Pinocchio in Venice

21. PLATO'S PRANK

"Gee, Professor Pinenut," Bluebell exclaims, snapping her gum in his tender earhole, "that's a real masterpiece, hunh?" It is not. It is one of the most idiotic paintings he has ever seen. He cannot stop looking up at it, though. Chagrin would be his middle name, he thinks bitterly, if he had more than one in the first place. "I mean, when you look up at the ceiling and see a stark naked old man as ugly as that who's supposed to be, you know, 'The Universe,' it makes you realize what a mess we're in, right? Standing up there on that croc as though to say that's all it is, you know, just a big crock, see you later, alligator, whoo! That's really deep, man! I can see why you dig it!"

"He is not the Universe, that happens to be the River Nile he is standing on, and in any case that is not why I — "

"No? Hey, wait, don't tell me it's that cute tootsie with her big jugs spilling out like the Milky Way that's — crack! pop! — got your old eye, teach! Jiminy! I feel like I'm back in your classroom again, down mammary lane in the Beak's lecher hall, arse pimples, dix pix, cunny funnies, and all that!" That vulgar creature up there does indeed have his weary eye, but by the decree of — first, crack, then pop — Fate, as it were, not by election. Fate and Plato. That his beloved mentor should have helped to do this to him makes him feel doubly betrayed. "Whoa, speaking of your old clit classics," Bluebell whispers, her red windbreaker rustling as she leans down to press her warm cheek next to his, "I just realized! From where you're standing, you can see right up the little sweetie's ballooning sky blue skirts, can't you?! Wow, the art of introspective, just like you taught us! Dimples and all!" She gives him a conspiratorial squeeze. "Never know what you'll see if you just keep looking, right?"

"The details in this instance are insignificant, Miss," he snaps in his old tutorial manner, his irritability provoked not by her, for in truth he has been longing all the while, though he had forgotten this, to see her again, but by his present predicament, disconcertingly pathognomonic, preferring an aesthetic explanation for it, however contrived, to the humiliation of the mechanical one. Or, more precisely, the wooden one. "What matters is the, ahem, overall composition." Which doesn't matter at all. What matters in a cheap ham-fisted pastiche as bad as this one is who commissioned it and why that cretin and the painter weren't both gibbeted in the Piazzetta or hung out to dry in a cage at the top of the Campanile. But, given his seemingly intense scrutiny of the wretched thing (what is worse, he can feel his incorrigible nose acting up again, even as he speaks), what he says is: "That and its position, both in, eh, historico-cultural time and in physical politico-geographical, as you might say, space."

"Oh yeah, I get it! You don't have to point! Like, right beside it there's that painting of 'Modesty,' right? And so that whole bare-assed scene of the Universe or whatever it is up there becomes like an assault on — splupp! crack! — decency itself, a case of aggravating rape by a dirty old man, you might call it! I love it! And then in this one up here — gee, I'm sounding just like you, Professor Pinenut! I told you you taught me everything I know! — in this one we got this gorgeous hunk in the red bikini holding up the earth, or else maybe the mother just came down and — squit! fpooff! — bopped the sucker in the neck, and right over there we got Fortune — am I warm? — with her naked buns spread like fat on lean on a round dead stone, same size as the world on the hunk's back, as though to say that that's — spopp! — what this whole ball o' wax is gonna come to, right? Diddly-squat and let's hope her rectum's clean!"

As far as this blue Monday is concerned, it has been pretty much diddly-squat from the beginning. There were masked Carnival revelers whooping it up outside his windows all night until the early hours, and then, after an hour or two of vague stifling nightmares about interminable tenure committee meetings back at the university, which he couldn't escape because the chairman, an old crab, had his claw clamped on his elbow, warning him to "void evil companions," he awoke to the shrill squealing of schoolchildren in St. Mark's trying to hold up armloads of feeding pigeons, a "Ladies' Marching Band" made up of bearded and mustachioed men dressed in pinafores and blowing trumpets and tubas, and the hammering together of the viewing stands for the Mardi Gras Gran Gala on the other side of the Piazza. He had a pounding headache, his backside felt as if it had been coarsely sandpapered all night, and there was a fresh weevil infestation in his right elbow, telltale sawdust in the soiled sheets. On his return from the cemetery island of San Michele, he had resolved to press on immediately with his life's work — if he hoped to recover his discipline and integrity, it was now or never — and his worsened condition this morning made that resolution all the more urgent.

Of course he had to gauge his remaining strength. Though never afraid of the difficult, willing to confront challenges few other men of letters would even contemplate, he had never undertaken the impossible, knowing that was just another form of cowardice. His great Mamma opus was irretrievably lost, he knew that, and he also knew he could never reconstruct it, much less rewrite it, an effort as useless as trying to make an omelette out of a hatched chicken, but he believed he could capture something of its intent in a concentrated monograph, and such a project he might well have the time and energy to complete. In effect, he would write that final chapter that had brought him here in the first place, summarizing the salient points of the lost book and incorporating his recent Venetian experiences as paradigmatic fables of a sort, much as Saints Augustine and Petrarch used their own more vulnerable moments to provide dramatic contrast to their eventual unwavering commitment to higher principles, a commitment he intended, rejecting folly now once and for all (as though he had not done so many times before, but never with such a prospect of looming finality), to emulate. As his body weakened, he felt his spirit strengthening, as if being purified by the very impurity of his physical decay: home at last in the figurative lap of virtue, so to speak, all of a piece or not. This would be his theme, together perhaps with Wagner's dream of "dying in beauty," a dream which that musical impresario eventually realized upon this very island, though probably, as always, sooner than he'd hoped. With that in mind, then, he thought he might conclude the essay with the image of that tombstone on San Michele, the one he thought for a moment was hers, an artifact hard as an idea but pulsating with transcendent emotion, and ultimately something other (more abstract, in effect, more indefinite) than it appeared to be, an image that would thus reveal much that was at the very core of his personal aesthetic, he who, dying in beauty, had always lived in it as well, though more in the abstract than in the particular.

What was here unfolding, he felt, or rather was already in full bloom, was what one might call, as another who died here once did, the "miracle of regained detachment," that ingenuous but contemplative state of mind from which all true creativity flows. This detachment was difficult to sustain, however, with that rude din just outside his windows, it was worse than those head-butts the puppets had given him, so he decided to escape the palazzo altogether and, in preparation for that spiritual task which, like a kind of artist's holy purgation, awaited him, to embark upon his long-planned pilgrimage to the works of Giovanni Bellini, poetic painter of Madonnas, whose many masterpieces anchored the city in that high serenity for which it was named and kept it from floating off through Ricci's and Tiepolo's silly ceilings. And where better to start than in the Accademia with the painting that had changed his life, "The Madonna of the Small Trees"?

But Eugenio, in a pink-faced dither, would have none of it. "Out of the question, dear boy! I need everyone here! My costume has to be completely remade, the bodice just won't do! Then there are the masked balls, the decorations, and I haven't even started on my introduction speech for the Gran Gala! Tomorrow night! Martedě Grasso! Can't you see?" The palazzo staff was indeed in great turmoil, the servants scuttling about feverishly, racing hither and thither on Eugenio's screamed orders, out one door and in another, crashing into each other on thresholds and tumbling down stairs, though it was not certain anyone was actually doing anything. "And now Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo is on his way here with the deeds to the Palazzo Ducale! I told you I had something extravagant boiling, Pini! The Count is the direct descendant of nine doges, but he's at the green, as the saying goes, and we've got the gold! Think of it! The central building in the world! This is a chance that comes only once every Pope's death! But we have to grasp luck by the hair and the bull by the horns, my boy, a botta calda, while the drum's pounding — !"

"But you promised! You said I could have anything I wanted!"

"But, Pini, all the way to the Accademia — ?! Be reasonable! I have five Madonnas right here in the palazzo. One of them might even be by Burloni!"

"Bellini."

"Bollini, Ballone, I simply can't do it, my dear! The Count is due here any moment! History is being made! Buffetto! Quickly! Take the professor to the Gritti and buy him a Picolit grappa!"

"I don't want to go to the Gritti!"

"Ahi, what a plague you are, Old Sticks! You always were such a restless thing, I did think you'd learned better!"

"It's not restlessness, it's my life's work! My Venetian monograph! I insist — !"

"Believe me, the worst thing you could possibly do, amor mio, is write another book about Venice!"

"But it's not about — !"

"Wait! How about the Biblioteca Marciana? Eh? Just the other day you were complaining that it was easier for you to visit a distant island than the Marciana across the way!"

"But there aren't any Bellinis — !"

"Tomorrow the sodding Bellinis! Today Petrarca! Cicero and Pliny! Marco Polo's will and Era Mauro's map! The Grimani Breviary! The Bessarion Codexes! A million precious volumes, Pini, if we haven't sold them! Not to mention the 'Wisdom' of Tiziano hanging up there someplace, and the immortal 'Philosophers' Gallery' in the Great Gilded Hall! How can you resist?"

"Well… but — "

"Francatrippa! Buffetto! Hurry! Transport the professor across to the Sansovino Library immediately! This is important! Can't you see the dear man is waiting? His life's work depends upon it! And come back at once! Count Ziani-Ziani is on his way! The future of Venice awaits us!"

"Back in a crack, direttore!"

"In a pig's whisper, direttore!"

"In quattro e quat — !"

"Non fare il coglione, you impertinent blowhards! Get your feet out of here, or it's off with your heads! And I don't mean the ones with ears on them!"

And so they'd not even gone for his litter chair, they'd just swept him up by his armpits and gone clambering madly out of the palazzo as though escaping a burning building, bustling him, feet dangling, down the back stairs into the alleyway behind with its stale kitchen odors, clinking of dishes, and BLOWING GLASS FACTORY ENTRANCE sign, then through a tiny sottoportico past camera, clothing, and junk shops into the Piazza itself, startling the patrons of the Laverna as the three of them collided with the marble tables and sent the yellow café chairs tumbling; then, his feet fluttering behind him like a wind-whipped flag, they went racing pell-mell across the open end of the Carnivalized Piazza, under the rearing bronze horses and past the towering Campanile, colossal father figure of all bell towers, now sounding from on high its throaty five-mouthed alarums, putting white-masked tourists to flight as they charged down upon them and churning up clouds of terrified pigeons, barreling finally at full gallop through a doorway flanked by a pair of caryatids, massive and glossy as body builders on steroids, and bearing the legend: BIBLIOTECA NAZIONALE MARCIANA: LIBRERIA VECCHIA; without pause, he was hauled on up the marble stairs, now under workers' scaffolding, the vaulted ceilings and precious gilded grotesqueries hidden behind tented sheeting, and deposited hastily in the barren Great Hall, stripped of its display cases and undergoing restoration, no book in sight, not a person either, and there, without so much as a brief farewell, abandoned, his protest — "Wait! Stop! Damn you, take me back!" — unheard.

Stand there he could, but little more than, his knees shaky but holding, just, there in that cold empty hall, surrounded by a kind of cartoon gallery (he recognized Tintoretto's facile ink-stained hand) of ancient philosophers mocking him with their robust good health and their evident immunity to folly. Not a one with a wooden head. He felt cruelly judged. Was one of them his master Petrarch? No doubt. Perhaps that one in the golden robe, teetering on a loose pile of books, piercing him through with his dark sagacious gaze. Petrarch had bequeathed to Venice his entire library, the most splendid private collection of its time, launching the idea of this building in which to house it, and then had taken the whole lot back again. The professor had flown here from America with the poet's Epistolae seniles under his arm, and it might now be said their roles had been reversed, he now (it was the dank sad smell of the place perhaps that suggested this) in the great man's armpit. Francesco Petrarca, alias Petrarch, Petracchi, Petracco, Petraccolo, and Petrocchio: like himself the most celebrated scholar of his age, one who also blended art and theology, promoted the classic vision, opposed folly and deceit, and became an exemplar in his lifetime for all humanity, the old professor not excluded. He had stopped short of producing bastard children, but had otherwise emulated in all ways the noble life of his fellow Platonist and Tuscan, even in ways unpremeditated, for Petrarch had also, upon becoming a boy (this is said to have happened when he saw Dante in Pisa at the age of eight), lived a pious and studious youth, suffered a Hollywood-like period of dissipation on foreign soil (Petrarch's faucet worked better, there were consequences), then found his true vocation through an idealized love, abjuring lust and devoting himself thereafter to a lifetime of scholarship, writing, and tenured self-denial. They both had wandered the world in pursuit of truth and beauty, and had both ended up finally here in Venice, though Petrarch had lived long enough to die elsewhere, something the old professor doubts will be granted him. They both struggled their lives long against Aristotelians (Sophists they scorned outright), Petrarch finally driven from this city on that score, no wonder he took his books back. And they both were, it could be said, composers of tombstones

On either side of the doorway through which he had been ported in such haste, posted there in their voluptuous robes like candidates for honorary degrees or guests at a royal feast (Veronese again, to be sure, that sybaritic host) and coldly examining him now in his doddering ignominy, stood the warring figures from his own and Petrarch's intellectual history, Aristotle and Plato. Plato's gaze, though full of disappointment and sorrow, was essentially benign, like that of a forgiving lover, but Aristotle, dressed as a Moorish prince, appeared to be glaring fiercely at him, giving him the big eye, as they say here, as though enraged at the bad press the professor had given him all these years. He had made Aristotle — and standing there on his trembling pins, feeling the chill of hostility in the air, needing all the friends he could find, he nevertheless did not regret this, and so, bravely, with what eye remained, returned the glare — the emblematic target of his lifelong dispute with those who substituted mere problem solving and art-for-art's-sake banalities for the pursuit of idealized beauty, and thus of truth and goodness as well. Aristotle and his vast camp following had unlinked art from its true transcendent mission, reducing it to just another isolated discipline, one among many, the worst of heresies, he deserved no quarter even had he any, in his extremity, to give.

Perhaps a cloud went by, or else it was a trick of his old eyes, but Aristotle seemed to wince as though at a bad odor and turn away, dismissing him with a contemptuous shrug, while Plato's austere expression, contrarily, appeared to soften, a faint appreciative smile curling the great sage's lips. His aged disciple, confused but moved (though move in fact he could not), dipped his nose in modest homage to the master, whereupon Plato, his rosy robes rustling gently, lifted one hand, puckered his fat lips, and, with a coy wink, blew him a kiss. The professor started, Plato's eyes rolled up to stare in alarm at the ceiling, he jerked his own head back and — crack! pop! — there it stuck, his rot-decayed neck locked, his nose pointing up at Il Padovanino's barbarous allegorical roundel, while around him the venerable philosophers wheezed and giggled like mischievous schoolboys. Which is when Bluebell came in and said: "Hey, Professor Pinenut! What a surprise! Whatcha lookin' at?"

There was a time once, he was still a young man in his early sixties, when he decided that writing about the decline of art in the Western world was not enough, he had to become a painter himself and establish the new classical norms by example. Futurism, expressionism, cubism, surrealism, abstraction, op art and pop art and all the rest: just forms of iconicized naughtiness, when you got down to it, and he felt it was up to him to recover art's ancient integrity, its sense of duty, its inherent grandeur. No more self-mocking irony, no more moral shilly-shallying, but true devotion: this was his cause, so he bought himself a box of paints and pencils and turned up at life-drawing class. It was not something he could accomplish overnight, he knew that, his eyes were open, but no one understood the history of art better than he did and he had been pretty good at basket making, so he figured it was just a matter of time, a year or two perhaps, he could be patient. He took to wearing berets, smocks, and neckerchiefs, and let the four or five hairs on his upper lip grow.

As it happened, the model for the art class was a student in his Art Principles 101 (was it this student? he couldn't be sure, but he thought not, remembering the girl as shy and delicate with body hair the color of burnt sienna dulled with a touch of Sicilian umber, which he had to go out and buy separately since it wasn't in his paint box), and about three weeks into the semester she came to see him late one afternoon during office hours. This was before the time of tights and miniskirts, it was more a ponytail-and-bobbysocks time when skirts were full and long and often pleated, and so, as she came in and sat down in his office, her flexing hips and legs were more like the subtle implications of hips and legs enveloped as they were in the soft contours of her flowing skirt, and, he thought as she gathered the folds around her, expressing a thigh here, hiding a knee there, much more provocative than when seen in the flesh, which he tended to look on primarily as a technical problem. That choice of roughly five parts of burnt sienna to one of Sicilian umber to capture the soft dark luster of her body hair, for example, was dictated in part by reality and his close examination of it, and thus captured something of the absolute for which he was always searching, but it was also tempered by the inconstant flesh tones of her circumambient thighs and abdomen, which seemed sometimes pale, almost bluish, and at other times tenderly flushed, almost aglow, and so threatened him with that relativity he so abhorred: if not even private hair color was constant, what then was Truth? An important question, perhaps none more so, yet one that seemed strangely irrelevant in his office that afternoon as he caught a teasing but imprecise glimpse of pale shadowy thigh when she crossed her legs and said: "That's just it, Professor Pinenut: it's — it's your nose!"

"What — ?" He realized then it had been growing and had become engorged and feverish at the tip, and, as always on such occasions, he ducked his head and buried the unruly thing in a handkerchief. "Sorry, Miss, just a bit of a — !"

