(1991) Pinocchio in Venice

by Robert Coover

  "Ah, poor Pini! And still a virgin, then!"

  "Well, not quite " He lowers his head, his nose inscribing its usual ignominious arc through the liquid night air, and stares out at the lagoon, pitch black except for the glittering gold coins cast on its surface by the yellow lamps of the channel markers and illusorily deep as an ocean. He lets his gaze drift out upon it, losing focus in its seeming immensity, floating deep, deep into the void, acknowledging his lifelong yearning to hide himself from life's profuse terrors and confusions upon the bosom of the simple, the vast, and surrendering for a moment to his ancient appetite, as perverse as the day Geppetto chopped out his rough-hewn little torso, for the absolute anarchy of the eternal emptiness, that incommunicable but ineradicable truth of his pagan heart, which the Blue-Haired Fairy so abhorred. In effect, civilizing him, she taught him, if not his intractable nose, how to lie "There was the night I I became a boy "

  "Aha !"

  He'd been wearing himself out, doing the sort of donkey work he'd been spared in his donkey days, harnessed to the primitive water-wheel that had killed his old friend Lampwick, just to earn a glass of milk each day for his grappa-crazed babbo, now on his last legs. The times were hard. Since their escape from the monster fish, they'd been holing out in an abandoned straw cottage that was insect-ridden and stank of goats, sleeping on beds of rank straw, dressed in rags and half starving. The farmer he worked for was a tyrant, but no worse than his old man, who hated him still for dragging him out of Attila's innards, the best home he'd ever had. At the time, he'd felt that he was saving him, but now he didn't know for what. The old loony, now calling himself San 'Petto, raved all day and often as not all night, spat out the milk he brought him from his backbreaking labor, peed spitefully on their straw mattresses, left his other evacuations around the cottage wherever he felt like. Saint's relics, the old boy called them. So as to have something to trade at the market, he'd taken up basket weaving and, whenever he was away at market or off pushing at that murderous waterwheel, his father would throw his handiwork down the well or set it on fire or chop it up and try to make grappa out of it. He'd knocked together a little cart to use on his trips to the market, and Geppetto had torn up three of his best baskets, braided a whip out of the raffia, and bullied him into pushing him around in the thing. That was all right, at least it kept him quiet, if only while he was in it, and the whip didn't hurt, the old brute was too far gone to do more than wave it about like a blind man's cane. It was the meanness of it that hurt. The Disney film had captured something of Geppetto's stupidity maybe, but not his malice. On one of his trips to market, he had picked up an old coverless primer with half its pages missing, the very one perhaps he had sold for a ticket to Mangiafoco's puppet theater, and had begun to teach himself to read and write, and in this book, under "M for Madonna," was a picture that, though he did not know it at the time, was eventually to change his life: a reproduction of Giovanni Bellini's "Madonna of the Small Trees." He could not keep his eyes off it, returning to it time and again. Maybe he identified with the stunted trees. Whatever, it utterly absorbed him. "M" was the letter he learned best in the alphabet, and it was still his favorite. It was no accident that the title of his final opus, only five letters long, was to have had three of them in it. This primer was the treasure of his life and his sole consolation. Until Geppetto mustachioed the Madonna of the Small Trees and drew a penis in her mouth, then drank up all his fruit-juice ink and smoked the shredded pages, "M" the first to go.

  "Poverino!"

  "It was awful. I couldn't help but feel sorry for myself. I cried all the time. The Fairy was out of my life forever, I was stuck with this mad old man, I'd watched my best friend die a miserable death that seemed to foretell my own, I was working fourteen-hour days and getting nowhere and I felt like all my joints were coming apart from the physical strain, I was cold and hungry most of the time, and I was utterly alone. My old enemies the Fox and the Cat were somewhere in the neighborhood, down on their luck, Il Gattino who'd once feigned blindness as a beggar now blind in fact, La Volpe crippled and her tail gone, both of them desperately needy but also probably dangerous. I'd chased them off but knew they might return at any moment to steal what little we had, the scraps of food, the baskets, the few coins I'd managed to put aside from my market dealings. So one day, deciding I'd better spend those coins while I still had them, I took them to market to buy myself some new clothes. As I walked down the road, I imagined myself making a fresh start. You know me, always the irrational optimist, fields of miracles, money trees, zin, zin, zin, and all that. Why not, I thought. I knew at least half the letters in the alphabet by then and figured I could fake the rest and so perhaps move up into the professional classes. But "

