(1991) Pinocchio in Venice (33 page)

    Too late. There is another flash as Diamantina flares up and, along with the tombstone, vanishes, leaving only a sooty smudge on the cracked flagstone. At the same moment, the church doors behind them open slowly as though by themselves and a thick creamy light, faintly rose-hued, flows out into the campo, accompanied by a strange ethereal music which might be harp music played on an organ, or else organ music played on a flute and theorbo. Or more likely none of these things, instrumentation having nothing to do with it. He sits alone in the light and music, of course; the puppets are all back in the gondolas once more, frantically preparing to push off from the steps and head with all haste for the high seas. "Stop! We forgot old Pinocchio!"

    "We
can't
stop, Colombina! The curtain is
down
on this horror show!"

    "But -!"

    "Leave him! Think of him like a dropped cue! A line that got stepped on! Tough, but that's showbiz!"

    "It was his fault anyway! Come on! Let's blow this mud-hole!" The beautiful inlaid marble walls now glow like alabaster lit from within and, above him, colored lights flicker and dance teasingly from window to window. The center of the lustrous façade is creased at the navel by a dark shadowy cross, and he sees now that the dazzling entranceway below it is bearded in a spiky blue moss, the Virgin's glistening white head peeking out overhead as though to inquire who might have put their foot in the door. He knows where he is. He has been here before. It is the little white house. The same one he saw between the Fairy's legs all those years ago.

    "But we can't just leave him there, not Pinocchio," he hears Colombina protesting, and, in spite of a lot of short-tempered growling, there eventually seems to be general agreement about that, though less a consensus about who would go pick him up and bring him back. Finally, by offering up her share of the booty, she is able to persuade five others to come with her, the six of them creeping up on tiptoes, doubled over like chicken thieves, peeping up uneasily from under their lowered hat brims at the transformed church.

    "These fucking miracle marts give me the creeps!"

    "Eat me, drink me - they're like a fast food chain for vampires and cannibals!"

    "Last time I played one of these houses, they called me Perverse Doctrine. Must've been centuries ago. Worst beating I ever got!"

    "You'll get worse if you don't move your stumps! Grab the old board up and let's go!"

    "No, no! Not that way!" he begs as they pull on his chair. "I want to go in there! I
must
go in there!"

    "Now, now, dear Pinocchio," counsels Colombina, leaning close to his earhole, then speaking as to a deaf person, "as your best friend, let me give you some advice. It is very late, the night is dark, and we're up to our mildewed bungholes in death and danger as it is! We've already lost poor Lelio and Diamantina tonight. And the law's right behind us! Things are bad enough, as the saying goes, so don't blow on the fire!"

    "Yes, you are my best friend, Colombina," he replies with his dry cracked voice. "I have almost no one left but you. If you don't help me, I-I don't know what I'll do!"

    "But, Pinocchio, my love, this is crazy! Do you remember what our dear late lamented Arlecchino used to say? 'What do you gain by hanging yourself?' he used to say. 'Does that put any flesh on your bones? It does not, it makes you thinner!' Now, for goodness' sake, or at least for your own, and for mine, too, if you love me, be sensible! Come with us while there is still time!"

    "Please! Just take me inside. I can't get there by myself. Then you can go."

    "Go? But aren't you coming with us?"

    "I-I don't know."

    "Ahi, my dear Pinocchio, you are impossible!" she cries.

    "Perhaps we could just toss the old cazzo inside on the count of three and make a run for it -?" Pierotto suggests.

    "Or maybe we could nail a couple of those fancy crosses we stole to what's left of his knees and he could toddle on in on his own," says another.

    "Bad luck," mutters Brighella. "We've your nut for a hammer, but we're fresh out of nails."

    "No, if we're going to do it, let's at least show some style, let's go clean - like they say in the trade: if you slip in the shit, make a dance out of it!" Colombina insists, and, with an exasperated sigh, the six of them lift his gondola chair in unison like grim-faced pallbearers, sharing out not the weight, little of that that there is, but the dread. The other Burattini, being old troupers after all and superstitious about splitting up an act, reluctantly pile out of the gondolas yet again and join them, huddling closely, for their collective entrance.

    "Mamma mia! Is this dumb, or what?"

    "We must all be out of our waterlogged gourds!"

    "Look at those crazy lights playing around up there! It's like some kind of Grand Opening!"

