(1991) Pinocchio in Venice (15 page)

    "Ha ha! Che parlare da bestia! Give him a hand, everybody! In fact, give him two, he needs them!"

    But it's true! It's true! A fraud! A turncoat without even a coat to turn! I'm a vile unprincipled scoundrel through and through!

    "He may have a small mind, ladies and gentlemen, but he knows it from corner to corner!"

    Yet how can it have happened? A century of prudence and sobriety and effortful mastery blown away in a day, less than a day, vanished into the flux as though it never existed, leaving him not only the ludicrous dupe of charlatans, robbed of his every possession, arrested and humiliated by the authorities, stripped of his clothing as of his pride, indeed of his very humanity, enfeebled with illness and deprived even of his ears and nipples -
"Lai, lai,
" the grimacing clown is crooning sourly to the rhythm of a child's taunt,
"co se xe veci se xe buzarai! Ay, ay! Hugger-mugger! To be old is to be buggered!"
- but now, having abandoned his only true friend in the world in mad pursuit of a vaporous fantasy, a true
ignis fatuus,
a most foolish fire, he is hopelessly paralyzed as well, frozen, lost, confused by fever and hunger, left to die in a trash bag, taunted by cretins and crushed by his own shame, and all because of a vulgar American coed with a soft blue sweater…

    "Oho!" cries the jester, leaping into the air and clicking his heels. "So
that's
the rock you've split your decrepit buns on, old man! Ha ha! Rispettabile pubblico!
Here
is where the donkey has fallen!"

    He seems, alas, to have been talking out loud again. He doesn't know for how long, but fears the worst. It's almost as though he's forgotten how
not
to. Crowds of people, scarfed and booted, have gathered around, laughing and applauding and stamping their feet in the snow, whooping the prancing buffoon through his mocking routines - now, hobbling and cackling wildly, he is chasing all the young girls in the audience, making them squeal and clutch tight their coats and skirts. The venerable scholar has become, he sees through bitter tears, seeing little else, the very fool of fools. Butts' butt. But what, being four-fifths buried in refuse already and the rest soon to follow, does it matter? Oh, bambina mia, you little blue-jeaned and cowboy-booted barbarian, you twangy gum-popping red-white-and-blue siren!
You have been my death!

    "Well, at least your life has not been in vain for nothing!" the comedian exclaims with insolent bravado, as though egged on by the raucous crowd. He seems brash as a child yet ancient at the same time, his features beardless yet furrowed with grimaces and depravity, marred by warts and pockmarks and an enflamed carbuncular growth on his forehead, and with two deep wrinkles standing arrogantly, harshly, almost savagely between his bushy brows, like something out of a repressed nightmare. "Hee ha! Isn't it wonderful!" he brays, launching a little bowlegged dance around the wastebin, the professor shrinking into his trash bag and solacing himself with the thought, which in his feverish misery he only half believes, that at least - surely - nothing worse can happen to him now.
"Tutti quanti semo mati / Per quel buso che semo nati!''
the clown warbles out in a squeaky falsetto, rolling his eyes roguishly as he hops about.
"It's crazy how we're all inflamed / By that little hole from which we came!"

    But why is he surprised? For didn't the Blue-Haired Fairy warn him? "Puppets never grow up," she said, wagging her finger at him all those years ago. "They are born puppets, live puppets, die puppets!"

    "Yes, well, dummy, that's show business! But do you mean to say -?!"

    What a terrible oracle! He'd thought she was presenting him with an alternative, a moral choice;
she'd merely been pronouncing sentence upon him!

    "Hey now, here's a song and it isn't long: 'He who doesn't die in the cradle, / Will suffer for it sooner or later!' Hah! Who says there are no poets in Venice? Yes, at the end of the day, we're all just clay, give or take a sliver or two - we all bough down to the curse of events, you can't stave it off, speaking figuratively! So nothing to do, cavalieri e dame, but show a little spunk, as we say in the charade trade, brace up and stick it out as best you can, and let the chips fall where they may! But now tell me, old man," the entertainer murmurs, peering closer, the frown between his sunken eyes deepening, "what did you mean when you said - ye gods! Am I dreaming or…?" And -
ka-POK!
- he butts him suddenly in the head.