  "Ah yes. With you, dear friend, there's always a but "

  "On the way I met La Lumaca, the Blue-Haired Fairy's sluggish maid, the one who once took twelve hours to bring me plaster of Paris bread and alabaster apricots when I was sick from hunger."

  "Ha ha! And she told you the Fairy was dying, no doubt, and was temporarily short of funds !"

  "That's right. She said she didn't even have enough to buy a crust of bread. I gave her all I had."

  "Ah, poor Old Sticks!"

  "It was nothing to me. I was overwhelmed by hope and despair at the same time. I ran back home and started making more baskets. I doubled my production in a single evening even though I was crying so hard I could hardly see, the tears streaming down my nose like a rainspout. I was going to save her life with baskets. I'd work till dawn, and then till dawn again, and for as many dawns as it would take. But I was too exhausted. About midnight I fell asleep. And I had a strange dream "

  He was back in the Fairy's little snow white house in the dark forest. He didn't remember how he got there, but there was something before about pushing his sodden father, or perhaps the carcass of his dead friend Lampwick, in the little wooden cart he had made. Whoever it was was very heavy and the going was slow. Far far ahead in the dark night he could see the old Snail, lit up like a porcelain-shaded nightlamp, and crying: "Hurry! Hurry! You'll be late!" But pushing against the cart was like pushing the terrible waterwheel. La Lumaca disappeared and the night came down on him like a coal sack. But then, without transition, it was he who was being carted, just like the first time, into the Fairy's cottage. She was little like she was when he first met her with her waxy face and spooky eyes and strange blue hair, and they were playing doctors again, or something like it, though this time he was completely dead. She laid him on her bed and took all his clothes off. Then she removed his feet, took his knees apart, unhooked his legs where they were pegged into his body, popped his faucet out like pulling a cork. She did the same thing with his arms and head and all the rest, took him apart joint by joint. Though it should have been scary, it was in fact very relaxing. When she unplugged his nose he felt like he could really breathe for the first time in his life, even though he was dead. She put all the parts together in a pile and played with them for a while like wooden blocks, making little houses with them and knocking them down. It didn't hurt and he felt freed from responsibility, though it made him dizzy when she rolled his head around. When any of the pieces got dirty, she licked them and rubbed them clean on her dress, which was more like a winding sheet. They seemed to need a lot of cleaning, so she took off her clothes and rubbed them all over her body, which was smooth and slippery like a bar of soap, kissing them and licking them and caressing them at the same time. It felt wonderful, especially when she pushed the pieces down between her legs, where her softest parts were. She was on her back now, fondling and stroking all his segments, and though he couldn't see very well anymore, he could feel how each part of him got pushed up into the warm wet place between her thighs and scrubbed around in there and then came out again, hot and soaking, his torso too, though he didn't know how she managed it, little flat-tummied thing that she was. When his head went in, he caught just a glimpse of the crimson slash amid the waxy pallor like rose
petals buried in ice cream, and he was afraid she might have hurt herself, she was moaning and yowling now and pitching about as though in horrible pain, but she slapped him playfully and growled at him to "Close your eyes, you little scoundrel!" in a voice that didn't sound like a little girl at all, and pushed him on in where everything was soft and creamy and utterly delicious, he didn't want to come out again, he just wanted to push deeper and deeper and stay there forever. But while he was in there - his head at least, he could still feel the rest of him in a wet scatter outside - he seemed to hear her speaking to him: "Bravo Pinocchio!" she said. "Because of your good heart and other parts I forgive you everything!"

  "Wonderful! And so you woke up a real boy!"