    "Yeah, well, just so what gets opened isn't me!"

    "This church, is it… is it used for last rites?" he asks faintly.

    "No, never. Lust rites, more like. It's a wedding chapel."

    "The brides are off-loaded from those steps out there."

    "The only things that get buried here, old chum, are little birds in ripe figs."

    "Ah…"

    "But never so deep they can't be made to rise and sing again."

    "And again."

    "This is the only shaman shed in town where the Second Coming is not sufficient cause for celebration."

    "Let's just hope we don't lose any more than the brides lose!"

    "What did you say?"

    "What?"

    As they reach the blue-wreathed doorway, the liquid glow from within seems to grow more intense, troubling their sight and hearing alike ("Loose enema, then: what -?"), the music, which is more like a fragrant lullaby than a hymn or a wedding march, now reaching them less through their ears than through their noses as a rich harmonious brew of incense, gentle arpeggios, hot peperonata, and Venetian lagoon.

    "Listen! The bells!"

    "It's nearly midnight!"

    "And tomorrow -!"

    "I can't hear them, but I can feel them kicking!"

    "Tell me when we're in Paris!" whimpers Lisetta, only her nose sticking out, and Pierotto complains: "What's that? I can't hear a thing! I've still got poor Diamantina's ashes up my nose!"

"Now, come in here, and tell me how it happened that you fell into the hands of assassins!"
intones a grave windy voice that seems to come from another world, and is not so much heard as felt like a cold finger down the spine. The gondola chair is dropped on the flagstones there in front of the open door with an answering bang and the trembling puppets fall clatteringly together like a sackful of shingles.

    "Who was that -?!"

    "Assassins? What assassins -?"

    "I'm suddenly losing interest," Captain Spavento wheezes solemnly, turning shakily on his heel, and the top half of Il Zoppo gasps: "Whoa, old pegs! Any further and I'm getting off!"

    "Button your pants, Pulcinella! Don't let me look!"

    "You close this farcetta on your own, Colombina! I'm butting out of here!"

    "Me too! I'm so scared I think I just split myself!"

    "This is not in my contract!"

    "No, don't go!" he cries. "Please! Capitano! Brighella -!"

    "But they are right, dear Pinocchio!" agrees Colombina. "This is not our pitch! It's clear we've all been cast here for tomorrow's Ash Wednesday magic makeup kit! We must go - quickly! - and you must go with us!"

    "But -!"

    "No more 'buts'! 'Buts' have caused you nothing but trouble all your life! Come now! The show must go on, old trouper!"

    "But that's just it!" he gasps feebly. "Look at me, Colombina! Dear Brighella! Capitano! Can't you see?! My part is over! I've got no feet, no ears, no teeth, my fingers are dropping off and everything else is warped and cracked and falling apart - I can't move without fracturing and splintering, my cords and ligaments have rotted out, and my insides are nothing but wet sawdust! There's nothing alive and well in there except the things feeding on me! And Lelio was right, though I love you, I'm not one of you! Flesh has made a pestilential freak out of me! Even I don't know who or what I am any more! There's only one thing left for me now. But I-I can't do it without you!"

    His desperate plea has silenced them. Brighella has returned. Pierotto looks over his shoulder from the foot of the watersteps, the tear on his cheek gleaming like a sapphire in the blue light there.

    "You've touched me to the very core, dear Pinocchio," Colombina sighs. She gives him a tender little hug, and the miserable sound of wet twigs snapping makes her groan and hug him again, whatever the damages. "What is it you want us to do, my brother?"

    "I want, how can I say…? I want you to help me make… a good exit."

    "Ah…!" The puppets turn as one toward the blazing blue-whiskered doorway of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. This is something they all understand. A proper exit needs timing, boldness, clarity, purpose, but, before anything else, one must command the stage. What they feel, standing here in the misty wings, is worse than stage fright to be sure, but it is no longer mere woodenheaded panic. They are professionals, after all. Those who have fled to the boats now return, and though there is still some surly grumbling to be heard at the fringes, the general mood as they pick up his tapestried gondola chair once more and step pluckily on through the resplendent portal (the Virgin, under a punctuated cross lit up now like a pinball bumper, seems to spit on them as they pass beneath her, or perhaps she is squirting her breasts at them, or little Jesus, lost in the dark tangled foliage, might even be peeing on them all, it is hard in the confusion of their senses wrought by the musical light, or luminous music, to be sure) is more like that of getting stuck with a lean part in a bad show in front of a cold house: grim but steady, and prepared to see it through.

