"Well, at least your life has not been in vain for nothing!" the comedian exclaims with insolent bravado, as though egged on by the raucous crowd. He seems brash as a child yet ancient at the same time, his features beardless yet furrowed with grimaces and depravity, marred by warts and pockmarks and an enflamed carbuncular growth on his forehead, and with two deep wrinkles standing arrogantly, harshly, almost savagely between his bushy brows, like something out of a repressed nightmare. "Hee ha! Isn't it wonderful!" he brays, launching a little bowlegged dance around the wastebin, the professor shrinking into his trash bag and solacing himself with the thought, which in his feverish misery he only half believes, that at least — surely — nothing worse can happen to him now. "Tutti quanti semo mati / Per quel buso che semo nati!'' the clown warbles out in a squeaky falsetto, rolling his eyes roguishly as he hops about. "It's crazy how we're all inflamed / By that little hole from which we came!"
But why is he surprised? For didn't the Blue-Haired Fairy warn him? "Puppets never grow up," she said, wagging her finger at him all those years ago. "They are born puppets, live puppets, die puppets!"
"Yes, well, dummy, that's show business! But do you mean to say — ?!"
What a terrible oracle! He'd thought she was presenting him with an alternative, a moral choice; she'd merely been pronouncing sentence upon him!
"Hey now, here's a song and it isn't long: 'He who doesn't die in the cradle, / Will suffer for it sooner or later!' Hah! Who says there are no poets in Venice? Yes, at the end of the day, we're all just clay, give or take a sliver or two — we all bough down to the curse of events, you can't stave it off, speaking figuratively! So nothing to do, cavalieri e dame, but show a little spunk, as we say in the charade trade, brace up and stick it out as best you can, and let the chips fall where they may! But now tell me, old man," the entertainer murmurs, peering closer, the frown between his sunken eyes deepening, "what did you mean when you said — ye gods! Am I dreaming or ?" And — ka-POK! — he butts him suddenly in the head.
O babbo mio! I am dying! There is loud laughter and shouting all around him, but the old traveler can hear it only intermittently through the reverberant clangor in his hammered head. What is this insane monster doing — ?! "Oh please!" he wheezes, but this time no one hears him. "Help — !"
"It might be ," muses the clown, leaning back, and then — WHAACK! — bangs heads again, hammering him brutally with the very knob of his carbuncle.
"Abi! o povero me!" yelps the professor, whimpering in the old style, his head reeling, his eyes losing their focus. "Ih! ih! ih! " And the jester cries: "It COULD be "
And then, even before the next blow comes, the distant memory returns and the old scholar recognizes his adversary — not an adversary at all of course but once his most beloved friend — a memory repressed to be sure, but not of a nightmare: rather of what was perhaps — before the glory of being human, that is, and all that shameful past was put behind him — the happiest night of his life! Pa-KLOCKK!
"It IS! It IS! Pinocchio! It's PINOCCHIO!"
"Arlecchino!" he gasps, his eyes still spinning around in his ringing head. Did he used to do this for fun? "My-my friend! Ow! Oh! It's you!"
"Pulcinella! Pantalone!" Arlecchino shouts across the campo, leaping up and down like a mechanical frog. "It's Pinocchio! Colombina! Our dear brother Pinocchio is here! Flaminia! Brighella! Capitano!"
"What — ?!" cry the musicians of the rock band, dropping their instruments with an amplified clatter and bounding down off the stage. "Pinocchio — ?! Can it be — ?!"
And he is suddenly engulfed in a great commotion as they swoop down upon him, everyone kissing him and hugging him and giving him friendly head-butts and pinches and all talking at once — "It is! It is really he!" "It's our brother Pinocchio!" "Evviva Pinocchio!" "Lift him out of his hamper there!" "Who has done this to him?" "Oh dear Pinocchio! Come to the arms of your wooden brothers!" "Give us a kiss, love!" "Easy! The damp seems to have got to him!" "Why have you been tormenting him so, Arlecchino? Our own brother!" "He saved your life!" "I didn't recognize him, he's been smeared with all this funny makeup!" "That's human flesh, you imbecile!" "Pinocchio, how did it happen?" "Why did you leave us?" "It's been so long!" "Careful, Brighella, don't drop him!" — and, trailing a litter of paper bags, old vaporetto tickets, and unspooled cassette tapes, he is lifted out of the trash basket, hoisted upon their shoulders, and paraded triumphantly around the campo, the puppets recovering their instruments and striking up a gay-spirited circus march quite unlike the pounding headachy noises they were making before. As they pass by the stage, the professor sees above it the psychedelically painted canvas he could not read before: GRAN TEATRO DEI BURATTINI. "That's us!" cries Pulcinella below his left buttock. "Welcome, dear Pinocchio, to the Great Puppet Show Vegetal Punk Rock Band!"
