(1991) Pinocchio in Venice (11 page)

    "So she found you after all."

    "She'd never lost me…" Even if he'd nearly lost himself. She was everywhere now, he'd realized, vast and immediate as the ocean outside his Malibu window or the blue sky overhead. The house he'd returned to after rescuing his father from the belly of the monster fish -
her
house, though the Talking Cricket claimed he'd got it from the blue-haired goat - had expanded to become the entire universe. He'd been a fool to think he could get away…

    "Yet last night you said," she says, bringing over his washed underclothes and suit, and helping him out of his cocoon of blanket, "that without you she wouldn't even exist."

    "It's our own creations that most possess us," he replies, pleased to be able to quote himself again, and thus, as it were, to clothe in some fashion his naked decrepitude.

    "Yes, true, like blind Father Didymus in the demonic grip of the Holy Trinity, or poor old Pope Innocent the Eighth, who, populating Hell for the faithful, found himself nightly in the fiends' amorous clutches, a consequence, I take it, you have not suffered…?"

    "Not… not in that sense, no, I have never, so far as I know," he says, choosing his words carefully (his underwear is fresh and crisp, but his suit seems to have shrunk and is pocked, as though in imitation of his diseased flesh, with burn holes), "seen her again. Not since the night I… I became a boy…" He scrubs his itchy nose, holds his suit up to the dull light of the snowy day. "But what -?"

    "Sorry about that. Must have been cheap material, dear friend - old sheep's hair of some kind, I suspect. I put it to dry on the barrel last night and it couldn't take the heat. I don't have much else to -"

    "It's all right," he says, feeling very generous this glittery morning. "I've gotten by with less. There was a time when I had nothing better than wallpaper or a beanbag to wear, and stale bread on my head. And anyway I still have the overcoat."

    "Yes, well, most of it… But wait!" She raises her snout to the air and sniffs expectantly, then barks:
"Here comes Alidoro!"

    "Ah, noble friend!" the grateful professor cries, stumbling forward, tears in his eyes, to embrace the great mastiff as he comes lumbering into the boatyard. "You have saved my life - again! And my life's work! How can I ever thank you? How can the
world
thank you?!" Lido does not immediately return his embrace. His old eyes droop rheumily. What -? A chill runs through the old scholar. He staggers back. "Is something -? Were the bags
not
found? Were they someone else's -?!"

    "No, they're there. They're yours, all right -"

    "Well, then, it's time for celebrations! Dinner tonight! At my hotel! With champagne! Cream puffs and panettoni! Tiramisu! Grappa from the last century! We'll have a week of Saturdays! Christmas and Carnival, all at once! For you, Melampetta, those shawls and baubles you've been wanting! For you, Alidoro, my most precious friend,
the world!"

    "The bags are yours," growls the old mastiff when he's able, "but they're empty."

    "Empty -?"

    "Ah," whispers Melampetta softly, tossing some more letters into the fire, "it rains on the arse of the unlucky, even when they are sitting on it…"

    "Nothing in them but one sheet of paper."

    "One sheet -?" he squeaks, beginning to choke up. "From all my work, just one sheet? But which -?" Lido hands it to him. There are three proverbs scrawled on it. Stolen money never bears fruit. The devil's flour is all bran. He who steals his neighbor's cloak ends his life without a shirt. He recognizes them. The last time he'd seen La Volpe and her stupid companion before last night was nearly a century ago. They were ragged then, maimed and destitute, begging out of need, not knavery, though it was only what they deserved, and so, his own conversion by then complete, he'd sent them both to hell:
"Addio, mascherine!"
he'd laughed, throwing proverbs at them like stones. And these: these were the proverbs. "Scoundrels!" he hisses. He is trembling from head to foot. "Villains!
Thieving treacherous fiends! Murderers! ASSASSINS!"
He finds himself beating wildly on Alidoro's chest. He clutches his head, which seems about to burst. They can't
do
this! Not to him! Don't they know who -? But what -? What's this -?!
There's nothing on the right side of his head!
"My ear!
What's happened to my ear
-
?!"

