(1991) Pinocchio in Venice

by Robert Coover

  "Murderer! See what you have done to me -!"

  "What's that? Speak up, Pini," Eugenio complained, turning to primp in a gold-framed mirror, "I can't hear a word you say! As for your room here, if that's what you're mumbling about, I regret to say, your credit has run out, dear old chum, and I must ask you to leave. No hard feelings -"

  "Run out -? Credit -?"

  "Yes, credit - did you think it was Cuccagna around here? In the real world, things cost money, my dear, as a Nobel Prize-winner you should at least know that much!

  "But all my savings -!"

  "Your bank accounts are as empty as a Venetian well, your credit cards are used up, your properties sold or seized, your royalties bequeathed to, eh, charity, there's simply nothing left."

  "My retirement funds ?"

  "Tsk tsk. I am afraid they're gone, too, Pini. You've been a very expensive guest!"

  "You took even my -?!"

  "Everything, carino mio. I am nothing if not thorough, as the Little Man himself would have told you long ago." Applying fresh ruby red lipstick, Eugenio puckered his lips in the mirror and winked coyly at himself. "And, please, I didn't take those little baubles, you forgetful old thing, you gave them to me. Still," he added, adjusting his wig, then turning away from the mirror and snapping his purse shut, "for old time's sake, if you stop fussing, I will let you stay on one more night. I'm certainly not coming home tonight, I'm having the most delicious time, so you or this grand imperial nabob here may use my rooms for the time being, whichever one of you promises to be continent. "

  "But - but what about tomorrow?"

  "Tomorrow is a lifetime away, amor mio. We will take off our shoes, as we say here, when we come to the water! Those of us who still have them, that is. Now, now, don't put on such a face! I do love you, you know. And just to prove it, I have a little present for you! You there without the nose! Go to the library immediately and bring me what you find there on the Cinquecento papal secretary! Snap to it, you unsightly rogue!"

  Almost before he had left, Brighella/Buffetto was back, cradling an all-too-familiar portable computer. "That's mine!" the old scholar croaked as the puppet-servant set it on his old writing table by the window. "You've - you've had it all the time!"

  "Have I? Well, how should I know?" snapped Eugenio petulantly, turning away from the window where he had been throwing kisses and hallooing in his teasing falsetto to someone down in the Piazza below. "I buy and sell things all the time, that's what I do. I can't keep up with all the details! Now, really, I must get back to my party. We only live once, you know! Be a good fellow and don't disturb the other guests! And get something on, dear boy, you look a fright!"

  "Wait! The - my student - how did -?"

  "Ah, sorry about that, Old Sticks. I'm afraid she stood you up."

  "No! I mean, what did she - did you -?" But Eugenio, with a flamboyant swish of his brocade skirts and jangling his jewelry like little beggars' bells, was gone, squealing: "Here I come, you naughty boys, ready or not!"

  So he would not know. Perhaps he did not want to know. Knowledge, he has written somewhere, leads to the abyss. Knowledge is the abyss. How proud he had been to take that notorious path and, beating his breast for all to see, to walk the perilous rim, failing to perceive the true abyss opening up behind him with every footstep he took! One look back, and -!

  And, well, here he was.

  On his writing table sat the most recent instrument of his own daily acts of self-deception and -destruction. The very sight of it filled him suddenly with an indescribable loathing, a hatred of what Eugenio had done to him, of what he had done to himself, and of his long wretched life so wrongfully spent. Feeble as he was, he lurched to his feet, desiring to reach the thing, and it was then that he discovered his feet were gone. The clatter he made on the marble floor alarmed the puppets.

  "Ahi! Be careful, dear Pinocchio! You're splintering!"

  "There's not much holding you together!"

  "It's the climate, you know! You must -!"

  "Take me over there!" he gasped.

  "What? To your table?"

  "You wish to write, dear friend?"

  "You should be in bed!"

  "Now! Please! While I'm still able "

  Reluctantly, Colombina rolled his leather swivel chair over to the table and Brighella and Captain Spavento set him in it, propping him up tenderly with goose-down pillows as they'd always done. "Great artists must always work when inspiration strikes them, I suppose," Colombina said dubiously, pulling a blanket off the bed to tuck around his shoulders. It took every last ounce of strength left him, but, summoning up all his rage to assist him in the final thrust (it didn't help that the infernal chair was on casters), he managed to push the computer out the open window, feeling as he did so the weight of a century lift from his frail weather-beaten shoulders.

