"I know. That's how it seemed to me at times. And I haven't told you everything, either." He offered the old watchdog a replying sigh, and mostly in gratitude, for her tongue seemed to have spread out and was lapping him all over now like a warm wet towel. "Whenever I was a bad boy, for example, she seemed to go limp and cold and fall down with her eyes rolled back. It was really scary!"
"Oci bisi, paradisi ," snorted Alidoro from between his thighs. "Remember that one, Mela? 'Gray eyes, paradise ' "
" 'Black eyes, hot romance ' "
" 'Blue eyes make you fall in love ' "
" 'White eyes make you shit your pants!' I know, I know — but how many times will it work? Once? Twice? This babau, this bugaboo, must have pulled her routine as often as she brushed her fangs. If I may say so, it seems to have taken you forever to eat the leaf, my friend!"
"I was a slow learner, Melampetta, as the world knows. But I'd suffered a lot of births and rebirths myself, I was used to the idea. I was a very lively piece of wood, you know, before the man I called my father — my primum mobile, as you might describe him — turned me into a puppet. Then the assassins hung me and the Fairy brought me back to life again. After that I became a dancing donkey and, when the fish ate all my donkey flesh away, I was reborn a puppet from the corpse, though naturally I'd hoped for something better."
"A dancing donkey! Do tell — !"
"Later, my father and I were delivered together from the belly of the monster fish, if that's what it was. Finally I died as a puppet and was reborn a boy. And now well, you can see, it might not be over yet "
"The 'miracle,' as a tourist here once defined it in a fine piece of Christian idiotology, 'of reborn ingenuousness,' a wonderful thing in principle no doubt, but you're like some kind of wind-up demonstration model. Round and round you go! Still I'm surprised you didn't get fed up finally with all this crazy vampire's pernicious horse-plop and just plant hut and puppets, if you'll pardon the expression, and walk out! Why didn't you send her to get fried?"
"Oh, I did grow to resent it, to resent her, Melampetta, I did walk out. I was a good boy, after all, obedient, hard-working, studious, truthful — but then what? I'd done everything I was supposed to do, I'd become a famous scholar and exemplary citizen, the whole world loved me, I felt I deserved to have a little fun. But whenever I let myself go a little, I'd see her tomb again: 'Here lies who died because ' I couldn't get rid of it, it was worse than athlete's foot, and it ruined everything. Why did I want a boy's body in the first place, I began to wonder, if I couldn't use it? So I tried to run away again. This time to Hollywood — "
"Ah, Hollywood!" rumbled Melampetta, moving eagerly toward his nipple, which she circled playfully with her tongue. "Here comes the good part!"
"Not so good as all that," he replied, flushing with shame. "I suffered a kind of relapse out there, I even became a bit reckless " His heart gave a little regretful leap under his breast which Melampetta was swabbing, and his nose began to itch in admonishment. "I became something of an ass again, another sort of well Until one day " And he told them then about his revelation, his sudden quite stunning perception that the Blue-Haired Fairy was not alive and pretending sometimes to be dead, but was truly dead, only pretending sometimes, when he helped her, to be alive. "It was not she who had given me a place in the world, you see, but I who had called her into being!" This explained the way she first appeared to him, her sinking spells, her desperate messages: goodness, she was trying to tell him, could die in the world. It was not an absolute, not a given, but something that got re-created from day to day, from moment to moment, by living and dying men. Either they kept it alive or it disappeared. Maybe even forever. "It gave me a mission. Her power was really my power, I had but to exercise it. 'I-ness,' I called it in a famous essay: the magical force of good character. My virtue, I felt, my decency, my civility, my faithfulness, might save the world!"
"Oh my !" Both tongues were sloshing around in his groin now. "Aren't we the little Redeemer!"
"Or if I couldn't manage that," he has added, somewhat abashedly, "there were always the tombstones waiting to be done "
"Whew, I haven't had such a workout since my last litter, bless their long-forgotten little hearts!" Melampetta exclaims now, panting heavily. "I think I have some idea now how John the Baptist felt, coming up for air amid the repentant multitudes after loosening all their laces, as he liked to put it: 'You have to swallow the toad,' said he, speaking about knowledge, of course, that bitter pill, 'to shit pearls'! Or as Jesus himself, that notorious pearl-pooper, once declared, shouting out over the screams of the rich man he was trying to thread through the eye of a needle, this not being one of his better numbers: 'Hey, compagni, you can't suck an egg without making a hole!' So don't hide your recklessness and edifying relapses under a bushel, my venerable friend, don't skip over the beastly bits — the seen, as they say in Hollywood, separates us from what we long to see! Let's hear about the donkey days!"
"Ah, the donkey days ! It's been so long, I can barely "
"That's right, barely and baldly, it's the naked truth we want, the unvarnished reality! Veritas in puris naturalibus — !"
"Scusa, Melampiccante, old suck, but I think this side's about done "
"What? Oh yes, Alindotto, you're right, it's time to turn the spit and baste the other one — be careful, though, the little duck's as brittle as croccante and flaking like puff pastry!" They straighten his legs and tuck his arms in, then gently ease him over: "That's it — like folding an omelette!" Melampetta urges, her sudden rash of culinary metaphors no doubt betraying the effort to work up an appetite for the awesome feast she is about to face. He shudders to think of the spectacle he must now, in his procumbent attitude, present to his friends' eyes — and other senses ("He's shivering, Lido, go put some more wood on the fire!") — but at the same time, while being rolled, he's caught a glimpse of the snow falling thickly through the night sky outside their humble shelter, and it is as though the magical glow it seems to cast upon everything has fallen upon him as well, for he feels suddenly an intense flush of warmth penetrating his entire body: this is what it is like (the fire is crackling, the two dogs are nuzzling his thighs apart) to be among true friends! He had nearly forgotten. Junior faculty may be attentive, but rarely like this. "Aha, I think we've reached the font, Alidrofobo, you faithful old blister," Melampetta mutters (there is a cold nose poking at his rectum, perhaps more than one), "that which Aristotle the Wise termed in his treatise on The Classification of Dejecta the effervescent cause. We are at the source, the wellspring, the root, the core — or what the divine Duns Scrotum, confronted with the preserved contents of the Virgin's placenta, called in his nausea 'the very stone of the scandal,' the ultima realitas entis. We are, insomma, if I am not mistaken, at the drippings. So, will you taste the soup please?"
"My pleasure," grunts the old mastiff with gruff simplicity, "it just does for me."
"Mmm. Al dente. Though maybe we've let him lie in the sawdust too long."
"Careful. Shoulder blades look a bit dodgy "
"Yes, I see." She laps around one, stroking his neck and the back of his bald pate with her broad stroke ("The hairs of your head are indeed numbered, comrade," she murmurs in his ear, "and the number is zero!"), and slides her velvety tongue down his crenellated spine, pushing at the knots, stiffens her tongue to prod at the small of his back, then slips on down the crack to the gap between his thighs like a skier on a downhill run, curls up around one thigh, and, as though congratulating herself or getting her wind back, laps generously at his near cheek. As she does so, he has a dim fleeting recollection of being combed and curried, back when he was still a performing donkey and being readied for a show, an experience so comforting it nearly reconciled him to his unnatural life, a life indeed more like a dream than waking life, and so all but lost now to his living memory "You know, I can understand humans wanting to tart themselves up a bit," Melampetta pants. "I mean, I wouldn't mind a little lace shawl or some beads myself, if ever some whoreson should offer me such baubles — naked we're only cute for a day and after that we need all the help we can get. But why people leave all their other orifices gaping, then cover their assholes up in this cumbersome tailoring is beyond me."