    Melampetta, head ducked, tail curled between her legs, glances

    devil's flour sideways at Alidoro as though she might have just eaten a chicken. "Last night," she says meekly, "when we were trying to get you back into your blanket, it… it came off."

    "What -?! My ear -?!"

    "Don't worry, we saved it!"

    "You knocked my ear off, you stupid animals -?! You slobbered all over me, you burned my clothes up, you made me sleep in all this filth, and then, on top of it all, you knocked my
ear
off -?!"

    "Actually, it sort of fell off by itself…"

    "Listen, my friend, you can stay here another night," suggests Alidoro. "The owners won't be back till the snow's gone, and Mela won't mind. Until we can -"

    "Here -?! In this pestilent flyblown dunghill of a kennel? This loathsome flea farm, this squalid, stinking -?"

    "You and Mela can talk. You know, about serious things. Meanwhile I'll go back and see if -"

    "Talk?" he screams, his rage exploding. "With this dumb mutt, this illiterate foul-mouthed retard? Listen to her preposterous idiocies another whole night? Are you
crazy,
you stupid mongrel, I'd rather
die!"

    Alidoro, who has slumped to his haunches, now lowers his jaws and gazes mournfully up at him from between his paws. "For charity, vecchio -!" he rumbles softly under his breath. Melampetta stares at him a moment as though trying to see through the holes in his suit. There is a brief dreadful silence. Then she lifts her snout, closes her eyes, and commences to howl pathetically.

    Oh no. What has he done? What has he said?

    "My… my friends! Oh, my friends,
forgive me!"

    He rushes over, tearfully, to embrace them. Alidoro buries his nose deeper, Melampetta howls all the louder. All over Venice he seems to hear dogs howling. "Oh please! I'm just upset! Can't you see? It's been so hard! I'm an old man! I'm at the very edge, I've nothing left!" He is weeping, sobbing, all his pain concentrated now in Melampetta's terrible howl. "Oh what a wretched fool I've been!" His knees collapse, but Alidoro reaches for him now to steady him with a gentle forepaw. "You're the dearest friends I have in the whole world! Last night was, truly, one of the most beautiful nights of my whole life! Not even the day I got my Ph.D. was as wonderful! It's true! Please, Melampetta! Don't howl like that! I'm so sorry!
I love you so!"
She releases one more anguished siren, then allows herself to be drawn into his arms. They are all hugging and licking one another now and whimpering and crying. "Oh dear sweet eloquent Melampetta! You're the greatest philosopher I've ever known!" he exclaims, then adds, to stop his nose from twitching: "In all of Venice!" They all laugh at that, and then they cry some more, and hug and kiss and promise always to be true and to help each other and not to say unkind things, and while they're all rubbed up together like that, his other ear comes off.

10. THE THREE KINGDOMS

    It is all the old traveler can do, his traveling all but done, to put one benumbed foot in front of the other. It is not just the snow, blowing through the holes in his clothing and down his neck and ankles, it is not just the freezing cold snapping cruelly at his tender nose, or the pain in his elbows and locked-up wooden knees, the arduousness of the trek itself through the treacherously frosted city. It is also despair. Bleak, final, disabling. He no longer has anything left to live for. His conclusive and definitive work, his
capolavoro,
is gone forever, his life is ended. Why then must the suffering go on? "I have lived long enough," San Petrarca said. Perhaps while wandering these very streets. "If the Stage Director wants to break it off, very well." "We can but keep trying, my friend," Alidoro had insisted gruffly in a temper something between heroism and simple doggedness. "Death must find us alive." And so, without conviction, they have set out, the heartsick professor and the faithful old mastiff, bound for the Questura with the aim of providing the police with a list of the empty luggage's missing contents and perhaps a little monetary encouragement on the side ("Not for nothing is that band of shameless beggars known also as the
questua
- the Sunday collection plate!" Melampetta had growled good-humoredly, forcing upon him the few rumpled notes she and Lido had somehow scraped together, stuffing them into his pockets along with his ears), but the journey is as futile, he knows, as the larger one which brought him here.
Back
here, he should say, back here to Acchiappacitrulli, the infamous snare of simpletons, Fools' Trap, city of the shorn, where he himself once played, now plays again, the booby.

