(1991) Pinocchio in Venice (26 page)

"I fell -!"
Yes, he had almost forgotten: the wild ride, the mad chase, the icy green slime underfoot -

    "Without thinking, something the fart-brained testardo always did find harder to do than fly backwards, he jumped in to try to save you -"

    "Alidoro -?! But he can't -
he can't swim -!"

    "From all the available evidence, amico mio," growls Melampetta, scratching her ear with her hind foot, "that would seem to be a reasonable deduction. The driveling old eyesore, at no loss to the general aesthetics of this open sewer, has not been seen since."

    "Oh no…!" Though Alidoro later rescued him from fire, sealing the ancient bond between them, they had met, so to speak, in water, the powerful young police dog having leapt into the sea to chase him, only remembering after it was too late that he did not know how to swim. It was the first time he had ever had the authorities at his mercy, and he reveled in it. He taunted the drowning mastiff, toyed with him, exacted promises, swam teasing circles around him. Finally, convinced the miserable beast was too bloated from all the salt water he had swallowed to pursue him any further, but still wary of the fanged jaws, he took hold of the thick tail he still had in those days and dragged the half-dead creature back to the lido. Alidoro could not even stand up, but lay helplessly on his side, draining from all his orifices like a punctured balloon, blubbering out his gratitude. Pretending to be administering artificial respiration, he jumped up and down on the prostrate body, just for fun, and kicked the turgid belly-bag like a football, then jumped back into the water, daring the police dog to follow. Only later, on the lip of the Green Fisherman's frying pan, did he come to understand that he had made a friend for life, a real friend, perhaps the truest one he ever had.

    "Now, now, no need for tears. There are those who would say the poor dim brute should have been put down years ago. He was a good comrade but something of a backslider in his old age and stupid as warm water, alia fin fine he may have done us all a favor."

    "But -
sob!
- why didn't you
tell
me -?!"

    Melampetta tips her head and gazes up at him quizzically, but before she can reply, the Count, who has been lamenting in the high style on behalf of the dripping kidneys and swollen bladder of the Madonna, not to mention his own leaking instrument, the removal from this campo of a municipal urinal ("Here, where a great public facility once stood, and where many great public figures thus stood as well…"), now announces his intention to conduct them all, en route to their official civic reception in the Piazza San Marco, on a sacred pilgrimage in memory of what he calls the original fourteen "pisciatoi della Via Crucis," commencing with a communal pee of homage and protest from the Accademia bridge.

    And so the old scholar, weighed down now with grief, is hoisted once again by the palazzo servants and, led by il Conte Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo and the Madonna of the Organs (New Acquisition), with the rest of the zany assemblage trailing behind, the Count's personal attendants with their bodily parts
a soqquadro,
as they say here, bringing up the rear with their cartloads of free-flowing wine, he is ported ceremonially up the massive wooden staircase, past a priest and a blind nun posted there at the foot like sentinels of conscience, nodding lugubriously as though tolling the knell of the passing sinners, and, at the bridge's crest, is tipped foward, portantina and all, so that just his nose with its translucent red-tipped rubber sheath droops over the railing.

    Alongside him, up and down the bridge, the rest of the Count's cortege bring out organs of every size, color, and description and dangle them over the side, those without baring their behinds or else their breasts, or something resembling all of these, and, upon the Count's appeal to his "friends, roamers, and dribbling cunnymen, as Marcus Aurelius was said to have declared on the eve of the Battle of Thermopylae, lend me your tears and other bodily excretions, for our noble causeway depends upon it," let fly a veritable downpour upon the Grand Canal below, sending motorboats swerving and gondolas pushing desperately for shore, those on the decks of vaporetti ducking inside for cover, or else replying with similar, if only token, gestures of their own. The old professor, gripping his newly recovered watch with trembling fingers, seems to see through his bitter tears the sodden body of his old friend Alidoro floating by on the dark ruffled waters below, though it is probably only the usual plastic sack of garbage, of which the canal is always full. "I-I'm sorry!" he weeps, his chest riven. "I loved you so!"