  "Free at last!" he rasped bitterly.

  There was a sickening k-thuck! sound and then screams and shouts rose up from the square below. Oh no. He had forgotten about the Carnival crowds. He gripped, gripped by dread, the sill and, wishing not to see what he feared he must see, pulled himself forward to peek over, the three puppets squeezing around him to gape over his shoulder. At first he thought he had struck a woman. There at the mouth of the little underpass beneath his window, she lay lifeless, limbs outflung, wearing the fallen computer like a large square cartoon head. But then he recognized the tender butterball knees splayed out beneath the tossed brocaded skirts, the plump bejeweled hands. Blood pooled out richly around the computer, as though the Piazza were flooding from below. This time there was no mistake, Eugenio was as dead as he could be.

  "Che colpo di scena!" whooped Brighella. "And what a shot!" The other two were already down the stairs, running to join in the festivities erupting around the body. Il Zoppo was down there, attempting celebrative back flips that were more like lanky pratfalls, and also the Madonna of the Organs and Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo and all his bizarre retinue, the Count tipping back his mask and laughing the fierce strident laugh of the Venetian Lion-Planter, Pantalone the Magnificent. His monumental phallus was slit open by Colombina and Captain Spavento, just arriving, and out popped Pierotto, Lelio, and Diamantina, while other Burattini emerged from the costumed entourage, leaping and dancing wildly. "Viva Pinocchio!" they shouted. "He has saved our lives!"

  Their presumptive hero, however, was not celebrating. He was weeping grievously, head drooped over the sill as though on the, block. "Oh Eugenio, Eugenio!" he sobbed. "What have I done? Get up, Eugenio! This is not why I came here! Damn you! You mustn't die!"

  The Madonna of the Organs took off her mask and wig, and the figure inside, the huge bearded maskmaker Mangiafoco, tipped his hairy head to one side and, peering up at the palazzo window, his eyes blazing as though with an inner fire, asked: "Who is that little woodenpate filling the air with sighs and watering the ground with his tears? Eh?" They might well be the last tears he would ever shed, already he could feel the tear sacs drying up, perhaps he should save them, he thought, things might get worse, but he could not stop them from flowing, it was like a wound that could not be stanched. "Yes, Pinocchio! Why?" the puppets cried. "After all he has done to you?"

  "I-I don't know! I c-can't help it!" he bawled, feeling ashamed of his answer, his tears, his uncertainties, and of his very shame all at once. It was as bad as when he found himself in old Giangio's stable, crying like a mooncalf over a dying donkey. "He was a schoolmate of mine! And - and now he is dead!"

  "Ah well," laughed Mangiafoco toothily, spreading wide his arms costumed in the pale likeness of flesh, "but that, signorino, is the very nature of our comedy here -!"

  "Wait!" Pantalone cried out, beaked nose high as though testing the air, gray beard bristling. "Listen!"

  Sirens wailed distantly. Beyond the Molo blue lights flashed. "It's the carabinieri! They're on the way!" "La madama!" "What do we do now?!" "We must rescue Pinocchio!" "He saved our lives, it's the least we can do!" "Bu
t how? They'll be here before we can even get him out of the palazzo!" "They're already at the Ponte della Paglia!" "They're coming down from Santa Maria Formosa!" "We're surrounded!" "They're at the Bocca! All is lost!" "Ahi! Ahi! Poor Pinocchio!" "Who will save him now -?!"

  Whereupon began that heavy overhead flopping now no less familiar to him than the smell of the lagoon, as the Winged Lion of Saint Mark, for the second time, flew down to save his life, if his present condition could be so generously labeled. And this time, tossed out the window by Brighella onto the great beast's glossy back instead of into its jaws, without the torment of the creature's lethally fetid breath. Which, nevertheless, nestled here now on the Fondamenta del Teatro in the old fellow's pebbly mane, he has to admit he finds somehow less odious than before. Of course, the grappa probably helps.

  "Helps -?"

  "Your halitosis."

  "My drinking grappa does?"

  "No, my drinking it."

