(1991) Pinocchio in Venice (18 page)

    "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 somewhere… 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 -!"

    The ancient pigeon gapes his gnarled beak as though to interrupt, but before he can manage so much as a peep, Eugenio, approaching the bird with a broad smile and full of loving kindness, steps on his head, crunching it into the stone pavement beneath the snow. The wings flop once and are still.

    "What… what have you
done
-
?!"
the professor squeaks in alarm.

    "The tedious old thing had some kind of cricket in his head, as we say -
qualche grillo per il capo,
ha ha! - and I, as it were, got rid of it for him!" chuckles Eugenio, wiping his shoe in the snow. He waddles back to the sedan chair and caressingly tucks the blankets around his old friend once more. "But, dear fellow, you're
trembling
so! It's like you're trying to shake yourself
out
of yourself -!"

    "You - you've
killed
him -!"

    "Now, now, let's not make an elephant out of a fly, precious boy! There are too many of these little shit-factories in Venice as it is! The commissions we get on the tourist seed stalls may be good business in the summer, but this time of year the little bandits are just a drain on the economy! So, here we go, it's off to the Palazzo dei - Pini, my love! are you there? Pini -?
Speak
to me!"

PALAZZO DEI BALOCCHI

17. VIEW FROM THE CLOCK TOWER

    Across the ruffled lead-colored waters of St. Mark's Basin, poised between crenellated Gothic fantasy and High Renaissance exuberance, Andrea Palladio's masterful church of San Giorgio Maggiore, with its sagging cheeks, carbuncular dome, and stiff cone-capped campanile at its rear (his grumbling companion has likened it to a belled cat with its tail in the air), sits gravely at anchor like an ordered thought within a confused sensuous dream, this damp dream called Venice, "the original wet dream," as his dear friend Eugenio likes to call it. The church's pale façade, caught obliquely in the winter sun's angular light and framed now between the two absurd columns of the Piazzetta like a carnival mask hung in a window, peers out past the growling, bobbing water traffic upon this shabby but bejeweled old tart of a city, the mystery of reason confronting the mystery of desire, and what it seems to be saying is: history, true, is at best a disappointment ("It is a fairy tale full of wind, master, you are right, an empty masquerade, a handful of dead flies…"), but it is also, in spite of itself, beautiful…

    Not an easy idea for the old professor to accept, any more than that traditional Venetian notion of art as speech, as a discourse with time ("No, no," he is muttering now, his voice muffled by ruin and his thick woolen wraps, "that's not what I mean at all!"), a kind of ongoing dialogue between form and history, as Palladio, that Paduan Aristotelian, would have it. "Dialogue," after all, smacks of the theater and "history" of the storybook, and the professor, in his dedicated pursuit of ideal forms, has always rejected the theatrical, the narrative, indeed
all
arts with concepts of time other than eternity. This was, in his early days, his argument with Palladio, who drew echoes of Venice's corrupt and mongrel history into his designs even as he gently chastised the city with his intimations of a rational geometric ideal, a compromise the professor himself, schooled in the categorical imperatives of the Blue-Haired Fairy, was unable to make. Such an accommodation to the moment was, he felt then, both patronizing and delusory. Just as there were good boys and bad boys, there were, the artistic image being the form given to thought, pure thoughts and those contaminated by history. If art's endeavor, it being otherwise useless, was to express man's ceaseless striving for perfection, then history was what always went wrong.

    "Yes, you have put your treacherous finger on the very sore, Excellency," snarls the old bewhiskered dark-visaged servant who, on Eugenio's orders, has wheeled him out here onto the balcony of the Torre dell'Orologio, muttering sourly at the time that he was "just tying the donkey, as they say, where the master wants." The balcony overlooks a Piazza San Marco decorously strewn this cold bright Sunday morning with the preparations for Carnival: raw yellow timbers, metal frames and scaffolding, duckboards and bunting, all stacked helter skelter below him amid the café tables laid out like chips in a board game and the souvenir stands with their fluttering bouquets of gondolier hats and the flocks of bundled-up tourists and feeding pigeons. It is a view of this glorious court, dizzying but thrilling, not unlike the one he enjoyed a century ago, long before the Age of Flight, when, clinging in joyous terror to the slippery pigeon feathers, he flew on Colombo's back in search of his father. Ah, the excitement of that flight! The freedom! He'd called Colombo his "little horse":
"Galoppa, galoppa, cavallino!"
he'd cried.

    "Gladly, master, but my instructions were to stay at my post while drying you out in the sun."

    "No, no, I didn't mean you! I was only recalling… a flight…"

    "You wish to fly, master -?"