    The tall spindly hunchbacked character next to him with whom he had been forced to exchange hats, the one known as Il Zoppo, opens up the flies of his baggy white pantaloons, and a face leans out of them, spews a mouthful of wine over the railing, then turns to him and says, in chorus with another deeper voice above: "No need to be sorry! We love you,
too,
dear Pinocchio!"

    Though charred and disfigured, it is a face he recognizes: the once-beautiful Lisetta of the Gran Teatro dei Burattini! There is still a trace of magenta in her hair and a safety pin in her wooden ear! But then -?! He cranes his old head up stiffly, peering through the tears and biting wind:
"Pulcinella!
Is it - is it
you
-
?!"

    "As you see, my friend," replies Pulcinella, tipping the professor's hat from on high, and from inside the pantaloons Lisetta says: "Yes, Pinocchio my dear, it is we!"

    "But I thought -! I was afraid -!" And suddenly it all comes rushing back to him as though the evacuations cascading down from the bridge were releasing a torrent of dammed-up memory: his rescue from the wastebin, the kisses and pinches and dizzying head-butts, his brief career at the electronic keyboard (but how had he forgotten all of this? He must have nothing but woody pulp up there…!), and then the police parading in, the brutal charges, the bludgeonings and screams, the mad crush of the terrorized mobs, the frantic bodies kneeing him, pushing him, the smoke tearing at his eyes and throat, the two tall thin carabinieri bearing down on him, swinging brave Pulcinella's torn-off legs like nightsticks - "I saw -! Oh Pulcinella!
What they did to you -!"

    "Ebbene, compare, don't cry, it could have been worse. Others lost the lot. I've always walked as well on my hands as on my feet anyway - I was out of there in less than it takes to say it! Poor Lisetta here was not so lucky! They threw her on the fire!"

    "Mangiafoco turned up and pulled me out in the nick of time! Burned my face black as a pewit's, I lost both arms, and my tits aren't what they used to be, but the bottom bits are all still good as new!"

    "I'd lost my legs and Lisetta her arms, so Mangiafoco put the two of us together by nailing me to her shoulders."

    "Nailing -?!"

    "The joints and hinges were all gone, nothing left to pin new limbs to, it was the best he could manage."

    "It's all right."

    "It's kind of fun!"

    "Of course, back flips aren't so easy any more."

    "What I miss most is not being able to clap."

    "But we do a double act now."

    "We've worked up some new
lazzi,
Pinocchio, you wouldn't believe!"

    "The old Siamese twin gags, you know! With a new angle, as you might say!"

    "With a bit of a twist!"

    "Not everyone's got a woman's head in his crotch!"

    "Not everyone's got an asshole behind her ears!"

    "But… but the others -?" he asks uneasily. "Brighella? Colombina -?"

    "Ah… well…"

    "You know…"

    "Where there's smoke…"

    "It was a real horror show, friend…"

    "Mass pupicide…"

    "Poor Arlecchino… they used a hacksaw on him…"

    "They drilled him full of holes…"

    "They soaked him before throwing him on the fire…"

    "You know, to make him burn longer…"

    "His screams would have broken my heart, if I had one," sighs Lisetta from inside Pulcinella's pants, as Pulcinella reaches in to wipe the tears from her eyes. "Fortunately I've always been a bit wormy in that part…"

    "At least you did what you could for him, dear Pinocchio!"

    "Well…"

    "At least you didn't turn your back on your dearest friend!"

    To his horror, just as he is about to reply, in all honesty of course, as is his wont, if not indeed his onus, he suddenly sees the same flash of blue that he saw then: she is sitting out all alone on the bow of a battered old No. 1 waterbus lumbering up below on its way to the Accademia landing stage, seemingly oblivious to the excreta showering down upon her, gazing up through it as though in stunned disbelief at the professor, crowned ludicrously in Pulcinella's peaked
coppolone,
his nose hanging limply over the railing, still in its silky sheath, like that stupid character in the World War II graffiti. His heart plummets. "Forgive me!" he whispers in his pain and confusion as she slips past. His mortification is complete. "My… my love -!" And then she is under the bridge and out of sight, and he is, though numbed by shock and utter despair, under way again, the procession setting forth once more, Count Ziani-Ziani having just pulled up his crimson breeches and declared: "As the great Zan Bellini, painter of the famous 'Incontinent Fortune,' shown relieving herself blissfully from the side of a gondola with a granite blue globe in her fragrant lap, used to say,
'Forbirse el cul col sasso tondo, xe la piu bela cossa de sto mondo!'
The loveliest thing in this world that's known is to wipe your ass with a round stone! And now, fellow citizens, it is time, as they say, to jump, having blessed it, the ditch! The city babbos await us! So soak your beak and let it leak, our solemn round proceeds!"