  "Not yet. When my head came out I found myself lying on her bed where she was reassembling me. I was still drenched from head to foot. What is all this wetness, I wondered? Why, it must be sweat, human sweat! I'd never sweated before, and I realized now that something truly grand was happening. When she put my hands back on, she lifted them up and pressed them to her nipples. I could feel her breasts puff up like spongy little balloons to fill them up, and she blew me a sly kiss and winked. I felt whole and happy, but vaguely frightened. Almost whole. There was one part still missing, forgotten until now."

  "Ah! I see it! Your nose!"

  "I was rather hoping it had gotten lost. I'd always hated it, it had caused me nothing but trouble and humiliation, and it seemed I might be free of it at last. I'd not lost the sensation of it, however. Wherever it was, it was encased in a plump fragrant warmth. As it turned out she was sitting on it. She plucked it out from beneath her and held it up between us, as though it might be a wicked secret we shared. Her azure hair was snarled and wild, her eyes strangely glazed, her lips twisted into a grin that bared her teeth, and, somehow aware that I was dreaming, I began to fear this might turn into a nightmare. She licked it all over, then blew on it teasingly. I watched it grow in her hands, felt it growing at the same time, felt her tongue on it, her lips, her breath, even though she was sitting far away from me at the foot of the bed. It was a very peculiar sensation. Perhaps this sort of thing happens in everybody's dreams, but for me it began to feel like something utterly new in the world, not unlike a sudden visitation of angels. As she put it in her mouth, wallowing it about with her tongue and sucking it deeper and deeper down her throat, I began to suffer a terrible tension around the hole gouged in the middle of my face, and my eyes and teeth felt like they were about to leap from their sockets. It was frightening, I was literally petrified, but I couldn't stop it, nor did I want to. When a little acorn appeared at the end of it and she nipped it off with her teeth, I nearly screamed with something compounded of both terror and delight, and then she put it up in that place where all the other parts had been. It was too much. I couldn't hold back anymore. 'Grow wise,' she said, 'and be happy.' I sneezed. I woke I was covered in flesh "

  CARNIVAL

  21. PLATO'S PRANK

  "Gee, Professor Pinenut," Bluebell exclaims, snapping her gum in his tender earhole, "that's a real masterpiece, hunh?" It is not. It is one of the most idiotic paintings he has ever seen. He cannot stop looking up at it, though. Chagrin would be his middle name, he thinks bitterly, if he had more than one in the first place. "I mean, when you look up at the ceiling and see a stark naked old man as ugly as that who's supposed to be, you know, 'The Universe,' it makes you realize what a mess we're in, right? Standing up there on that croc as though to say that's all it is, you know, just a big crock, see you later, alligator, whoo! That's really deep, man! I can see why you dig it!"

  "He is not the Universe, that happens to be the River Nile he is standing on, and in any case that is not why I -"

  "No? Hey, wait, don't tell me it's that cute tootsie with her big jugs spilling out like the Milky Way that's - crack! pop! - got your old eye, teach! Jiminy! I feel like I'm back in your classroom again, down mammary lane in the Beak's lecher hall, arse pimples, dix pix, cunny funnies, and all that!" That vulgar creature up there does indeed have his weary eye, but by the decree of - first, crack, then pop - Fate, as it were, not by election. Fate and Plato. That his beloved mentor should have helped to do this to him makes him feel doubly betrayed. "Whoa, speaking of your old clit classics," Bluebell whispers, her red windbreaker rustling as she leans down to press her warm cheek next to his, "I just realized! From where you're standing, you can see right up the little sweetie's ballooning sky blue skirts, can't you?! Wow, the art of introspective, just like you taught us! Dimples and all!" She gives him a conspiratorial squeeze. "Never know what you'll see if you just keep looking, right?"