"I always get the feeling, you know, in the studio, that you're painting with your nose, and it gives me a very eery feeling, not so much in the art class itself where it seems almost natural, even when it bumps the canvas and gets paint on the end of it or when it's down between my knees when you're mixing colors, but in your lecture class when you're all dressed up in your nice wool suits and standing up there on the platform in front of everybody like the president or something and pointing it straight at some art slide you're showing, and, well, it's suddenly so — so naked!" She blushed and pushed her trembling hands between her knees, tightening the skirt around her hips. "It — it almost scares me, and I get this funny feeling between my legs like, well, like God's there, you know, doing something, and I can't even hear what you're saying anymore and everything else just disappears and all I can see is your nose and I can hardly breathe and I'm wet and trembling all over and probably the other kids around me are laughing but I don't even know they're there, there's just nothing in the world except your nose, pointing at me suddenly, like it is now, and this weird overwhelming feeling, even now I can almost — oh! — almost not stop it! — and what I'm wondering, Professor Pinenut, what's — gasp! — got me scared is, well — ah! — am I the Madonna?"

That was when he shaved his upper lip and gave up painting. And that was when he stopped blaming individual painters for the tragic decline of art. He now knew they couldn't help it. It was just how things were.

Which is more or less what he is thinking now when Bluebell, who is still cuddled up close with her arm around him, whispers in his earhole: "You know, Professor Pinenut, sometimes I think I don't even like paintings, even great ones like that one up there on the ceiling. They just seem so dead or phony or something, like those photos they put up outside movie theaters to advertise the films they're showing and which aren't anything like the films at all. But just watching you look at a painting like you are now — I don't know, maybe it's your nose or something, how intense it gets, how excited, like it's really on to something — whatever, I just get this tremendous feeling that, even though I'll never understand it, something great is happening, and it's enough for someone like me just to be close enough to pick up the vibrations. If I'm too dumb or insensitive to feel what you feel, you know, at least I can feel you feeling it!"

He knows he should tell her the real reason he is staring at this stupid painting, just as he should have told that teary-eyed student in his office that day that she was not the Madonna and stopped her from licking his nose all over, but he hates, now as then, to break the spell. Bluebell has moved behind him and, taller than he, now stands looking down, their heads pointed in opposite directions, into his eyes, her blond hair falling in curtaining wisps, her soft breasts, unzipped from the windbreaker, resting snugly on his shoulders like a kind of furry foam rubber warming pad. It is wonderfully relaxing. He can feel the back of his neck unpopping, unsnapping, almost like magic. He squints up past her smiling eyes and wonders if he sees what he sees. "The — the roots of your hair — " he whispers hoarsely, as she blows a quivering pink bubble toward his forehead and at the last second sucks it back between her bright white teeth: "- are they — are they blue — ?"

"Oh yeah," she laughs lightly, giving her head a little shake to tickle his face with its strands, her breasts hobbling gently around his ear-holes. "Just a silly college stunt. A bunch of us girls thought it'd be neat to dye our hair some weird punk color, and I did mine in this funky blue to, like, you know, go with my sweater. Pretty dumb, hunh? Thank goodness, it's finally growing out — only the roots are left."

"Ah…" The stiffness in his neck seems to have melted away. He finds he can lower his chin at last and his headache has utterly evaporated, though his face feels flushed and pinched in a not unpleasant way. He wonders if, in some mysterious way, he has found the illusive closing image for his monograph

"Speaking of my sweater, prof," she adds, holding something strung on a gold chain in front of his nose, "you left this inside it last time." It is his ear, now blackened and shriveled up like a smoked oyster. He can feel his headache coming back. "I thought it was maybe kind of a present, you know, like a fraternity pin or something, so I've been — snap! ffpoop! — wearing it, but if you need it for anything…?"

"No — !" he squeaks.

"Gosh, thanks a million, Professor Pinenut," she whispers and gives him from behind a tender little hug. "I'll always wear it next to my heart, just where I found it! Right here — see?"

He turns his head, following the dangled ear, and, encouraged by her pointing finger, presses his earhole into the warm blue hollow where its dessicated outer shell is snuggled. As he listens to the accelerating thump within, nodding in concert with it, his nose stroking lightly the fleecy breast, he tells himself with an outburst of rapture that what he sees there before his crossed eyes is beauty's very essence: form as divine thought, the single and pure perfection which resides in the mind, of which an image and likeness, rare and holy and soft as a powder puff, is here raised up for adoration. He wishes to explain this to her, discreetly of course, never once forgetting that she is the student, he her teacher and moral exemplar, wishes to tell her that beauty, my dear Bluebell, beauty alone is both lovely and visible at once, and indeed touchable as well, it is all that we can know of the spiritual by way of the senses and is the discriminating person's route to it, if approached with the appropriate fear and reverence and without getting overexcited, if you can help it, just a matter, the route that is, of following your nose, so to speak — but before he can even get started on this little essay the servants Buffetto, Francatrippa, and Truffaldino come storming in with his portantina, shouting: "Come quickly, master! We have something to show you!"

"No, no!" he cries in alarm, as they snatch him up and strap him in. "I want to stay here!"

"There's nothing to see here, professore, it's closed for renovations, as you can see for yourself! Come now, we've got to run! There's a new Bellini at the Accademia!"

"But I don't care about — !"

"It's the Madonna of the Organs, dottore! II Conte Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo has brought it! A masterpiece! You have to see it to believe it!"

"A new acquisition!"

"A gift to the city!"

"He's the heir of eleven doges!"

"Twelve!"

"And he's brought the deed to the family palace!"

"We have to escort the Count back to the Piazza for his official reception! Hurry! There's not a moment to lose!"

"No! Stop!" he protests, tears coming to his eyes. "You can't do this! My — my life's work — !" But they have already bundled him out of there, not even time to glance back, and now they go clattering down the marble stairs and out onto the busy Bazzetta, past the diapered Ducal Palace and the stiffened digits of the patron saints twin monoliths, racing at full tilt toward the motor launch.

22. THE PROCESSION IN HONOR OF COUNT ACNELLO ZIANI-ZIANI ORSEOLO AND THE MADONNA OF THE ORGANS (NEW ACQUISITION)

"Ah! casa mia, casa mia!" exclaims il Conte Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo, his old head thrown back, pointed gray beard thrust high in the wintry wind, his eyes closed his immense dripping phallus bobbing with the tremulous ecstasy of his wide-armed embrace of this city he calls his dulce domum and summum bonum, il suo paese, bell'e buono, first cause and final hope: "My fulcrum! My feedbag! My fetish! My fenny fount and fungous funiculus! Floating fleshpot of my fancy! My foolscap, fizgig, flophouse, and fantod! My foreskin! My fistulae!" Thus, to the cheers of his strange audience there on the Campo della Caritŕ, the Count glorifies the alleged city of his birth, exhausting the alphabet in his exaltation, or at least all the F's, prompting Melampetta to bark out finally from beside the professor's portantina: "Ma, fammi il favore! Va' a farti fottere, faccia da culo! "

Which, far from arousing the ire of the Count or the crowd only draws more cheers ("Viva! Viva! Go fuck yourself, buttface!" they chant lustily, led by Francatrippa, who conducts them with a candy-striped phallus of his own, Buffetto and Truffaldino bounding gaily about the campo doing handsprings and cartwheels: "Va' a farti fottere! Va' a farti fottere!") and incites the old graybeard to even loftier flights of grandiloquence: "Ah, Venezia! Mother of all my pleasure and profit!" he cries, striding about manfully, gripping his phallus with both hands to keep it from slapping the pavement as he goes, the onlookers ducking and scattering to make room for the monstrous engine. "Father to my glorious misdeeds! Uncle of my wild oats, sown and unsown, mother-in-law of my exile, and second cousin of my throbbing green-isled imagination! Great aunt by marriage of my melancholic flatulence! Grand nephew of my noble erections and half-sister to my sweet ruin! Venezia! Veni etiam! Your errant prodigal has indeed come again! And again! Clasp me close to your bosom as a scrotum clasps its restless testes, let me wander no more! Those of us who have changed our homes and pleasant thresholds, and sought a country spreading its legs beneath another sun, as a great Roman publicist was wont to say, ought to have our heads examined, if we can find them, stuffed up our irrespective rectums as they waywardly are. No, no, propria domus omnium optima, or oppressa, or obstupida, and/or words to that effect, home is where the hard is, he who lies everywhere, gets laid nowhere, eheu, eheu, sic passim!"

This oration draws more applause and cheers ("Bravo! Viva la faccia!" they shout: "Ipse dixit! Viva il Magnifico!") which the Count acknowledges by leaning back and raising his glitteringly decorated organ on high like a bejeweled flagpole, others in the assembly at the Accademia landing stage responding in kind as their constitutions permit, the monumental Madonna of the Organs for her part reaching into the scarlet folds of her glistening vagina with both hands and pulling out her ovaries which she proceeds to flick on their fallopian strings at the Count's shaft like little pink yo-yos. Her face, true, the professor has to admit, does, except for the hollow eyes and the fringe of ink-black beard peeking out from under her chin, resemble that of Giovanni Bellini's "Madonna of the Small Trees," but the rest of her is more like an oversized walking anatomy lesson, an elaboration of sorts upon the traditional Madonna of the Bleeding Heart, in that not just her heart (which is bright green) is outside her body, but all her glands and organs are dangling from her generous flesh like Christmas ornaments: her spleen, kidneys, liver, brains, bladder, stomach, larynx, pancreas, and all the rest, her lungs worn like water wings, her mammaries like shoulder pads, her intestines looping from her rear like a long spongy tail or a vacuum sweeper hose.

Il Conte Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo's first act, upon the arrival of the emissaries from the Palazzo dei Balocchi, the exchange of greetings, the display of the deed, the windblown dissemination of the billion lire, and the Count's knighting, as it might be called, of the professor, was to present the Madonna as a gift to the city ("Urbi et orbi!" he'd cried, making the sign of the cross over her in the Byzantine fashion with his ithyphallic appendage, the genuflecting citizenry in the Campo della Caritŕ replying with a communal breaking of wind and a whooping ovation), observing that, as he pointed to her exuberant crimson-petaled gash: "Heroes have trod this spot! Poets have slept here and signed their ineffable names! Merchants have here lost all their earthly goods, philosophers their minds! Only a few intrepid explorers, venturing into its labyrinthine depths, have returned to tell the tale in their epistles and travel guides of the fatal gift of beauty, the very sight of which sets us afire with pain and longing and sends us plunging, lance hoisted, blind to dangers, into the awesome abyss! Ah, but roses, roses all the way, good friends and figsuckers, so loving and so lovely, nature herself shivers with ecstasy at the sight of this toothsome apparition! She walks the waters like a thing of life! Beauteous even where beauties most abound, she is the answer to our bedtime prayer that womankind have but one rosy mouth, to kiss them all at once from North to South!" Which is what they all did, lined up to lap, more to the south than to the north, at the Madonna's fluorescent lips, which some said exuded a dewy liquor not unlike zabaglione laced with rum and holy water and went eagerly back for seconds, the professor in his dark temper demurring, furious still at having been dragged away from his former student (he felt that some grave academic principle had been ruthlessly violated, but his threats and protests had gone unheeded) and subjected once more to the cruel abuse of the elements and the callous masses.

On their way here, as they came spanking up the blustery Grand Canal in the roaring motor launch, Truffaldino, Buffetto, and Francatrippa had driven him finally into a sullen silence with their breathless overlapping accounts of the triumphant arrival in Venice of the famous Count, descendant of at least thirteen doges ("No, no, fifteen!" cried Francatrippa vehemently: "Fifteen doges! And three popes!"), the splendor of his entourage, the undeniable authenticity of his deed to the Palazzo Ducale, attested to by 579 recognized doctors of law, living and dead, for which he had already received from Omino e figli, S.R.L., a preliminary down payment of a billion lire, and his gift to the city of the newly uncovered Bellini masterpiece, "The Madonna of the Organs," which they called "a living miracle." "Well, yes, it's sort of in the style of the 'Madonna of the Small Trees,' master, only more like a 'Madonna of the Stunted Kidneys,' as you might say!"

What they meant by this became clear when they rumbled up under the green steel frame and dark heavy timbers of the Accademia bridge to the vaporetto landing stage of the great museum and were met there by his onetime boatyard hostess Melampetta, serving as official watchdog in the absence of Alidoro, and now yapping out something between a joyful welcome and an angry scolding; a motley assemblage of hundreds of citizens, local or otherwise, many of them bearing or wearing gaudy organs of their own, together with a number of wild animals, demons, extraterrestrials, monsters, and plague victims, all cheering the new arrivals with grunts and roars and exposure of their backsides; a squadron of regally dressed attendants to the Count, standing at attention, their genitals where their faces should be and their faces between their legs, and each with a barrel of wine on a little cart in tow; the Count himself in the crimson cap, vest, and tight breeches of his ancestral dogeship, his flowing black gown lined in crimson satin and trimmed with sable, his yellow gloves and golden mules in the Turkish style, and his colossal erection emerging from the gaping money pouch hanging between his thighs; and finally, towering above them all, "The Madonna of the Organs" with all her insides on her outside, including her disproportionately small kidneys, sticking out at either side of her ample waist like shriveled tree-shaped little handles.

"Here he is!" Buffetto exclaimed, as Truffaldino and Francatrippa unloaded him from the boat and onto the landing, elements of the bearded Ladies' Marching Band beating out a drumroll as they disembarked. "L'Omino's dearest and oldest pal! Old Sticks himself! Un gran cultore! Winner of the No-Balls Prize and, as you see, a worthy challenge to any present! Make way! Make way! Largo per il Gran Nasone!"

He was paraded in his litter chair, with much pomp and swagger, past the ticket booth and up a kind of aisle beside a small garden, the scraggly bushes crowding up there like groundlings, a bank of outdoor phones standing in the front like spectators in the orchestra seats, to be deposited eventually, seething still with rage, mocking cheers and applause ringing in his defoliated tympanic cavities, in the middle of the broad campo under a massive yellow brick wall with tall dark windows, flat as a backdrop, a wall he recognized from the postcard pictures of Canaletto, prince of the vedutisti, to be that of the defrocked church become Venice's celebrated Temple of Art. His temple, too, alas, and there, in its scowling shadow, looked down upon, as it were, by those very masters to whom his own long life had been devoted, he was obliged to exchange his new felt borsalino for the tall conical sugar-loaf hat of someone called Il Zoppo, a red-tipped prophylactic device was slipped on over the end of his nose and unrolled to his cheeks, around his neck they hung a sign reading "ECCE NASUS," and then Count Ziani-Ziani tapped him on each shoulder with his huge phallus and declared him an Immortal Member in Firm Standing in the Great Privy Council of the Illustrious and Lubricious Republic of Venice.

Throughout all this — and the subsequent exchange of greetings, toasts, and tributes, which included a brief memorial to the original Little Man in the form of a chorus of "Viva i balocchi!" and "Abbasso l'aritmetica!" followed by the unscrolling of the ancient parchment deed to the Palazzo Ducale, doodled on, it was said, by Doge Sebastiano Ziani himself, decorated with architectural fancies, and colorful as a circus poster, then the scattering into the wind of the billion lire, which the Count somehow managed to discharge explosively out the end of his upraised phallus, much to the squealing and scrambling delight of the vast crowd, and finally the presentation to the city of the "Madonna of the Organs," an unveiling that was more like the opening of a pop-up book — the venerable scholar sat hunched in his portantina, dunce-capped head ducked, beating with impotent fury at the chair arms with his little balled fists, and grinding his teeth so hard that most of the ones that remained fell out in his lap. What most galled him was his awareness of how much his own wooden-headed resistance to well-meant advice, that ancient bane, was responsible for his present distress. It was as though he were inhabited by some kind of demonic antibodies to common prudence and sanity! Oh, he had blundered in public before, exposed himself, played the fool, but now it was as though he were making a career of it!

"There, there, don't pull the snout so, dear friend," growls Melampetta at his side. "True, it's about as pretty as a blackhead, this cazzo di niente we call life — 'un bel pasticcio,' were the Abbé de Montfaucon de Villars' immortal words for it, I believe, as he lay dying in the road in a bed of horse dumplings, asking only that they pass the parmesano — but as Horace Il Poetastro once counseled the constipated Augustus Caesar whilst feeling his way hopefully in the dark, 'Nil desperandum, padrone, there's a plug here somewhere!' So cheer up! Not all sorrow comes to bring damage! Besides, I have a surprise for you!" When he first arrived, Melampetta had, less generously, greeted him with a bitter howl of invective and reproach, quoting everyone from Alexander of Abonuteichus to the Zenos of Citium, Elea, and the Zattere on the subjects of ingratitude, bad manners, false friends, the corruptions of power ("Was it not our own Zan Petrarca who denounced in these very streets those who 'swallow a gazeta and shit it in silver — ?' "), sins of omission, faithless love, broken promises, and blind folly, and not forgetting in her citations Zosimos of Panopolis, whose mystical vision of a world alchemically bonded by interlaced dogs and puppets, here betrayed, led the sagacious old gnostic to rewrite the incommunicable axiom to include "arf!" and "cuců!" and to remark on his deathbed that the only dangers to universal happiness were a warm nose and a cold arse. But her desperately wagging tail revealed her true feelings and she soon took pity on his dire condition, even acknowledging his justification in abandoning the doghouse and taking refuge in the Palazzo dei Balocchi: "It's an old prole's dream, after all, to live the life of Michelaccio among the filthy rich, vicious unprincipled pricks though they be. But just the same, comrade, you might've stopped by the yard from time to time to scratch my ears and let me give you a lick or two…" Now she reaches beneath her tail with her teeth and strips a watch off her hind leg, holds it up to him: it is his own, the one he threw through a window the night he came here. "Alidoro managed to wrest it away from those pirates down at the Questura, but when he got back where he'd left you, you weren't there."