23. THE LAST CHAPTER

    In a cramped busy campo like many others they have visited on their pilgrimage to the Fourteen Urinals of the Cross, the procession of Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo and the Madonna of the Organs (New Acquisition) is interrupted suddenly in the middle of one of the Madonna's bizarre purification rituals by the clamorous headlong arrival of the Winged Lion of Saint Mark, flapping in either to join or to assault the party, but, already well in his cups, seriously misjudging his approach, catching his forepaws on the tent top of a makeshift costume stall and somersaulting heavily into a marble wellhead, roaring out an alarming stream of drunken obscenities all the way. A human butterfly, pirouetting decorously on the convex lid of the wellhead, is sent flying when the yowling Lion slams into it, stone crashing upon stone, while from within the collapsed stall come cries of "Rape!" and "Earthquake!" and "Help! Murder! It's the Red Brigade!"

"Che cazzo
-?" bellows the Lion in his querulous stupor.
"By the Virgin's verminous and fulsome cunt, I'll kill the turd who did that! Oh, I am fucked! Get me something to drink, you cretinous pricks! I am dying!"

    The three servants hastily set the old scholar down in a quiet corner of the little campo, warning him not to run away or get into mischief or talk to strangers, and rush off to attend to the raging Lion, who seems prepared to eat the poor crumpled butterfly if he can just get on his feet again and if he hasn't lost all his teeth in the calamitous fall, Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo ordering that an entire barrel of wine be poured down the old fellow's throat as a kind of holy libation in recognition of the once-glorious empire and designating him Honorary Chaircreature and Despot of their entourage for their triumphal march into the Piazza San Marco.

    Left alone, the professor, crushed by sorrow and chagrin, buries his veiled nose in his lap, the condom's red tip hanging forlornly from the end like a bloody drip, and fretfully twists his silvery watch as if he were telling his beads, gripping the skittish thing with both hands in the old way, before he had fingers, thinking bitterly: what a paltry bauble time is! He's had more than his share of it, and what good has it done him? He can't even see the face of it. All he can see is the shock and disappointment on Bluebell's innocent upturned face as she passed below him back at the Accademia bridge, a famous phrase from his early writings returning now to haunt him: "The bridge between It-ness," he wrote in
The Wretch,
elucidating a concept first introduced in
Art and the Spirit,
"and I-ness is
character,
whether staunch or frail, artfully made or haplessly jerry-built, and that which flows below is not Time, but
the ceaseless current of implacable Judgment!"

    As Buffetto and Truffaldino ported him down the broad wooden steps of the brdge, it recalled for him an earlier descent from another bridge, that night he first arrived here, full then of hope and joy and something like intellectual rapture, the city, silenced by snow, awakening in him an almost mythic sense, as it felt at the moment, of being a witness to eternity. He had plunged into the alluring labyrinth of the magical city that night on his damaged but still functional knees as a lover might enter the body of his beloved (speaking poetically of course), experiencing that rare creative communion between the spirit and the body that prophesied a happy conclusion to his final work-in-progress and thus to his long exemplary life as well. And now all that noble joy had come to this. That reckless eager plunge into the masked city had been his undoing. As they looped back toward the Piazza San Marco, whence this newest misadventure today began, he felt caught up in loops within loops, his fraudulent life a mad skein of recurrent self-deceptions, and he wished only, the tears streaming down the craquelure of his cheeks, to make it safely back to his room in the Palazzo dei Balocchi and to hide his terrible face there forevermore.

