(1991) Pinocchio in Venice (22 page)

    Eugenio gave each cheek a misty-eyed farewell kiss, pocketed the rosary which he'd been fingering with his free hand, then, on the way back to the motor launch, took the professor on a quiet meditative tour of the cemetery island, describing for him as he waddled along, the old scholar ported at his side by the three servants, his long and happy life in Toyland, which he still held to be the most beautiful place in the world, a land of dreams,
un paese benedetto,
the very goal of human civilization, and he the preserver of its sacred flame, becoming over time L'Omino's dearest beloved, subjecting the adorable man in his declining years to his least whim and fancy, including his signature on the documents that created Omini e figli, S.R.L.

    "I was a good little boy, Pini, loving and obedient, and everything came true for me, just as the Little Man promised!"

    The professor, somewhat befogged and guilt-ridden, as was his wont in the midst of tombstones, did not know what to answer to all of this, and finally, as they were making their way back to the landing stage, twilight by now dimming the sky and darkening the hovering cypresses, what he said was: "I-I have never known the careless freedom of youth…"

    "Ah, poor Pini!" smiled Eugenio, taking over the controls as they reboarded the motor launch. "And now with your little thingie gone…"

    "Well, it's - it's not exactly gone…"

    "No? But when I was oiling you, I saw nothing there but a -"

    "I mean 'it' wasn't…
it
…"

    Whereupon, the others urging him on as the launch, growling softly, slides out into the wet dreamy lagoon, the ancient wayfarer commences to tell them, with all the candor that the day has inspired, the tale of the world's only Nobel Prize-winning nose…

20. THE ORIGINAL WET DREAM

    "So it's all true, then," murmurs Eugenio in the echoey darkness, "all those old jokes…?"

    "Yes, all the pornographic films and comic books, the sex magazine cartoons, the party songs and burlesque routines, just pages really out of a depressing case history. The boy who had to wear on his face what other people hid in their pants. Watch it misbehave. Watch it get punished. I always felt insulted by the names you called me in school, not recognizing at the time that it was not much worse than calling me 'Faceface' or 'Footfoot.' And people laughed at it, but they were afraid of it, too. It took a lot of abuse. What was old Geppetto's assault on it that day he made me, after all, but…?"

    "My thoughts exactly, dear boy! An attempt to emasculate his own son! But that you should remember it all so vividly is most extraordinary!" Eugenio and the servants have become just faceless shadows hovering over him, faintly silhouetted against the distant glow of the city. The boat motor is off, the lights as well, and they bob silently now on the lap of the black lagoon, the cool night mist having gathered round them with a motherly embrace, as though to soothe away the anxieties aroused by their visit this afternoon to the island of the dead. "For the rest of us, our beginnings remain forever a strange unfathomable mystery. A bit terrifying in fact…"

    "Actually, I forgot most of this when I became a boy. Only lately has it been coming back to me…" Not all of it, there are vague scary bits for him, too, mysteries he too cannot penetrate. But he does have a clear and precise memory of his babbo's clumsy affectionate strokes as he carved and fluted his wooden hair and whittled out eyes for him to see by, eyes he rolled mischievously at the old fellow just to make him jump and reach for his grappa, and he can almost feel still the impatient hewing and hacking up and down his body as Geppetto roughed out the rest of him: a mouth with its own mocking tongue, thumbed but fingerless hands with which to pincer away the old boy's yellow moth-eaten mop of a wig, feet for kicking him in the nose, and then a nose of his own, fashioned from scraps chopped out between his new legs and wedged into a hole gouged in the middle of his face, a nose that started to grow as soon as it was plugged in, a trick he had no control over and which frightened him nearly as much as it did the old man, who erupted into a kind of blind squeaky rage, accusing the thing of insolence and deviltry and slashing at it wildly with his rude tools, sending splinters flying about the room, bits and pieces of him lost forever, alas, he could use them now to patch up his losses. And still the perverse thing kept shooting out in front of his startled eyes, irrepressible as that infamous beanstalk, stretching and quivering, the tip of it sore where his father whacked madly away at it, but somehow itchy and tingling with fresh raw excitement at the same time, insisting upon its prefigured but ludicrous length even as Geppetto went on lopping it off. Even as he wept, loudly disclaiming it, he could feel himself coming to identify with it in some odd way, as though it were somehow, in its unruly defiance, expressing his own deepest and truest nature, as though it were, in a word, taking a stand in his behalf, or rather, taking a stand that would become his own, he in the end, until the Blue-Haired Fairy taught him how to master it, the captive appendage of the obstreperous nose.