"Something… came up. Another… another engagement…"

"The bright lights, break a leg, a star is burned, and all that, you mean, yes, yes, Lido found your crazy tracks, heard the commotion but by the time he reached your venue the show was over. Nothing but greasepaint smears and ashes. They'd rung down the curtain and then burned that, too. Nobody left onstage but a few of his pals from the pula, toasting their garlic sausages and warming themselves like sanctimonious Parsees around the embers of their fiendish bone-fires, as they are properly called, according to Saint Elmo of the Smoldering Ecstatics, or else it was Saint Anthony the Great in his bone-on fever. The mangy old mutt was heartbroken, of course, until he picked up your scent in an underpass and saw your ear floating in the canal at the end of it. He didn't know if you'd been thrown in or fell but — "

"I fell — !" Yes, he had almost forgotten: the wild ride, the mad chase, the icy green slime underfoot -

"Without thinking, something the fart-brained testardo always did find harder to do than fly backwards, he jumped in to try to save you — "

"Alidoro — ?! But he can't — he can't swim — !"

"From all the available evidence, amico mio," growls Melampetta, scratching her ear with her hind foot, "that would seem to be a reasonable deduction. The driveling old eyesore, at no loss to the general aesthetics of this open sewer, has not been seen since."

"Oh no…!" Though Alidoro later rescued him from fire, sealing the ancient bond between them, they had met, so to speak, in water, the powerful young police dog having leapt into the sea to chase him, only remembering after it was too late that he did not know how to swim. It was the first time he had ever had the authorities at his mercy, and he reveled in it. He taunted the drowning mastiff, toyed with him, exacted promises, swam teasing circles around him. Finally, convinced the miserable beast was too bloated from all the salt water he had swallowed to pursue him any further, but still wary of the fanged jaws, he took hold of the thick tail he still had in those days and dragged the half-dead creature back to the lido. Alidoro could not even stand up, but lay helplessly on his side, draining from all his orifices like a punctured balloon, blubbering out his gratitude. Pretending to be administering artificial respiration, he jumped up and down on the prostrate body, just for fun, and kicked the turgid belly-bag like a football, then jumped back into the water, daring the police dog to follow. Only later, on the lip of the Green Fisherman's frying pan, did he come to understand that he had made a friend for life, a real friend, perhaps the truest one he ever had.

"Now, now, no need for tears. There are those who would say the poor dim brute should have been put down years ago. He was a good comrade but something of a backslider in his old age and stupid as warm water, alia fin fine he may have done us all a favor."

"But — sob! — why didn't you tell me — ?!"

Melampetta tips her head and gazes up at him quizzically, but before she can reply, the Count, who has been lamenting in the high style on behalf of the dripping kidneys and swollen bladder of the Madonna, not to mention his own leaking instrument, the removal from this campo of a municipal urinal ("Here, where a great public facility once stood, and where many great public figures thus stood as well…"), now announces his intention to conduct them all, en route to their official civic reception in the Piazza San Marco, on a sacred pilgrimage in memory of what he calls the original fourteen "pisciatoi della Via Crucis," commencing with a communal pee of homage and protest from the Accademia bridge.

And so the old scholar, weighed down now with grief, is hoisted once again by the palazzo servants and, led by il Conte Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo and the Madonna of the Organs (New Acquisition), with the rest of the zany assemblage trailing behind, the Count's personal attendants with their bodily parts a soqquadro, as they say here, bringing up the rear with their cartloads of free-flowing wine, he is ported ceremonially up the massive wooden staircase, past a priest and a blind nun posted there at the foot like sentinels of conscience, nodding lugubriously as though tolling the knell of the passing sinners, and, at the bridge's crest, is tipped foward, portantina and all, so that just his nose with its translucent red-tipped rubber sheath droops over the railing.

Alongside him, up and down the bridge, the rest of the Count's cortege bring out organs of every size, color, and description and dangle them over the side, those without baring their behinds or else their breasts, or something resembling all of these, and, upon the Count's appeal to his "friends, roamers, and dribbling cunnymen, as Marcus Aurelius was said to have declared on the eve of the Battle of Thermopylae, lend me your tears and other bodily excretions, for our noble causeway depends upon it," let fly a veritable downpour upon the Grand Canal below, sending motorboats swerving and gondolas pushing desperately for shore, those on the decks of vaporetti ducking inside for cover, or else replying with similar, if only token, gestures of their own. The old professor, gripping his newly recovered watch with trembling fingers, seems to see through his bitter tears the sodden body of his old friend Alidoro floating by on the dark ruffled waters below, though it is probably only the usual plastic sack of garbage, of which the canal is always full. "I–I'm sorry!" he weeps, his chest riven. "I loved you so!"

The tall spindly hunchbacked character next to him with whom he had been forced to exchange hats, the one known as Il Zoppo, opens up the flies of his baggy white pantaloons, and a face leans out of them, spews a mouthful of wine over the railing, then turns to him and says, in chorus with another deeper voice above: "No need to be sorry! We love you, too, dear Pinocchio!"

Though charred and disfigured, it is a face he recognizes: the once-beautiful Lisetta of the Gran Teatro dei Burattini! There is still a trace of magenta in her hair and a safety pin in her wooden ear! But then — ?! He cranes his old head up stiffly, peering through the tears and biting wind: "Pulcinella! Is it — is it you — ?!"

"As you see, my friend," replies Pulcinella, tipping the professor's hat from on high, and from inside the pantaloons Lisetta says: "Yes, Pinocchio my dear, it is we!"

"But I thought — ! I was afraid — !" And suddenly it all comes rushing back to him as though the evacuations cascading down from the bridge were releasing a torrent of dammed-up memory: his rescue from the wastebin, the kisses and pinches and dizzying head-butts, his brief career at the electronic keyboard (but how had he forgotten all of this? He must have nothing but woody pulp up there…!), and then the police parading in, the brutal charges, the bludgeonings and screams, the mad crush of the terrorized mobs, the frantic bodies kneeing him, pushing him, the smoke tearing at his eyes and throat, the two tall thin carabinieri bearing down on him, swinging brave Pulcinella's torn-off legs like nightsticks — "I saw — ! Oh Pulcinella! What they did to you — !"

"Ebbene, compare, don't cry, it could have been worse. Others lost the lot. I've always walked as well on my hands as on my feet anyway — I was out of there in less than it takes to say it! Poor Lisetta here was not so lucky! They threw her on the fire!"

"Mangiafoco turned up and pulled me out in the nick of time! Burned my face black as a pewit's, I lost both arms, and my tits aren't what they used to be, but the bottom bits are all still good as new!"

"I'd lost my legs and Lisetta her arms, so Mangiafoco put the two of us together by nailing me to her shoulders."

"Nailing — ?!"

"The joints and hinges were all gone, nothing left to pin new limbs to, it was the best he could manage."

"It's all right."

"It's kind of fun!"

"Of course, back flips aren't so easy any more."

"What I miss most is not being able to clap."

"But we do a double act now."

"We've worked up some new lazzi, Pinocchio, you wouldn't believe!"

"The old Siamese twin gags, you know! With a new angle, as you might say!"

"With a bit of a twist!"

"Not everyone's got a woman's head in his crotch!"

"Not everyone's got an asshole behind her ears!"

"But… but the others — ?" he asks uneasily. "Brighella? Colombina — ?"

"Ah… well…"

"You know…"

"Where there's smoke…"

"It was a real horror show, friend…"

"Mass pupicide…"

"Poor Arlecchino… they used a hacksaw on him…"

"They drilled him full of holes…"

"They soaked him before throwing him on the fire…"

"You know, to make him burn longer…"

"His screams would have broken my heart, if I had one," sighs Lisetta from inside Pulcinella's pants, as Pulcinella reaches in to wipe the tears from her eyes. "Fortunately I've always been a bit wormy in that part…"

"At least you did what you could for him, dear Pinocchio!"

"Well…"

"At least you didn't turn your back on your dearest friend!"

To his horror, just as he is about to reply, in all honesty of course, as is his wont, if not indeed his onus, he suddenly sees the same flash of blue that he saw then: she is sitting out all alone on the bow of a battered old No. 1 waterbus lumbering up below on its way to the Accademia landing stage, seemingly oblivious to the excreta showering down upon her, gazing up through it as though in stunned disbelief at the professor, crowned ludicrously in Pulcinella's peaked coppolone, his nose hanging limply over the railing, still in its silky sheath, like that stupid character in the World War II graffiti. His heart plummets. "Forgive me!" he whispers in his pain and confusion as she slips past. His mortification is complete. "My… my love — !" And then she is under the bridge and out of sight, and he is, though numbed by shock and utter despair, under way again, the procession setting forth once more, Count Ziani-Ziani having just pulled up his crimson breeches and declared: "As the great Zan Bellini, painter of the famous 'Incontinent Fortune,' shown relieving herself blissfully from the side of a gondola with a granite blue globe in her fragrant lap, used to say, 'Forbirse el cul col sasso tondo, xe la piu bela cossa de sto mondo!' The loveliest thing in this world that's known is to wipe your ass with a round stone! And now, fellow citizens, it is time, as they say, to jump, having blessed it, the ditch! The city babbos await us! So soak your beak and let it leak, our solemn round proceeds!"

23. THE LAST CHAPTER

In a cramped busy campo like many others they have visited on their pilgrimage to the Fourteen Urinals of the Cross, the procession of Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo and the Madonna of the Organs (New Acquisition) is interrupted suddenly in the middle of one of the Madonna's bizarre purification rituals by the clamorous headlong arrival of the Winged Lion of Saint Mark, flapping in either to join or to assault the party, but, already well in his cups, seriously misjudging his approach, catching his forepaws on the tent top of a makeshift costume stall and somersaulting heavily into a marble wellhead, roaring out an alarming stream of drunken obscenities all the way. A human butterfly, pirouetting decorously on the convex lid of the wellhead, is sent flying when the yowling Lion slams into it, stone crashing upon stone, while from within the collapsed stall come cries of "Rape!" and "Earthquake!" and "Help! Murder! It's the Red Brigade!"

"Che cazzo — ?" bellows the Lion in his querulous stupor. "By the Virgin's verminous and fulsome cunt, I'll kill the turd who did that! Oh, I am fucked! Get me something to drink, you cretinous pricks! I am dying!"

The three servants hastily set the old scholar down in a quiet corner of the little campo, warning him not to run away or get into mischief or talk to strangers, and rush off to attend to the raging Lion, who seems prepared to eat the poor crumpled butterfly if he can just get on his feet again and if he hasn't lost all his teeth in the calamitous fall, Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo ordering that an entire barrel of wine be poured down the old fellow's throat as a kind of holy libation in recognition of the once-glorious empire and designating him Honorary Chaircreature and Despot of their entourage for their triumphal march into the Piazza San Marco.

Left alone, the professor, crushed by sorrow and chagrin, buries his veiled nose in his lap, the condom's red tip hanging forlornly from the end like a bloody drip, and fretfully twists his silvery watch as if he were telling his beads, gripping the skittish thing with both hands in the old way, before he had fingers, thinking bitterly: what a paltry bauble time is! He's had more than his share of it, and what good has it done him? He can't even see the face of it. All he can see is the shock and disappointment on Bluebell's innocent upturned face as she passed below him back at the Accademia bridge, a famous phrase from his early writings returning now to haunt him: "The bridge between It-ness," he wrote in The Wretch, elucidating a concept first introduced in Art and the Spirit, "and I-ness is character, whether staunch or frail, artfully made or haplessly jerry-built, and that which flows below is not Time, but the ceaseless current of implacable Judgment!"

As Buffetto and Truffaldino ported him down the broad wooden steps of the brdge, it recalled for him an earlier descent from another bridge, that night he first arrived here, full then of hope and joy and something like intellectual rapture, the city, silenced by snow, awakening in him an almost mythic sense, as it felt at the moment, of being a witness to eternity. He had plunged into the alluring labyrinth of the magical city that night on his damaged but still functional knees as a lover might enter the body of his beloved (speaking poetically of course), experiencing that rare creative communion between the spirit and the body that prophesied a happy conclusion to his final work-in-progress and thus to his long exemplary life as well. And now all that noble joy had come to this. That reckless eager plunge into the masked city had been his undoing. As they looped back toward the Piazza San Marco, whence this newest misadventure today began, he felt caught up in loops within loops, his fraudulent life a mad skein of recurrent self-deceptions, and he wished only, the tears streaming down the craquelure of his cheeks, to make it safely back to his room in the Palazzo dei Balocchi and to hide his terrible face there forevermore.

Around him, meanwhile, the Count and his followers celebrated with wine and song and wild abandon. Drums beat out a processional march as they wound their way from the site of one vanished urinal to another through the dreary Venetian labyrinth, the Count squirting his monstrous phallus on them all from time to time as though dispensing holy water, the Madonna waddling about seductively with her exaggerated Trecento dehanchement, wagging her intestines, her organs jouncing and bobbing like bangles, teasing passersby to give her parts a little squeeze. Feet went by with eyes and noses on the soles, an immense penis passed with semen dripping from a white mask at the tip, there were copulating rodents and horn-blowing bottoms and birdlike creatures with phallic beaks and pretty young novices with devils' faces winking from their bare behinds. But to the tormented professor, hunched over in his litter chair, they were all mere mourners at a wake, their revelry a dirge, their bawdy songs a last lament. Cast down in final defeat, he could only stare darkly at the recovered watch in his trembling hands, sinking ever deeper into that pit of inconsolable grief, regret, and bitter self-reproach into which he had fallen, or, as it were, been pushed. Most of the flesh had fallen away from the backs of his hands, and he noticed now how the grain stood out like reticulated tracery, the softer parts of the wood eaten away. It was as though its encasement of flesh had fed upon it like lichen. He tried to pick off a scabby piece of skin, but the pain, as ever, was harrowing, as if it were determined to hold fast, to carry through, even if he were not.

This power of flesh to go its own way became the subject (perhaps he had been talking aloud again, quite likely) of several of the Madonna's ceremonial performances as they went along the route of late lamented pissoirs. She would light the seminally blessed votive candles with her apple green heart, which worked like a kind of miniature blowtorch, empty her bladder on the site of the displaced pisciatoio, and with her spleen lead a communal prayer for making public urinals and ridotti out of all the city's banks and churches: "Piů cessi meno chiese!" they would chant. Then, after Count Ziani-Ziani had recited from what he called the Ancient and Holy Testament of Latrine Grafitti, she — or, more precisely, her organs — would sermonize briefly on various topics such as individual organ and glandular rights, cruelty by civic neglect of the tragicomically fused genito-urinary twins, or the body politics of visceral autonomy versus a united organic front, the various glands and organs sometimes getting into heated debates and even duels with one another, all trying to shout at once, the liver blackening with rage, the stomach turning sour, the bowels complaining rudely, the heart winning most arguments finally with its lethal blowtorch, the Madonna's body becoming a kind of strange traveling puppet booth, the organs her fractious tattermen. Finally, the larynx or the adenoids or the vagina would bring all the spitting and screaming and squirting of this anatomical psychomachia to an end by singing the Benedictus, the anus at the end of its long undulatory tube providing the resonant antiphon, and then the Madonna would deliver a few dozen marzipan Jesuses from her womb and pass them out to the children

Here in this campo, after the opening rituals, she and her organs, having paused to reflect upon martyrdom, had taken up as a case in point the professor's nose, on rubber-masked display above his "ECCE NASUS" sign, debating the question: which was the true martyr, his nose or the rest of him? Not surprisingly, the more exposed parts opted for the abused and repressed ("Hamstrung," was the way the hamstrings put it) nose, the glands and internal organs arguing contrarily on behalf of the inner humiliation and suffering brought to the whole by the offending part, which the fulminating colon called an intolerable pain in the butt and the uterus said wasn't worth a dried fig and, for its sins, as much of omission as commission, probably ought to get the chop. "I've had it up to my hair with the stuck-up thing!"

"That's right," agreed the adrenal glands, "let the snotty nuisance stew in its own juices!"

"I see what you mean," observed the eyeballs on their little strings. "At first glance, the little blowhard does appear to be something of a fist in the eye and more than a bit uppity, but it is our view that only the branch can be said to be martyred when the tree, for its own good, is pruned!"

