(1991) Pinocchio in Venice by Robert Coover Read Free Book Online Page B

not walking either, it would be hard to say what he's doing, but he's picking them up and putting them down, all four of his wasted limbs at once and not in any special order, his head ducked for fear of having it snatched away, his torso bouncing along erratically like unwieldy luggage.
        But then he finds himself again in an open campo, probably one he has been in before, and though his mind is racing down the next alleyway, his body is on its knees. It just does not want to go any farther. He crawls dutifully ahead, carrying through in the old way, holding fast, hauling his resistant carcass through the snow like a dull plow, a thing heavier even than his abusive old father was the night he had to wrench the old brute, hallucinating wildly on grappa he had made from seaweed, fish eyes, and ship wreckage, and fermented in his erstwhile host's digestive juices, a grappa too good, he kept blubbering insistently, to leave behind, out of the giant fish's belly. Which is where he is again, swallowed up as one sucks up an oyster and waiting to be digested, only now his daddy's not here and there's no escape. He can hear his assassin flapping fiercely in the wind above him, circling round as though, at last, to pounce. Well, let it, whatever it is, come. He curls up against the wall. It is not the wall of the painted fire and steaming kettle, but it will have to do. He can go no further. His opus magnum will remain unfinished. Our worst fears, he thinks, are always justified. He is going to "sleep like the Pope" all right, but not the present one. Above him, what looks for all the world like a flying lion is thrashing about in the snowstorm, roaring lustily and batting the snow away from its eyes with its massive paws. But it may be his own dizziness, his poor sight, his indigestion which delivers to him this vision. "PAX TIBI - wurrp! - EXCREMENTUM MEUS!" the fiendish creature bawls: "Hic! - REQUIESCET CORPUS TUUM!" and, its great ghostly wings churning up the snowy air theatrically, it circles a bell tower once to commence its murderous descent.
        But then something quite unexpected happens. The winged monster dips and swerves erratically as though confused or blinded by the snow and (are its eyes crossed?) heads straight for the bell tower - or else the bell tower, which has been floating treacherously in and out of the whirling snow, sways suddenly and leans into the storm; from the stricken traveler's position in the nauseous pit of the orchestra, so to speak, it is hard to tell. The lion lifts its paws and spreads its wings, but too late: there is a thunderous earth-shaking ear-splitting clangor, followed by a frantic scattering of astonished pigeons, fleeing groggily from they know not what, the light fall of stone teeth and feathers upon the little campo, and a series of mighty reverberations that sound and resound through the frosty night as though a giant cymbal has been struck, a throbbing metallic clamor that seems to set all the bells in Venice ringing.
        Behind the repercussions rippling out into the night, the professor can hear, up in the campanile where the din was launched, a great moaning and puling and thick-tongued cursing in the Venetian dialect: ''You turd! Rotto in culo! Oh! Ah! I'm dying! You head of a prick! I piss in your mother's cunt! Oh, my head! My ears! Shut up, will you, sfiga di cazzo? By the leprous cock of Saint Mark, you asshole of God, I'll have you melted down and turned into souvenir gondolas! Where are my teeth - ?! Oh, you whore! I come on you, you sack of shit, on you and all your dead!" And then, head in its paws, tail adroop, the pale beast goes flapping off sorely into the night, growling its oaths and imprecations, disappearing into the blowing snow and the fading tintinnabulation of tolling bells.
        Left alone, the abandoned wayfarer, huddled miserably against the wall, accepts this melancholy tolling as his own knell. To be poised against fatality, to meet