MAMMA

29. EXIT

    They crowd in under the overhanging ridge of the Nuns' Choir at the back of the little Santuario di Santa Maria dei Miracoli, gazing in awe, their senses still somewhat bedazzled, at the fabulous scene before them, which reminds the much-traveled old wayfarer of nothing so much as his visit to Attila's innards. The sheer marble walls, pale as old bone and glistening dewily, seem to be pulsating with the strange pumping music, as do the softly clashing gold-framed Pennacchis, arched above them like the plated back of a prehistoric beast. As, cautiously, the puppets port him down the aisle between the ribbed pews, they are assailed by the delicate aromas of frankincense, ambrosia, and myrrh, along with something headier, reminiscent of the sweet decay of wens and bogs, which may be the odor of the throbbing music. In all the church, except for the celestial gallery of portraits in the gently billowing vault above, there is only one painting, a Quattrocento Madonna and Child, mounted on the high altar standing atop broad marble steps crisp as vertebrae and surrounded by balustraded galleries and filigreed marble carvings delicate as living tissue. Two hanging Byzantine lamps swing at either side of the altar like blood red pendulums under an expanding and contracting cupola, and the crimsoned painting itself seems to glow from within as though the Virgin, robed in midnight blue and holding the haloed child like a ventriloquist's dummy, were standing in the midst of a blazing fire.
"Gentlemen, I should like you to tell me,"
the painted Madonna calls out to them in that whispery otherworldly voice they have heard before,
"I should like you to tell me, gentlemen, if this unfortunate puppet is dead or alive!"

    The Burattini pull up short, wooden mouths gaping from ear to ear, their knees knocking in the sudden silence like a whole marching band's drumsticks being rapped together. "Who-who said that -?!" they gasp severally.

    "O Fatina mia, why are you dead? Why you, so good, instead of me, so wicked?" squeaks the long-nosed deadpan creature the Madonna is holding, its right hand rising and falling mechanically. Her hands deftly but in full view work the marionette from underneath, pulling the wires down there, and her lips move perceptibly as the wooden-faced baby's lower jaw claps up and down: "If you truly love me, dear Fairy, if you love your little brother, come back to life! Aren't you sorry to see me here alone and abandoned by everyone? Who would save me if I were caught by assassins? What can I do, alone in a world like this?" Then, though the little figure continues its singsong recitation of the famous "Puppet's Lament," the text in this century of tragedies, operas, and countless requiems throughout the world, the Madonna's cheeks puff out, her lips pucker up, and between them a shiny pink bubble emerges, slowly filing with air until it is as big as the talking infant's mouth, its head, its halo. "Who will give me something to eat? Where will I sleep at night? Who will make me a new jacket?" continues the whining voice, the hinged jaw clopping up and down like slapsticks, even as the bubble expands until only the Virgin's right eye peeks slyly over the top of it. "Oh, it would be a hundred times better if I died too! Yes, I want to die!
Ih! Ih! Ih -!

    The crescendoing sobs are interrupted by a sudden bang as the bubble explodes like a firecracker, splattering the faces of the Madonna and Child, and indeed some of the painting's fiery background as well, with pink bubble gum. A breathless quivering hush seems to grip the little wedding chapel. Even the music has stopped. The Virgin, blinking through the impasto of gum as though through thrown pie, pushes her hand deep into her son's body, then pokes out the eyes from within, waggling two long rosy fingers at her awestruck audience like insect feelers. Her own mouth gapes, webbed by moist streaks of gum, and the damp windy voice wails:
"Birba d'un burattino! Are you not afraid to die?"

    "That does it! I'm off!" cries Capitano Spavento del Vall'Inferno, letting go his side of the gondola chair and wheeling round. "You can only carry friendship so far!"

    "No! Stop!" the old pilgrim gasps, twisting around in the dropped chair, heedless of the wrenching and splitting within, but the mercurial Captain, sword drawn and striding as though into battle, is not to be held back. He charges full tilt at the doorway, now overgrown with blue brambles, slashing at the wiry thicket with his sword, and -
FFRISST!
- there is a sudden brief blaze in the shape of Captain Spavento, gone before seen. His ashes hang like a shadowy afterimage for a moment, then settle silently to the floor.