    There is something wrong with this memory. Something out of his recent ordeal that he does not wish to recall. Or, better said, that he has simply forgotten, and probably a good thing, too, he needs to put all that behind him like Eugenio says, his recovery may depend upon it. Three café orchestras are playing all at once this morning, their whimsical cacophony interscored with the clangor of the city's multitudinous bells, the blast of recorded music, the whistling of hawkers and the honking of gulls and boats, the shouting and laughter in the square, the grinding of the clock mechanism beside him, all of it echoing and rebounding off the glittering waters of the lagoon like a single clamorous voice, which even he can hear in spite of having lost his ears, a voice which seems to insist upon the dominion of the present. Above him, the two huge bronze figures, known popularly as "Moors" because of their shiny black patina and their legendary genitalia, pivot stiffly and hammer out the morning hours, while, beneath them, under the symbolic Winged Lion of St. Mark with his stone paw on an open book and the copper Virgin and Child on their little terrace, the great revolving face of the zodiacal clock celebrates eternity with its serene turnings even as it intransigently mills away the passing moment, turning history into a kind of painting on the wall. "It is a devilish priest's game not worth the candle, a charade of charlatans, am I right?" hisses Marten the servant, keeping up his subversive
pissi-pissi
in his ear. "History! Hah! It is a veritable shit storm, master,
punto e basta!"

    "But, no, I was wrong then, you see…" For in time, tutored by Giorgione and by his beloved Bellini, he came to recognize that, if there were pure and impure thoughts, there were also simple and complex ones, and pure complex thought, which he was increasingly given to (he had taken on flesh, after all, he was no longer a mere stick figure), was obliged to embrace the impure world, else, blinkered, it found itself jumping, again and again, through the same narrow hoop.

    "Uhm, excellent way to break a leg, padrone."

    "Oh, I know, I know…"

    "Or, heh heh, a neck…"

    Moreover, as he himself had been a sort of walking parody of thought given form, assuming that what was in old Geppetto's pickled head was so noble a thing as to be called thought, he had been able to intuit (here, perhaps, the years in Hollywood helped) the hidden ironies in all ideal forms, and so began to perceive that thought's purity lay not so much in its forms as in its
pursuit
of those forms - whereupon: his "go with the grain" as a moral imperative, "character counts," his symbolic quest for the Azure Fleece, the concept of I-ness, "from wood to will," and all that. Already, in
Art and the Spirit,
erroneous as it might have been in its refusal to acknowledge the theatrical in Venetian art (what, he was obliged to admit, was the "emergence of archetypes from the watery atmosphere like Platonic ideas materializing in the fog of Becoming" but pure theater, after all pure stage hokum?), he had begun, if not wholly to accept ("Ebbene, I too am interested in archetypes, condottiero…"), at least to understand and respect Palladio's position, and if he was once impatient, he was now more sympathetic, more prepared to make room for the human condition. Which was his condition, too… more or less…

    "… Provided the little stronzos are edible!" And Marten snatches, or seems to snatch, at a passing pigeon, throttle it, and stuff it into a bag at his side.

    "Of course, it might just be my weakened eyesight…"

    "Eh?"

    Thus, from his lofty Clock Tower perch, coped and hooded in thick cashmere blankets with only his nose poking out, the old professor peers out upon this luminous spectacle and, face to face with Palladio's pale sober San Giorgio Maggiore across the sun-glazed bay, muses, his own pale and sober thoughts punctuated by the thick fluttering of pigeons and the rude interruptions ("Eh? Eh?") of Eugenio's impertinent servant, upon the folly of his youth and the debilities ("That fog, I mean…") of old age. Which, it would seem, contrary to his expectations of just a few nights ago, is not yet over. Like this crumbling old city, these famous "winged lion's marble piles" ("A damned nuisance, I can tell you, and no bloody cure for them either," he hears somebody grumble, might be Marten, he can't be sure) now scattered out before him in their antique devastation - pocked, ravaged, bombed, flooded, tourist-trampled, plague-ridden, pillaged, debauched, defaced, shaken by earthquake, sapped and polluted, yet somehow still stubbornly, comically afloat - he too, perversely, lingers on. Little more than, perhaps, but if by some misfortune he is not yet dead, as one of his doctors so wisely put it that night of Eugenio's rescue, then it's a sure sign he's still alive.

    He had awakened, having apparently passed out in the Piazza, a Piazza he could not however at that moment recall (even now that bitter night with its monstrous snow-frosted shapes looming over him in the swirling wind like howling ghosts is little more than a half-remembered nightmare, in no way resembling the cheerful scene spread out before him now), in a soft warm bed piled high with down comforters, a hot water bottle at his feet, and three doctors at all his other parts, probing and prodding with various tools of their trade and debating the particulars of his imminent demise.