  "Well, hrmff," grumps the old fellow, a bit miffed but with that sour, melancholic dignity that marks his character, "for centuries the citizens here fucked one another over by stuffing my mouth full of anonymous accusations. A shitty diet like that, what can you expect?"

  The ghostly bulb overhead, casting no more light than a glowworm, barely illuminates the munched bricks in the wall right beside it, much less the little elbowed platform down here whereon, like cornered fugitives, they huddle, the dark wet walls and mazy canals beyond lost in an impenetrable darkness, yet he has the distinct impression that something large and secretive is moving now under the nearby bridge. The old Lion notices it, too. "Che cazzo -?!" he rumbles, flexing his clattery wings and beginning, slowly, boozily, to rise. The large dark shapes, darker than the darkness behind them, sway and bob furtively, moving slowly this way with the soft treacherous sound of rustling leaves. Then, like a dead man's hand reaching from its coffin, the silvery beak of a gondola emerges from beneath the bridge, followed by a second, and then a third. The occupants still are hidden in the shadows of the arched bridge, but, unless his ancient eyes deceive him, the ashen figure standing at the prow of the lead gondola, sightless and bloodied, broader than he is tall, one hand at his breast, or breasts, the other pointing accusingly straight at him, is Eugenio.

  28. THE FIELD OF MIRACLES

  "Porca Madonna!" whispers someone at his side, as, drawn up together, they stare in awe at the ghostly little campo, eerily lit by the single blue bulb hanging in the mists above. "Am I dreaming?"

  In the middle of the softly undulating campo, where a wellhead might otherwise be, stands a strange tree, no larger than a leggy Tokai Friulano grapevine, leafed with crumpled thousand-lire notes and plastic credit cards and bearing clusters of silvery coins that glitter like lapis lazuli in the spectral blue light, though the sound they make is not so much the zin-zin-zin of his childhood fantasy as the kunk-kunk-kunk of old postwar leaden coins, the credit cards and dog-eared banknotes, ruffled by the cold damp breeze, adding a listless continue of futter-futter-ffpussh to the blurry plunking.

  The gondolas are already perilously overladen with treasures looted from the Palazzo dei Balocchi, but the lure of the mysterious money tree is irresistible, and soon the ancient anthropoid emeritus is alone once more, as his companions scramble up the broad watersteps to gather in cautious amaze around the luminous spectacle. He peers up through the blue mist at the sign engraved on the crumbling brick wall above him and sees: CAMPO DEI MIRACOLI. So here he is again. The Field of Miracles. It looks a bit different from the time he last saw it, returned then to search in vain for the gold pieces he had, with an innocence that shames him still, buried here. It has been paved over for one thing, though it is still as washboardy as a harrowed field. And it seemed larger and wilder to his childish eyes, he doesn't remember the pretty fog-masked Renaissance houses crowding in across the square from him or even the little church here by the watersteps with its façade of precious inlaid porphyry and marble, iridescent as mother-of-pearl, but then, what did he care about such things then, artless little gonzo that he was? In the lunette above the closed paneled doors of the church, a pensive stone Virgin gazes down at her naked baby, who seems to be pointing, amused, or perhaps alarmed and about to cry, at the even more naked figure hunched, trembling, in the gondola below, singling him out for reproach in much the same way that Eugenio, to his terror, seemed to be doing a few moments ago.

  When he'd first seen the ashen bloodstained ex-Director of Omini e figli, S.R.L., floating toward him out of the mists, his pointing finger raised in angry denunciation, he'd hardly known what to think. He'd seen Eugenio dead, he had no doubt of that, this ghastly hollow-eyed apparition approaching him now could not be alive - and yet Stripped of everything else, he feared his sanity might be going, too. And whatever else it meant, he was sure, as he shrank back into the rough mane of his growling companion there on the little gloomily lit fondamenta, that his own retribution was at hand.