    O babbo mio! I am dying! There is loud laughter and shouting all around him, but the old traveler can hear it only intermittently through the reverberant clangor in his hammered head. What is this insane monster
doing
-
?!
"Oh please!" he wheezes, but this time no one hears him. "Help -!"

    "It
might
be…," muses the clown, leaning back, and then -
WHAACK!
- bangs heads again, hammering him brutally with the very knob of his carbuncle.

"Abi! o povero me!"
yelps the professor, whimpering in the old style, his head reeling, his eyes losing their focus.
"Ih!… ih!… ih!…"
And the jester cries:
"It COULD be…"

    And then, even before the next blow comes, the distant memory returns and the old scholar recognizes his adversary - not an adversary at all of course but once his most beloved friend - a memory repressed to be sure, but not of a nightmare: rather of what was perhaps - before the glory of being human, that is, and all that shameful past was put behind him - the happiest night of his life!
Pa-KLOCKK!

"It IS! It IS! Pinocchio! It's PINOCCHIO!"

"Arlecchino!"
he gasps, his eyes still spinning around in his ringing head. Did he used to do this
for fun?
"My-my
friend!
Ow!
Oh!
It's
you!"

"Pulcinella! Pantalone!"
Arlecchino shouts across the campo, leaping up and down like a mechanical frog.
"It's Pinocchio! Colombina! Our dear brother Pinocchio is here! Flaminia! Brighella! Capitano!"

"What
-
?!"
cry the musicians of the rock band, dropping their instruments with an amplified clatter and bounding down off the stage.
"Pinocchio
-
?! Can it be
-
?!"

    And he is suddenly engulfed in a great commotion as they swoop down upon him, everyone kissing him and hugging him and giving him friendly head-butts and pinches and all talking at once -
"It is! It is really he!" "It's our brother Pinocchio!" "Evviva Pinocchio!" "Lift him out of his hamper there!" "Who has done this to him?" "Oh dear Pinocchio! Come to the arms of your wooden brothers!" "Give us a kiss, love!" "Easy! The damp seems to have got to him!" "Why have you been tormenting him so,
Arlecchino? Our own brother!" "He saved your life!" "I didn't recognize him, he's been smeared with all this funny makeup!" "That's human flesh, you imbecile!" "Pinocchio, how did it happen?" "Why did you leave us?" "It's been so long!" "Careful, Brighella, don't drop him!"
- and, trailing a litter of paper bags, old vaporetto tickets, and unspooled cassette tapes, he is lifted out of the trash basket, hoisted upon their shoulders, and paraded triumphantly around the campo, the puppets recovering their instruments and striking up a gay-spirited circus march quite unlike the pounding headachy noises they were making before. As they pass by the stage, the professor sees above it the psychedelically painted canvas he could not read before: GRAN TEATRO DEI BURATTINI.
"That's us!"
cries Pulcinella below his left buttock.
"Welcome, dear Pinocchio, to the Great Puppet Show Vegetal Punk Rock Band!"

14. GRAN TEATRO DEI BURATTINI

"I want you stick to me, Pinocchio,"
Arlecchino rasps fiercely from beneath his stiff upper lip as he drags him off the back of the stage and down into the terrified crowds,
"like shit to a shovel!"

    "But my knees! I can't even -!"

    "Don't argue, friend! This is
serious!"