"Right, I can swallow that," piped up the esophagus, and the shrunken kidneys, siding with the eyeballs, added: "Moreover, if the fault is in the handle, as the saying goes, so then is the anima: dismemberment hallows the honker!"

"I speak," said the heart, flaring up briefly, "from the heart when I say that your argument, my dear kidneys, doesn't hold water. The holy martyrs were canonized for their good hearts, not good hooters!"

Thus, inevitably, the debate, which grew increasingly tempestuous ("You're getting up my nose, you cardiocentric four-flusher!" screamed the sinuses, and the ovaries started throwing eggs again), evolved into a raucous theological dispute about the true location of the soul, each organ staking its claim as sole container of the elusive stuff, the lungs bellowing that insufflation had been the true sign of life since God first puffed up Adam, the brain retorting heatedly that the soul was inseparable from the logos and that to think otherwise was unimaginable idiocy, the mammary glands doing a bit of breast-beating of their own, and the rectum airing its "gut feeling" that, since everything else in the world got stuffed up it, the soul must, willy-nilly, be there as well. "Macchč! I haven't the stomach for this," rumbled the stomach acidly, burned by the heart and vainly seeking relief from the spreading crossfire, which came finally from on high with the head-over-heels arrival of the Winged Lion, explosively interrupting the performance.

Throughout all this, the professor had been watched at some distance by the mournful old priest he had noticed back at the foot of the Accademia bridge, standing now across the little campo, together with his companion, the blind nun, under a circus poster for tomorrow night's Gran Gala. Perhaps they were waiting for him to resolve the dispute of the organs with one of his famous Augustinian disquisitions on the "changeless light within," an image he had once found useful in trying to recapture the peculiar essence of his prenatal (so to speak) life on the woodpile. No, I am sorry, my friends. No resolutions. The light's gone out. He has never been afraid of course to speak of the "soul" or "spirit" ("I-ness" was in effect a word for this), though he has often wondered why men born to real mothers did, and indeed it could be said that his entire Mamma project had been really little more than a homiletic account of his idiosyncratic search for the magic formula by which to elevate his soul from vegetative to human form, as though body, far from being a corrupting adversary, were in itself a kind of ultimate fulfillment. Soul itself, in the particular.

Now, left alone by the Lion's crash landing to savor, hunched over his scabs (has he found at last, he wonders, picking at them, his closing image?), the manifest ironies of his life's quest, he is approached deferentially by the limping priest and his ancient companion, stumbling along on a cane. "Scusi, signor professore!" rumbles the holy father softly in his gravelly old voice, bowing slightly and tipping his black hat, and the nun, nodding circumspectly, whispers as though in awe: "Professore!" "We are profusely honored, il nostro caro Dottore Pignole," the old cleric continues with another little bow, "to have your sublimated presence among us! We hold your nugaciously pleonastic writings here in grand esteem, alla prima, and consider them to be, as the saying goes, of the most beautiful water!"

"Yes," whispers the nun, her old head bobbing, "your water is very beautiful!"

"They have, as we Veneti say," the priest is quick to add, "la zampata del leone, the paw of the lion, that is to say, the indisputable footprint of genius and caducity. We few, to whom such things still have provenance, from the bottoms of our unworthy souls, if indeed they have bottoms, exalted sir, and who would know better than you, thank you!"

"You are welcome," replies the antiquated nun, then wheezes deeply as though suffering a sudden pain in her lower ribs.

"I–I am not who or what you think I am, father," the old professor confesses abjectly.

"You are not Professor Pinenut — ?" asks the priest, peering closer. The nun, in seeming confusion, turns to hobble away, but the priest snatches her by her habit and draws her back.

"Yes — no, I only meant — "

"Ah. You speak metaphorically, of course, true to your majestic and incogitant stylus. We are all, souls masked by bodies, other than what we seem to be, and yet what we seem to be, in the soulless barter of the bodied world, we also are, and so, though not Professor Pinenut, you are he nonetheless! I trust then you will not deny us a trifling favor, good sir: to wit — "

"Good, sir," says the nun. "Do it."

"- To wit, to sign one of your noble and predacious tomes for our parish library, hoping that is not too magnanimous an imposture for such a gran signore — ?"

"No, of course not, but I'm afraid I don't — "

"Have an opus at hand? Do not concern yourself, maestro, for we have traduced a little volume of our own. Psst! The book, you little turk's head!" The nun, he sees now, has a book clamped under one arm, but the arm seems disabled. Reaching for the book with her other arm, she drops the cane. Stooping for the cane, she drops the book. She feels around blindly for the book, but the priest steps crunchingly down upon her black-gloved hand and, sighing deeply, picks up the book himself, hands it to the professor with an uncapped pen.

"Your — your colleague, she's — "

"Yes, blind in all her two eyes, excellency, from too much devotion to the noble battologies of your ambagious texts. Now, if you would be so kind…"

Wearily, he opens the book to the flyleaf. He has signed millions of these things in his lifetime. The gesture is automatic. The book, however, is not an edition he recognizes. After signing it, he turns to the title page. For a moment he cannot comprehend what he is seeing. The letters stand there on the page like a row of rigid pine trees or the teeth of a saw. "Where — where did you get this — ?!" he gasps, as the priest takes the book back and loses it in the voluminous folds of his cassock, the nun still whimpering under his planted foot.

"Why, in the little bookstore by the Rialto bridge, dottore. Everyone is reading it. It is a worldwide success!"

"But — but that's impossible — !"

"Ah, you are too modest, signer professore. I insure you it has been festooned by the most fulsome praise and garlanded with the ambrosia of excessive honor!" grimaces the priest, holding back a wheezing cough. The nun, too, on her feet once more, is shaking so hard with inner convulsions, she has to lean against the priest not to fall down again. "Perhaps you would like to peruse some of the recent reviews from La Repubblica or the Corriere della Sera?"

He takes with trembling fingers the clippings the priest hands him. "Mamma, the final opus magnum of the Nobel Prize-winning art critic and historian Dr. Pinenut," he reads through his blurring vision, a shudder shaking him violently from head to foot, "has been universally declared, upon its posthumous publication this week by the Aldine Press, in cooperation with the executors of the author's estate, to be, if not his greatest masterpiece, certainly his most revealing work. Although the unusual scrambling techniques of the early sections make them exceedingly obtuse, the patient reader will eventually find his reward in the clarity and simplicity of the final chapter, 'Money Made from Stolen Fruit,' with its extraordinary sentimental eulogies to his early mentors La Volpe and Il Gatto, from whom he admits most of his ideas were taken. 'They made me what I am today,' the great scholar confesses, providing fresh and startling new insights into the true sources of his peculiar, though now perhaps questionable, genius…"

"Mascherine!" the professor hisses between clenched jaws. He feels he is about to explode. Even this they have stolen! His work! His reputation! His very life! "Assassini!"

"Are you all right, master?" asks Truffaldino softly, leaning close. "You don't look so well…!"

The priest and nun are long since gone, of course. As is, once more he notes, his watch. "Take me home," he whispers hoarsely, his whole body trembling. It is all over. Like his beloved San Petrarca before him, he is tired in body and soul, tired of everything, tired of affairs, tired of himself… "I have lived long enough. I am ready to die."

But then, just when ("Why not," he can hear Truffaldino saying with a shrug, "we're going that way anyway…") all hope vanishes, something occurs that reminds him forcibly of his old babbo's favorite saying. "One never knows, carogna mia," he would say, tipping his dirty yellow wig slyly down over one eye and sucking wickedly at his grappa jug, "what might happen next in this curious world…"

24. LA BELLA BAMBINA

It is to be believed, as Father Tertullian once said, leaping from paganism to the Apocalypse in a single bound, because it is absurd. It is certain because it is impossible: Tonight he is to have her at last! In his case, too, the miracle has owed something to the Apocalypse, though he can hardly be said to have leapt, and the Apocalypse in his tale of redemptive grace was a Carnival ride on the Riva degli Schiavoni: no mere mystical vision, that is, but an extraordinary and dizzying reality. Even now, he seems to lose his balance whenever he thinks of it, an experience he has never felt when contemplating something relatively so frivolous as the end of the world — and that magical ride was as nothing compared to what is yet to come before this day is over! "At last, tomorrow," Eugenio promised him yesterday, after making the arrangements, "your biggest wish will come true!" His mind cannot even quite take it in, though the rest of him is certainly more than ready, his whole body trembling in anticipation of that which, for his staggered imagination, remains ultimately unimaginable. As Bluebell put it on the Apocalypse yesterday, begging him to hug her close: "Wow! I'm so excited, teach, I feel like I'm about to wet my doggone pants!"

"Easy, master! You'll tip us over!"

"We'll be there soon enough!"

Yes, they are rocking dangerously, standing huddled there together in the frail gondola in the middle of the Grand Canal, both shores now lost to view in the damp cold fog of this wintry Mardi Gras morning, lost to his view anyway, but it doesn't frighten him, nothing frightens him since his wild ride on the Apocalypse, he feels reckless and manly and heroic, invulnerable even, and he responds to their silly fears with devil-may-care laughter, which unfortunately comes out more like deranged cackling, no doubt making him sound to the servants porting him completely fazzo, as they'd say — as indeed, in love, he is. Stark staring.

"Brr! What a cold stinking soup this is!"

"It's like the old Queen let one and it froze!"

"If this caeca gets any thicker we'll have to shovel our way across!"

For the professor, the dense fog which rolled in last night is full not of threat but of tender promise, an obliging curtain dropping upon the past, dissolving its regrettable angularities, so harsh and obstinate, in the sensuous dreamlike potential of the present. It is as though the city were masking itself in buoyant anticipation of secret revels of its own, hiding its shabbiness and decay behind a seductively mysterious disguise which is not so much a deception as an amorous courtesy. "The important thing about Carnival," he wrote recently in a note intended as part of his monograph-then-in-progress, "is not the masking, but the unmasking, the revelation, the repentance, the re-establishment of sanity," but, as always in all the days before yesterday, he was wrong. The important thing is the masking. What is sanity itself, after all, but terror's sweet foggy disguise? And love the mask that shields us from the abyss, art its compassionate accomplice?

These poignant thoughts come to him unbidden, full-formed already in a language, though chaste, clearly steeped in Eros's ennobling power (only now could he write that monograph which now he knows he will never write), swirling through his quickened mind as easily as do the coiling twists of fog here upon the still gray surface of the Grand Canal. This fog has caused the suspension this morning of all motorized water traffic and so forced upon them this slow labyrinthine journey to the mask shop by foot and now traghetto, a journey whose purpose is, in effect, to initiate a healing, providing him the means, designed by Eugenio, by which to rejoin, after the misguided century, his life's lost theater. He will put a new face on and, in love's name, learn to lie again, free at last from the tyranny of his blue-haired preceptress with her "civilizing" mania, her cruel tombstone lessons. The long oar splashes softly behind him as the black-snouted bark carves its perilous way across the silent waters, drawing a line erased as soon as drawn, thus celebrating, not the line, dull as death itself, but the motion that has made it. The others stand in a cluster in the rocking gondola like passengers on a crowded bus, holding him up between them, chattering nervously and peering intently through the purling mists for a glimpse of a landing, as though afraid that what they cannot see might not exist. Though impatience grips the old scholar, fear does not, and, least of all, the fear of movement, once such a bugbear that even melody's traveling line offended him and his gardens all were paved so as not to have to witness growth. No more. Movement, after all, was his very raison d'ętre, he was made for it. "To dance and fence and turn somersaults in the air," as his father advertised. His concept of I-ness, as he tried to explain yesterday to his former student, aboard the whirling Apocalypse, was never more valid: he could not, without doing violence to himself, be other than what, at the core, he was. "And only here, dear Bluebell, right now, where I am, am I truly what I truly am!"

Or words, in his cross-eyed, thick-tongued, mouth-stuffed delirium, to that effect

"Ecco!" cries Francatrippa as the gondola strikes its dock, unseen till hit, and slides, bumping and scraping, into its berth. "We're here!"

"Where else," asks Buffetto impatiently, stepping onto the bobbing dock and reaching back to help with the portantina, "could we be?"

"Well, if I were here and you were there," replies Francatrippa, as the two of them lift him out, "and vice versa, then we'd be, both, both here and there, would we not?"

"And if I were here and you were there," pipes up Truffaldino, following them ashore, "and he were neither here nor there, then we'd all be both here and there and neither either, too!"

"Hrmff. And yet here is where we'd each still be for all that," insisted Buffetto. "Isn't that so, professore? But now come along, if you are to find the romance and adventure that you seek, we must find the guise for it. Am I right? Tonight's the night!"

Yes, so he believes, though twenty-four hours ago he would not have thought it possible. Nothing seemed possible then. His desire to go on living, guttering out, had dimmed to nothing more than the simple wish to be able to die in his bed at the palazzo beside his hot water bottle, and even that wish was more like the memory of a wish than the thing itself. Moreover, as he thought about that hot water bottle, there, surrounded by Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo's raucous court with their drunken taunts and fountaining organs, dunce cap on his lowered head and condom on his nose, bereft, grieving, his manuscript pirated and his watch stolen for the second time, the realization slowly invaded his consciousness like a last lethal wounding that it was his hot water bottle, the snuggies, too, also his the bent spectacles, the half-empty bottle of pine-scented mouth-wash, and certain very grievous patterns began to emerge, not least the lifelong pattern of self-deception: he had known all along that was his own hot water bottle, there could not be two of them.

The procession had reached the Bocca di San Marco. Through the columns and beyond the temporary stands and stages built for Carnival, a vast assembly of the island's smart set and power elect could be seen congregated together in full regalia under the Clock Tower, prepared to receive the venerable Count Ziani-Ziani, now poised arm in arm with the Madonna of the Organs, his free hand tucked in his vest of crimson velvet ŕ la the builder of this final wing of Venice's so-called "open-air drawing room," his chin high and pointy gray beard fluttering in the gusty wind, his immense phallus held aloft with the help of little Truffaldino. On a cart being pulled along beside him, the Winged Lion snored drunkenly, a sign around his neck reading "THE GOOD SOVEREIGN." Il Zoppo, as Pulcinella and Lisetta were — or was — now called, stepped forward from the crowd and raised a horn to Lisetta's lips, prepared to lead the multitudes into the Piazza, and just at that moment he heard it again, as though in fulfillment of some grim brassy oracle: "Oh my Ga-ahd! Lookit this! What a lotta crazy lolly-pops! Ding-dong, man! It's like a — ffpupp! squit! — little girl's dream come true!"

The professor sank even deeper into his litter chair, wishing there were a hole in it he could fall right through. The American strutted, hips swaying, through the spellbound crowd in her fringed white boots and wet blue jeans, tweaking organs and peeking into empty eyeholes and slapping the smirking faces on bared behinds, cracking gum between her dazzling white teeth and blowing fleshy pink bubbles, hooting and wisecracking ("Hooboy, I love those little faces down there, fellas! Is that what you call — ssffPOPP! — 'masked balls' — ?!") and circling inevitably around to the cringing scholar in his portantina. "Hey, wow, prof! This is a surprise! What are you doing here — ?!"

"I — kaff! — it's not what — ! A-a monograph I'm working on…!" he stammered helplessly down between his knees, and felt his shameless nose bounce and waggle goofily in its latex wrapper.

"Jeepers, teach, that freaky rig is beautiful!" she exclaimed, clapping her gaudily ringed and bangled hands together. "I hadn't seen you as such a fun-loving guy!"

And then she did something quite extraordinary. She peeled the condom away, pulled it on over her wet blond curls like a shower cap, and, leaning over, her red windbreaker rustling between them like a whispered secret, gave his nose a tender lingering kiss, tonguing it at the tip and pinching it gently between her soft lips before letting it go. He felt for an alarming but exquisite moment that he might be going blind. "Yum!" she sighed, her breath warm on his ravaged cheek, then added: "But gee whillikers, prof, look how you're shivering! You must be freezing to death!" Cold was what he did not feel. But he could not argue. He could not speak. He could not even close his gaping jaw, but could only stare in stunned amazement as she tossed her windbreaker over his knees, stripped off the azure blue angora sweater, and, while blowing a huge rosy bubble, the only thing his bedazzled eyes could see, tucked the sweater around his chest and shoulders. Then she pulled the windbreaker on again, leaving it unzipped, and grabbed Francatrippa's grand candy-striped phallus away from him: "Hey, gimme that, man! Whoopee! I always did want one of these doodads!" She gave it a squeeze and a jet of milk spurted out the end of it, making those nearby duck and shriek. "Yipes! Whaddaya know! It even works! C'mon, gang! Let's go!"