    "I always thought of this as the Island of the Busy Bees," he had sighed somewhat grievously while they were bundling him up in his scraps and tatters of overcoat, which has the odor this morning of burnt camel dung, and Lido had replied drily: "Well, that's right, and what they're busy at, compagno, is skinning the tourists."

    So he has returned, he has discovered, not only to the scene of his triumph, but to the scene of his ignominy as well, the place where all those years ago, in Acchiappacitrulli's Field of Miracles, he buried his gold coins, dreaming of orchards of tinkling money trees. He should have guessed. This infamous city of despotism and duplicity, of avarice and hypocrisy and subterfuge, this "stinking bordello," this wasps' nest of "insatiable cupidity" and "thirst for domination," as Venice's outraged neighbors once declared, this police state with the air of a robber's den, always out after its "quarter and a half-quarter" and "conspiring the ruin of everyone," this fake city built on fake pilings with its fake fronts and fake trompes l'oeil, this capital of licentiousness and murder and omnivorous greed: who else but these lagoon rats would
want
the tail feathers of a poor gullible pheasant or the hair of a dumb dog? One thing, surely, can be said of all who have come to this island: whether they left wiser, wearier, happier, sadder, enchanted or enlightened, exasperated or exalted, impregnated with beauty or disease or rabid hedonism, they all left poorer. Just as the Blue-Haired Fairy ever, in her profound maternal wisdom, warned him.

    Yet it was for
her
sake he has returned and, though deceived, he can pride himself that on this occasion his intentions at least were nobler: the search, not without considerable personal sacrifice, for the consummation, as it were, of a virtuous life - and yet, and yet, he cautions himself, stumbling along, wasn't that dream of an ultimate life-defining metaphor as mad as the dream of money trees? What was he hoping for this time, another Peace Prize? Beatification? Another review that lauded his wisdom and stylistic mastery, whilst scarcely concealing an annoyed amazement that he was still alive? Another invitation to receive an honorary degree and put his nose on view? As he trudges miserably, step by leaden step, through this city of masks, its very masks masked this morning by the snow blown against its crumbling walls like the white marble faces masking Palladio's pink churches, a dazzlingly sinister mask, today's, as expressionless and macabre as the Venetian
bauta
worn last night by the hotel proprietor, the
alleged
hotel proprietor (fakes within fakes, deceptions upon deceptions!), he feels the mockery cast upon his own shabby self-deceptions, the impostures and evasions, grand pretensions, the many masks he's worn - and not least that of flesh itself, now falling from him like dried-up actor's putty. Ah, he was right to come here, after all, old piece of rot-riven firewood that he is, to share his shame with the defrocked sheep and peacocks, the wingless butterflies and combless cocks of Fools' Trap.

    As the despondent prodigal shuffles along, "carrying through," as he would say, but just barely, dragging one ill-shod foot laboriously through the snow, then, after a deliberating pause, the other, his patient companion trots back and forth, sniffing this canal railing, lifting his leg on that boutique wall or Carnival poster, nosing around in garbage bags and emptied crates, lapping at cast-off food wrappers and paper cups, as though to pretend that this is the unhurried way he always goes to work. The streets are empty but for a few angry red-faced women under their dark umbrellas, carried like missile shields, a midmorning drunk or two, flurries of wheeling black-faced gulls, the occasional lost tourist. The heavy metal shutters are down on most of the shops, intensifying the city's blank stare (it is this blank stare he has been feeling, this cold shoulder, this icy scorn - there are no
reflections
today, even the ditchlike canals full of dirty slate-colored water, scummed with snow, are opaque), but from those that are open - a baker, a newsstand, a pasta maker, a toyshop and a cantina, a pizzeria - Alidoro receives and returns greetings, picking up scraps of this and that to nibble on which the professor in his desolation refuses.

