"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) t
o 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 popp
ed 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?"