    Just like a puppet. Doesn't understand the limits and hazards of human flesh. Il Dottore, as his fellow musicians now call him,
knows
it's serious. He can smell the bonfires. He can hear the screams. He knows what happened to the last Dottore. He's frightened, too. But he still can't move. Shifting his body is like moving a refrigerator or a heavy log: he has to tip it from side to side, rock it forward all in one piece, every inch costs him almost unbearable pain and effort. And at the same time he's so frail, the tiniest jolt sends him spinning off in another direction, making him feel like one of those airy little balls in a whirling lottery basket, a walking (speaking loosely) paradox. So, inevitably, they are separated, shit and shovel. The metaphor was all too apt. Shit always gets left behind. He can hear Arlecchino shouting for him through the awesome pack-up, but the shouts grow more and more distant. He tries to shout back, but he keeps wheezing and coughing instead. The smoke is getting in his eyes and tearing at his throat, aggravating the itching there. He is being stepped on, elbowed, crushed between frantic bodies, kneed and pushed, they can't see him down here. He longs for the relative safety of the rubbish bin. Though those too, he can see, are being tipped over and flattened by the panicky mob. He strikes out for the awning of a greengrocer's stall, hoping for a refuge there, but it disappears before he can reach it. "Striking out" is perhaps not quite the expression: most of the time his feet are not even touching the ground. But he manages to stay afloat in the human flood, one of his more conventional talents, even if he remains somewhat below the surface.

    The last Dottore, he's been told, was taken apart stick by stick. The band's been outlawed, its members condemned, they're on the run, and the Dottore, too fat to run, got caught. The carabinieri were trying to get him to talk which was of course like inviting the hare to run, as Pulcinella put it, only they could not understand his garbled Latin, whoever could, so finally they had to torture him to
stop
him talking. Even as he was edifying his captors with his celebrated
at iam gravi
lecture about the wounded Queen and her raw sausages, they snapped the old philosophaster's limbs in two, split up the chunkier bits with hammer and chisel, then, with his own strings, tied all the pieces up in his big hat and shipped the lot off to Murano glassblowers for kindling. "But now you can be our new Dottore!" Flaminia exclaimed gleefully, meaning no irony at all, as they propped him up in front of the electronic keyboard, the newest member of the Gran Teatro dei Burattini Vegetal Punk Rock Band. "But I'm no musician!" he protested. "Neither are we!" they laughed. "Look! It's easy! Just hit this! Now this!" Arlecchino guided his hands and from the stiff poke of his fingers, frozen into gnarled little claws, vast sounds suddenly rocked the campo. "Now just keep repeating that!" The others picked up their instruments and gathered around him on the stage, improvising raucously upon his little phrase (which sounded suspiciously to him like "When You Wish Upon a Star"), electric guitars and theorbos, harmonicas, tambourines, flutes, lutes, and a set of amplified drums responding thunderingly to the touch of the virtuoso Burattini.
Pi-pi-pi!
they went.
Zum-zum-zum!
They made the whole square shake and tremble. It was fun, in a dizzying and anarchical sort of way, like the old days in Mangiafoco's mercurial puppet theater, and their friendship, however bruised he was by it, warmed his feeble heart.

    The dizziness he suffered in their midst was not so much from the loud music or the smothering attention or even the fever which no doubt grips him still, but from all the head-butts he'd endured by which they'd first, ecstatically, recognized him. Indeed, down here in the desperate press and jostle of the fleeing multitudes, his head is still ringing from those blows, making it difficult for him to maintain any sense of direction, little good it would do him if he could. He sees the four public security police drag Corallina away, hears her screaming, but a moment later he cannot be sure whether she's in front of him or behind him. Arlecchino's fading shouts have seemed to spiral around him like a ball on a stretching string, almost as though the campo were expanding and he were being screwed deep into its tangled center. When Captain Spavento comes creeping by on all fours between the legs of the crowd, having just crept abjectly past in the opposite direction, the professor can no longer be sure, in his throbbing vertigo, that these are two separate events.

    "Long live our brother Pinocchio!" they'd all cried on discovering him and the hugging and pinching and head-thumping had begun, everyone had a turn, he couldn't even speak it hurt so, he could only weep, and then they wept, too, but for joy, as they supposed he did, and kissed him some more and pinched him even harder as though to try to pluck him clean and banged heads again and crushed him with their wild loving hugs. And, in truth, for all the pain, he
was
happy, delirious even, it was as if, as they transported him out of the trash bag and onto their shoulders and paraded him through the snowswept square and up to the makeshift bandstand, he'd been suddenly and miraculously rescued, not merely from a lonely ignominious death, but from a whole lifetime of misguided exile and isolation, it was as if
this
was what he had come back for, this place, these friends, it was as if, as if a hundred years had never happened…!