    Once they've passed out of earshot, Lido fills him in on the politics, in-laws, crimes, calamities, debts, spouses and lovers, foibles, fantasies, and farces of each of the shopkeepers, keeping up a steady rumble of conversation as though to stop the old professor's brain from freezing up. "Started life as a gigolo for the local contessas, that one, helped manage one of their Friends of Venice flood rescue funds, rising as you might say while the Old Queen sank, and then, when his little bird died, he retired into politics for awhile and, after the usual scandals and piracies, ended up in fashion leather, security systems, and the manufacture of decorative window boxes. Careful now, old friend, not too close to the edge there…" Lido talks as well about his career as a police dog, life in Italy between the wars, how the Fascists tore his tail off for some secret he never knew or couldn't recall ("You know me, I can't remember from the nose end of my muzzle to the other…"), his irremediable attachment to this island in spite of his loathing of tourists and his lifelong fear of water ("I always meant to leave, but you can't straighten an old dog's legs my friend, I'll have to draw the hide in this infested overdecorated chamber pot, I'll fodder their boggy eelbeds in the end…"), his hatred of the modern world with its electronically hyped-up homeless transients, all of them nowhere and anywhere at the same time, even when they think they're at home, the humiliations of toothlessness and blindness (the professor, absorbed in his own debilities, hasn't noticed; he notices now: the old fellow navigates largely by nose alone), and life with his "mistresses," as he calls them, women he meets getting arrested, who take him home with them when he gets them off, and who are grateful and treat him well until they get taken back in again.

    "They seem to get some comfort out of an old dog. I do what I can for them. Not much, of course, but the cask gives what wine it has, as they say, and at worst I've got this old stub of a tail to get me by when I'm not up to better. Unfortunately, a lot of the old dears have taken a bad fold of late, gone onto the needle, and are dying off now with the plague."

    "There's a plague in Venice -?!"

    "There's a plague everywhere."

    In between stories, Alidoro, circling round and round in the bristling cold, asks the venerable scholar about his own career, about his books and his honors and his nose, about his prison days and life as a farm worker and getting swallowed by the monster fish ("You know what my father said when I went running up to give him a hug," he flares up, angry about something, though he can't say just what, "he said, 'Oh no, not you again, you little fagot! Even in this putrid fishgut I can't get away!' "), about his reasons for coming back to Venice (he doesn't give them - whatever they were, they were tragically stupid), about his problems with wood-boring weevils and fungal decay, and about America, about the bosses and the range wars, the recent elections ("How is it a country can stand tall, hunker down, sit tight, fly high, show its muscle, tighten its belt, talk through its hat, and fall on its ass, all at the same time?" the old mastiff wants to know), and the gangsters and centerfolds and dog catchers of Chicago.

    Even though the professor is aware that his friend is provoking this dialogue as well-meant therapy against the despair which is threatening to halt him in his tracks, he cannot curb his sense of outrage and betrayal that he should be visited by such bitter despair in the first place - or the last place, as it were (and perhaps he even
wants
the despair, who knows, perhaps it is this that is making him crabby: he's earned it, has he not?), such that when Alidoro asks him: "How did you get so interested in painted pictures anyhow, compagno? I would have thought, wide-awake as you were -", he cuts him off snappishly with: "Because they don't move. And they don't ask tiresome questions." He groans faintly, regretting the outburst, though Alidoro seems unperturbed by it, maybe even pleased, in that it has carried him another three steps or so. They are trudging past silent black-faced gondolas with silver beaks, now laden with snow as though trying to disguise themselves as squatting gulls. Actors everywhere. Who can you trust? "I'm not a greedy man, Alidoro. I learned early on from my father's pear peels, the pigeon's tares, the circus hay, to be happy with little in this life. I have given up much for that little. And the little I wanted, here at the end, was to finish one last chapter of one last book before I died. But now…"

    "Ah well, maybe that's a blessing," grumps the old dog. "Too many words in the world already. Like taking water to the sea."

