(1991) Pinocchio in Venice (30 page)

    Oh yes! Oh yes! His heart is full, as they liked to say in Hollywood. (He
adored
Hollywood, why did he ever leave it?) All day he has been embracing everyone who came within range, the busy servants, the doddering and incontinent clientele of the palazzo, the police officers who came with the news of La Volpe's arrest, the seamstresses with their mouths full of pins, the Omino e figli, S.R.L. lawyers, laden with briefs and deeds, and the contessa offering to give up her claim to the Rialto bridge in exchange for an efficiency apartment in the new Palazzo Ducale, the maids stripping his bed down and emptying out his closets and drawers, building contractors with plans for converting the Bridge of Sighs into a love nest, even the electricians stringing up lights outside his windows and hanging the new red banners - he has so much love in him he has felt he must share it or die! Madness! But eagerly he embraced that, too! Let it come!

    And he has forgiven everybody! His mean old babbo, all the tormenters of his youth and age, the bad painters and jealous reviewers, the Fairy, the upstart department chairman who tried to take away his second office and limit his franking privileges, the student who wrote THE BONG'S LONG, ART'S SNOT - SENECTA on the blackboard, even the old Fox, his ancient nemesis, apprehended at last today and jailed, held on the charges from the professor's own denunciation. Which he now regrets. She had apparently been trying to use the money from the piracy of his
Mamma
manuscript to buy back her old tail, now not much more than a ratty piece of frayed rope and no longer useful even as a fly swatter, her mistake being, as the police explained it, that for the first time in her life she was attempting to purchase something instead of simply stealing it, and, unaccustomed to legal barter as she was, she had gotten into a violent argument with the dealer complaining that the price was too
low
for so precious an object, the dealer finally calling the police, fearing he had a lunatic on his hands. The professor tried to persuade Eugenio to intercede for her, but to no avail: "Let the old reprobate stay there overnight," Eugenio snapped reedily, scarcely able to breathe in his tightly laced corset. "We'll all be richer for it!"

    But then, when the sad news came that poor blind Gattino, without his companion, had walked off the wrong side of a vaporetto in the fog ("When the tipo hollered out the stop, Il Gatto repeated it loudly and stepped off the other side! He never came up, master, all they found was his white cane…"), he made another urgent appeal for La Volpe's release, fearing for her when she got the news, begging Eugenio to help him drop the charges, but his friend threw up his hands in despair, crying: "Madonna! We've worked so hard to
catch
the infamous whore! How can you ask for such a thing after all she has
done
to you -?!"

    "I forgive everybody! I forgive even you, Eugenio!"

    "How nice, dear boy, I forgive you, too - but this is completely bizarre! And look at the hour! I can't do anything now!"

    "But -!"

''Tomorrow,
Pini!
Maybe!
For now, I tell you, we haven't a minute to lose!"

    He had to accept that, his own costume was not even begun, and already the bands were playing in the Piazza and the darkening square was filling up with masked revelers, exciting him with a sense of romance and adventure not felt since he first heard the
pi-pi-pi
and
zum-zum-zum
of Mangiafoco's magical marionette theater in the last century. He had sold his primer then for a ticket and he would sell it again now, together with all his degrees and books and honors, only to have Bluebell's cheek next to his once more.

    His excitement was evidently contagious, the entire Palazzo dei Balocchi has seemed abuzz with it all day, the staff, the clientele, the visitors, and its Director, too, alias the Queen of the Night, giddy as a schoolchild about his big party this evening (he has been dropping hints he may have acquired Casanova's bones for his great Mardi Gras Gran Gala tonight after all, for he is also laying plans for elaborate Ash Wednesday obsequies on the morrow, inviting, it would seem, the whole world to them, as though reluctant to let the glorious season come to an end) and priding himself on being the new owner and resident-soon-to-be of the Doges' Palace. He has already ordered up new stationery. When the professor expressed his doubts about the authenticity of Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo's deed, Eugenio replied that "a country which has happily accepted the legitimacy of fantasy titles purchased by mail order from a remote German king, my love, can as easily accept the legitimacy of
this
entertaining document!" Various charges have been brought against the Count by the city meanwhile, including "the illicit erection of a public display intended to violate the true Christian meaning of Carnival" and "contributing irresponsibly to an increased risk of
acque alte,"
and Buffetto, Francatrippa, and Truffaldino have been sent out this afternoon to supervise his arrest by the authorities, Eugenio assuring them that, if by some unfortunate circumstance the Count should be martyred in the course of his pursuit, an appropriate plaque would be mounted on a wall of the Ducal Palace, commemorating his historical visit here and specifically honoring all emissaries of the occasion.