  "The details in this instance are insignificant, Miss," he snaps in his old tutorial manner, his irritability provoked not by her, for in truth he has been longing all the while, though he had forgotten this, to see her again, but by his present predicament, disconcertingly pathognomonic, preferring an aesthetic explanation for it, however contrived, to the humiliation of the mechanical one. Or, more precisely, the wooden one. "What matters is the, ahem, overall composition." Which doesn't matter at all. What matters in a cheap ham-fisted pastiche as bad as this one is who commissioned it and why that cretin and the painter weren't both gibbeted in the Piazzetta or hung out to dry in a cage at the top of the Campanile. But, given his seemingly intense scrutiny of the wretched thing (what is worse, he can feel his incorrigible nose acting up again, even as he speaks), what he says is: "That and its position, both in, eh, historico-cultural time and in physical politico-geographical, as you might say, space."

  "Oh yeah, I get it! You don't have to point! Like, right beside it there's that painting of 'Modesty,' right? And so that whole bare-assed scene of the Universe or whatever it is up there becomes like an assault on - splupp! crack! - decency itself, a case of aggravating rape by a dirty old man, you might call it! I love it! And then in this one up here - gee, I'm sounding just like you, Professor Pinenut! I told you you taught me everything I know! - in this one we got this gorgeous hunk in the red bikini holding up the earth, or else maybe the mother just came down and - squit! fpooff! - bopped the sucker in the neck, and right over there we got Fortune - am I warm? - with her naked buns spread like fat on lean on a round dead stone, same size as the world on the hunk's back, as though to say that that's - spopp! - what this whole ball o' wax is gonna come to, right? Diddly-squat and let's hope her rectum's clean!"

  As far as this blue Monday is concerned, it has been pretty much diddly-squat from the beginning. There were masked Carnival revelers whooping it up outside his windows all night until the early hours, and then, after an hour or two of vague stifling nightmares about interminable tenure committee meetings back at the university, which he couldn't escape because the chairman, an old crab, had his claw clamped on his elbow, warning him to "void evil companions," he awoke to the shrill squealing of schoolchildren in St. Mark's trying to hold up armloads of feeding pigeons, a "Ladies' Marching Band" made up of bearded and mustachioed men dressed in pinafores and blowing trumpets and tubas, and the hammering together of the viewing stands for the Mardi Gras Gran Gala on the other side of the Piazza. He had a pounding headache, his backside felt as if it had been coarsely sandpapered all night, and there was a fresh weevil infestation in his right elbow, telltale sawdust in the soiled sheets. On his return from the cemetery island of San Michele, he had resolved to press on immediately with his life's work - if he hoped to recover his discipline and integrity, it was now or never - and his worsened condition this morning made that resolution all the more urgent.

  Of course he had to gauge his remaining strength. Though never afraid of the difficult, willing to confront challenges few other men of letters would even contemplate, he had never undertaken the impossible, knowing that was just another form of cowardice. His great Mamma opus was irretrievably lost, he knew that, and he also knew he could never reconstruct it, much less rewrite it, an effort as useless as trying to make an omelette out of a hatched chicken, but he believed he cou
ld capture something of its intent in a concentrated monograph, and such a project he might well have the time and energy to complete. In effect, he would write that final chapter that had brought him here in the first place, summarizing the salient points of the lost book and incorporating his recent Venetian experiences as paradigmatic fables of a sort, much as Saints Augustine and Petrarch used their own more vulnerable moments to provide dramatic contrast to their eventual unwavering commitment to higher principles, a commitment he intended, rejecting folly now once and for all (as though he had not done so many times before, but never with such a prospect of looming finality), to emulate. As his body weakened, he felt his spirit strengthening, as if being purified by the very impurity of his physical decay: home at last in the figurative lap of virtue, so to speak, all of a piece or not. This would be his theme, together perhaps with Wagner's dream of "dying in beauty," a dream which that musical impresario eventually realized upon this very island, though probably, as always, sooner than he'd hoped. With that in mind, then, he thought he might conclude the essay with the image of that tombstone on San Michele, the one he thought for a moment was hers, an artifact hard as an idea but pulsating with transcendent emotion, and ultimately something other (more abstract, in effect, more indefinite) than it appeared to be, an image that would thus reveal much that was at the very core of his personal aesthetic, he who, dying in beauty, had always lived in it as well, though more in the abstract than in the particular.