    "Enough words maybe," acknowledges the old scholar with a sigh, "but we still haven't put them together right. That, Alidoro, is our sacred mission."

    "Bah!" barks Alidoro. "I shit on sacred missions!" And he squats right where he is in front of a barbershop to make his point.

    "That's easy for
you
to say," replies the professor wryly, gazing blurrily upon the squatting dog. "If I try to make that kind of argument, your friends will want to throw me in jail again."

    "To some son, to some -
unff!
- stepson," Lido grunts cheerfully, then lifts his rear, kicks a foot, and walks away. "Ciao, Mario!"

    "Ciao, Lido!" shouts the barber, rushing out to spread sawdust on the turd.

    "In Venice, Pinocchio my friend, in case you hadn't noticed, there is
always
a double standard. It goes with the scenery."

    The professor is momentarily transfixed, however, by the mastiffs sawdust-sprinkled turd, sitting upon the glittering white pavement with all the authority of a papal announcement. Or a gilded prophecy. "Mine," he says dismally, his depression creeping over him again, "are coming out that way. There's…"

    "Eh?" The dog turns back to nose his turd quizzically.

    "That stuff… there's something wrong inside…"

    "Mm, the sawdust, you mean… flour of your own bag, was it? Last night I was wondering…"

    "The
devil's
flour…," he sighs, trying to make light of it, but feeling tears prick the corners of his eyes. And standing there staring down upon Alidoro's turd, he feels the pang of his loss penetrate him once again to the very core, releasing afresh all those bitter memories of the more distant past, those times that heartless pair had cheated him, and lied to him, and set fire to the tree he was hiding in, then tried to murder him with knives and ropes. "After that," the abased traveler says, or perhaps adds, not sure whether he's been talking out loud or not, "the villains made me bury my money in the Field of Miracles. They took, then as now, everything I had!"

    "Ah,
that
infamous patch,
that
pesthole - I'm afraid that's another story, my fr -!" Alidoro begins, but he is suddenly interrupted by a strange spindly fellow who comes leaping out of nowhere, black coat-tails flying, and lands with both feet -
SPLAP!
- on Lido's snow-frosted turd:
"Got you!"
he cries, laughing horribly. "Stamping out
wisdom!"
he shrieks at the postered wall, shaking his fist vehemently at it. Then he whirls abruptly on Pinocchio, startling him with his manic ferocity, and, staring straight through him, screams:
"Heads up! Heads up! Here she comes!"

    "What -?!" gasps the old professor, ducking, as the wild-eyed creature flings himself flat out in the turd-stained snow, crying
"WAAHH-H-hhh!"
Then he springs to his feet again and bellows into the swirling snow:
"Go to the devil, you ungrateful cold-assed nanny! You cuntless whore! You endless nightmare! Oh, what madness!"
He throws himself at the wall, kicks it, rips off an impasto of overlaid posters and heaves it at the sky, crying out his "Woe! Woe! Woe!", his
"Guai! Guai! Guai!"
(or maybe it's
"Mai! Mai! Mai!
- Never! Never! Never!"), and then, declaiming solemnly with a quavering voice, "I shall not leave until I tell you a great truth," the lunatic goes bounding off into the falling snow, the black tatters of his suit fluttering behind him like unpinned ribbons, and, at the far end of the little calletta, disappears into the storm suddenly like a candle snuffed in the wind.