And so, with condom-capped Bluebell in the vanguard, carrying her particolored phallus over her head like the troop ensign and switching her behind provocatively, they all paraded triumphantly on into the great open light of the Piazza, unloosing in those delicate symmeteries a mad cacophony of shouts and squeals, honkings and blarings and other rude noises: Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo il Magnifico behind Bluebell with his long nose in the air, his much longer organ on little Truffaldino's shoulders, and his flouncing Madonna on his arm; the slumbering Lion on the wine cart alongside him, wearing his crumpled sign like a belled cat; the bearded Ladies' Marching Band, led by Il Zoppo blowing a trumpet out the flies of his/her white pantaloons; the old professor, sugarloaf-capped and shawled in blue and ported by Buffetto and Francatrippa in his litter chair, his astounded gaze locked helplessly on their bewitching bare-breasted standard-bearer; the Count's royal attendants with their inverted anatomies, dragging along the now much lighter barrels of wine; and finally the multitudinous throngs of zany and improbable creatures who had joined the procession along the way, Melampetta yipping and barking at the periphery, first on one side, then the other, like a sheepdog rounding up the drunken strays. At the far end of the square, the awaiting dignitaries arose en masse, either in homage to the visiting Count or else aghast at the apparition descending upon them through the Mouth of the Piazza, while overhead the terrified pigeons, displaced by the clamorous invasion, let their frantic droppings fall upon the Piazza like confetti.

They emerge now from a narrow passageway so tight they have been scraping the walls into a campo too broad and thick with fog to make out its shape or exits. "Which way now?" asks Truffaldino tremulously as the other two set the professor down. "I'm afraid — !"

"Don't be stupid! That way, of course!" reply Francatrippa and Buffetto more or less in chorus, one pointing to the left, the other to the right. Glancing at each other, they quickly switch directions, pointing at each other, then switch back again, and Truffaldino bawls: "Help! We're lost!"

Just then the heavy silence is broken by a scratchy two-way radio announcing something about a thief in a junk store, and a moment later two carabinieri materialize out of the fog, clattering past at full trot, their black capes fluttering behind them, rifles gripped at the ready in their white-gloved hands. "Wait!" the three servants cry out as one: "Mangiafoco's — ?!"

"This way!" shouts one of the policemen as both are swallowed up once more in the swirling fog, the smacking of their boots on stone fading slowly away to a distant ticking sound like an animal's claws on glass, and then everything is submerged once more in a dense muggy silence.

"Ebbene," sighs Buffetto as he and Francatrippa pick up his litter chair again. "We'll never get there by standing still! Andiamo subito!"

Subito is not exactly the word. They pick their way across the campo like ants, the pavement emerging in front of their wary toes as it vanishes behind their heels, a sharp contrast to yesterday's roisterous Carnivalesque crossing of the Piazza San Marco. If Eugenio was incensed by the irreverent congregation that approached him, he did not show it. He greeted the Count Ziani-Ziani with a deep bow and prepared eulogies, departing from his script only briefly to remark upon the nobleman's prodigious scepter, referring to it as "The Great Disseminator of Empire" and "The Magnificent Lion-Planter," citing it (at this reference to lions, the "Good Sovereign" awoke suddenly with a startled stupid look, bawled out "Che cazzo — ?!", then, bloodshot eyes crossing, dropped his shabby old head back in his paws and nodded off once more) as demonstrable proof of the Count's lineage and pointing out to the wide-eyed city fathers gathered around him that: "You see before you the true cause of that envy that stirred our sister states in times gone by to so malign our great Republic and bring about through deceit, intrigue, and spiteful tongues her eventual and untimely ruin! The Turks, for all their famed endowments, came up short in their rash challenge to it, and similar fates befell the impudent Franks and Goths, who simply overreached themselves! In a later age, Napoleon in his impotent rage raped and pillaged our most beautiful Queen, swallowing up everything on the island he could lay his lascivious hands upon, but this, her true glory, he could not, for all his voracity, engorge, though a fateful glimpse of it is said to have embittered his dreams to the end of his tormented life!" He then suggested that, while the city officials were examining the deed, according to the law, the Count might like to join him privately in camera caritatis to sample some grappa distilled in the time of his ancestors and toast the success of their transactions.

The Count, introduced as the direct descendant of four popes, at least three of them male, six cardinals, and nineteen doges, replied that he was indeed honored to have his pockets picked by such a distinguished assembly of impenitent thieves and whoresons, true heirs of the pustulous glories of the Serenissima, but that, while gladly surrendering the deed for their exanimation, he would have to decline the Director's kind invitation to visit his privy chambers, not because he suspected treachery or doubted his host's integrity — "You'd better doubt it, that rotto in culo is as bent as a forcola!" barked Melampetta from the edge of the multitudes, and Eugenio turned to the Inspector General of the Questura at his side and, smiling unctuously through clenched teeth, growled: "Somebody go muzzle that damned bitch!" — but because, in his present state of arousal stimulated by his return to his debauched and beloved homeland, he might do damage to its Renaissance splendors and would in any event find it painful to negotiate the stairwells. About this time, the Lion rose up once more and roared out a string of sour melancholic oaths threatening, for the greater glory of Venice, to bite the heads off every infidel present, starting with the Archbishop — "Soul to God, body to the crypt, asshole to the devil for his tobacco dip!" he bellowed — but the Madonna calmed him down by feeding him some of her organs, and soon enough the decrepit creature was sonorously back asleep again.

For the professor, bundled up in the blue angora sweater with its warm milky odors, deliciously stupefying, all of this was happening as a sort of remote theatrical backdrop to the only event left for him on center stage and the focus of all his entranced attention. As his former student pranced about, so full of life, spraying dignitaries and revelers alike from her gaily striped machine, or clamping it between her thighs and riding it like a bronco, or challenging other phalli to duels, she occasionally afforded him glimpses of smooth creamy flesh and bouncing breasts with generous nipples that excited him as no masterpiece had ever done. Her worn blue jeans were molded around her abundant thighs and hips like a second skin, freely exhibiting to the delight of his captive eye every thrilling line and posture of her piquant body, which he, with an outburst of what would have been, before the Blue-Haired Fairy stole it from him, rapture, told himself was ideal beauty's very image and all he would ever know of the divine, forget all previous pretensions of his long misdirected life. He was utterly disarmed, overpowered, intoxicated with fugitive, mad, unreasoning hopes and visions of a monstrous sweetness: in short, oh joy, he was, alas, too late, in love.

Seeing him stare at her with such pained tenderness, Bluebell gave the giant phallus back to Francatrippa and, zipping up her wind-breaker against the cold, came over to her old mentor's portantina. "Politicians are just so darn boring!" she complained, cracking her pink gum. She stripped off the condom and shook her blond curls out. "C'mon, teach! Whaddaya say we get the heck outa here and go have some fun!" He could not in his smitten state find breath to speak, much less words to use were even breath available, but, deftly reading his wistful devastated gaze, she unbuckled him from his litter chair — "What're they doing, prof, holding you prisoner — ?" — and lifted him up into her arms. "Holy moley, you're light as a parakeet feather! Look at you, poor thing! You're nothing but skin and bones! Or… whatever." She gave him a little hug and whispered in his earhole: "Let's sneak down to the waterfront and have a ride! C'mon! These goofballs'll never miss you!"

And so it was that he found himself on the Apocalypse. There were other choices out on the cold windswept riva: bumper cars and whips and fun houses, pirate ships and merry-go-rounds, looping airplanes, spinning teacups, but for Bluebell, who had tried them all, only the Apocalypse still gave her a thrill. "Present company excluded of course!" she added with a tinkling gum-snapping laugh. In all his life as a human being, he had never been in or on any of these things, and he had disdained those who had, but now the very prospect brought tears of joy and excitement to his eyes, as he huddled, shivering, against Bluebell's soft slippery windbreaker, clasped like a child in her strong young arms. Music was playing separately from each of the attractions, a chaotic dissonance, diabolically loud, but the riva was empty, they were all alone, their Carnival fling like a secret tryst behind closed doors.

What followed was the most exciting ride of his life. Not even his flight on Colombo's back could match it. At first it wasn't fun at all, it was sheer terror. So whipped about was he by the sudden violent wheeling and swooping and plunging that he worried he might start coming apart. Flakes of dried flesh were flying from him like dead moths from a shaken carpet and his insides were in such turmoil he was afraid he'd end up like the Madonna of the Organs. Bluebell, seeing his plight, quickly opened up her red windbreaker and tucked him inside. "Yow-eee!" she howled as they dipped and whirled, her golden locks flying and her bright white teeth sparkling in laughter. "Hot dog! I love it!" For a moment he suffered a terror of another sort. Not since Hollywood had he been this close to a woman's fleshy parts, and never when they were jouncing and bobbling so crazily as this. He grabbed on as best he could but it was like trying to hug a runaway exercise machine. Her naked breasts literally flew up and whopped him on the nose, and her knees were sometimes as high as his head. "Whee-ee-ee!" she squealed and wrapped her arms and legs around him and squeezed him tight.

Then, as the mad ride continued, he began to find an anchor in that very motion. The earth was flying about them everywhere and they were being severely shaken still, but it was as though they were becoming one with the very forces that, so powerfully and so primordially, shook them. This: this is truth, he realized, with such a jolt of recognition, he knocked his head on her chin and set off another giddy burst of whooping and squealing: "You made me swallow my gum!" she yelled, and then suddenly they were upside down again and hanging on to each other for dear life. All these years, he thought as they plummeted, then shot upwards again, instead of riding with it, he had been trying to stop it in artificial freeze-frames, made lightheaded by anything that twitched, but now, suddenly, he began to feel most centered, most contented, when most ferociously flung about. "I feel alive," he gasped, as, headlong, they looped and dived and spun, "truly alive, for the — ahi!! — first time since the day I–I… grew up!" It helped of course to be held by and holding Bluebell and to be pillowed in her lovely bobbing breasts, whose nipples, he saw now, and this was just another amazing revelation among many, were exactly like the rosettes of Ca' Dario across from the Gritti Hotel where he used to take his grappas, but it was more than the breasts, more than the hugging and squeezing and bouncing against one another, and the glorious fragrances that wound him round, it was a true mystical communion with the Other, the most ecstatic and visionary moment in his life. And, well, even if it was just the hugging and the breasts, et cetera, one thing he knew without any qualifications: whatever it was, he didn't want it ever to stop

They are lost again. Truffaldino, whimpering, wants to go back to the palazzo, but Buffetto reminds him that, as they are lost, they don't know where that is either. They have just crept over another bridge, having almost missed it on the other side and fallen in, and now they find themselves in another open space in fog too thick even to see each other if they lean away. They set the portantina down and, holding on to each other, feel about them in the fog. The whole purpose of this hazardous journey is to procure a certain mask for the professor, who, though he plays no part in the servants' deliberations, is determined to carry on, per amore o per forza, as the saying goes. The plan is Eugenio's. "Leave it to me, Pini," he'd said with a sly knowing smile. "Yes, yes, tomorrow night, I can see it all! Trust me!" And so here, wherever it is, they are, preparatory to his night of nights, whatever the deceptions, whatever the costs.

On the Apocalypse yesterday, as he grew accustomed to the violent motion, he tried to speak to Bluebell about his affection for her, indirectly of course, joking abstractly about the laughable folly of old men and referring to certain scandals that had happened at his university over the years between professors and students, never to him needless to say, though who, ever, dear Bluebell, is wholly immune, and telling her about a movie star he once knew, quite famous, who kissed him once — for the cameras, of course — in a very special place, finding it difficult as he spoke to keep Bluebell's wildly bouncing breasts out of his mouth. This seemed to make her giggle, so he let it happen more and more until, his more reasoned approach abandoned, he was lapping at them and gumming them and scrubbing his nose on them quite shamelessly. She laughed at his clumsy gaiety, gasping as the Apocalypse whipped them about that she always thought of him as such a stuffy old bird, and he tried to correct this impression by bragging about running away from home all the time and about his bad-boy past in the Land of Toys. "We wuh' weawwy — shplurpp! glop! — wicked!" he squawked around his mouthful of convulsive breast. He offered to take her places in the motor launch, to Torcello or Chioggia, for example, wherever, it didn't matter, he was just hanging on, hanging on to everything, making desperate plans for the future, and she asked if they couldn't go out on an American Express "Venetian Night" package tour instead. "We'll go dancing! And to the Casino! No museums, no churches, just fun! We'll take gondolas! With singing gondoliers! It'll be wild!"

And then suddenly the ride ended and she carried him back to the Piazza and, the official ceremonies over and his portantina gone, deposited him in the palazzo doorway in the Sotoportego del Capello, took her sweater back, rang the bell, gave him a little kiss on the top of his head, popped a bubble, and said: "Well, in case we don't see each other again, Professor Pinenut, have a happy Carnival!"

He was shattered. He felt like he felt whenever the Fairy died. He turned, once he knew who he was, to Eugenio.

Police whistles blow not far away and there are shouts and the sounds of scuffling. "Per caritŕ, gentlemen! What are you doing — ?! A poor holy man! Ow! In nomine excelsis and de profundis gloria, have you no shame?" cries a gravelly old voice from out of the fog. "What ficcanaso has sent you here? Eh? What bad tongue in partibus infidelium has misled you? Ih! Ih! Ih! Mercy, gentlemen! A frustulum of indulgence, if you please! A bit of nunc dimittis and ite, missa est! I am no thief! Upon my faith! See, here is my money! Take it if you wish! I have made vows of poverty! Look at my hair shirt! Per amor del cielo, let me go and I will forgive you! See, it's only an old tail, not worth the novena of spades, as they say! Who would want to steal such a thing! Uf! Be reasonable, gentlemen!" There are heavy booted footsteps and the sound of something or someone being dragged, but the sounds seem to come from every direction at once. And, as suddenly as they began, they cease.

"Signori carabinieri…?" Truffaldino calls out hopefully into the murky silence. There is no reply. The little servant starts to cry.

"What — ? Who is that malcontented guttersnipe out there?" comes a waspish voice from out of the coiling yellow fog. "Unbutton yourself, you blubbering turd!"

"It's us!" wails Truffaldino. "Help! We are lost!"

"Lost! Hah! We should all be so lucky!"

"I'd give an arm and a leg to be lost!"

"Easy for you to say, dearie!"

"Please! We've walked all the way from Saint Mark's — !"

"Oho! The little pap-sucker walks! He talks! He's a bloody miracle!"

"He's probably even got one of those lumpish things between his head and his feet — what do you call them?"

"Let it all leak out, piss-brains, we're on burning coals…"

They take a step toward the voices and faces materialize around them in the fog. The old scholar recognizes them — the pink-cheeked sun, the angel with the cherry-red lips, the camel, the skull, the freckled face with red hood and yellow braids — "Hey! It's the mask-maker's!" cries Truffaldino. "We've found it!"

"It's found us, more like," mutters Buffetto, then falls silent as the towering figure of Mangiafoco with his fiery eyes and his rampant black beard like flung ink crowds into the doorway, filling it, his head half lost in the swirling mists high above. "Ma che cazzo fai — ?" he roars, making the masks rattle on the wall. Peering down through the fog with his glowering eyes, he spies the old professor. "Eh! What's this — ?!" He bends down to look more closely. A big toothy smile cracks his plaster-stained lips. "Oho! So this is our great Casanova, enh? Ebbene! Enter, signori! I have just the faccia for the little ciuco!"

The masks titter furtively as they enter, making the collective sound of mice scurrying through the walls. The old scholar is fully aware that he is the object of some ridicule. He doesn't care. There is not time left in his life to care. This American student will be his, whether the foolish milk-fed gum-popping creature knows it or not. Nothing will stand in his way. Not his long unyielding life with its heroic devotion to truth and art and virtue. Not his terrible fear of confusion and humiliation. Not all the "civilizing" precepts and ruthless pieties of his despotic blue-haired catechist. Nothing. "Nothing!" he tells the walls of brightly colored faces, all the red ones, white ones, green, black, leathery brown, and Venetian gold ones, the flesh pink ones and those of dreadful azure blue: turchino. Cassiodorus called this blue the "Venetian color." It was the color of the darkness which came over the sun at the time of the desolation of the Gothic kingdom. The color of his own desolated life. No longer. Eugenio has promised. "Tonight!" he declares, twisting round defiantly in his portantina.

And then he sees her. Just behind him in the middle of the room. Tipped back in a barber's chair in a winding sheet with only her blue jean cuffs and fringed white boots sticking out, hands crossed, face waxen, eyes rolled back, lips slack and parted. Dead. Dead — ?! He feels faint. His vision blurs. He cannot breathe. There is something so dreadful about this sight that his mind will not take it in, but continues, stubbornly, even angrily (what has she done — ?!), to contemplate a future now utterly erased: She will come to him. (She cannot.) He will have her. (There is nothing to have.) She will love him forever. (Forever is over.)

25. COOKED IN LOVE

The august professor emeritus, embedded in molded pizza dough, has an uneasy premonition, as they back him into a bread oven with only his head sticking out ("Don't worry, Pini, you won't melt!" Eugenio assures him, beaming ruddily from beaded ear to beaded ear: "Just like baked Alaska! You won't feel a thing!"), that this night is not going to turn out exactly as he had so ardently hoped. He had asked for a proper philological costume, a mysterious and somber bauta perhaps with ruffle and tricorn and wig and cape — he had practiced taking short steps about his room in the palazzo, more or less erect, imagining the cape fluttering majestically yet secretively around him as he staggered along — but, as Eugenio explained when they opened up the box from the maskmaker's and, to his wailing dismay, found instead the donkey mask inside: "Now, now, a bauta mask would not even fit correctly over your… you know, your thing — and besides, there will be thousands of capes and bautas out there tonight, dear boy! How will she find you if you are not somehow different from the rest?"