14. GRAN TEATRO DEI BURATTINI
"I want you stick to me, Pinocchio," Arlecchino rasps fiercely from beneath his stiff upper lip as he drags him off the back of the stage and down into the terrified crowds, "like shit to a shovel!"
"But my knees! I can't even — !"
"Don't argue, friend! This is serious!"
Just like a puppet. Doesn't understand the limits and hazards of human flesh. Il Dottore, as his fellow musicians now call him, knows it's serious. He can smell the bonfires. He can hear the screams. He knows what happened to the last Dottore. He's frightened, too. But he still can't move. Shifting his body is like moving a refrigerator or a heavy log: he has to tip it from side to side, rock it forward all in one piece, every inch costs him almost unbearable pain and effort. And at the same time he's so frail, the tiniest jolt sends him spinning off in another direction, making him feel like one of those airy little balls in a whirling lottery basket, a walking (speaking loosely) paradox. So, inevitably, they are separated, shit and shovel. The metaphor was all too apt. Shit always gets left behind. He can hear Arlecchino shouting for him through the awesome pack-up, but the shouts grow more and more distant. He tries to shout back, but he keeps wheezing and coughing instead. The smoke is getting in his eyes and tearing at his throat, aggravating the itching there. He is being stepped on, elbowed, crushed between frantic bodies, kneed and pushed, they can't see him down here. He longs for the relative safety of the rubbish bin. Though those too, he can see, are being tipped over and flattened by the panicky mob. He strikes out for the awning of a greengrocer's stall, hoping for a refuge there, but it disappears before he can reach it. "Striking out" is perhaps not quite the expression: most of the time his feet are not even touching the ground. But he manages to stay afloat in the human flood, one of his more conventional talents, even if he remains somewhat below the surface.
The last Dottore, he's been told, was taken apart stick by stick. The band's been outlawed, its members condemned, they're on the run, and the Dottore, too fat to run, got caught. The carabinieri were trying to get him to talk which was of course like inviting the hare to run, as Pulcinella put it, only they could not understand his garbled Latin, whoever could, so finally they had to torture him to stop him talking. Even as he was edifying his captors with his celebrated at iam gravi lecture about the wounded Queen and her raw sausages, they snapped the old philosophaster's limbs in two, split up the chunkier bits with hammer and chisel, then, with his own strings, tied all the pieces up in his big hat and shipped the lot off to Murano glassblowers for kindling. "But now you can be our new Dottore!" Flaminia exclaimed gleefully, meaning no irony at all, as they propped him up in front of the electronic keyboard, the newest member of the Gran Teatro dei Burattini Vegetal Punk Rock Band. "But I'm no musician!" he protested. "Neither are we!" they laughed. "Look! It's easy! Just hit this! Now this!" Arlecchino guided his hands and from the stiff poke of his fingers, frozen into gnarled little claws, vast sounds suddenly rocked the campo. "Now just keep repeating that!" The others picked up their instruments and gathered around him on the stage, improvising raucously upon his little phrase (which sounded suspiciously to him like "When You Wish Upon a Star"), electric guitars and theorbos, harmonicas, tambourines, flutes, lutes, and a set of amplified drums responding thunderingly to the touch of the virtuoso Burattini. Pi-pi-pi! they went. Zum-zum-zum! They made the whole square shake and tremble. It was fun, in a dizzying and anarchical sort of way, like the old days in Mangiafoco's mercurial puppet theater, and their friendship, however bruised he was by it, warmed his feeble heart.