    But though he can remember all that as though it had just happened, can indeed remember his entire birth right down to the beveling and pegging of his articulated joints, the drilling of his bottomhole, chased decorously with a chamfer bit, and the planing of his belly which made him whoop and giggle, there are also things he cannot recall, and which cause him deep disquiet when he tries to think about them. His earlier life on the woodpile, for example: When did it begin and where did he come from? Was he always just an impudent log, a sentient chip from a dead block, nature's freak, a useless piece of yaltering driftwood, as his father called him when he washed up inside the fish's belly, or did he have, so to speak, a family tree out in the world someplace, its amputated limbs a lost brotherhood? And then, when Maestro Ciliegia found him there on the stack of firewood, how did he, without eyes, see, and, without a mouth, how speak? Still enclosed in his thick bark, how did he, when presented to Geppetto, shake himself free of Maestro Ciliegia and strike Geppetto on the shin, setting off the free-for-all that so delighted him?
How did he know "delight?"
And if, as a log, he had no ears, no legs, how distinguish what was "between" them? Or, put another way, all those pieces chiseled away, the slivers and shavings and even the sawdust: were they nothing more than the dead crust of the hidden self within, discovered by Geppetto, mere packing material, as it were, or were they lost fragments of a being once whole, monadic scraps of his original wooden integrity, now tragically scattered?

    "Such as those splinters that he hacked away from your nose like a great harvest of foreskins, you mean?" Buffetto asks softly.

    "Yes -"

    "Were they dead as clipped fingernails, you mean," adds Francatrippa, marveling, "or did they think? Did they feel?"

    "Did they talk back?"

    "Were they naughty?"

    "Yes, and, if so, do they, are they, somewhere, still…?"

    "Woo! Spooky!" whispers little Truffaldino from the prow, perched out there beyond Eugenio's reach. "It makes you wonder if anything is really what it seems to be!"

    "Nonsense, my little marinaio," replies Eugenio, sitting anchored in his dark shadow behind the wheel. "Everything is
exactly
what it seems to be. That's the sadness of it. Now, come and sit here on my knee, my child, and let us explore reality together while we still share in it!"

    "I am afraid if I did, master, I would lose my share to you! I would be in only half of my reality, you would be in the other half!"

    "Macché! Pleasure is never diminishing, ragazzo mio. It would not halve your reality, but double it!"

    "But I can barely clothe and feed the reality I have now. What am I to do with twice as much?"

    "Then I will double your income, sweet boy, with each doubling of your reality!"

    "Ah, very good, direttore! And if I increased my reality, by, say, fifty percent?"

    "Why, how would you do that?"

    "Like this, master!" Truffaldino puts his feet on the deck of the launch, or seems to, and walks over to Eugenio, even while remaining sitting on the prow. He puts his hands under his chin and lifts his silhouetted head to arm's length - then the arms themselves seem to periscope upwards in the darkness, raising the head another foot or so in the night air.

    "Che roba! And can you do that with
all
your parts, you wicked boy?"

    "Only in the darkness, master," sighs Truffaldino, shrinking back into himself, leaving Eugenio snatching at air. "That's, as you say, the sadness of it…"

    A moment of wistful silence descends then, through which, as though from some other time more than another place, come, across the dark waters from the other side of the island, the distant hollow reverberations of revelry: amplified voices, waves of laughter like sullen heartbeats, whistles rising into the night and muffled shouting, the beat but not the melody of music - the sounds of Carnival. The peace of his suite in the Palazzo dei Balocchi is not what it once was, but he dare not complain, for the recent restoration of the Venetian Carnival is virtually the invention, or reinvention, of Eugenio, yet another of his host's acts of homage to his legendary mentor, for whom Carnival existed twelve months of the year. Besides, the professor expects to move any day now into quieter quarters of his own, as soon as his new credit cards, checkbooks, and personal documents, requested for him by Eugenio, reach him through the anarchical Venetian postal service, though the bag of mail they saw floating in the Giudecca canal today made manifest the hazards.

    The old scholar leans his head back and gazes up at the night sky. The hovering mist seems to be breaking up, letting a few stars shine through, scattered here and there in abject loneliness like chips struck from the moon. Star light, star bright, he thinks. But what is he to wish for? To be free from his disease? A death wish. To be free from his fear of death? A kind of madness, the dubious blessing of senility, a greater terror. Perhaps just to
know.
But he already knows so much and what good has it done him? No, no, he knows all too well what he desires, she has been on his mind all afternoon, she whose graven tombs once marked his passage like milestones. He wishes - it is quite simple - he wishes only to be held again. Taking them to the heretics' corner of the cemetery island this afternoon to show them where he hoped to enshrine the bones of Casanova, Eugenio led them all through a section devoted, it seemed, to those who had died young: children climbed stairs to heaven, youthful lovers sprawled erotically on marble deathbeds, babies reached for the arms of Jesus. And there, in the dim light, half buried amid the grander monuments, he saw, or thought for one heart-stopping moment that he saw, that selfsame little slab of marble which once announced the Blue-Haired Fairy's death of a broken heart:
"Qui giace una bambina,"
he read, even from his bobbing portantina, "Here lies a child," and the words
abbandonata
and
fratellino
jumped out at him as though the stone itself were crying out.
"Stop!"
he gasped, and begged that he be taken closer. No, not her, he saw through teary eyes, some other little sister gone, and
abbandonato,
the brother, not the girl, deserted, but that was how he felt, too, and, no doubt startling Eugenio and the servants, he sobbed out his grief there on that stone, not for the dead child but for the little brother left behind, who was himself, exiled forever from the consolation of her hugs and kisses, her sweet embrace.
O Fata mia!