    Everything is changed. The curtain of blue bramble has vanished. The door is closed. The smooth bare walls, encrusted with precious marble the color of fresh air on a dull day, are merely walls now, holding in the solemn silence. The fifty Pennacchi portraits gaze down from above like the sober voyeurs they have always been, the altar lamps have stopped swinging, and the ancient painting displayed there is once more flat and lifeless, the Christ child's stare a bit askew perhaps with two dark holes where the fingers poked through, but otherwise, except for a streak or two of sticky pink, a work abused only by the passing centuries. Slender white tapers have been lit in front of it and throughout the chapel, and there is everywhere a great profusion of fresh-cut flowers, in all the pews and on the walls and statues and columns, in the pulpits and windows, and heaped up on the high altar like whipped cream and spilling into the choir galleries and through the ornamental balustrades and down the stairs and center aisle to where, clustered around the ancient figure in the gondola chair, the puppets press together in benumbed terror, their collective gaze riveted upon the strange person in the snowy white shift, her azure hair flowing down her back like a bridal train, sitting now, her back to them, on one of the two carved and upholstered stools before the altar. The other stool is empty.

    "Su da bravi, Burattini!" comes a voice from the front of the chapel, a voice he knows all too well, soft as canary down and sweet as panna cotta. It is the voice that changed his life, and its seductive power is undiminished. He feels his resolve crumbling like hot
favette dei morti
, the favette she always baked for him when he came home from school or mischief, saying tenderly as she popped them in his mouth: "You see how I love you, ragazzo mio? But if you want to stay with me, you must always obey me, and do as you are told!" With pleasure, mammina mia! Oh, with pleasure! Che bello! Che bello! "Do you see that poor half-dead puppet there?" the voice continues now. "Take him up gently, bring him to me, and sit him on this cushion here beside me. Do you understand?"

"No!"
he rasps, shaking off the terrorized puppets when, as though spellbound, knees rattling and eyes popping, they reach for him. It takes all his courage not to surrender to her immediately, such is the lure of her great power to one so powerless as he, and so desperately lonely, but he knows that, having lost everything else, the withholding of that surrender is the only expedient left him if he is to attain the end, or ends, he seeks. Or indeed any end at all, beyond abjection's shoddy but, alas, appealing joy…

    "What are you muttering between your teeth?" asks the voice up at the high altar. "What is the matter now?"

    "So you lied to me again," he wheezes, speaking up as best he can. "You are not dead, after all."

    A deep echoey sigh flutters through the little church, making the flower petals tremble and the candles gutter briefly, and setting the stupefied puppets' knees to clicking like wind through a cane brake. "It seems not," admits the voice, so wistfully affectionate he almost cannot bear to prolong his separation from her.

    "All these years of mourning my precious mamma's early and tragic death! 'Poor Fairy! The victim of a thousand misfortunes and too poor to buy a crust of bread!' Do you remember your little joke? I have carried the harrowing sadness of it with me all my life! All that I have done or have not done has been confused and tempered by it. Even now, my final years have been devoted to its bewildering mysteries, it is why I am here, why I have suffered so - and it has all been just a farce! Ah, Fatina mia! Why have you done this thing to me?!"

    "Because idleness is a dreadful disease, my boy, of which one should be cured immediately in childhood: if not, one never -!"

    "Oh, yes, yes, I've heard all that before! You always were the
good
little fairy, weren't you? Society's little helper! Civilization's drill sergeant! But I was free! I was happy! And you, with your terrifying heartbreaking parade of tombstones and canon, put strings on me where there were none. You cheated me! All my life," he squawks, lifting up the twisted splinters of his arms and rattling them at the blue-haired figure on the bridal stool,
"I have been nothing but a puppet!"

    Slowly, though she keeps her back to them still, her head begins to rotate on her shoulders, and the waxen face of the little Bella Bambina of old appears with her strangely rigid smile and rolled-up eyes, bringing a startled gasp from his friends, pressed tight about him. "I love you," the Bambina stage-whispers, piercing him to the quick with her terrible intimacy. "Stay with me! You shall be my little brother, and I will be your darling sister!"