    Around him, meanwhile, the Count and his followers celebrated with wine and song and wild abandon. Drums beat out a processional march as they wound their way from the site of one vanished urinal to another through the dreary Venetian labyrinth, the Count squirting his monstrous phallus on them all from time to time as though dispensing holy water, the Madonna waddling about seductively with her exaggerated Trecento dehanchement, wagging her intestines, her organs jouncing and bobbing like bangles, teasing passersby to give her parts a little squeeze. Feet went by with eyes and noses on the soles, an immense penis passed with semen dripping from a white mask at the tip, there were copulating rodents and horn-blowing bottoms and birdlike creatures with phallic beaks and pretty young novices with devils' faces winking from their bare behinds. But to the tormented professor, hunched over in his litter chair, they were all mere mourners at a wake, their revelry a dirge, their bawdy songs a last lament. Cast down in final defeat, he could only stare darkly at the recovered watch in his trembling hands, sinking ever deeper into that pit of inconsolable grief, regret, and bitter self-reproach into which he had fallen, or, as it were, been pushed. Most of the flesh had fallen away from the backs of his hands, and he noticed now how the grain stood out like reticulated tracery, the softer parts of the wood eaten away. It was as though its encasement of flesh had fed upon it like lichen. He tried to pick off a scabby piece of skin, but the pain, as ever, was harrowing, as if it were determined to hold fast, to carry through, even if he were not.

    This power of flesh to go its own way became the subject (perhaps he had been talking aloud again, quite likely) of several of the Madonna's ceremonial performances as they went along the route of late lamented pissoirs. She would light the seminally blessed votive candles with her apple green heart, which worked like a kind of miniature blowtorch, empty her bladder on the site of the displaced
pisciatoio,
and with her spleen lead a communal prayer for making public urinals and ridotti out of all the city's banks and churches:
"Piů cessi meno chiese!"
they would chant. Then, after Count Ziani-Ziani had recited from what he called the Ancient and Holy Testament of Latrine Grafitti, she - or, more precisely, her organs - would sermonize briefly on various topics such as individual organ and glandular rights, cruelty by civic neglect of the tragicomically fused genito-urinary twins, or the body politics of visceral autonomy versus a united organic front, the various glands and organs sometimes getting into heated debates and even duels with one another, all trying to shout at once, the liver blackening with rage, the stomach turning sour, the bowels complaining rudely, the heart winning most arguments finally with its lethal blowtorch, the Madonna's body becoming a kind of strange traveling puppet booth, the organs her fractious tattermen. Finally, the larynx or the adenoids or the vagina would bring all the spitting and screaming and squirting of this anatomical psychomachia to an end by singing the
Benedictus,
the anus at the end of its long undulatory tube providing the resonant antiphon, and then the Madonna would deliver a few dozen marzipan Jesuses from her womb and pass them out to the children

    Here in this campo, after the opening rituals, she and her organs, having paused to reflect upon martyrdom, had taken up as a case in point the professor's nose, on rubber-masked display above his "ECCE NASUS" sign, debating the question: which was the true martyr, his nose or the rest of him? Not surprisingly, the more exposed parts opted for the abused and repressed ("Hamstrung," was the way the hamstrings put it) nose, the glands and internal organs arguing contrarily on behalf of the inner humiliation and suffering brought to the whole by the offending part, which the fulminating colon called an intolerable pain in the butt and the uterus said wasn't worth a dried fig and, for its sins, as much of omission as commission, probably ought to get the chop. "I've had it up to my hair with the stuck-up thing!"

    "That's right," agreed the adrenal glands, "let the snotty nuisance stew in its own juices!"

    "I see what you mean," observed the eyeballs on their little strings. "At first glance, the little blowhard does appear to be something of a fist in the eye and more than a bit uppity, but it is our view that only the branch can be said to be martyred when the tree, for its own good, is pruned!"

    "Right, I can swallow that," piped up the esophagus, and the shrunken kidneys, siding with the eyeballs, added: "Moreover, if the fault is in the handle, as the saying goes, so then is the anima: dismemberment hallows the honker!"

    "I speak," said the heart, flaring up briefly, "from the heart when I say that your argument, my dear kidneys, doesn't hold water. The holy martyrs were canonized for their good hearts, not good hooters!"

