"Hee haw," he replies, meaning: Is that all there is, then, this monotonous dynamics of inclusion and extrusion, of presence and absence (of pretense and abscess, he is thinking, or perhaps the little wooden man, mocking him, is saying this), this timid seizure of shadows, this insensible shying from the edge, and what the wooden man responds is:
"The public, oh holy ass, is never wrong."
Ah well, the public, he brays in reply, struggling against donkey-brain takeover (sometimes, he remembers now, this happened to him in his real donkey days, a kind of sudden slippage, or displacement, as if from one room into another, a synaptic leap not easily reversible, each brain aware of the other only as the mattress and the pea could be said to be aware of each other in that story of the fastidious princess, an alarming though not altogether unpleasant metastasis provoked, often as not, by the erecting of that outsized dangle between his legs, which is back, he is amused to note, slapping his thighs animatedly as he plods along under his chattering burden, the topic from the saddle now being the Renaissance use of the ass motif as a prototypical theophanic icon: the reluctant gait a trigger of passionate spiritual response, the upright ears emblems of devotion and orthodoxy, and the haunches, radiant as halos, more emotionally reverberant than angels' wings — one of the portentous themes of his own brazen youth, he is quick to recognize), the public — the public is always dying on you!
"Ah, where would we be," sighs the man on his back, who has been growing heavier and heavier with the weight of his discourse, "without the script?" And, as though to pursue the inquiry, he flings it away from him, the sheets scattering and tumbling in the air like sinners at the Last Judgment. Though they have made little enough actual progress (the boat shed, he feels certain, is still nearby), they have maintained the illusion of it by passing — or being passed by — revolving stages with painted backdrops representing the scenes of his childhood: the Tuscan village where his carpenter father lived, his fairy mother's cottage in the woods, the city of paupers known as Fools' Trap where all who came there lost their hair and plumage and other valued parts, the infamous Toyland, though here labeled "Pleasure Island" and looking a bit dated, even the little hill and coastal towns he toured as a marionette and dancing donkey, all gleaming and decorous as the backgrounds in a Bellini altarpiece. Now, however, they have arrived, by way of a gated and treeless city on an arid plain, desolate as a Western ghost town (a film set, of course: watching cameras no doubt lurk, unseen, behind the ruined walls), at a massive marble rock, white as candle wax and rearing ominously into the intense azure sky above them like one of Paolo Veneziano's primitive crags. Has he been here before? Alas, unlike the scenes on the revolving backdrops, this one has not been tagged. Gone, it's all gone. Or going. He can't remember yesterday. He shouldn't have thrown away the script. "What's the point," he cries bitterly, "of all these strenuous accumulations, if we only, in the — "
"Don't," groans the withering beast between his legs, limping now as it labors up the impossible rise, "give away the ending !"
At the summit, he is met (the fatally lamed donkey has crumbled away, turning to dust beneath him like a doused witch, he has had to scrabble up the last sheer face, hand over hand, alone) by a bearded ape in the scarlet robes of an opera buffa judge who, excoriating him for arriving so late ("But my poor knees-!" he protests, unheard over the strings of the studio orchestra), condemns him in an aria not unlike a love song ("The Picture That Could Change Your Life" is its title) to be rolled in flour and crucified.
He turns to address the gathered multitudes ("Blessed are they who turn the other omelette!" he cries), but snarling gendarmes swarm over him, strip him of his imported finery, lather him up with flour paste, and dress him for the party in his tattered old suit of flowered wallpaper, with a silver sash bedizened with bright ribbons bound round his waist and white camellias tied to his ears. Children are invited up from the audience to hammer the nails in, some of whom he recognizes as old schoolchums, who take pleasure in reviling him in the old style, calling him a stick-in-the-mud, pencil-peter, and a woodenhead, pulling his nose, covering his paper suit with graffiti ("HOORAY FOR TOYS!" they scrawl, "DOWN WITH ARITHMETIC!"), and tying strings to his hands and feet to make him dance, as though he were still a puppet and without the dignity of flesh and history. This is what it means, he realizes in his suffering, to be, of anything, incarnate. The children are clumsy and impatient, driving nails in randomly, some crooked, others only halfway, sometimes missing the nails altogether and hammering his flesh, and complaining all the while about the hardness of his bones and the wood, solid holly, of the cross beneath, which keep bending the nails and making their little hands sting.
Finally, a charge against him bearing the inscription "THE STAR OF THE DANCE" is nailed over his head and, to the accompaniment of fifes and drums, the cross is levered erect into the posthole prepared for it, the very hole, he sees, that he once dug in the Field of Miracles to plant the gold coins as seed for his magical money tree, he now rising as his own fruit, as it were, all of this taking place in exquisitely painful slow motion (there are so many nails in him, he hardly sags at all) as though they were overcranking the scene for erotic effect. "Rispettabile pubblico, cavalieri e dame!" bellows a voice from below: "Your attention, please!" He feels dizzyingly high, almost face to face with the sun itself, yellow as a patty of polenta there in the brilliant blue sky blanketing him. "Oh babbo mio-!" he whimpers as though cued. "Direct from the burning mountains and savage highways of wildest America, we bring you now in living color, speaking loosely, our feature attraction, in a performance more thrilling than the deeds of man, more beautiful than the love of woman, more terrifying than the dreams of children- " the children hoot and holler delightedly at this and heave their hammers at him, "- the final stirring episode in the Passion of Pinocchio! You will see before your eyes the farewell dance of the world's most notorious bad boy, this improbable son of an impotent carpenter and a virgin fairy, baptized by a chamber pot and circumcised by woodpeckers, part flesh, part spirit, and a legend in his own lifetime! Right this way!"
"Looks like this time you have, to make a phrase, barked up the wrong tree, dottore," remarks, amid all the burlesque whistling and cheering, a sour voice at his side: it is La Volpe, still in her porter's costume — he has been hung in the middle, he discovers, between her and her blind Gattino, now cackling on his other side with senile laughter. "You got the short stick, as one might say, you're out on a limb — you are, in a word, up the pole!"
"Up the pole!" wheezes the Cat, covering his mouth with the stub of his right foreleg: he hangs by one paw only, an empty black glove nailed up on the other side. "In a in a ?"
"Word."
"Word! Hee hee hee!"
"You two seem cheerful enough," gasps the butt of their badinage in his transfixed pain, beginning to worry that the movie of his life might suddenly have turned into a documentary.
"Enh," shrugs the Fox, as best, in her own pinned state, she can shrug, "you get used to everything in this world, professore, familiarity breeds consent, as the saying goes, though I do miss being able, what with all my blebs and buboes, to scratch my tormented old arse. If perhaps you have a hand free — "
"Don't even listen to those bandits, Pinocchio!" warns a voice at his back. He twists around to seek out the source, but there is no one back there, just empty space, blue, vast, and inscrutable. "If you lend those scoundrels a hand, they'll steal it!"