    By the time they roll the old scholar out of the meat locker, his new hide, as it might be called, has cooled as firm as a body cast, though he is stinging all over as if his cauterized flesh might have become suffused somehow with the baked pizza dough. His head hangs limply from its weary neck like a turtle's dangling from its shell, and his breaths are coming in short dry patches as though they might be his last. "Ah,
that's
better!" gushes Eugenio, lifting his former school-chum's drooping chin up and wiping his tears with a scented handkerchief. It is dark outside, bands are playing, and the crowd noises have mounted: there are shouts and screams coming in through the windows, and bursts of wild laughter and, underneath it all, the intense rumble of anticipation, as in a stadium before a big match. "It is almost time now for your great adventure, you old rogue! She is already out there waiting for you!"

    "Out -? Out where?"

    "In the city, dear boy, where else? That fabulous house of pleasure, that opulent place for perfect licentiousness, that lubricious refuge of love with its illusion of the incredible, its wondrous aura of fairyland -!"

    "But you said a salon -!"

    "But of
course,
Old Sticks! Have I ever said otherwise? And look at you! Beautiful! I am in love with you myself! Ah, but one last thing to make you perfect!"

    Eugenio, whistling a happy little tune, bores a hole in his rear with an apple corer and works in a jauntily upright tail made of long crisp cannoni, filled with sweet ricotta. Then, following the Director's instructions, the kitchen staff move him from the trolley onto one of the wine carts from yesterday's procession, perhaps the one the old Lion slept on, it smells like it, securing him to it by way of ropes around the neck and butt of the creature in whom he now resides. Earlier today, the old professor was convinced he was ready for this. Now he is not so sure. Only Bluebell's whispered wish sustains him. But if this is how she expects to find him, what is it she expects to do? He tries to conjure up stimulating memories of his ride on the Apocalypse, his snuggle with her in the mask shop, but it is as though, in his present position, his memory has plummeted into his sinuses somehow, closed to recall, merely making his head heavier on his tired neck. Carnival, perhaps, is not meant for everyone…

    They lower the professor, imbedded in his donkey-shaped pizza loaf, to street level in the freight elevator, joined by two bleary-eyed old ladies who squat in a corner to pee, and at the bottom they roll him out into the Sotoportego del Capello, the dimly lit alleyway behind the palazzo. Through the narrow underpass there, he can see the bright lights and the massed crowds of the decorated Piazza San Marco, but back here it is damp and silent, like the darkened wings of a musty theater. He has supposed they would be heading down an obscure calle or corte somewhere: isn't that where assignations are always held? Eugenio, however, bubbling with excitement, seems prepared to march them all out upon the raucous Piazza. This is not good news. Does he mean to inaugurate the Bridge of Sighs tonight? The two ancient ladies, a Russian princess and the heiress to a rubber fortune, clients of the palazzo, have exited the elevator with them and wandered confusedly off into the night, somewhat shackled by their drawers, and now two soft splashes are heard at the far end of the Sotoportego del Capello where the gondolas dock at night. Eugenio sends instructions out into the square to commence the fanfare and then carefully fits the donkey mask over his old friend's face, attaching fresh white camellias behind the upright ears. "And now, my dear little mammifero," he says, peering in at him through the eyeholes with a look full of loving kindness, his voice like honey oozing from the comb, "the rest depends on you!"

    Before they can set off, however, they are interrupted by the clamorous arrival of Buffetto, Francatrippa, and Truffaldino, staggering down the alleyway, wailing and groaning, their clothes torn and bloodstained, their arms and heads bandaged, Buffetto and Francatrippa on crutches, little Truffaldino crawling toward them on all fours. "Ahi, direttore! What a terrible fight! We are dead!"