    "Remember the party that night? We danced till dawn!"

    "Dancing wasn't the half of it! We all stripped and swapped parts and got our strings in a delicious tangle! Then Arlecchino stole Mangiafoco's swazzle and started playing it through his
bumhole!"

    "If it
was
his bumhole - might have been anybody's, things were pretty mixed
up
by then!"

    "Listen, Pinocchio had just saved my can from the fire, the least I could do was
sing
through it!"

    "As Arlecchino said at the time, he was thanking Pinocchio from the bottom of his heart and from the heart of his bottom!"

    "I remember!"

    "What a blast!"

    "Then Rosaura challenged everybody to a pelvis-cracking contest with her polished cherry pudendum, and ended up splitting Colombina's mound and breaking Lelio's little thing off, not that he ever had any use for it!"

    "She called it hardass cunny-conkers!"

    "It never healed, I've still got a crack there!"

    "It was a crazy night!"

    "I was so happy…!"

    "That party is a legend now!"

    "But when was it?
I
don't remember it!"

    "You weren't
there,
Flaminia. Must have been a century ago, maybe two."

    "You were still just a gleam in old Mangiafoco's chisel!"

    "And Rosaura," he asked then, craning his head about above the sea of faces, "where
is
Rosaura?"

    "Ah, poor Rosaura, bless her wormy little knothole, has gone the way of all wood, I'm afraid, all except for her hardwood hotbox which Pierotto here inherited for a head when his old one got damp rot and fell apart!"

    "It's made him a bit strange, but he's got a new
lazzo
with a chamber pot and a monocle you wouldn't believe!"

    "But there are plenty of others here, you old rogue! Here, meet Corallina and Lisetta and Diamantina…!" They lowered him into the arms of these gay soubrettes with their bright-colored skirts and aprons tucked into leather leggings, their purple and magenta butch cuts, and safety-pin earrings through their wooden ears.
"Evviva Pinocchio!"
they laughed and they kissed him again and pinched and squeezed him and, just for fun, knocked heads some more.

    "But why did you go away, Pinocchio? We were having so much fun! Why did you leave us when you said you loved us so?"

    "Well, I -
ow!
- my father -"

    "Loved us?
Loved
us?" roared Capitano Spavento del Vall'Inferno, rearing up then in sudden choler, his plumes quivering and waxed moustaches bristling. "He loved us as the wolf loves the sheep! As the whip loves the donkey! As the woodman loves the tree! No, no, let us say bread to the bread and bugger-my-ass to bugger-my-ass! This abominable imitation of humanity, this vile hodgepodge, this double-dealing French-leave-taking skin artist
deserted
us!"

"Ahhh!"
gasped the three servant girls in unison and, tossing him in the air, shrank away as though from a bad odor. He would have crashed disastrously to the stage floor had not Arlecchino and Colombina deftly caught him, Colombina whispering behind what had once been his ear: "Is it true you left us because of a woman, dear Pinocchio? A painted woman with a mysterious past…?"

    "She wasn't exactly painted -!" he wheezed in dazed dismay.

    "Ho ho! Beating about the bush, were you, you old gully-raker?" laughed Brighella, winking slyly. "Nothing like splitting whiskers for splitting friends!"

    "It wasn't a woman, it was
fame
he was after," declared Pulcinella. "We weren't hot enough for the little showboat! He wanted to be the big pimple, not some second stringer out in the sticks! He wanted to be a
star!"

    "No, no:
money!
It was
money
made the donkey trot, it
always
is!" argued Pantalone, thrusting his pointed beard in the air like an accusing finger. "There was the passing of a purse, his palm was greased, I heard the insidious chink of gold! Money taken, friends forsaken -!"