    The sight of the Bambina, the dearest playmate he ever had, gruesome as her games could sometimes be, makes his arms drop and would bring tears to his eyes if they had not all been spent, like everything else. How good she was, or seemed to be! How tender, even if she did leave him hanging all night in the oak tree, swinging in the wind like a bell clapper, her loving care! And does she not offer him what he now most wants: just to play again? "I have thought about your little white house, Fatuccia mia," he croaks at last, summoning up all his strength to resist her, "and how much pleasure you promised me in it. Yet when I tried to return to it, you took it away and put a tombstone in its stead! I went crazy with grief for a while, but I learned my lesson well."

    "So my medicine really did do you good?"

    "I can truthfully say, though I have been diligent, obedient, truthful, and circumspect, I have not had a wholly happy day since. I might somehow have found my way back to one little white house or another, but I was always too afraid. Pleasure was death and dissolution. That's what you taught me. Fun was fatal. No. I will not play with you."

    "My child, you will be sorry," sighs the Bambina as her grinning head recommences its slow grim turning. "You are very ill…" When the next revolution begins, the head is joined by the upper torso, swiveling at the waist, and this time it is Bluebell. "Hey, wow, teach, you don't look so hot!" she laughs, snapping her gum in her bright white teeth. She reaches up with both hands to pull away the lacy shift and out pop her spectacular young breasts like fat rabbits from a hat, bringing fresh gasps of amazement from the puppets surrounding him. Those breasts, last seen on the Apocalypse, are dizzying alive, the scintillating rosettelike nipples, lightly gilded, throbbing as though with excited little heartbeats of their own. "You need some
nourishment,
Professor Pinenut! So, why don't you scoot your cute little boopie-doops up here and grasp, as you like to say, my 'civilizing principles?' "

    This glorious sight, for which, so recently, he was ready to throw away honor, dignity, life itself, steals his breath away, what little there is left for theft, and he feels riven (literally: he can hear the stifled creaking and snapping deep inside) with an unendurable yearning, not to fondle them - what would he fondle them
with?
- but simply to rest his dying head there, to hide himself, as someone has said, on the breast of the simple, the vast, the ineffable… "I see," he rattles drily, hanging on to his chair arms with both gnarled fists, "you are still wearing my ear."

    "You better believe it, Daddy-o! It's my good luck charm!" She reaches up to finger the shriveled black brooch, making her breasts wobble teasingly. "So, hey, what'll it take to trade you for the rest, prof?"

    "Certainly, you deceitful ogress, more than those puffed-up things you are flaunting so, a mask like any other. Put them away! The dead ear suits you better!"

    She looks crestfallen, deflated, the rosette nipples withering to something more like smallpox vaccination scars, and he almost regrets his own deceit, hoping his nose is not giving him away. "You're right, teach," she says finally, perking up a bit, "I could use a good dressing-down! I've been really rotten, I admit it! A dirty dog! C'mon! You can treat me as rough as you please! I
deserve
it!" She hesitates, gazing at him hopefully ("That's a pretty good offer!" one of the puppets whispers in his ear, and another asks: "Do you think we could all have a go?"), but when he makes no move, she turns away sorrowfully and begins to rotate once more.

    When she pivots around again, it is with her whole body, though the stool at the top of the steps remains in place. He is not quite sure how she does this because his gaze is fixed on the creature appearing before him. This he has not been prepared for. It is his mamma, to be sure, she could be no other, but she has changed. At first he thinks she must simply have aged, he hasn't seen her since the last century, but then he catches a glimpse of the Bambina's wicked smile, Bluebell's milk-fed complexion and fluorescent eye shadow, and hints, too, of a Hollywood starlet he once knew, maybe more than one, a colleague at university, several students, his interviewer on a television talk show, the doctor who removed the peculiar growth on his nose a year ago and prescribed a long voyage, an admiring museum curator who confessed to a platonic affection, his traveling companion in the limousine to the Nobel awards in Stockholm, even (the stray blue hairs on her chin perhaps, the ridge of her forehead) the blue-haired goat he passed on his way into Attila's gut. These features, or suggestions of features, seem to exist not simultaneously but sequentially (now it is the Bambina's waxen complexion he sees, Bluebell's gum-smacking cherry-lipped grin), in a kind of moving montage, flickering across her face like unstable film projections. It is like being under water in a Hollywood pool with naked starlets swimming by and his eyes full of chlorine. Or like trying to put a half-forgotten face together with a half-remembered name.