Pinocchio in Venice Part 16

"Ah!" He turns to his companions. Pierotto sniffs. Colombina shrugs. "Megio no aver bezzi / che el cul in diese pezzi," mutters Brigh.e.l.la, apparently quoting a Gran Teatro dei Burattini routine, for the others pick it up like a murmured antiphon: "Better broke than your a.r.s.e / broken up in ten parts!"

"Thank you, my friends. The second request, dear Fairy, is a little more difficult, but I believe you can do it. When I was turned into a boy, something happened which, though at the time I thought little of it, has troubled me increasingly all my life. I have written about it, but not well. Too much guilt maybe. When I woke up a boy, the straw cottage had been transformed into a beautiful house, I had brand-new clothes and a purse full of gold pieces, my dying babbo was suddenly healthy as a fish and back at his lathe, and -"

"Well, that is because when children who -"

"No, no, that's not the part I mean. What bothered me was that the wooden puppet I once was was still there, outside of me, the old Pinocchio, I saw him, collapsed against a chair in my father's workshop with his legs doubled up under him and the rest unstrung and dangling."

"Oh yes!"

"I want you to let that puppet live again. Do that, and my friends here will bring me to you."

"But what are you saying, my son? You have lived a long and ill.u.s.trious life, an impeccable example to all humanity. Your bibliography is one of the ten longest in the world, and few men in history have been more honored. A university has been named after you -"

"It's not a university, it's a junior high school -"

"But don't you see? If that stupid puppet lives on, all that will have been in vain! Your own beautiful life, the one I gave gave you, will have been meaningless!" you, will have been meaningless!"

"That's right. It's what I want."

"You won't know anything about it, you know. It's not like -"

"I know. It doesn't matter." The Fairy slumps back darkly onto the stool. Stools, rather, she is sitting on both of them now. She doesn't look anything at all like his mamma at this moment. More like Attila actually. He hadn't realized she would take it so personally. "I love you, mamma. But he, as you might say, stands between us!"

Reluctantly, composing herself, she nods, her s.h.i.+fting features gathered up once more into something like maternal melancholy: "It's not a very nice thing for a good fairy to be doing," she says with a sigh that sends the flowers at her feet cascading down the steps, "but it's done."

"Thank you, mamma!" he whispers, showing her a bit of a smile, which bring on another loss of outline and rush of color, then he turns to the puppets encircling him: "You may take me up to her now."

But they seem rooted to the flower-strewn floor, a little petrified copse in the field of petals. Only the rattling of their knees gives them away. "Are you kidding?" one of them whimpers. "After what happened to Captain Spavento?"

"That's just putting the straw next to the fire!"

"Already my head feels capped with phosphorus!"

"All that's over. Don't be afraid. You won't be harmed."

"Can you put that in writing?"

"Why can't that thing with the fright wig come down here? Hasn't it got any legs under that drapery?"

"Compagno, don't ask!"

"Friends, please! You promised -!"

"I just dried up! Can't remember a thing!"

"I seem to recall another engagement -"

"No, brothers and sisters, Pinocchio is right. It's his drop scene and we're the support, the feed, don't you see? We can't stick now! Not when he needs us most! We can't spoil his curtain!"

"I don't know, Colombina. I'd tear myself to pieces for the little fantoccio, you know that. On the other hand!"

"We could sing a song," he suggests. "What was that one you taught me? Da-da-da-da-da-da-DUM -?"

" 'Lzi, scrivi,' you mean?"

"How does it go -?"

Someone hums a bit of it, Brigh.e.l.la raps out a beat with his hands on the back of a pew, others make instrumental noises through their noses or pick up on the words, and soon the troupe is in full throat and marching together down the flower-carpeted aisle toward the altar, his gondola chair raised on high. He joins in, celebrating all the naughty truths of the world, sung to the tune of his Hollywood theme song, his final performance with the Gran Teatro dei Burattini Vegetal Punk Rock Band. They port him up the fourteen steps to the altar and at the top lift him out onto one of the two stools there, the Fairy having discreetly withdrawn for the moment to a side gallery, and then, with hugs and kisses and tearful break-a-leg jokes, they leave him.

Even as, descending to the pit, they slip from view, he finds himself, home again, on the Blue-Haired Fairy's pillowy lap. Tenderly, clucking and sighing and, it may be, weeping, she goes over him from head to shredded s.h.i.+ns, testing the hinges, brus.h.i.+ng away the vermin and pizza crumbs, kissing the sore spots. "Poverino!" She raises and lowers his limbs, listens to his heart, picks him up and turns him over, pokes and knocks at what she finds there, gasping with pity when her finger pushes into the soft bits. She does a little makes.h.i.+ft repair work to the crumbling mortise and tenon joints between head and shoulder, then, laying him on his back again, dresses his wounded stumps with wet motherly kisses and twists of her azure hair. "You forgot your third wish," she remarks teasingly as she binds him.

"No," he whispers. "You know it, mamma!"

The luminous flush returns to her cheeks and throat and he feels a damp dense warmth engulf him for a moment. Her eyes lose focus, though whether in ecstasy or in grief he cannot say, and her blue hair, alive once more, spreads out like a veil above him, then flutters down, the tingly strands flowing over his body like water, curling round all his parts, penetrating the innumerable gaps and fissures, swathing him wholly in their writhing embrace for a moment of what seems to him the very quintessence, although abstract, of pa.s.sion, as if he were being gripped by a delicious idea. Then, as quickly, her hair slithers away again, releasing him to her subtler ministrations, her kisses, nibbles, soft caresses. "You've been well plucked, my son," she murmurs. "There's not enough left here for a sandwich and a cigar box. You're not even worth burning. I'm afraid there's nothing left to do but send you to the pulping mills to help ease the world paper shortage." She leans down, little more than a loving shadow to him now, to kiss his eyes closed, whispering down the long receding tunnel of his earhole: "We'll make a book out of you!"

"Ah!" he replies with his vanis.h.i.+ng voice, grateful for the line she has, in her wisdom, thrown him. "But a talking book, mamma! A talking book!!" A talking book!!"

Though his eyes are closed, his senses withdrawn, for one vivid moment he sees himself at a distance in the Fairy's arms. He has not moved from those arms, has indeed fallen deeper than ever inside himself, yet the view seems to be from the back of the church, near the door, looking down a long polished nose at an altar bedecked with flowers and flooded with soft light, the rest of the little chapel now in darkness. What he sees up there is a decrepit misshapen little creature, neither man nor puppet, entangled in blue hair and lying in an unhinged sprawl in the embrace of a monstrous being, tented obscurely in her own wild tresses, but revealing, as she picks and nibbles at the ridiculous figure in her lap (it feels, remotely, very good), glimpses of tusk and claw and fiery eye. She is grotesque. Hideous. Beautiful. She leans toward the little man's head now as though to suck at the orifices there (yes, he can feel it go, feel it all emptying out), and then the eyes at the doorway turn away from the light and he is finally and for all that infinite span of time still left him, infinite because he will never know its limits, be they but a hair's breadth away (the thought escapes him, even as he thinks it), in the dark. Somewhere, out on the surface, distant now as his forgotten life, fingers dance like children at play and soft lips kiss the ancient hurts away. And! is she doing something with his nose? Ah!! Yes!! Good!

About the Author.

Robert Coover is an Iowan who now lives in Rhode Island and Europe. Among his awards are the William Faulkner Award, the Brandeis Citation for Fiction, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the REA Award for the Short Story, and fellows.h.i.+ps from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a member of the faculty at Brown University.