"Find me? I thought we were to be alone — !"

"Well, er, of course! But not at first…"

"You mean it's some sort of masked ball?"

"Precisely! A masked ball! Is it not Martedě Grasso? What did you think? So now stop being such a little fusspot, Pignolo my darling! I promise you, it's going to be beautiful! A night you will remember for the rest of your life! Trust me!"

And so they have brought him to the kitchen, stripped him of his fine clothing, his silk suit and monogrammed hand-tailored shirt and his satin underthings, and wrapped him in layers and layers of heavy pizza dough, stuffing in prawns and olives and onions and pepperoni and wild mushrooms and tuna and golden pimientos and eggplant, with a whole garlic salami wedged up between the thighs, a stiffened mane made of wild asparagus beribboned with prosciutto curls, and with anchovies and artichoke hearts and extra cheese on the hind portions — "Best bits for last!" Eugenio enthuses, patting the enriched rump, his plump cheeks flushed with excitement and an overly tight corset (he doesn't look at all like the person the professor mistook him for yesterday, he must have been reeling still from that mind-churning ride) — and now, six cooks all helping at once, they ease him on backwards on a little trolley into the bread oven.

Eugenio is mistaken about not feeling a thing. The intense heat actually soothes his inner wooden parts, penetrating like muscle balm to the damp rot lodged deep there, but the burning dough expands around his outer fleshly remains with all the blistering ferocity of a red-hot iron maiden, piercing him through with the most agonizing pain and squeezing the breath right out of him, making him gasp and scream and beg for mercy. Even as he bawls to be let out — "Ih! Ah! Please!" — his breath seizing up in his chest and his cries emerging like raw heaving croaks ("Let him cry," Eugenio urges the startled kitchen staff with a tender chuckle, "the little ass can laugh when he gets laid!"), he has a sudden total recall of the dream he had while burning his feet off on his father's brazier all those years ago, a simple dream about leaping. At first it was only common everyday real-life leaping, over hedgerows and thorn bushes and muddy ditches — he'd only been a puppet for a little while, his legs were new to him, but already, barely able, with Geppetto's help, even to walk, he had gone bounding off, full of short-lived joy, leaping as high as he could, but running straight into, as though ordained, the nose-grabbing fist of the constabulary (such troublesome impetuousness, already on the move even as a shapeless lump of wood, where had it come from?) — but gradually, while his feet, as remote from him in his sleep as if they belonged to someone else, blackened and turned to ashes on the brazier, he felt himself in the dream growing lighter and lighter, he could suddenly leap over carts and houses and could even leave the world behind altogether, and as he rose above all the rooted trees and planted houses far below, he was overwhelmed by an intense sense of freedom, of being truly alive, his nose out of the reach of all earthly constraints and rising even higher than the rest of him rose. But then, as he soared higher and higher, he had a thought. A very simple thought, one of his first: that his freedom only made sense, only truly was freedom, if he could get back down there whenever he wanted to. With that, he began to fall. Feet first at the beginning, then head, finally just tumbling wildly, nose over heels and out of control. It was terrifying. He was screaming like he is screaming now. He fell with the awesome clatter of a sack of wood thrown from the top of a house, scaring even himself. When he awoke, his feet were gone. He thought they'd been eaten and blamed the cat.

"Stop carrying on so, Pini! You are out!"

So he is. But he is still burning up. Inside and out, baked to a turn. "Innamorato cotto," as the faces on the maskmaker's wall mocked, tittering and hooting (he didn't care) when his little American student left him all agape and askew on the shop floor, chewing gum stuck to the side of his earhole, their ridicule now becoming prophecy: an old fool literally cooked in love. His darling Bluebell, too, had prophesied: "cute as a blister," she'd called him on their Carnival ride. He is crying so hard he cannot even get his breath. His surface is bubbling and the salami between his legs has shriveled and is dripping hot grease.

"Ahi, what a nuisance you are, carino mio!" shouts Eugenio over his desperate howling. "Chetati! You are drying me up!" He sniffs appetitively at the professor's sizzling hindquarters, reaches in with a bejeweled finger, plucks a meatball stringy with melted cheese. "Roll the tedious beast into the meat locker and cool him off!" he commands irritably, popping the hot meatball in his mouth with a loud smack. "Ow! Yum! See what you get for doing someone a favor!"

He has asked for it, it is true. He'd had a terrible shock after his ride on the Apocalypse yesterday when Bluebell had abandoned him so abruptly, dropping him in the palazzo doorway like an old unwanted toy, and an even worse one when the door opened: for there, towering above him like an avenging angel, her arms folded majestically over her bosom and her face half in shadow, was she whom he'd thought dead these hundred years, returned as it were from the grave, or graves, his sister, mother, bedtime hair-raiser, drillmaster, and erstwhile benefactress: "O Fata mia! Forgive me!" he'd cried, utterly stupefied and undone (where was he?), and he had tumbled to his knees there to hug hers, sobbing out his confession together with an account of his many and ghastly trials, and not excluding his most recent truancy and all his sinful thoughts while buried in his beautiful ex-student's rosette-nippled breasts, shameless recreant that he incorrigibly was, but regretting this even as he did so: perhaps… perhaps, even with her strangely fat knees, she could help — ?

"Ah, while you are down there, dear boy, would you care to suck my lecca-lecca?"

"Eugenio — ?!"

"But of course! I don't know who you thought I was, sweetheart, but I am supposed to be the Queen of the Night!"

"I–I've been through so much I can hardly — !" His bewilderment was such that he could not even see, he felt numb and dry-mouthed, as though his senses were falling away with the rest of his bodily parts, maybe that wild ride had done more damage to the lignified mush in his brainpan than he'd thought. Only one thing was clear in all this dreadful blur. "Eugenio! Listen to me! Dear old friend! I–I know now what I want! You said I could have anything — !"

"Oh, I know. The American bambina, no? I thought you'd never ask, you wicked boy! But it goes without saying! I already have a plan!"

"You do — ?"

"Tomorrow night! I promise you! She is yours!"

And so this, this is the plan. He can feel the crust, like fate itself, hardening around him. Still, he clings, speaking loosely, his blistered arms spread beneath him, locked in stiffened pizza dough here in the meat cooler, to his one hope — absurd, abject, perverse, yet at the same time spiritual, and even, for he is after all who he is, venerable — because: what else is there left to believe in if not love? Yes, love is the word of the day, his word, his only one. Her mask shop confession rings still in his inner ear, the only sort he has left, like celestial music. She is, the sublimate of his otherwise vaporized concept of perfect beauty, all he can see. If she is expecting an ass tonight, he will, with all his smitten heart, be one.

When he saw her this morning, stretched out in her winding sheet in the barber's chair, her eyes rolled back and her blue lips slackly parted, he was not able to breathe. He had gaped his mouth, but no air entered. He felt like he was strangling. His gnarled fingers tore at the straps of the portantina. Feverish chills shook him, and guilt, dismay: Had his own demented desires done this — ?! Oh no! "I–I'm sorry!" he had gasped. He fell out onto the floor of the mask shop, bruising the patches of flesh that remained, crawled toward her. When he reached her boot, he kissed it passionately, wetting it with his tears, his nose pressed into her blue jean cuffs, then pulled himself up to hug her knees. "Oh, Bluebell!" he sobbed, abandoning all his greater learning for that simple and terrible formula, the abject confession of a stricken heart: "I–I love you! Don't die!" Gripping her belt buckle, he hauled himself up onto her lifeless body, blind to the danger of being caught in so mad an attitude, crawling over her sunken belly, her flattened breasts, pausing to weep there, his face buried in what, until a moment before, were his greatest joy on earth, shapers of his very destiny; then, using them as wobbly handles, he dragged himself on up to her precious face, ghastly in its ashen pallor, and kissed tenderly her cold lips, still faintly bubble gum-perfumed. Her lips moved beneath his lips. They stretched into a smile. A miracle! She opened her eyes, sighed, gave him a little smack on his behind, and said: "Now, now, teach! Be nice!"

He tried to speak. He could not. He felt cruelly deceived and impossibly jubilant at the same time. She lived still!

"C'mon, don't take it so hard, prof, just having a little fun! I saw you coming, I thought you'd get a kick out of it! You gotta admit it's a great costume, right? But down you go now, I've turned over a new leaf, no more spreading it around, I'm saving it for the man of my dreams!" She lifted him by his armpits and set him down dismissively in his litter chair again, as though clearing her lap of a minor nuisance. "I learned about him from a little fat man who has, well, you know, befriended me. He told my fortune, like, and said I'm gonna meet my true love tonight! In the most scrumptious drawing room in Venice! In a mask! It's all worked out! That's why I got this crazy costume! Jeepers, isn't it romantic?! Tonight! Who do you think he is — ?"

"Ah…!" What could he say? He felt a terrible weight upon him. He had never lied before. Not like this. But if he told her the truth, she wouldn't come. He would never see her again. He gazed upon this lovely apparition, now wriggling out of her grave clothes like a beautiful thought, softly bodied forth in denim and angora, his eyes delighted afresh by each familiar curve and hollow as it emerged, quiveringly alive, and he knew, drunk with mad desire, grateful merely that, this night at least, she lived, he lived, that (his nose alone would have told him this) he was lost. "He… alas…" he wheezed, desperately trying not to tell her what he could not but tell her, "it is only…!"

"Honest, you know what, prof?" she whispered then. She leaned down to press her warm cheek next to his, so dizzying him with fragrant memories of their fairy-tale ride on the Apocalypse he had to close his eyes, and, shyly, almost breathlessly, she added: "I hope it's you…!" When he opened his eyes again, feeling her cheek still pressed hotly on his own, he'd fallen out of his portantina and she was gone.

He has been, all day, since that confession, and until the costuming began, in a state of constant dreamlike euphoria, a state unlike any he has ever known, even as a puppet. "My, how perky you are!" Eugenio had laughed when they returned from the mask shop, by vaporetto this time, the fog beginning, much slower than his spirits, to lift, and in reply he had crawled out of his litter chair and performed a feeble little bowlegged jig, bowing afterwards to the general applause. Ah, the theater, the theater! he'd thought, blowing kisses to them all. Why have I turned my back on it all my life? It is time made real, it is movement, it is passion, it is life! All the rest, the dead paintings, the statuary, the tiresome books, all those pompous "images of eternity": just so much bullpoop, as his dearly beloved so eloquently put it. Perhaps, in spite of himself, he had taught her everything she knows! Eugenio, surrounded by a flock of clucking tailors and seamstresses making emergency repairs in his costume, the seams of which had largely given way under an excess of flattering tucks and "modelings," had smiled benignly at all of this and, fluttering his long false lashes, wheezed: "Dear boy, love is good for you!"

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.

"Rispettabile ed irrispettoso pubblico!" cries the Director, stepping to the microphone and raising his pale plump arms, glitteringly bangled. "Welcome! Welcome, my dear fiends! All of you beastly boys and ghastly ghouls! Welcome to the Pizza San Marco!" The sudden roar is deafening and disturbingly appetitive. The professor cannot turn his head, can only stare straight ahead at the strange masked faces slowly circling past as he rotates on the little platform. "Ah, what a moment, my noble and nubile congregation! Here we are in Venezia, the most magical city in the world! And it is Carnevale, Martedě Grasso, the most magical night of the year! Magic squared in the magic square! What cannot happen?" The din of the Piazza seems not to diminish when Eugenio speaks but to mount from phrase to phrase like the heavy steps of an approaching monster. "And oh! oh! what a banquet we have for you tonight! A subtle delight, like our voluptuous metropolis itself, for all the tender senses! For at this time I, the Queen of the Night, debauched trollop that I am, have the inestimable honor and license, as well as the infinite pleasure, naughty and otherwise, to present to you for your admiration and delectation, the feature attraction of our Gran Gala: our own Marco the Pole come home to us like so much drifting flotsam stumping back to his deepest roots!" Around him the deadpan masks blankly circle, belying the savage frenzy boiling up behind them. The three servants seem to have disappeared. He is alone on stage with the mellifluent Eugenio, who, with a sleight-of-hand flourish, has turned his fan into a little scarlet whip which he cracks now above his donkey rump to the rhythm of his exhortation: "A mere sprout of native undergrowth when he left here, a green little sap pegged for the pen, he penned his way, as he grew alder, to become the world's most distinguished woodenknob, spunkily taking on all the knotty problems of the wormy world, branching out into his-tree, sophis-tree and rudiment-tree ribal-tree, a hack of all trades, and now, au currant, a seasoned sage laureled, lacquered, and lionized!" Snap! crack! goes the whip with each phrase, as Eugenio goads his delirious audience on, many of them now pressing toward the stage, leaping and bobbing and throwing themselves about like fiendish ecstatics. "So here he is, this most poplar fella and perennial favorite, for whom two's company and tree's a crowd, this legno da catasta who became a man of many letters, nine to be exact, the evergreen fantoccino who is nobody's dummy, with a cherry before and a cork behind, shy o'veneer but with balsa walnut and a peach of an ash, the puncheon from Puncheon Judy, our very own boneless bosky-boy, yew all know him of gorse: the one and only, the world-renowned, the great, that inimitable old chestnut, nose and all, Pinocchio!"

A moment ago, crossing the square, the old professor, much honored for a fleshly condition he now abhorred, that condition's alleged wisdom not excluded, had the impression, trusting that fleshly wisdom as he knew he should not and thinking, as usual, about himself, about his present fate and how he got here, all on his own, in the old way, bad company, drifting attention and all that, that he knew everything now. He was, once again — oh, how he weeps! — mistaken. For, with the platform's slow turning amid the mounting lunacy of the Piazza, he has seen his love again, somber amidst the maddened merrymakers, dressed in mourning and wearing his ear like a memorial medallion on a long gold chain around her neck, only the whites of her eyes showing and her head slowly spinning on her shoulders as though in derisive parody of his revolving platform. Around and around it goes, seven times, then stops and goes the other way. And so, though her curls are still mostly blond, he knows her now, a new and bitter knowing that makes all other knowing the merest trifle. He feels his heart shrink to the size of the deathwatch beetle gnawing at it. He waits for the platform to bring him around again that he might, though it be his last breath and unheard in the thunderous furor, cry out his loathing of her, that all the world might know her for what she truly is: assassina!

"You all know his story, he's held nothing back, his life as they say is an oaken book, he's logged it all! You know how he came to this island all those years ago, brought here then by donkey cart, soon to become a donkey himself, headed for the circus life as the Star of the Dance, trained to play dead, jump through a hoop, and dance the polka on his hind feet! You know how he lamed himself, was sold to a peasant for his hide, and thrown into the sea to drown, but was rescued by a school of fish that nibbled away his donkey flesh, revealing the puppet still within like the stick in a lollypop! Well, we had hoped to have the radiculose little peckerwood here in his glorious person tonight — in the bark, as it were — but, by juniper, wooden you know it, as you can see, the little sucker has done it again!'"

Whoops and howls muffle the hour being struck hollowly up on the illuminated Clock Tower, a nebulous blur in the high rolling fog, as the platform slowly wheels him round again toward the Blue-Haired Fairy, she who, whipping him with guilt and the pain of loss, has broken his spirit and bound him lifelong to a crazy dream, this cruel enchantment of human flesh. In effect, liberated from wood, he was imprisoned in metaphor. Even his shabby career has been a sham, for, all these years, he has really only had an audience of one. Millions have read him, only because they too were all puppets like himself, hapless creations of the insidious Blue-Haired Fairy. But, though on his last legs, all four of them, trapped in pizza dough and confronting, he knows full well, an imminent horror, he will at last repudiate her. He will, though crushed by chagrin and sorrow, be free! He will do, dying, what he — but what's this — ?! Too late! She is gone! Vanished. And her being gone is worse than all the things she has done to him, a final devastating punishment. She has lured him to his terrible fate, then mockingly abandoned him. His heart, still there after all, withered raisin though it be, is agonizingly wrenched, his eyes fill with tears, his mind with a blackness deep as the midwinter night beyond the fog

"But alas, my hale, hellish, and hearty friends, there are no little fish here tonight, it is we who must eat the little ass out of his sorry plight! We must be of good mouth and do the little shoe, as they say, we must lick the poxy platter clean! Don't be shy! Dig in! You know the saying: If you touch wood, it's sure to come good! So come now, my ostrich-bellied butchers, and put your fangs into it! A capriccio! He's as good as bread, as they always said, da cima a fondo! Ammiratelo! And judge for yourself! Al passo! Al trotto! Al galoppo, you crapulous maniacs! Let the feast begin!"

