(1991) Pinocchio in Venice (29 page)

    "Signori carabinieri…?" Truffaldino calls out hopefully into the murky silence. There is no reply. The little servant starts to cry.

    "What -? Who is that malcontented guttersnipe out there?" comes a waspish voice from out of the coiling yellow fog. "Unbutton yourself, you blubbering turd!"

    "It's us!" wails Truffaldino. "Help! We are lost!"

    "Lost! Hah! We should all be so lucky!"

    "I'd give an arm and a leg to be lost!"

    "Easy for you to say, dearie!"

    "Please! We've walked all the way from Saint Mark's -!"

    "Oho! The little pap-sucker walks! He talks! He's a bloody miracle!"

    "He's probably even got one of those lumpish things between his head and his feet - what do you call them?"

    "Let it all leak out, piss-brains, we're on burning coals…"

    They take a step toward the voices and faces materialize around them in the fog. The old scholar recognizes them - the pink-cheeked sun, the angel with the cherry-red lips, the camel, the skull, the freckled face with red hood and yellow braids - "Hey! It's the mask-maker's!" cries Truffaldino. "We've found it!"

    "It's found us, more like," mutters Buffetto, then falls silent as the towering figure of Mangiafoco with his fiery eyes and his rampant black beard like flung ink crowds into the doorway, filling it, his head half lost in the swirling mists high above.
"Ma che cazzo fai
-
?"
he roars, making the masks rattle on the wall. Peering down through the fog with his glowering eyes, he spies the old professor. "Eh! What's this -?!" He bends down to look more closely. A big toothy smile cracks his plaster-stained lips. "Oho! So
this
is our great Casanova, enh? Ebbene! Enter, signori! I have just the faccia for the little ciuco!"

    The masks titter furtively as they enter, making the collective sound of mice scurrying through the walls. The old scholar is fully aware that he is the object of some ridicule. He doesn't care. There is not time left in his life to care. This American student will be his, whether the foolish milk-fed gum-popping creature knows it or not. Nothing will stand in his way. Not his long unyielding life with its heroic devotion to truth and art and virtue. Not his terrible fear of confusion and humiliation. Not all the "civilizing" precepts and ruthless pieties of his despotic blue-haired catechist. Nothing. "Nothing!" he tells the walls of brightly colored faces, all the red ones, white ones, green, black, leathery brown, and Venetian gold ones, the flesh pink ones and those of dreadful azure blue:
turchino.
Cassiodorus called this blue the "Venetian color." It was the color of the darkness which came over the sun at the time of the desolation of the Gothic kingdom. The color of his own desolated life. No longer. Eugenio has promised.
"Tonight!"
he declares, twisting round defiantly in his portantina.

    And then he sees her. Just behind him in the middle of the room. Tipped back in a barber's chair in a winding sheet with only her blue jean cuffs and fringed white boots sticking out, hands crossed, face waxen, eyes rolled back, lips slack and parted. Dead. Dead -?! He feels faint. His vision blurs. He cannot breathe. There is something so dreadful about this sight that his mind will not take it in, but continues, stubbornly, even angrily (what has she
done -?!
), to contemplate a future now utterly erased: She will come to him. (She cannot.) He will have her. (There is nothing to have.) She will love him forever. (Forever is over.)

25. COOKED IN LOVE

    The august professor emeritus, embedded in molded pizza dough, has an uneasy premonition, as they back him into a bread oven with only his head sticking out ("Don't worry, Pini, you won't melt!" Eugenio assures him, beaming ruddily from beaded ear to beaded ear: "Just like baked Alaska! You won't feel a thing!"), that this night is not going to turn out exactly as he had so ardently hoped. He had asked for a proper philological costume, a mysterious and somber
bauta
perhaps with ruffle and tricorn and wig and cape - he had practiced taking short steps about his room in the palazzo, more or less erect, imagining the cape fluttering majestically yet secretively around him as he staggered along - but, as Eugenio explained when they opened up the box from the maskmaker's and, to his wailing dismay, found instead the donkey mask inside: "Now, now, a bauta mask would not even fit correctly over your… you know, your
thing
- and besides, there will be
thousands
of capes and bautas out there tonight, dear boy! How will she find you if you are not somehow different from the rest?"

    "Find me? I thought we were to be alone -!"

    "Well, er, of course! But not at first…"

    "You mean it's some sort of masked ball?"

    "Precisely! A masked ball! Is it not Martedě Grasso? What did you think? So now stop being such a little fusspot, Pignolo my darling! I promise you, it's going to be
beautiful!
A night you will remember for the rest of your life!
Trust
me!"

    And so they have brought him to the kitchen, stripped him of his fine clothing, his silk suit and monogrammed hand-tailored shirt and his satin underthings, and wrapped him in layers and layers of heavy pizza dough, stuffing in prawns and olives and onions and pepperoni and wild mushrooms and tuna and golden pimientos and eggplant, with a whole garlic salami wedged up between the thighs, a stiffened mane made of wild asparagus beribboned with prosciutto curls, and with anchovies and artichoke hearts and extra cheese on the hind portions - "Best bits for last!" Eugenio enthuses, patting the enriched rump, his plump cheeks flushed with excitement and an overly tight corset (he doesn't look at all like the person the professor mistook him for yesterday, he must have been reeling still from that mind-churning ride) - and now, six cooks all helping at once, they ease him on backwards on a little trolley into the bread oven.