    "Look, direttore! Do you see -?"

"Sshh! Come here, my child! Quickly!"

    He made some foolish remark then, to cover his greater foolishness ("But why should you be interested in a little thing like me, master, when you have a Nobel Prize-winner on full display?"), about life's cruel brevity, the stony permanence of death, and Eugenio, laughingly reminding him of the old wisdom, which he credited to Dante Alighieri, that "He who comes from tinche tanche, goes in the end to gninche gnanche," guided them all back to the gloomiest, remotest, most desolate corner of the island where bad boys, he said, were buried and where all the tombs were sinking and collapsing, the headstones broken, the busts and crosses cracked and fallen, the pieces scattered about like garbage floating in the canals. It was a strange, wild, darkly canopied place with spiky plants and stunted trees and thick beds of moldering leaves among the broken stones and rampant weeds through which fiendish little black and emerald lizards skittered while pale butterflies hovered in the coiling mists above like flakes of dead flesh.
"I ta morti!"
Francatrippa exclaimed, and Buffetto concurred, "Un merdaio, compagno, a veritable shithole," Truffaldino pointing silently to a sign at the entrance that read: DEAD END. Eugenio ordered them to set the sedan-chair down and to jump up and down as hard as they could. As they did so, whooping and grunting cheerfully, the entire area began to wobble in little waves that spread slowly out to the four walled edges. Tombs tipped and toppled, cracked apart, dumped their dead flowers, cast off ornament, and sank another inch or two, as the ground rippled under them like a shaken carpet. With a soft sucking noise, two or three of the graves disappeared altogether. Overhead, cypresses leaned and fell against one another like grieving or drunken friends, and the walls coughed out loose bricks that plopped softly to the earth as though falling into thick pudding. He could feel the tremors beneath his chair, which seemed as it shook to be tipping and sinking just like the tombstones, and the fright he felt was not unlike that he'd suffered as a puppet whenever the Fairy, in despair at his misbehavior, would go pale and cold and fall down with her eyes rolled back, showing only their whites, remaining like that until he hugged and kissed her and wet her all over with his tears, her limp lifeless body slowly vibrating beneath his sobs just as the earth was doing now, a kind of loose ripple that seemed to spread from the middle out and come bouncing back, building slowly until at last her body would be shaking him as much as he was shaking it and she started to come alive again, groaning and sobbing, or maybe laughing, it didn't matter, and hugging and kissing him as feverishly as he her…

"Che sborro!
What a
cannon!"

    "If we had a sail, we could use it for a mast!"

    "Maybe we should put a light on it to warn low-flying aircraft!"

    "Standing at attention like that, I can see why it got the Nobel for keeping the peace!"

    "Though it won the Nobel Peace Prize," the professor sighs, gazing up at the bright star his nose is fingering and silently making his futile but heartfelt wish ("No request is too extreme," as that old hymn goes), "it itself has had no peace. It was cited at the time 'for standing for the truth in the age of the Great Lie.' This was on the eve of World War Two, the film had just appeared and was being viewed as a realpolitik fable, with Geppetto as a kind of Swiss neutral, Stromboli as a bearded Mussolini, Foulfellow and Barker the Coachman as fifth columnists, Monstro the Whale as the German U-boat menace, the Miss America-like Blue Fairy representing the wished-for Yankee intervention with their magical know-how, and my mystical nose as a mark of the divine, visible proof that we, not they, were the designated good guys. Like many a victim of the political repression of that time, it had been imprisoned, tortured, humiliated, reviled, and in countless other ways persecuted, and so stood as well for courage and integrity in the face of tyranny, even while exhibiting a peaceful, rather than warlike, stance. In the film it is shown sprouting a branch in which birds nested, and this was interpreted as being an olive branch. Of course all that changed when war came…" That was when the jokes began. The world was more aggressive then. Military units wore his nose into battle and fighter pilots painted it on their fusilages: "Always Hard." It appeared on condom packets sold in PXs and USO canteens. Still, he didn't figure it out. Or rather, he knew full well, had known since he'd become a boy, if not before, but kept forgetting,
that
truth elusive as a dream. The expanded version of his Nobel acceptance speech,
Astringent Truth,
which became a classic of moral philosophy, never mentioned it, and even in his more autobiographical writings such as
The Wretch, Sacred Sins,
and
The Transformation of the Beast,
works which won him his second Nobel, this was a truth, naked as it may have been in the world, which remained largely under wraps. With all the dignity of his great career he carried his nose through the world as though it were only a nose, he alone beguiled by his own pretenses. It might have been otherwise. There were students who wanted, who might have… but whenever they got too close his nose would start to smart and shrivel as if the Blue-Haired Fairy's woodpeckers were at it again, a painful humiliation far worse than any imaginable pleasure, at least any that he in his innocence could imagine, and so he distanced himself from them behind his professorial demeanor. Anyway, they were never his best students…