    "It is my professional opinion," said one solemnly, flicking the old pilgrim's tender nose back and forth as though testing its reflexes, "that he is dying from top to bottom, or else from bottom to top, though one could conceivably hold the position that death was rapidly overtaking him, both inside and out."

    "I quite disagree!" exclaimed a second, lifting a foot by a toe that snapped off like a dry twig. "You see? His condition is clearly as desparate at one end as at the other, even
if
the surface is as moribund as the core!"

    "Gentlemen! Please!" protested Eugenio, who, for a confused moment, the dying scholar mistook for his old friend and benefactor Walt Disney with his apple red cheeks and pussycat voice and sweet soft ways, oily as whipped butter. "Is there no hope?"

    "Well," sighed the first, pressing a stethoscope to the place where an ear used to be and rapping the professor's feverish brow speculatively, "if he is not dead by midnight, he may live until tomorrow."

    "How can you say that?" cried the second, sticking a thermometer in his peehole, and glaring angrily at his watch. "He will certainly
not
live until tomorrow, if he is dead by midnight!"

    "And have you nothing to say, sir?" Eugenio asked, turning to the third doctor.

    "This face is not new to me!" that personage responded, pointing at the place where others might have a navel and he but a knothole. "I know him for a perfidious rogue and a shameless ideomaniac, buono a nulla, this faithless figlio di N.N., this good-for-nothing whoreson legno da catasta! Fortunately, all knots come to the comb, and to the lancet as well, this one no exception, so out with it, I say! Gentlemen, hand me my brace and bit!"

    "Wait!" cried the first doctor suddenly, drawing back. "Could it be - not being otherwise, that is - the
plague?"

    "It
might
be," gasped the second, wiping his hands nervously on his trousers, "but then again, if it isn't, it's assuredly not!"

    "Oh woe,
woe, WOE!"
exclaimed the third doctor, beating his chest and gazing upon the patient in horror. Certainly he could not have been a pretty sight, his hide foxed and tattered and falling away, bits and pieces of him missing altogether, his miserable water-soaked body wracked by fever and a rasping cough - as Eugenio remarked wryly when first seeing his eyelids flutter: "Behold, gentlemen, there is the man who has been in Hell!" In truth, in his condition the plague might have been a mercy. "As one who has had it hammered into him by bitter experience," the third doctor continued, clubbing his own pate with a balled fist, "let me assure you that neither earth, nor air, nor water, nor flesh itself is a safe refuge for wicked little philosophasters under the lignilingual curse!"

    "You mean…?" Eugenio moaned, a pudgy hand clasped mournfully to his soft breast.

    "Lamentably, sir, he is, as we say here," replied the first doctor, stepping forward, "truly between bed and cot! His hours are counted! He will soon be, morto e sepolto, making soil for the beans! That is to say -"

    "On the contrary," interrupted the second, crowding in front of the first, "he is rather, sir, as the saying goes, more on the other than on this side! Č bell'e spacciato! Dead and done for! Furthermore -"

    "Ah!" screamed the third, bounding about the room and banging his head vehemently on the walls. "But what's the moral?
What's the MORAL?"

    "Exactly!" exclaimed the first.

    "For once I agree with my esteemed colleague!" put in the second.

    "Ohi, povero diavolo!" sobbed Eugenio, rubbing his eyes with his rolled fists. "He is my dearest sweetest friend! Surely there is some remedy -?!"

    "Alas, I am afraid he is a tragic and more or less fatal victim of dermatological cytoclasis," sighed the first, stroking his beard, "for which no known cure has yet been found!"

    "I am sorry to have to disagree once again with my distinguished colleague," argued the second, clutching his lapels firmly, "but the patient has clearly contracted a somewhat lethal dose of cytolysis of the epidermis, the cure for which remains, regrettably, a scientific mystery!"

    "Idiots!" snapped the third, suddenly standing tall and composed beside the bed, staring severely down at - or into - the ancient traveler as though penetrating to the very core of his ignominy. "Can't you see? It is as plain as the face on his nose! This shameless ragazzaccio
is turning back to wood again!
Look at him! The little scoundrel is suffering from lignivorous invasions of all kinds, evil eruptions of xylostroma, probable sclerosis of the resin canals, peduncular collapse, weevil infestation, and galloping wet rot. He's starting to warp, too, disgustingly enough, and that offensive musty stench is unmistakable evidence that he's rotten to the very
pith!"