    "But - but it wasn't
any
of that, I just didn't
want
to be a -!"

    "O blind counsels of the guilty! O vice, ever cowardly!" cried the Capitano, still in high dudgeon. "We took the little sapling in as our trusted friend and brother, but it was a viper we found at our bosoms, a copper-hearted two-timing turntail as treacherous as a deathwatch beetle!" He snapped his sword from its sheath and whirled it about menacingly, strutting up and down the cramped stage. "O evil, of evils most evil! There is no worse pestilence than a familiar foe! Such perfidy makes me snuff pepper, and when I'm aroused the seas duck under for cover, mountains shrink into the earth like iced ballocks, the sun is afraid to show its face, and even the mighty gods shit themselves in terror, so look out below! Down with your breaches of faith! Out with your double-jointed hybrid treachery! Avast! Avaunt! Oyez! Attento! The greatest achievement of a general is to smite the foe and chop the whoreson into little specks and slivers, so let me have at him! Don't hold me back! My heart detests him as the gates of hell!"

    As Captain Spavento del Vall'Inferno, still brandishing his sword, whirled around and charged in his direction, the professor turned anxiously to the others for help, but they all seemed to be applauding the spectacle, or else grabbing up their musical instruments as though to use them for weapons themselves. Their painted faces and hard wooden smiles alarmed him, and he felt a sudden intense nostalgia for his old library carrel back at the university. "Wait! You don't understand -!" he gasped, but no one was listening. Arlecchino's and Colombina's grips tightened like shackles.

"Hasten with the sword,"
brayed the Capitano, bearing down upon him in full regalia and waving the others to follow,
"bring weapons, climb the walls; the enemy is at hand
-
IHAH!"

    Even as the old scholar ducked, Arlecchino heaved him up as though to ward the blow off himself. The effect, however, was to make everyone fall back, even the startled Captain, who dropped his sword and nearly fell off the stage, scrambling to pick it up again.
"Look at him!"
Arlecchino cried, holding him up by the scruff of his tattered coat and waggling him about. "Do you think he'd do this on
purpose?!"

    There was laughter and some rude whistling and murmurs of "It's true! what a calamity!" and "Povera bestia!" and when the Captain, recovering somewhat, started huffing and puffing again about collapsing the Hemispheres, shattering the Poles, sending heads rolling around the world like billiard balls, and, with his flaming sword inherited from Xerxes, Romulus, Caesar, and the Blind Doge, bringing on the final devastation, Lisetta took his sword away from him and swatted him on the behind with it until he cried. "Vergogna!" she scolded, as he crawled about on all fours, boohooing. "Keep your tongue, rotto in culo, and keep your friends, slander slanders itself! Chi pissa contro vento pisses on his own pants!"

    "Remember that a wretched man, as a wise compatriot once said," continued Arlecchino solemnly, still dangling him on high like one of the cats of Venice, "is a holy thing, and vice versa, da cima a fondo, and to be without a friend is to be like a body without a soul, that is to say, a turd without a fragrance - nor is friendship to be bought at a fair, at least not at an honest price, except sometimes in a raffle, and even then, as they say, old friends are still the best bargain if they are not so old they are dead and beginning to smell. Pesce, oglio, e amico vecchio, we would all be wise to remember that famous old Venetian recipe, the secret of which is fresh basil, sturgeon eggs, a forgiving palate, and funghi porcini, when in season, as friendship always is of course if you have the liver for it. Yes, compagni, old wood, as they used to say in the old days, days so old they were never new, except on the Feast Day of poor little Saint Agnes, whose martyred maidenhead, preserved in a silver noggin, once rivaled the eyeballs of Santa Lucia as an object of veneration amongst our countrymen and made old days young again - old wood, they used to say, as I say now, burns brightest, old linens wash whitest, old friendships cling tightest, and old arses spread widest, so watch where you sit for it is a difficult thing to replace true friends who have been inadvertently flattened, may they rest in peace, or in pieces, as the case may be."