26. THE STAR OF THE DANCE

    He knows everything now. What's happened to him. What happens next. Forget secret assignations. Forget dreams come true. Remember instead the words of Melampetta as attributed by her yesterday to luckless Pierre Abelard in his presumed exegetical marginalia upon Saint Bernard of the Cisternian beekeepers, "known in the underworld," as she (or perhaps he) put it, as "Doctor Mellifluus": "Honey in the mouth, amico mio, sting in the culo!" "But he has been so good to me!" he'd protested, and she'd growled back: "If I know the Little Man, compagno, you've been good to yourself!" That's right, he thinks now, staring out upon the demonically Carnivalized Piazza through the eyeholes of his donkey mask with increasing apprehension and terror, there's probably nothing wrong with the mails either. His retirement funds may well have just bought the Doges' Palace. His old classmate's "recent windfall" was a pinenut. He has probably lost everything but the clothes on his back. So to speak.

    Overhead, meanwhile, wisps of fog, like ghostly fish, twist and curl around crimson banners announcing the celebrated native son's Gran Gala top-of-the-bill performance tonight as the "Star of the Dance," and the stage toward which Buffetto and Francatrippa are rolling him is tented in strings of colored lights and decorated, even to a golden hoop, like the center ring of a circus. Eugenio as the Queen of the Night goes before them, switching his behind provocatively and calling out in his reedy falsetto:
"Permesso! Permesso! Largo per il Ciuchino Pinocchio! La Stella della Danza!"
On his back, Truffaldino, or whoever he or she is, does handstands and backflips, as the well-stung wayfarer, dismally at one with his freshly baked outer image, is paraded on his creaking carriage, to the hoots and cheers of the riotous multitudes, across the great square, which, notorious metaphors aside, is something less than the "sumptuous drawing room" his perfidious friend had led him to expect, though he is all too aware that his expectations have always been led less by the likes of Eugenio than by his own mad unrestrainable fancy, and that he deserves whatever he gets, insofar as getting and deserving have anything to do with each other, not much. Wretches are born, not made. Don't count on character. The grain goes with you, I-ness is an illness.

    Thus, with each fateful turning of the cartwheels, the venerable scholar's most abiding convictions fall away as lightly as those flakes of pizza crust, a truer tougher mask, kicked loose now by Truffaldino's acrobatics on his donkey back. It doesn't hurt. Neither the acrobatics nor the collapse of his precious ontology. He recalls (even as, on all fours, he is hauled through the bright lights and pressing mob) that solitary moment in his darkening office back at the university in America, when, left all alone on campus in the backside of the festive season (yes, he was feeling sorry for himself, a sure spur to folly) and despairing of a happy conclusion to his current, perhaps definitive work, he had been struck by the vision which propelled him here. He had been staring out of his office window, meditating upon his singular relationship to the Blue-Haired Fairy, as intuitively clear to him at that moment as had been the Trinity or the hypostatic union to Saint Thomas Aquinas, but also as resistant to formulation within language, a resistance which had thwarted his hopes of closing his epic tribute to his beloved preceptress with his latest chapter, just completed, "And The Wood Was Made Flesh and Dwelt among Us." He would have to try again. One more chapter. And the image that came to him then, as his thoughts floated back to that revelatory moment here on this island all those years ago when abjectly he dropped as though felled to hug, in joy and in sweet repentance, the Fairy's knees, no longer bony and childlike as when he'd played with them last, but now full-fleshed and maternally solid, was one not of absence and desolation (this was what he saw out his office window) but of generosity and abundance and throbbingly intense beauty. He seemed to be looking between her virtuous knees as between the two famous columns on the Piazzetta (perhaps two dead trees in the yard topped and amputated, had helped bring this image to mind), gazing in wonder upon that succulent composition of plump Christian splendor and lacy Oriental fantasy which, from a different angle and diabolically transformed, confronts him now, and he felt suddenly as if he were peering, his gaze drawn toward the dark labyrinth of the Merceria twisting its way into the distance beyond the radiant Basilica, into his very source. Yes, yes, the truth must be
seen,
he reminded himself then, the good
felt
(his hands, he saw, were pressed against the office windowpane, he was licking the glass). And so it was that, only hours later, as though compelled, with Petrarch's cautionary
Epistolae seniles
under his arm to curb his almost childish excitement (and what had happened to that book? he must have left it on the plane…) and his
Mamma,
seeking resolution, in his hastily packed bags, he had found himself on his way here, visions of climax dancing in his old wooden head like Bellini cherubs.