    Eugenio is mistaken about not feeling a thing. The intense heat actually soothes his inner wooden parts, penetrating like muscle balm to the damp rot lodged deep there, but the burning dough expands around his outer fleshly remains with all the blistering ferocity of a red-hot iron maiden, piercing him through with the most agonizing pain and squeezing the breath right out of him, making him gasp and scream and beg for mercy. Even as he bawls to be let out -
"Ih! Ah! Please!"
- his breath seizing up in his chest and his cries emerging like raw heaving croaks ("Let him cry," Eugenio urges the startled kitchen staff with a tender chuckle, "the little ass can laugh when he gets laid!"), he has a sudden total recall of the dream he had while burning his feet off on his father's brazier all those years ago, a simple dream about
leaping.
At first it was only common everyday real-life leaping, over hedgerows and thorn bushes and muddy ditches - he'd only been a puppet for a little while, his legs were new to him, but already, barely able, with Geppetto's help, even to walk, he had gone bounding off, full of short-lived joy, leaping as high as he could, but running straight into, as though ordained, the nose-grabbing fist of the constabulary (such troublesome impetuousness, already on the move even as a shapeless lump of wood, where had it come from?) - but gradually, while his feet, as remote from him in his sleep as if they belonged to someone else, blackened and turned to ashes on the brazier, he felt himself in the dream growing lighter and lighter, he could suddenly leap over carts and houses and could even leave the world behind altogether, and as he rose above all the rooted trees and planted houses far below, he was overwhelmed by an intense sense of freedom, of being truly
alive,
his nose out of the reach of all earthly constraints and rising even higher than the rest of him rose. But then, as he soared higher and higher, he had a thought. A very simple thought, one of his first: that his freedom only made sense, only truly
was
freedom, if he could get back down there whenever he wanted to. With that, he began to fall. Feet first at the beginning, then head, finally just tumbling wildly, nose over heels and out of control. It was terrifying. He was screaming like he is screaming now. He fell with the awesome clatter of a sack of wood thrown from the top of a house, scaring even himself. When he awoke, his feet were gone. He thought they'd been eaten and blamed the cat.

    "Stop carrying on so, Pini! You
are
out!"

    So he is. But he is still burning up. Inside and out, baked to a turn. "Innamorato cotto," as the faces on the maskmaker's wall mocked, tittering and hooting (he didn't care) when his little American student left him all agape and askew on the shop floor, chewing gum stuck to the side of his earhole, their ridicule now becoming prophecy: an old fool literally cooked in love. His darling Bluebell, too, had prophesied: "cute as a blister," she'd called him on their Carnival ride. He is crying so hard he cannot even get his breath. His surface is bubbling and the salami between his legs has shriveled and is dripping hot grease.

    "Ahi, what a nuisance you are, carino mio!" shouts Eugenio over his desperate howling.
"Chetati!
You are drying me
up!"
He sniffs appetitively at the professor's sizzling hindquarters, reaches in with a bejeweled finger, plucks a meatball stringy with melted cheese. "Roll the tedious beast into the meat locker and cool him off!" he commands irritably, popping the hot meatball in his mouth with a loud smack. "Ow! Yum! See what you get for doing someone a
favor!"

    He has asked for it, it is true. He'd had a terrible shock after his ride on the Apocalypse yesterday when Bluebell had abandoned him so abruptly, dropping him in the palazzo doorway like an old unwanted toy, and an even worse one when the door opened: for there, towering above him like an avenging angel, her arms folded majestically over her bosom and her face half in shadow, was she whom he'd thought dead these hundred years, returned as it were from the grave, or graves, his sister, mother, bedtime hair-raiser, drillmaster, and erstwhile benefactress: "O Fata mia!
Forgive me!"
he'd cried, utterly stupefied and undone (where
was
he?), and he had tumbled to his knees there to hug hers, sobbing out his confession together with an account of his many and ghastly trials, and not excluding his most recent truancy and all his sinful thoughts while buried in his beautiful ex-student's rosette-nippled breasts, shameless recreant that he incorrigibly was, but regretting this even as he did so: perhaps… perhaps, even with her strangely fat knees, she could help -?

    "Ah, while you are down there, dear boy, would you care to suck my lecca-lecca?"

"Eugenio -?!"

    "But of course! I don't know who you
thought
I was, sweetheart, but I am
supposed
to be the Queen of the Night!"

    "I-I've been through so much I can hardly -!" His bewilderment was such that he could not even see, he felt numb and dry-mouthed, as though his senses were falling away with the rest of his bodily parts, maybe that wild ride had done more damage to the lignified mush in his brainpan than he'd thought. Only one thing was clear in all this dreadful blur. "Eugenio! Listen to me! Dear old friend! I-I know now what I want! You said I could have anything -!"