The guest of honor, unable even to flinch in his cumbersome infrumentation, can only gape in wide-eyed terror at the mayhem that erupts at the edge of the stage and gradually closes in upon him, as the revelers, many with painted faces or their masks flung aside, their eyes aglow with a bestial appetite, their sharp teeth bared, battle each other for first bite. There is only one pizza pie. There are thousands of snapping and laughing and frothing mouths. Eugenio stands rooted in the crazy melee, a bit alarmed by the anarchy he has unloosed, but giggling so hysterically he seems about to pop his corset stays, his colorful wig bouncing gaily on his sleek round head. The professor catches only the briefest glimpse of all this — and then he is upside down, there are hands grabbing at his legs, trying to tear them from his body, he is dragged one way, then another, is tossed and thrown, he sees someone eating his papier-mâché mask, another with her mouth full of half-chewed camellias, others rabidly biting each other, and then he is lost in the sea of rending teeth. It is not like the time with the little fish. This time there is no sensation of his body wanting to rise from within. No delicious nibbling, no thrilling tingle, no ecstasy of release. And the fish at least knew when to stop.

27. THE FATAL MATH BOOK

"In the old days, I never even knew little piss-pockets like this existed in the city, but probably they were here all along, dark and filthy as an old whore's cunt, the swampy cold creeping up through the cracked flagstones like death sticking a finger up your asshole, and so quiet you can hear a pigeon shit," rumbles his companion, stretching his stony wings briefly and fluttering them to shake the damp out. The rattle they make bounces off the crumbling brick wall facing them and then slowly dies away through the black labyrinth of canals in a fading echo that sounds like dry cackling laughter. "But now I know better. I know now this is the real Venice, has been all along, ever since that first desperate wanker, pissing himself with fright, nested here like a marsh bird a couple of millennia ago — no, fuck all the famous pomp and grandeur, the bloody glorious empire and all the tedious shit that went with it and made such strutting ninnies of us all, all that was just for show, a kind of mask the old Queen put on to hide her cankers and pox pits, her true face was back here all the time, just like the devil's true face is on his arse. And you know what, my little cazzo buffo? It's fucking beautiful. I love it!"

The old Lion takes a long meditative suck from the grappa bottle and hands it to what remains of the senescent professor, now huddled, shivering, in the great beast's gritty fossilized mane, and naked as Saint Mark himself at the arrest of Jesus, nothing left but a few bloody tatters of flesh and flakes of pizza dough still clinging to his wooden frame. The grappa is cheap raw stuff, but, vile as it is — "Good for clearing the passages," the Lion growled, pressing it on him, "burns the moss out of your throat and kills off the vermin that crawl in…" — he soaks it up, fuel against the bitter nighttime chill, deadener of the ache in his heart. What's to happen next, he does not know. That he is still here at all is a miracle in itself, short-lived as its effects are apt to be. And, except for his "new feet," as he has always called them, the ones Geppetto made for him when the original ones got burned off and now nothing more than raggedy gnawed-off stubs, he is still amazingly "all of a piece," as his old friend Captain Spavento del Vall'Inferno put it, helping to smuggle him out of harm's way, Colombina responding: "True enough, compagno, but a piece of what?" But then, no sooner rescued and he was in trouble again, terrible trouble, and now they are on the run, having escaped here to this secluded little corner after flying hastily out of the uproar of the Piazza just before the police arrived to arrest him. It was Brighella's idea: "Get him as far as the Teatro Malibran! We'll take it from there!" So here they crouch, the decrepit puppet and the venerable marble Lion, outlaw and monument, pressed together in the wet shadows and dense eery silence under the unadorned pediment at the back entrance of a derelict theater with a plaque on its wall commemorating another wayfarer of mixed fortunes who allegedly once lived here, the two of them sharing a half-liter flask of his winged redeemer's fiendish spirits and waiting for he knows not what.

The end probably, there being no imaginable future. Though, if the end, at least not the one he had seemed fated, only a short while ago, to suffer, there in the Piazza San Marco in that collective maw of omnivorous mouths and gnashing teeth — getting swallowed by Attila was, relatively, a civilized experience. Trapped in his donkey suit and pinned to the cold slick paving stones by all the crazed revelers who fell upon him and upon each other and by his own crushing despair, he could do nothing but surrender to the horror of raw human appetite, helpless as the day he ended up on the Green Fisherman's plate. By the time his friends from the theater intervened, he had lost all hope, had even forgotten what hope in such a world might be. Most of the pizza pie had by then been eaten away or ripped off and passed around and now the delirious celebrants were trying to do the same with what no doubt looked to them like yet another costume: nothing could be that grotesque and live. They munched at his wooden limbs, tore off scraps of flesh with their teeth, bit his face and hands, chewed his feet up altogether, their prey meanwhile, though in mortal agony, sinking deeper and deeper into himself, as though to distance himself from the dish of the day he had become, his gaze locked on the top of the Campanile, glimpsed flutteringly beyond the bobbing heads of banqueters as though in slow-cranked film frames, half lost in the fog, which swirled about up there like teasing wisps of bluish hair, and seeming (or perhaps he wished it so with the last wish left him) to lean toward them, ready to come crashing punitively down upon their mad ruthless feast.

Then, suddenly, there was a tremendous explosion, and when the smoke had cleared, Buffetto was standing over him on one side gripping an immense blunderbuss and, on the other, Il Zoppo with a huge hole in the crotch where Lisetta's head should have been, masked and painted faces peering through the hole in stunned alarm from the other side. Il Zoppo, eyes crossing, toppled over like a felled tree, scattering startled merrymakers, and, before they could recover, Francatrippa came leaping over the fallen body, wielding a scimitar with both hands. "Stand fast, you craven turd, and measure swords! I'm a man of blood and, not to strain courtesy, you've stroked me up the wrong way with your gutless buggery! Prepare now to pitch and pay and pray your paternosters, you perfidious poltroon! En garde!" Buffetto raised his blunderbuss to fire again, and Francatrippa, crying out, "Death to all tyrants! Liberty for the people!" and "Viva Inter!", slashed Buffetto's hand off at the wrist.

There were shouts and screams and outbreaks of panic at the fringes of the mob, boos from Juventus fans in the masses beyond. Buffetto, undaunted, drew a saber of his own with his remaining hand and, remarking that "those who try to shit turds bigger than their assholes end up with tears in their eyes," commenced a furious blade-clashing duel with Francatrippa over the remains, as it were, of the communal repast, their dangerous leaps and strokes, though agile and successful in driving the crowds back, threatening to do more damage than all the mad ravening revelers had done. In one such parry and thrust, though the erstwhile Star of the Dance felt nothing in his benumbed desolation, Francatrippa seemed to trip over what was left of him and fell, dropping his scimitar. "Haha! Time to let the gas out, you pompous fartbag!" laughed Buffetto, jabbing his saber at Francatrippa's breast, but before he could drive it home, little Truffaldino came swooping in from overhead, clinging to a rope of some kind, and, reaching out as he passed by, cut off Buffetto's nose with a rapier. By the time he had swung away and back again, both Buffetto and Francatrippa were waiting for him: slick! slack! went Truffaldino's ears in twin strokes, and then, zzzip! the head, both blades crossing each other as they sliced through the neck, the headless body, now fountaining blood like popped champagne, still hanging on the rope and swinging like a gruesome pendulum.

By now there was general panic spreading throughout the Piazza, and when Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo, his gigantic member clad in gleaming armor, stepped into the fray, shouting "Terrorists! Terrorists! It's the Puppet Brigade! Stand back or we'll all be killed!", the stampede was on. The Madonna added to the pandemonium by flinging about her organs, which exploded in great magical puffs of colored smoke wherever they fell, and in the confusion which followed, the moribund dancing donkey emeritus found himself being strapped secretively to the underside of the Count's phallus by Buffetto and Francatrippa, the Pulcinella half of Il Zoppo holding the thing up at the head, Lisetta whispering in his ear through the blasted hole in the white linen pantaloons: "Time to cut and run, dear friend!" And before they could even say it, they were out of there, a disappearing act so deft even Eugenio had wanted to know later how they had done it.

"It used to be bigger, this place, you know," rumbles the old Lion, passing him the grappa flask and lapping his stony jowls melancholically with his rough tongue. The coarse wet grating sound is echoed faintly by the inky waters of the Rio di San Lio lapping at the stone steps below them. "There was a time you couldn't fly from one fucking end of it to the other. I mean, literally. I wasn't sure I could say what its limits were then, any more than I could tell you how long God's devious pox-ridden cock was. Of course, I was just a cub then, I wanted to hump everything in sight and was eager for action, I took a lot of detours — Dalmatia, Crete, Byzantium, Cyprus, Crimea, and Galilee — I'd head out after breakfast, wouldn't get back for three years. So I admit I wasn't all that good a judge of distances. But, look: that guy Polo whose house used to be here somewhere? The restless coglione dragged his ass all the way to fucking Mongolia, other side of the world somewhere, came back and wrote a book about it, Il Milion, they called him, because of how the cunt stretched the truth, or else for all the money he made. But ask him if he'd seen all of Venice, he'd tell you straight to your face: Impossible. No one has or can. The distances are unimaginable. That's true, that's how it used to be, mate. I shit you not…"

The naked wayfarer, hovering disconsolately in the beast's abrasive mane, takes a deep pull on the grappa bottle, pincering it between both hands, having lost a few fingers back there in St. Mark's, and, trying not to cough or wheeze, hands it back, recalling the grandeur and seeming infinitude of the stage upon which, when young, he too had strutted, a spatial concept which he has often defended as being "an intimation of Being, ultimately dimensionless, and therefore real." Rising up out of the demented frenzy of the Piazza astraddle the Lion's slippery back, polished slick by the centuries, and clinging desperately to the mane with his mutilated fists, he had seen in one vertiginous glimpse how small it all was, how illusory the fantasy of "Being." "Un cazzo di niente," as the old warrior piloting him would say. "A lotta bullpoop": someone else. And yet, he knew, too, that in thousands of hidden corners of thousands of hidden artworks in all the hidden churches and museums in all the hidden alleyways throughout that disintegrating but multilaminous island down there, there were whole discreet worlds to be found like DNA clusters or nested microchips, belying their material limits. Ah well, the "real." He is coming to the end of a long life devoted intransigently to a pursuit of it, and, truth to tell, he still doesn't know what it is. All he knows is that, whatever it is, he is in it. And soon won't be

"Some years later," his companion goes on, swigging from the flask, "I went away for a while. I was pretty old by this time, and suffering from mange and anemia and buboes and crotch rot and delirium tremens and all kinds of depressing shit, I couldn't even get it up anymore, I was just a useless fucked-up old boozer, sick at heart, jerking off limply at the world's keyhole. Napoleon came here then, just walked in and kicked my miserable hemorrhoidal butt around like he owned it, and nobody gave a moldering fig, not even me. Then he took me off to Paris for a while. And, though I hate to admit it, I had a pretty good time…" The old Lion tips back the bottle, finishes it off, tosses it into the black waters of the canal, belches resonantly. "When I got back, this place looked different somehow, shriveled up, tackier, fucking pathetic really. It was never ever the same after that." He lifts one paw and scratches himself ruefully between his hind legs, making a sound like bricks rubbing and clattering against one another, a sound that rebounds thinly from the wall across the softly plashing water, dimly lit by the single dull yellow bulb above. Drifting down the canals toward them now with the wisps of cold fog as though carried on them come, faintly, the distant sounds of Carnival: music, laughter, whistles, horns, shouts, drumbeats, sirens. Then they fade away again. He stares at the little arched bridge a few meters up the canal from them as though to see the sounds lingering there, but there is only a bleak dark silence. Did his puppet friends get away, he wonders. Or…? He is afraid to consider the alternatives. "And now, shit, I'm nothing but an emasculated flea-bitten old clown, I know that. A fucking joke, too old to merit another telling. Hrmff. Still got my figure though. Eh? Wurrp! Damn right! Not worth the dingleberries on a stray cat's ass, but I'm still something to look at!"

When they got back to the Palazzo, the three servants having unstrapped him from the Count's giant penis and carried him gingerly up to his apartments, they found a glass coffin in the hallway outside his rooms, the rooms themselves stripped of his personal possessions, and a wizened Third World monarch, still wearing his crown, sleeping in his bed. They poked and prodded the ancient potentate but he seemed to be brain dead, so Buffetto and Francatrippa, peeling off their human masks to reveal themselves as his old Gran Teatro dei Burattini colleagues Brighella and Capitano Spavento del Vall'Inferno, dragged the royal person out onto the floor, while Colombina, whose head had popped up to replace Truffaldino's severed one, prepared now to remake the bed. "Yes, it's me, dear Pinocchio!" she laughed when she saw him staring up at her. "One of my most successful roles ever, though it hasn't been easy! I had a hard time keeping the Director from grabbing at something that wasn't there!" And she lowered her breeches to show him her hard hairless pubis, slightly cracked, knocking on it — bok! bok! — with her wooden fist. "Come in!" Brighella shouted ("In emergencies, I had to use everything from clothespins to broom handles!" Colombina was laughing), and the Captain muttered ominously: "Cazzo! Il tristo nominato e visto!"

"What are you doing, you idiots?!" screamed Eugenio, storming in in his disheveled Queen of the Night costume, no doubt red-faced under all the smeared paint. "Why is His Royal Puissant Majesty lying on the floor in his nightshirt? Are you mad?! I come back to powder my nose and freshen my lipstick and what do I find — ?!"

"Easy, easy, direttore," urged Brighella, hastily pulling on his noseless Buffetto mask. "There was someone in the professor's bed — "

"Of course there was someone in his bed, you cretinous scoundrel! He doesn't live here anymore!"

"No? But then — ?"

"Traitor!" the abused pilgrim squawked feebly from where he lay. "Monster — !"

"What? Ah, so there you are, Pini! How on earth did you get here, dear boy? I couldn't believe my eyes! There you were, in the middle of the crowded Piazza, quite the center of attention, and then suddenly a puff of smoke and: vanished! Into thin air! I thought they must have eaten you up! How ever did you manage that?"

"Murderer! See… what you have done… to me — !"

"What's that? Speak up, Pini," Eugenio complained, turning to primp in a gold-framed mirror, "I can't hear a word you say! As for your room here, if that's what you're mumbling about, I regret to say, your credit has run out, dear old chum, and I must ask you to leave. No hard feelings — "

"Run out — ? Credit — ?"

"Yes, credit — did you think it was Cuccagna around here? In the real world, things cost money, my dear, as a Nobel Prize-winner you should at least know that much!

"But all my savings — !"

"Your bank accounts are as empty as a Venetian well, your credit cards are used up, your properties sold or seized, your royalties bequeathed to, eh, charity, there's simply nothing left."

"My retirement funds…?"

"Tsk tsk. I am afraid they're gone, too, Pini. You've been a very expensive guest!"

"You took even my — ?!"

"Everything, carino mio. I am nothing if not thorough, as the Little Man himself would have told you long ago." Applying fresh ruby red lipstick, Eugenio puckered his lips in the mirror and winked coyly at himself. "And, please, I didn't take those little baubles, you forgetful old thing, you gave them to me. Still," he added, adjusting his wig, then turning away from the mirror and snapping his purse shut, "for old time's sake, if you stop fussing, I will let you stay on one more night. I'm certainly not coming home tonight, I'm having the most delicious time, so you or this grand imperial nabob here may use my rooms for the time being, whichever one of you promises to be continent. "

"But — but what about tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow is a lifetime away, amor mio. We will take off our shoes, as we say here, when we come to the water! Those of us who still have them, that is. Now, now, don't put on such a face! I do love you, you know. And just to prove it, I have a little present for you! You there without the nose! Go to the library immediately and bring me what you find there on the Cinquecento papal secretary! Snap to it, you unsightly rogue!"

Almost before he had left, Brighella/Buffetto was back, cradling an all-too-familiar portable computer. "That's mine!" the old scholar croaked as the puppet-servant set it on his old writing table by the window. "You've — you've had it all the time!"

"Have I? Well, how should I know?" snapped Eugenio petulantly, turning away from the window where he had been throwing kisses and hallooing in his teasing falsetto to someone down in the Piazza below. "I buy and sell things all the time, that's what I do. I can't keep up with all the details! Now, really, I must get back to my party. We only live once, you know! Be a good fellow and don't disturb the other guests! And get something on, dear boy, you look a fright!"

"Wait! The — my student — how did — ?"

"Ah, sorry about that, Old Sticks. I'm afraid she stood you up."

"No! I mean, what did she — did you — ?" But Eugenio, with a flamboyant swish of his brocade skirts and jangling his jewelry like little beggars' bells, was gone, squealing: "Here I come, you naughty boys, ready or not!"

So he would not know. Perhaps he did not want to know. Knowledge, he has written somewhere, leads to the abyss. Knowledge is the abyss. How proud he had been to take that notorious path and, beating his breast for all to see, to walk the perilous rim, failing to perceive the true abyss opening up behind him with every footstep he took! One look back, and — !

And, well, here he was.

On his writing table sat the most recent instrument of his own daily acts of self-deception and — destruction. The very sight of it filled him suddenly with an indescribable loathing, a hatred of what Eugenio had done to him, of what he had done to himself, and of his long wretched life so wrongfully spent. Feeble as he was, he lurched to his feet, desiring to reach the thing, and it was then that he discovered his feet were gone. The clatter he made on the marble floor alarmed the puppets.

"Ahi! Be careful, dear Pinocchio! You're splintering!"

"There's not much holding you together!"

"It's the climate, you know! You must — !"