    No cherubs out here tonight, alas. Climax is happening without them. Everything but, however: he is encircled by a crazed menagerie of the impossible, massed up hundreds deep. The racket is deafening. There are bands playing, whistles blowing, flashguns popping, fireworks crackling, and the costumed revelers, the most terrifying of them wearing Pinocchio masks of their own, are dancing about drunkenly and shouting out his name: "Evviva Pinocchio!" "It's him! Č proprio lui!" "This is gonna be fun!" As he rolls through the bedlam of the square, lit up bright as day, he scans the crowds in vain for a friendly face, even the hint of a friend behind a face. Not even the Count or the Madonna, perhaps dead or chased off after all. Ah, this,
this,
my poor dear Fox, is the devil's very flour, he laments as paper streamers and confetti flutter overhead like tossed seasoning, and I am in it…

    "Yes, you are truly buggered, my tender friend, becco e bastonato, and worse to come," Buffetto, who is perhaps not Buffetto after all, murmurs in his donkey ear. "But, as we say here, 'Zoga el coraggio a l'ultimo tagio!' Play your nerve at the final serve! At the last hand, old man, take a stand!"

    He had hoped for a moment, back in the darkness behind the Palazzo dei Balocchi, that Buffetto, Francatrippa, and Truffaldino might be coming to his rescue, or at least to whisk him off, as planned, to his assignation with little Bluebell, but this was not to be. "Ohi, direttore, what a terrible fight, we are dead!" they had cried, staggering up the alleyway on crutches, all bruised and bandaged, Truffaldino crawling along on all fours, and Eugenio, slapping his palm impatiently with a folded fan, had snapped fiercely: "If not, you soon will be, you worthless louts, unless you come with the news I want to hear! The hour is late! Quickly!
What has happened to the Count!"

    "We apprehended him, master!"

    "We seized him!"

    "We surrounded him!"

"Good!"

    "But he escaped!"

    "Escaped -?! I warn you -!"

"Tried
to escape, direttore! We pursued him!"

    "Ah!"

    "But he got away!"

    "What -?!"

    "But we caught him again! By the very throat! What a battle!"

    "You can't imagine, direttore! That retinue! We were up against witches and wiverns and hundred-armed fiends from outer space!"

    "Gryphons and ghouls!"

    "Hellhounds and harpies, master!"

    "Yes, yes, and so -?"

    "Enh, what could we do against such an army?"

    "They were merciless!"

    "They drove us back!"

    "They
what -?!"

    "Then we drove
them
back!"

    "Aha!"

    "Into the sea!"

    "The sea?"

    "Well, into the canal!"

    "Very good! And -?"

    "They had gondolas waiting!"

    "They were swept away before you could blink an eye!"

    "But surely, mere gondolas, you must have been able -"

"Motorized
gondolas, direttore! One minute they were all drowning, the next they were roaring away!"

    "Into the fog!"

    "You couldn't see them -!"

"You let the Count get away, you imbeciles -?!"

    "No!"

    "No! We, uh…"

    "We…?"

    "We chased him in the motor launch!"

    "That's it!"

    "Aha! Then finally you -"

    "They sank it with their submachine guns!"

    "They sank the motor launch -?!"

    "We fired back and sank the gondolas!"

    "It was frightful, direttore! There were bodies everywhere!"

    "The canals were full of them! You could walk right across without getting your feet wet!"

    "The gondolas couldn't move even if we didn't sink them!"

    "What do you mean? Did you sink them or didn't you?"

    "Well, the fog…"

    "All those bodies…"

    "It was confusing…"

    "If you
didn't,
you fools,
it's Marten's fate for you!"

    "We did!"

"Pum! Pof!"

    "Blew them right out of the water!"

    "The canals were running with blood, direttore!"

    "And guts! Blood and guts, direttore!"

    "It was a fight to the death!"

