside, he is fated to be a drumhead after all, one more noseful and the mad dream over. He takes a deep snort: no, no such luck, just more frosty air, faintly Venetian-tinted, it has not yet, whatever it is, stopped going on

  "Ah, Pini, still with us! Good boy!" enthuses Eugenio at his side. "Coraggio, dear friend, we are almost there! But, ah! what a splendid night this is, a pity you're under the weather! It reminds me of the first night I came here all those years ago! It was snowing then, too, and dog-cold, but we were young and Carnival had begun, so what did it matter? No one to drag us in to baths and books, no one to make us keep our caps and scarves on, our pants either for that matter! Who could be happier, who could be more contented than we?"

  The professor, too, is thinking, deep down inside his fever, where thinking is more like pure sensation, about happiness, and about all the pain and suffering that seems needed to make it possible. Everyone loves a circus, but to make the children laugh, his master whipped him mercilessly and struck him on his sensitive nose with the handle of the whip, so dizzying him with pain (yet now, when his thoughts are more like dreams, he knows - and this knowledge itself is like a blow on the nose - he was as happy as a dancing donkey as he has ever been since) that he lamed himself and so condemned himself to die. And as for that country fellow who tried to drown him, he was at heart a gentle sort who dreamt only of a new drum for the village band. No doubt some other donkey, even more ruthlessly treated, was eventually slaughtered for the purpose, maybe even someone he knew, because: who would want the village band to be without a drum?

  "Oh, the lights then! the extravagant music and endless gambols! In the streets there was such laughter and shouting! such pandemonium! such maddening squeals! such a devilish uproar! It was like no other place in the world! It is like no other place in the world, Pini! What fun it is still!"

  But should we, he asks himself, rising briefly out of the pit of his present distress, resisting the seductive lure of donkey thoughts, should we, aware of all the attendant suffering, deny ourselves then the pleasure of the circus, of the drum? Or should we, knowing that none escape the pain, not even we, seize at whatever cost (here he is seized by a fit of violent wheezing and coughing as though there were something caustic in the atmosphere, not unlike the foul air at faculty meetings) what fleeting pleasures, life's only miracles, come our way? In short, somewhere, far inside, something (what is it?) faintly troubles him

  "And look, Pini! Look how beautiful!" Eugenio exclaims, tenderly patting away the coughing fit. "See how the snow has been blown against the buildings! It's like ornamental frosting! Every cap capped, every tracery retraced, the decorative decorated! It's like fairyland! The Moors on the Clock Tower are wearing lambskin jackets tonight and downy cocksocks on their lovely organs and all the lions are draped in white woolly blankets! The snow is at once as soft and fat as ricotta cheese, yet more delicate in its patterns than the finest Burano lace! And now, do you see? in the last light of day, it is all aglow, it is as though, at this moment, the city were somehow lit from within! Look, Pini! O che bel paese! Che bella vita!"

  Having been ever, or nearly ever, the very model of obedience, a trait learned early and the hard way at the Fairy's knees, or, more accurately, at (so to speak) her deathbed, or beds, the old scholar cannot risk, in his own extremity, changing his stripes now (though that is, he is all too dizzyingly aware, the very nature of his extremity), so he does his best to respond to the wishes of his old friend and providential benefactor who clearly loves him so, poking his nose into the wind and nodding gravely, even though to his fevered eye it is a bit like gazing out upon a photographic negative, the ghastly pallor of the snow-blown buildings more a threat than a delight. All the towers and poles in the swirling snow appear to be leaning toward him as though about to topple, lights flicker in the multitudinous windows like chilling but unreadable messages, and the Basilica itself seems to be staring down at him as though in horror with fierce little squinting eyes above a cluster of dark gaping mouths, its familiar contours dissolving mysteriously into the dimming confusion of the sky above. All around him there is some kind of strange temporary scaffolding going up like hastily whitewashed gibbets. Blood red banners, stretched overhead, snap in the wind, a wind that tugs at the umbrellas of the few scattered early evening shoppers still abroad, stirs their furs, and whips at the tails of their pleated duffle coats. Pigeons, dark as rats, crawl through the trampled snow, no longer able to fly, their feathers spread and tattered, chased by schoolboys who pelt them with snowballs, aiming for their ducked gray heads.