    "Oh, I know. The American bambina, no? I thought you'd never ask, you wicked boy! But it goes without saying! I already have a plan!"

    "You do -?"

    "Tomorrow night! I promise you! She is yours!"

    And so this, this is the plan. He can feel the crust, like fate itself, hardening around him. Still, he clings, speaking loosely, his blistered arms spread beneath him, locked in stiffened pizza dough here in the meat cooler, to his one hope - absurd, abject, perverse, yet at the same time spiritual, and even, for he is after all who he is, venerable - because: what else is there left to believe in if not love? Yes, love is the word of the day,
his
word, his only one. Her mask shop confession rings still in his inner ear, the only sort he has left, like celestial music. She is, the sublimate of his otherwise vaporized concept of perfect beauty, all he can see. If she is expecting an ass tonight, he will, with all his smitten heart, be one.

    When he saw her this morning, stretched out in her winding sheet in the barber's chair, her eyes rolled back and her blue lips slackly parted, he was not able to breathe. He had gaped his mouth, but no air entered. He felt like he was strangling. His gnarled fingers tore at the straps of the portantina. Feverish chills shook him, and guilt, dismay: Had his own demented desires done this -?! Oh no! "I-I'm
sorry!"
he had gasped. He fell out onto the floor of the mask shop, bruising the patches of flesh that remained, crawled toward her. When he reached her boot, he kissed it passionately, wetting it with his tears, his nose pressed into her blue jean cuffs, then pulled himself up to hug her knees. "Oh, Bluebell!" he sobbed, abandoning all his greater learning for that simple and terrible formula, the abject confession of a stricken heart: "I-I
love
you! Don't die!" Gripping her belt buckle, he hauled himself up onto her lifeless body, blind to the danger of being caught in so mad an attitude, crawling over her sunken belly, her flattened breasts, pausing to weep there, his face buried in what, until a moment before, were his greatest joy on earth, shapers of his very destiny; then, using them as wobbly handles, he dragged himself on up to her precious face, ghastly in its ashen pallor, and kissed tenderly her cold lips, still faintly bubble gum-perfumed. Her lips moved beneath his lips. They stretched into a smile.
A miracle!
She opened her eyes, sighed, gave him a little smack on his behind, and said: "Now, now, teach! Be nice!"

    He tried to speak. He could not. He felt cruelly deceived and impossibly jubilant at the same time.
She lived still!

    "C'mon, don't take it so hard, prof, just having a little fun! I saw you coming, I thought you'd get a kick out of it! You gotta admit it's a great costume, right? But down you go now, I've turned over a new leaf, no more spreading it around, I'm saving it for the man of my dreams!" She lifted him by his armpits and set him down dismissively in his litter chair again, as though clearing her lap of a minor nuisance. "I learned about him from a little fat man who has, well, you know,
befriended
me. He told my fortune, like, and said I'm gonna meet my true love tonight! In the most scrumptious drawing room in Venice! In a mask! It's all worked out! That's why I got this crazy costume! Jeepers, isn't it
romantic?!
Tonight! Who do you think he
is -?"

    "Ah…!" What could he say? He felt a terrible weight upon him. He had never lied before. Not like this. But if he told her the truth, she wouldn't come. He would never see her again. He gazed upon this lovely apparition, now wriggling out of her grave clothes like a beautiful thought, softly bodied forth in denim and angora, his eyes delighted afresh by each familiar curve and hollow as it emerged, quiveringly alive, and he knew, drunk with mad desire, grateful merely that, this night at least, she lived, he lived, that (his nose alone would have told him this) he was lost. "He… alas…" he wheezed, desperately trying not to tell her what he could not but tell her, "it is only…!"

    "Honest, you know what, prof?" she whispered then. She leaned down to press her warm cheek next to his, so dizzying him with fragrant memories of their fairy-tale ride on the Apocalypse he had to close his eyes, and, shyly, almost breathlessly, she added:
"I hope it's you…!"
When he opened his eyes again, feeling her cheek still pressed hotly on his own, he'd fallen out of his portantina and she was gone.

    He has been, all day, since that confession, and until the costuming began, in a state of constant dreamlike euphoria, a state unlike any he has ever known, even as a puppet. "My, how perky you are!" Eugenio had laughed when they returned from the mask shop, by vaporetto this time, the fog beginning, much slower than his spirits, to lift, and in reply he had crawled out of his litter chair and performed a feeble little bowlegged jig, bowing afterwards to the general applause. Ah, the theater, the theater! he'd thought, blowing kisses to them all. Why have I turned my back on it all my life? It is time made real, it is movement, it is passion, it
is
life! All the rest, the dead paintings, the statuary, the tiresome books, all those pompous "images of eternity": just so much bullpoop, as his dearly beloved so eloquently put it. Perhaps, in spite of himself, he
had
taught her everything she knows! Eugenio, surrounded by a flock of clucking tailors and seamstresses making emergency repairs in his costume, the seams of which had largely given way under an excess of flattering tucks and "modelings," had smiled benignly at all of this and, fluttering his long false lashes, wheezed: "Dear boy, love is
good
for you!"