    Thus, inevitably, the debate, which grew increasingly tempestuous ("You're getting up my nose, you cardiocentric four-flusher!" screamed the sinuses, and the ovaries started throwing eggs again), evolved into a raucous theological dispute about the true location of the soul, each organ staking its claim as sole container of the elusive stuff, the lungs bellowing that insufflation had been the true sign of life since God first puffed up Adam, the brain retorting heatedly that the soul was inseparable from the logos and that to think otherwise was unimaginable idiocy, the mammary glands doing a bit of breast-beating of their own, and the rectum airing its "gut feeling" that, since everything else in the world got stuffed up it, the soul must, willy-nilly, be there as well. "Macchč! I haven't the stomach for this," rumbled the stomach acidly, burned by the heart and vainly seeking relief from the spreading crossfire, which came finally from on high with the head-over-heels arrival of the Winged Lion, explosively interrupting the performance.

    Throughout all this, the professor had been watched at some distance by the mournful old priest he had noticed back at the foot of the Accademia bridge, standing now across the little campo, together with his companion, the blind nun, under a circus poster for tomorrow night's Gran Gala. Perhaps they were waiting for him to resolve the dispute of the organs with one of his famous Augustinian disquisitions on the "changeless light within," an image he had once found useful in trying to recapture the peculiar essence of his prenatal (so to speak) life on the woodpile. No, I am sorry, my friends. No resolutions. The light's gone out. He has never been afraid of course to speak of the "soul" or "spirit" ("I-ness" was in effect a word for this), though he has often wondered why men born to real mothers did, and indeed it could be said that his entire
Mamma
project had been really little more than a homiletic account of his idiosyncratic search for the magic formula by which to elevate his soul from vegetative to human form, as though body, far from being a corrupting adversary, were in itself a kind of ultimate fulfillment. Soul itself, in the particular.

    Now, left alone by the Lion's crash landing to savor, hunched over his scabs (has he found at last, he wonders, picking at them, his closing image?), the manifest ironies of his life's quest, he is approached deferentially by the limping priest and his ancient companion, stumbling along on a cane. "Scusi, signor professore!" rumbles the holy father softly in his gravelly old voice, bowing slightly and tipping his black hat, and the nun, nodding circumspectly, whispers as though in awe: "Professore!" "We are profusely honored, il nostro caro Dottore Pignole," the old cleric continues with another little bow, "to have your sublimated presence among us! We hold your nugaciously pleonastic writings here in grand esteem, alla prima, and consider them to be, as the saying goes, of the most beautiful water!"

    "Yes," whispers the nun, her old head bobbing, "your water is very beautiful!"

    "They have, as we Veneti say," the priest is quick to add, "
la zampata del leone,
the paw of the lion, that is to say, the indisputable footprint of genius and caducity. We few, to whom such things still have provenance, from the bottoms of our unworthy souls, if indeed they have bottoms, exalted sir, and who would know better than you, thank you!"

    "You are welcome," replies the antiquated nun, then wheezes deeply as though suffering a sudden pain in her lower ribs.

    "I-I am not who or what you think I am, father," the old professor confesses abjectly.

    "You are not Professor Pinenut -?" asks the priest, peering closer. The nun, in seeming confusion, turns to hobble away, but the priest snatches her by her habit and draws her back.

    "Yes - no, I only meant -"

    "Ah. You speak metaphorically, of course, true to your majestic and incogitant stylus. We are all, souls masked by bodies, other than what we seem to be, and yet what we seem to be, in the soulless barter of the bodied world, we also are, and so, though
not
Professor Pinenut, you
are
he nonetheless! I trust then you will not deny us a trifling favor, good sir: to wit -"

    "Good, sir," says the nun. "Do it."

    "- To wit, to sign one of your noble and predacious tomes for our parish library, hoping that is not too magnanimous an imposture for such a gran signore -?"

    "No, of course not, but I'm afraid I don't -"

    "Have an opus at hand? Do not concern yourself, maestro, for we have traduced a little volume of our own.
Psst!
The
book,
you little turk's head!" The nun, he sees now, has a book clamped under one arm, but the arm seems disabled. Reaching for the book with her other arm, she drops the cane. Stooping for the cane, she drops the book. She feels around blindly for the book, but the priest steps crunchingly down upon her black-gloved hand and, sighing deeply, picks up the book himself, hands it to the professor with an uncapped pen.