  "No!" he wheezes, struggling to rise up within his bonds. "Stop stop that -!"

  "Ah, the mischievous little tykes," chuckles Eugenio. "Reminds me of our own schooldays, Pini, when we used to trap the little beggars with breadcrumbs, tie their claws together, and pitch them off the roof to watch them belly-flop below! What times we used to have -!"

  "I never did!" he croaks. "I loved pigeons! Don't do that, you young scamps! Stop it, I say!"

  A boy near his litter looks up at him, grinning, his narrow eyes aglitter, his mittened fists full of snow. He drops the snow, reaches up, and pulls on the professor's nose. When it doesn't come off, he backs away, the grin fading. His eyes widen, his mouth gapes, then, shock giving way to horror, he runs off screaming.

  "Ha ha! Well done, Pinocchio!" Eugenio laughs, as the boy, crying out for his mother, goes sprawling in the snow. "You haven't changed a bit!"

  "Pinocchio -?" askes a feeble voice below. A dull gray eye blinks up at him from a crumpled mass half-buried in the snow. Eugenio has gone over to pick up the small boy and brush him off, giving him a number of kindly little pats and pinches. "Is that Pinocchio?"

  "What -? Who is it -?!" he gasps, peering into the dark blotch on the snow. "Can it be -?!"

  "Did you did you ever find your father ?"

  "Colombo! It is you! Yes, but that was long ago -!"

  "I know, I know. At least the day before yesterday. I could still fly then "

  "But, dear Colombo -! How can it be you're still ?"

  "Alive? Don't exaggerate, my lad As you see But you're looking well "

  "Well -! I am dying!" he groans. "Just look at me!"

  "Ah, I wish I could, friend, but that's gone, too, I'm afraid. Fortune's not satisfied, as they say, with a single calamity "

  "I know "

  "Can't see past my bill, or coo either, if you know what I mean, can't remember if I ever did, that's going, too, my memory, I mean, and and What was I saying ?"

  "That it was all going, your -"

  "Going? No, no, I'm still Ah, yes, your father! Well, at least I still have my memory! He was off in a boat s
omewhere We stopped in a dovecote, do you remember, and feasted on birdseed !"

  "I remember, green tares, I had cramps for a week after, nearly drowned - oh, but it was wonderful up there in the sky with you, Colombo, galloping through the clouds! I've I've often had dreams "

  "We flew all the way to Malamocco!"

  "I thought I thought it was farther "

  "It was far enough. What times those were! I can't believe I ever knew how " The old pigeon, his dear strong friend of all those years ago, flutters a wing weakly, as though searching his memory with it. "What? Who's there ?"

  "It it's me, Colombo " Tears have started in the corners of his eyes again, melting the ones that had frozen there. He feels something deep down give way, popping and snapping like the banners in the wind overhead, releasing a rising turmoil of grief. He has soldiered on through so much, "carrying through" in the old way, "holding fast," and now, on the very threshold of deliverance from all his terrible trials, he fears he may not be able to keep his chin up any longer. Assuming he still has one. Eugenio has returned and seems to be poking at the bird curiously with his booted toe.

  "Oh yes Pinocchio. I heard you were in town. Someone someone was looking for you "

  "For me? What - what was she wearing -?!"

  "Ah, forgive me, dear boy!" exclaims Eugenio, snapping his fingers at the servants. "We must get you in out of this abysmal weather! Come along now!"

  "Wearing? Nothing, so far as I could tell -"

  "Nothing -?! But - wait -!" he cries as his porters pick him up again.

  "No dawdling, carino mio, your risotto's already cooking, can't let it get cold!"

  "Just an old fleabitten dog by the smell of him But who - who is that with you, Pinocchio my child? Is that -?"

  "It's my old classmate Eugenio, Colombo! A true dear friend! He saved my -!"

  "Ah, bada, Pinocchio -!" the pigeon gasps, trying to rise. "Take care -!"

  "I've suffered so much, dear Colombo! If you only knew! And now - a real bed and doctors and - Eugenio knows everything I've ever -!"