And so he did, starting from the beginning ("It all began," he began), when, one terrifying night, running from murderers, he came upon a snow white house set in the deep dark woods and, knocking frantically with feet, fists, and head, aroused a little girl with sea-blue hair and a waxen white face who would have been quite beautiful had she not been completely dead. She couldn't open her eyes, much less the door, so the two assassins caught him and, after shattering a couple of knives on his hardwood torso, hung him from an oak tree, where, after crying for his daddy, he died. "I still have nightmares about it," he told them, succumbing gradually to the rhythm of their lapping tongues. "I was up there for hours, blowing about like a bell-less clapper, till at last my neck broke and my joints locked up and my nose went stiff. And all the while that dead girl was watching me with her eyes closed, don't ask me how I know this, but it's true." Eventually, eyes wide open and grinning like old Maestro Ciliegia on a toot, she staged an elaborate rescue with a bunch of circus animals and some crazy doctors (he has a vivid memory of waking briefly inside an airy coach padded with canary feathers and lined with if whipped cream and custard, and thinking, in his unredeemed puppetish way, that Heaven was a sticky place that made him queasy, and he hoped they'd let him out soon), but why, he wondered, even as he described it for his friends, praising the Fairy for her ingenuity and her amazing remedies ("She brought me back to life again!"), did she wait so long?
Well, of course, she was just a little girl. This was the happy time. She was as capricious as he. They played doctors together, jokes on one another, house. They took rides on her birds and animals. She let him poke his nose in her long blue hair. He showed her how he could kick his own head, front, back, or sideways. She laughed at the wooden knock it made and showed him how she could turn her head all the way around seven times in the same direction without getting a crick in her neck; he managed only three before feeling all twisted up inside, but deliciously dizzy when he unwound. It was the most fun he ever had in his life, not even Toyland or Hollywood came close. She wanted him to stay and be her little brother, she even said she'd fetch his father, which somehow pleased him and displeased him at the same time. But it was too good to last. His trials, as it turned out, had just begun. He was dragged off to Fools' Trap by the Fox and the Cat to bury his money in the Field of Miracles, and then years went by, or what were probably years. He was still a puppet then and didn't know much about time. Except that it had something to do with beginnings and endings, this he found out when, after innumerable misadventures, he finally made his way back to where her cottage had been and found nothing but a tombstone with an inscription saying that the little girl with the azure hair had "died of sorrow on being abandoned by her little brother Pinocchio." "It nearly broke my heart. I tried to tear my wooden hair out. That was before I had real hair, of course. Now that's gone, too. I was so proud of it. Hair made me feel so human. But it all fell out. First, from my head, then from my chest and armpits, and and on down " Only on his feet is something still growing, and that probably isn't hair. Nor are they really, at root, his own feet.
The Fairy wasn't dead, of course. She who had taught him never to lie had lied, and not for the first or last time. Yet he accepted that. All part of his personal via crucis as he lightheartedly called it, though never in print. And, in a sense, she had died, for he never saw her as a little girl again. When next they met, here on the Island of the Busy Bees, she was suddenly old enough to be his mother, while he was still just a puny puppet. He didn't understand this. She pretended it was some kind of magic. Maybe it was, but he hated to get left behind. When he recognized her, he knelt and hugged her knees, and she gave him a glimpse of a possible future, more than one: he had to choose. Though his motives might have been mixed (there was something heady about having his nose there between her big tender knees), he chose boyhood, which meant he had to pass his examinations at school. But his classmates, hating him for the square peg he was, lured him to the beach and tried, as they put it, to knock his block off. Someone threw his own arithmetic book at him: it missed and struck down poor Eugenio, and the police came and arrested him for the crime. "That was when I met you, Alidoro. You chased me when I ran away."
"Yeah, we really tore up the landscape! When I was a pup, they trained me by making me chase a stick. I must've got carried away by your smell and lost my compass, nearly lost my life when you took to the water. I forgot I didn't know how to swim. Never did get the hang of it "
"Wait a minute," said Melampetta, licking the hairless hollow of his armpit, "let me get this straight — "
"Careful! My ribs — !"
"Yes, I see. Some exhibit, you are, old fellow! You're like one of those mythical inside-out creatures mentioned by Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia in his postural studies of metempsychotics. They could use you as a foldout in an anatomy book. But, listen, do you mean to say that this fairy with the weird locks who liked to keep a magical menagerie and play spooky games with little boys — "
"Puppets "
"Yes, well, like turning houses into tombstones and playing dead and conjuring up pallbearers and corpses and other such ectoplastic doodlings — do you mean to say that she gave all this up to pack school lunches and do the laundry, pick up toys and give baths — ?"
"Actually, she oiled me down "
"She abandoned fairyhood to be a mamma — ?!"
"Well, my mamma. It seemed to be something she had to do. Though later of course she changed into a goat."
"A goat "
"Yes. With blue fleece. That's how I knew it was her."
"Madonna! And udders hanging down the size of a theosophist's behind, no doubt?"
"She stood on a white rock in the middle of the sea trying to stop me from getting sucked up into the maw of the monster fish. Or maybe leading me into it, I couldn't be sure. It was the last time I saw her. Alive, that is "
"She died? Again?!"
"Well, she just became something else." How could he explain this? That, in effect, she became the house he lived in, the social order he embraced, even, in a sense, the universe itself at its most ineffable, its most profound "But before that, I found out she was dying in hospital, too poor to buy a crust of bread. I sent her all my money. Everything I had. And with that she came to me at last sort of It was in a dream " He was feeling very dreamy right now. Alidoro was tonguing vigorously the insides of his thighs as though to urge them back to youth again, while Melampetta was sliding up and down between hip and armpit with long soothing strokes, carefully circling the sore spots, making him feel almost like a ship at sea, awash in an airy foam. "It was beautiful "
"I don't know," sighed Melampetta. "All this melancholical hello and goodbye, all this gruesome hide-and-seek over an open grave, tombstones popping up like mushrooms — it sounds to me like either she was trying to cork up your ass with a motherlode of guilt, my dear Pinocchio, or else she had a terrific scam going."