    "It was hand-to-hand!"

    "And foot-to-foot!"

    "I was killed at least eleven times, master!"

    "But the Count, the
Count,
you damnable wretches -?!"

    "Who?"

    "Don't 'who' me! I'll have your
heads -!"

    "Ah, the Count! He's dead."

    "The Count's dead? You're sure -?"

    "He must be! Everybody was dead!"

    "But you didn't see him -?"

    "What did he look like?"

    "Short fellow with a bald head and a wrinkled -?"

    "Enough!
Enough!"
Eugenio screamed, his mascaraed eyes flashing in fury. "You'd better take confession tonight, you insolent vermin,
your afterlife begins tomorrow!"
And he turned sharply on his high heels to stamp out into the noisy and luminous Piazza San Marco, crying: "Now follow me, you little shits! And bring that wretched thing there on the wagon with you!"

    The three servants, anxious to please, threw away their crutches and, with Buffetto pulling, Francatrippa pushing, and Truffaldino helping at the side, they rolled the little wine cart into the tiny underpass leading to the Piazza. In the momentary darkness there, before the light and roar beyond, Truffaldino hopped nimbly up onto the professor's donkey back, then leaned down to whisper into his pointed ear: "La Volpe is dead, dottore!"

    "What -?!
Dead -?!"

    "Hanged herself. With her own tail. Isn't that funny? When they told her about Il Gatto. And your charges against her."

    "Ah…"

    "She left a note for you. In her pocket. Shall I read it?" The old scholar could not reply. He knew the nausea overwhelming him was human nausea, associated with his human flesh, what was left of it. " 'To my dear friend Pinocchio,' it says. 'Do not judge your old traveling companions too harshly. Remember that it is more shameful to distrust friends than be deceived by them.' " He hated the tears running down his cheeks, the lump crowding his less than wooden throat. He wanted no more of it, he wanted it all gone, wanted to be free of this appalling human sickness once and for all. Why did he ever want to be a boy? Why did he let them do this to him? Who talked him into it? Running away with Lampwick, though they didn't run far enough, was probably the wisest thing he ever did. Even being a donkey, a real one, was better than this. " 'As proof of my love for you,' she writes, 'I would like to return your watch, but, worse luck, Gattino was wearing it when he made his final blunder. All I have left is my old tail, which is yours, dear friend, as soon as I am no longer using it.' Signed, 'Yours in the bran, La Volpe.' "

    He was bawling by now, his heaving sobs catching in his imbreaded throat. He knew what it sounded like. He knew what he was.

    "Poor Pinocchio, I am really sorry for you," whispered Truffaldino in a voice suddenly familiar to him. "Be brave, dear friend. Whatever happens…"

    "Colombina…?" But his voice was drowned out by the tumultuous uproar that greeted them as they emerged from the underpass and, under a blazing explosion of floodlights, filed out here into the eerily transformed Piazza: "Pinocchio! It's Pinocchio! Here he comes!" they screamed, and scream still, raising their voices above the din. "Č Pinocchio davvero!" "Hooray!"
"It's the Star of the Dance!"

    As they rumble along now in the gaudy tumult, headed for the circus ring, they pass two tall caped carabinieri, mustachioed and thin as sticks, perhaps the same ones who chased him during the puppet band bust, now helping to keep the crowds back for his grand entry. Between them, on a leash, is a dog, masked by a steel muzzle: it is Melampetta, a friend at last! He aches to reach out to her, but he cannot move inside his bready cast. On seeing him, or perhaps, more correctly, on smelling him behind the pizza, the old watchdog throws her muzzled head back and lets out a pathetic wordless howl, for which she receives a whistling slash of a horse crop from one of her trainers.
"Stop! Don't -!"
the professor gasps, but of course he cannot be heard in the demented cacophony of the square, nor would they listen to him if he could be. Melampetta's miserable howl continues, as do the dialectical whip strokes, fading into the general pandemonium that fills in around him as they lift him off the cart and onto the stage. He is passed ceremonially through the great golden hoop, stretched with tissue crisp as old silk -
pfUFff!
- and, to a crescendo of applause and wild howling cheers, is deposited finally on a little round platform, rotating slowly in the center of the ring.