  The outstretched arm bent stiffly at the elbow as the grim figure approached, and slowly the pointing finger rose to point directly overhead. "The devil teaches how to make the pot," intoned a hollow voice that seemed to come from the bottom of a well, Eugenio's painted scarlet lips moving slightly like a clumsy ventriloquist's, his face expressionless except for a tear glistening on one cheek, "but not, dear boy, the cover!" The empty eyes began to glow and rays of light emerged, beamed directly on the accused. "Murder will OUT!" The hand pressed to the costumed bosom swung out abruptly and the padded bodice slipped to the waist, then, as though by itself, popped back up again, the hand overhead dropping quickly to clamp it in place, the other hand flopping loosely for a moment, then rising steadily once more, elbow bent, until it covered the tearful face, extinguishing the beams of light. "No evil more terrible," bemoaned the echoey voice from behind the hand, "than to give an old friend such a bloody headache! It's a technological scandal! What good is a friend with an empty attic, not one turd of a brain in his bean?" As though to demonstrate the consequences of this condition (snorting sourly, the Lion of Saint Mark dropped his blunt snout back into his paws, and the escaped fugitive, too, felt the danger, if not the horror, pass), Eugenio's arms opened wide, the bodice plopped down and rose again, the hands waggled on their wrists, then the elbows angled upwards, the hands flopping loosely like laundry on a line, while the eyeless head rocked from side to side until it shook its wig off. One of Eugenio's thick white legs rose rigidly to one side, pushing against the brocaded skirt, and fell, then the other did the same. Then both legs rose straight up out of the gondola until the feet, still in their Queen-of-the-Night high-heeled shoes, were higher than the lurid head, hands falling limply between the fat thighs. "Piů in alto che se va," sang the voice, or voices, which now might have been coming from any part of the body, the flabby arms spreading apart like an opening curtain, "piů el cul se mostra!" This reprise of the familiar Gran Teatro dei Burattini Vegetal Punk Rock Band ballad was followed by clackety wooden applause from the other gondolas and the cadaver's sudden collapse, its animators Pierotto, Brighella, and Diamantina peering out from behind it to take their bows.

  "Meat!" grumped Brighella in disgust, as he and Pierotto, Pierotto first plucking the crystal tear off Eugenio's face and putting it back on his own cheek, heaved the corpse into the canal. "It's got no style!" Then he sprang in one great leap from the gondola to the fondamenta, followed by all the other members of the troupe, the laden gondolas left bobbing on their own, spilling into the canal loose Trecento artworks, silver goblets and golden candelabra, and there he led them all in a strutting, high-spirited, double-jointed celebration of woodenness. They scaled the wall of the theater, then fell from the roof on their backs, wept lugubriously in unison, broke into wild knee-slapping laughter, fanned at each other with wooden or imaginary swords, danced, somersaulted, bounced rigidly as though on hidden springs, pirouetted, walked on their hands and kicked their wooden heels together, flew through the air from kicks they gave one another, swagger
ed about stiff-legged and flat-footed, spouting Latin nonsense, then turned into potbellied hunchbacks one and all, competing with one another in a wind-breaking contest. Throughout all of this, Il Zoppo, somewhat handicapped, put on his/her own show, a kind of choral version of the other puppets' acts, weeping and laughing at the same time, farting in Latin, walking on Pulcinella's hands while strutting on Lisetta's feet, and falling down even as she/he was getting up. Finally the two of them formed a kind of arched bridge from fondamenta to near gondola over which the others hopped, skipped, tumbled, pranced, or leapt.

  When they were all back in their gondolas, they turned to smile and wave up at him. "Come along, Pinocchio!" they cried. Captain Spavento maneuvered his gondola over to the watersteps so he could get in. "This house is played out! We're on our way to Rome!"

  "Paris!"

  "London!"

  "Hollywood!"

  "Look at all the loot we've got!"

  "We're rich! We sacked the palazzo!"

  "What parties we will have!"

  "Anyway, we have no choice," said Brighella. "The carabinieri are right behind us."

  "And are they mad!"

  "Pantalone's wearing the Madonna's gash and stalling them with his stolen cazzo act!"

  "They can't seem to find the corpus delicti either!"

  "Ha ha!"

  "But why didn't you laugh at our show, Pinocchio?" Lelio wanted to know. "We did that famous 'Dead Meat Lazzo' just for you!"

  "It's one of the oldest routines in show business!"

  "It's a real bitch, too!"

  "Hardest puppet act there is!"

  "Especially in a gondola!"

  "He weighed a ton!"

  "And the mask was too old and stiff. Maybe we should have left all that mucky stuff inside and used the whole head on a stick or something."

  "No, no, it was great! Those flashlight eyes were fantastic!"