"Take me… over there!" he gasped.

"What? To your table?"

"You wish to write, dear friend?"

"You should be in bed!"

"Now! Please! While I'm still able…"

Reluctantly, Colombina rolled his leather swivel chair over to the table and Brighella and Captain Spavento set him in it, propping him up tenderly with goose-down pillows as they'd always done. "Great artists must always work when inspiration strikes them, I suppose," Colombina said dubiously, pulling a blanket off the bed to tuck around his shoulders. It took every last ounce of strength left him, but, summoning up all his rage to assist him in the final thrust (it didn't help that the infernal chair was on casters), he managed to push the computer out the open window, feeling as he did so the weight of a century lift from his frail weather-beaten shoulders.

"Free at last!" he rasped bitterly.

There was a sickening k-thuck! sound and then screams and shouts rose up from the square below. Oh no. He had forgotten about the Carnival crowds. He gripped, gripped by dread, the sill and, wishing not to see what he feared he must see, pulled himself forward to peek over, the three puppets squeezing around him to gape over his shoulder. At first he thought he had struck a woman. There at the mouth of the little underpass beneath his window, she lay lifeless, limbs outflung, wearing the fallen computer like a large square cartoon head. But then he recognized the tender butterball knees splayed out beneath the tossed brocaded skirts, the plump bejeweled hands. Blood pooled out richly around the computer, as though the Piazza were flooding from below. This time there was no mistake, Eugenio was as dead as he could be.

"Che colpo di scena!" whooped Brighella. "And what a shot!" The other two were already down the stairs, running to join in the festivities erupting around the body. Il Zoppo was down there, attempting celebrative back flips that were more like lanky pratfalls, and also the Madonna of the Organs and Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo and all his bizarre retinue, the Count tipping back his mask and laughing the fierce strident laugh of the Venetian Lion-Planter, Pantalone the Magnificent. His monumental phallus was slit open by Colombina and Captain Spavento, just arriving, and out popped Pierotto, Lelio, and Diamantina, while other Burattini emerged from the costumed entourage, leaping and dancing wildly. "Viva Pinocchio!" they shouted. "He has saved our lives!"

Their presumptive hero, however, was not celebrating. He was weeping grievously, head drooped over the sill as though on the, block. "Oh Eugenio, Eugenio!" he sobbed. "What have I done? Get up, Eugenio! This is not why I came here! Damn you! You mustn't die!"

The Madonna of the Organs took off her mask and wig, and the figure inside, the huge bearded maskmaker Mangiafoco, tipped his hairy head to one side and, peering up at the palazzo window, his eyes blazing as though with an inner fire, asked: "Who is that little woodenpate filling the air with sighs and watering the ground with his tears? Eh?" They might well be the last tears he would ever shed, already he could feel the tear sacs drying up, perhaps he should save them, he thought, things might get worse, but he could not stop them from flowing, it was like a wound that could not be stanched. "Yes, Pinocchio! Why?" the puppets cried. "After all he has done to you?"

"I–I don't know! I c-can't help it!" he bawled, feeling ashamed of his answer, his tears, his uncertainties, and of his very shame all at once. It was as bad as when he found himself in old Giangio's stable, crying like a mooncalf over a dying donkey. "He was a schoolmate of mine! And — and now he is dead!"

"Ah well," laughed Mangiafoco toothily, spreading wide his arms costumed in the pale likeness of flesh, "but that, signorino, is the very nature of our comedy here — !"

"Wait!" Pantalone cried out, beaked nose high as though testing the air, gray beard bristling. "Listen!"

Sirens wailed distantly. Beyond the Molo blue lights flashed. "It's the carabinieri! They're on the way!" "La madama!" "What do we do now?!" "We must rescue Pinocchio!" "He saved our lives, it's the least we can do!" "But how? They'll be here before we can even get him out of the palazzo!" "They're already at the Ponte della Paglia!" "They're coming down from Santa Maria Formosa!" "We're surrounded!" "They're at the Bocca! All is lost!" "Ahi! Ahi! Poor Pinocchio!" "Who will save him now — ?!"

Whereupon began that heavy overhead flopping now no less familiar to him than the smell of the lagoon, as the Winged Lion of Saint Mark, for the second time, flew down to save his life, if his present condition could be so generously labeled. And this time, tossed out the window by Brighella onto the great beast's glossy back instead of into its jaws, without the torment of the creature's lethally fetid breath. Which, nevertheless, nestled here now on the Fondamenta del Teatro in the old fellow's pebbly mane, he has to admit he finds somehow less odious than before. Of course, the grappa probably helps.

"Helps — ?"

"Your halitosis."

"My drinking grappa does?"

"No, my drinking it."

"Well, hrmff," grumps the old fellow, a bit miffed but with that sour, melancholic dignity that marks his character, "for centuries the citizens here fucked one another over by stuffing my mouth full of anonymous accusations. A shitty diet like that, what can you expect?"

The ghostly bulb overhead, casting no more light than a glowworm, barely illuminates the munched bricks in the wall right beside it, much less the little elbowed platform down here whereon, like cornered fugitives, they huddle, the dark wet walls and mazy canals beyond lost in an impenetrable darkness, yet he has the distinct impression that something large and secretive is moving now under the nearby bridge. The old Lion notices it, too. "Che cazzo — ?!" he rumbles, flexing his clattery wings and beginning, slowly, boozily, to rise. The large dark shapes, darker than the darkness behind them, sway and bob furtively, moving slowly this way with the soft treacherous sound of rustling leaves. Then, like a dead man's hand reaching from its coffin, the silvery beak of a gondola emerges from beneath the bridge, followed by a second, and then a third. The occupants still are hidden in the shadows of the arched bridge, but, unless his ancient eyes deceive him, the ashen figure standing at the prow of the lead gondola, sightless and bloodied, broader than he is tall, one hand at his breast, or breasts, the other pointing accusingly straight at him, is Eugenio.

28. THE FIELD OF MIRACLES

"Porca Madonna!" whispers someone at his side, as, drawn up together, they stare in awe at the ghostly little campo, eerily lit by the single blue bulb hanging in the mists above. "Am I dreaming?"

In the middle of the softly undulating campo, where a wellhead might otherwise be, stands a strange tree, no larger than a leggy Tokai Friulano grapevine, leafed with crumpled thousand-lire notes and plastic credit cards and bearing clusters of silvery coins that glitter like lapis lazuli in the spectral blue light, though the sound they make is not so much the zin-zin-zin of his childhood fantasy as the kunk-kunk-kunk of old postwar leaden coins, the credit cards and dog-eared banknotes, ruffled by the cold damp breeze, adding a listless continue of futter-futter-ffpussh to the blurry plunking.

The gondolas are already perilously overladen with treasures looted from the Palazzo dei Balocchi, but the lure of the mysterious money tree is irresistible, and soon the ancient anthropoid emeritus is alone once more, as his companions scramble up the broad watersteps to gather in cautious amaze around the luminous spectacle. He peers up through the blue mist at the sign engraved on the crumbling brick wall above him and sees: CAMPO DEI MIRACOLI. So here he is again. The Field of Miracles. It looks a bit different from the time he last saw it, returned then to search in vain for the gold pieces he had, with an innocence that shames him still, buried here. It has been paved over for one thing, though it is still as washboardy as a harrowed field. And it seemed larger and wilder to his childish eyes, he doesn't remember the pretty fog-masked Renaissance houses crowding in across the square from him or even the little church here by the watersteps with its façade of precious inlaid porphyry and marble, iridescent as mother-of-pearl, but then, what did he care about such things then, artless little gonzo that he was? In the lunette above the closed paneled doors of the church, a pensive stone Virgin gazes down at her naked baby, who seems to be pointing, amused, or perhaps alarmed and about to cry, at the even more naked figure hunched, trembling, in the gondola below, singling him out for reproach in much the same way that Eugenio, to his terror, seemed to be doing a few moments ago.

When he'd first seen the ashen bloodstained ex-Director of Omini e figli, S.R.L., floating toward him out of the mists, his pointing finger raised in angry denunciation, he'd hardly known what to think. He'd seen Eugenio dead, he had no doubt of that, this ghastly hollow-eyed apparition approaching him now could not be alive — and yet… Stripped of everything else, he feared his sanity might be going, too. And whatever else it meant, he was sure, as he shrank back into the rough mane of his growling companion there on the little gloomily lit fondamenta, that his own retribution was at hand.

The outstretched arm bent stiffly at the elbow as the grim figure approached, and slowly the pointing finger rose to point directly overhead. "The devil teaches how to make the pot," intoned a hollow voice that seemed to come from the bottom of a well, Eugenio's painted scarlet lips moving slightly like a clumsy ventriloquist's, his face expressionless except for a tear glistening on one cheek, "but not, dear boy, the cover!" The empty eyes began to glow and rays of light emerged, beamed directly on the accused. "Murder will OUT!" The hand pressed to the costumed bosom swung out abruptly and the padded bodice slipped to the waist, then, as though by itself, popped back up again, the hand overhead dropping quickly to clamp it in place, the other hand flopping loosely for a moment, then rising steadily once more, elbow bent, until it covered the tearful face, extinguishing the beams of light. "No evil more terrible," bemoaned the echoey voice from behind the hand, "than to give an old friend such a bloody headache! It's a technological scandal! What good is a friend with an empty attic, not one turd of a brain in his bean?" As though to demonstrate the consequences of this condition (snorting sourly, the Lion of Saint Mark dropped his blunt snout back into his paws, and the escaped fugitive, too, felt the danger, if not the horror, pass), Eugenio's arms opened wide, the bodice plopped down and rose again, the hands waggled on their wrists, then the elbows angled upwards, the hands flopping loosely like laundry on a line, while the eyeless head rocked from side to side until it shook its wig off. One of Eugenio's thick white legs rose rigidly to one side, pushing against the brocaded skirt, and fell, then the other did the same. Then both legs rose straight up out of the gondola until the feet, still in their Queen-of-the-Night high-heeled shoes, were higher than the lurid head, hands falling limply between the fat thighs. "Piů in alto che se va," sang the voice, or voices, which now might have been coming from any part of the body, the flabby arms spreading apart like an opening curtain, "piů el cul se mostra!" This reprise of the familiar Gran Teatro dei Burattini Vegetal Punk Rock Band ballad was followed by clackety wooden applause from the other gondolas and the cadaver's sudden collapse, its animators Pierotto, Brighella, and Diamantina peering out from behind it to take their bows.

"Meat!" grumped Brighella in disgust, as he and Pierotto, Pierotto first plucking the crystal tear off Eugenio's face and putting it back on his own cheek, heaved the corpse into the canal. "It's got no style!" Then he sprang in one great leap from the gondola to the fondamenta, followed by all the other members of the troupe, the laden gondolas left bobbing on their own, spilling into the canal loose Trecento artworks, silver goblets and golden candelabra, and there he led them all in a strutting, high-spirited, double-jointed celebration of woodenness. They scaled the wall of the theater, then fell from the roof on their backs, wept lugubriously in unison, broke into wild knee-slapping laughter, fanned at each other with wooden or imaginary swords, danced, somersaulted, bounced rigidly as though on hidden springs, pirouetted, walked on their hands and kicked their wooden heels together, flew through the air from kicks they gave one another, swaggered about stiff-legged and flat-footed, spouting Latin nonsense, then turned into potbellied hunchbacks one and all, competing with one another in a wind-breaking contest. Throughout all of this, Il Zoppo, somewhat handicapped, put on his/her own show, a kind of choral version of the other puppets' acts, weeping and laughing at the same time, farting in Latin, walking on Pulcinella's hands while strutting on Lisetta's feet, and falling down even as she/he was getting up. Finally the two of them formed a kind of arched bridge from fondamenta to near gondola over which the others hopped, skipped, tumbled, pranced, or leapt.

When they were all back in their gondolas, they turned to smile and wave up at him. "Come along, Pinocchio!" they cried. Captain Spavento maneuvered his gondola over to the watersteps so he could get in. "This house is played out! We're on our way to Rome!"

"Paris!"

"London!"

"Hollywood!"

"Look at all the loot we've got!"

"We're rich! We sacked the palazzo!"

"What parties we will have!"

"Anyway, we have no choice," said Brighella. "The carabinieri are right behind us."

"And are they mad!"

"Pantalone's wearing the Madonna's gash and stalling them with his stolen cazzo act!"

"They can't seem to find the corpus delicti either!"

"Ha ha!"

"But why didn't you laugh at our show, Pinocchio?" Lelio wanted to know. "We did that famous 'Dead Meat Lazzo' just for you!"

"It's one of the oldest routines in show business!"

"It's a real bitch, too!"

"Hardest puppet act there is!"

"Especially in a gondola!"

"He weighed a ton!"

"And the mask was too old and stiff. Maybe we should have left all that mucky stuff inside and used the whole head on a stick or something."

"No, no, it was great! Those flashlight eyes were fantastic!"

"I saw the lips move!"

"So why didn't you think it was funny, Pinocchio?"

"Maybe he's seen it too many times."

"Maybe he's not really one of us. Maybe he's still — "

"Of course he's one of us!" Colombina argued hotly. "He killed the Little Man, didn't he? He saved our lives! And he did it with style! He added to the repertoire! He invented a whole new lazzo! And look at him! Of course, he can't last long, the rot's too deep, the pith's gone, and even his knotholes have knotholes, but one of us? What else could the poor little splinter be? Oh, I know, Lelio, I heard you complaining about the fungal spores and woodworm and other infestations, that they might be contagious and all that, but since when do we abandon a brother in his extremity just to save our own bark? That's not show business! That's not being one of us!"

"Bravo!" exclaimed Lisetta from inside Il Zoppo's flies. "Clap for me, you cretin!" she called up to Pulcinella, who, clapping, said: "But he still doesn't want to come with us. He's just sitting there."

"Because he hasn't got any feet, peathead! Have you forgotten what it was like? Somebody give him a hand!"

"Hurry! They'll be here any minute!"

So he was lifted aboard one of the gondolas, the Winged Lion of Saint Mark turning down their offer to join them, accepting instead a handblown bottle full of centuries-old grappa from the pillaging of the Palazzo dei Balocchi as a farewell gift, and after many hugs and "Ciao!'s" they set off, the Lion flapping westward to misdirect their pursuers, the puppets heading east for open waters, dreaming aloud about the grand adventures that awaited them. Hardly had they begun, however, when, sliding out from under a low arched bridge, they came upon this little campo bathed in blue light with the money tree in the middle.

It means nothing to him. He has no illusions, no hopes, no plans. All eaten away. He's going nowhere, he knows, even though he cannot stay. Does he hear sirens? Perhaps. It doesn't matter. He slumps, shivering, in his tapestry-upholstered gondola chair, watching his shipmates encircle, wide-eyed and breathlessly, the strange tree, drawn to the idea of wealth rather than to the thing itself. After all, their gondolas are already full to overflowing with fabulous cargo from the sacked palazzo, now tumbling piece by piece from the rocking barks into the sludge of the canal to become part of what holds this whole preposterous caprice up, they hardly need expired credit cards and coins worth less than the metal in them. Fairy gold

Ah! The thought alarms him, waking him from the stupor into which, like this lagoon city, he had been irretrievably sinking. Is it possible? "My friends!" he croaks weakly. "Come back!"

But Lelio has already reached for a fat cluster of coins. There is a blinding flash as the unfortunate puppet goes up in flames, the tree disappears, and in its place, aglow in the pale blue light, stands a small tombstone with an inscription carved on it. Even before poor Lelio's ashes have settled, the puppets are back in the bobbing gondolas and grabbing madly at their oars, having lost half their plunder in the frantic reboarding.

"Wait!" whispers the former scholar, unable, even in such extremity, to break old habits. "Brighella — ?"

"No way, old friend! Did you see that?! We have to get our lumbar regions out of here!"

"Please…" If there is something to be read, he cannot but, fearful of missing a message, the message, read it. "That may be for me…"

Violent arguments break out among the frightened puppets and there is talk of abandoning him there with Lelio's ashes, but finally, Captain Spavento threatening to slice up anyone who disagrees into cheeseboards and drink coasters, his oldest friends prevail and he gets his way: they use his gondola chair as a makeshift portantina and, slapping sullenly back up the half-submerged watersteps, carry him in it to the center of the small campo. Afraid to stay alone back in the gondolas, the entire company joins them there, gathering in a tight little cluster behind him, staying close to the church as though for protection, muttering about the need to keep moving before the madama catches up with them and complaining about the sudden deadly chill in the air.

He leans forward and squints his eyes, but either the light is too dim or else too radiant. He can see the letters but he cannot make them out. "Come on, come on, old vice! Get on with it!" complains Diamantina, glancing apprehensively over her shoulder, then, with a demonstratively impatient grunt, she stoops down and, peering close, reads it out for him: " 'I shall forgive you this once more,' it says, 'but woe betide you if ever again you are… you are…' There's moss or dirt or some kind of shit growing there, I can't read it. It looks like 'nauseous,' 'if ever again you are nauseous,' but…" She reaches forward to rub away the dirt.

"No!" he squawks. "It says 'naughty!' Don't touch it — !"

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.