The dizziness he suffered in their midst was not so much from the loud music or the smothering attention or even the fever which no doubt grips him still, but from all the head-butts he'd endured by which they'd first, ecstatically, recognized him. Indeed, down here in the desperate press and jostle of the fleeing multitudes, his head is still ringing from those blows, making it difficult for him to maintain any sense of direction, little good it would do him if he could. He sees the four public security police drag Corallina away, hears her screaming, but a moment later he cannot be sure whether she's in front of him or behind him. Arlecchino's fading shouts have seemed to spiral around him like a ball on a stretching string, almost as though the campo were expanding and he were being screwed deep into its tangled center. When Captain Spavento comes creeping by on all fours between the legs of the crowd, having just crept abjectly past in the opposite direction, the professor can no longer be sure, in his throbbing vertigo, that these are two separate events.
"Long live our brother Pinocchio!" they'd all cried on discovering him and the hugging and pinching and head-thumping had begun, everyone had a turn, he couldn't even speak it hurt so, he could only weep, and then they wept, too, but for joy, as they supposed he did, and kissed him some more and pinched him even harder as though to try to pluck him clean and banged heads again and crushed him with their wild loving hugs. And, in truth, for all the pain, he was happy, delirious even, it was as if, as they transported him out of the trash bag and onto their shoulders and paraded him through the snowswept square and up to the makeshift bandstand, he'd been suddenly and miraculously rescued, not merely from a lonely ignominious death, but from a whole lifetime of misguided exile and isolation, it was as if this was what he had come back for, this place, these friends, it was as if, as if a hundred years had never happened !
"Remember the party that night? We danced till dawn!"
"Dancing wasn't the half of it! We all stripped and swapped parts and got our strings in a delicious tangle! Then Arlecchino stole Mangiafoco's swazzle and started playing it through his bumhole!"
"If it was his bumhole — might have been anybody's, things were pretty mixed up by then!"
"Listen, Pinocchio had just saved my can from the fire, the least I could do was sing through it!"
"As Arlecchino said at the time, he was thanking Pinocchio from the bottom of his heart and from the heart of his bottom!"
"I remember!"
"What a blast!"
"Then Rosaura challenged everybody to a pelvis-cracking contest with her polished cherry pudendum, and ended up splitting Colombina's mound and breaking Lelio's little thing off, not that he ever had any use for it!"
"She called it hardass cunny-conkers!"
"It never healed, I've still got a crack there!"
"It was a crazy night!"
"I was so happy !"
"That party is a legend now!"
"But when was it? I don't remember it!"
"You weren't there, Flaminia. Must have been a century ago, maybe two."
"You were still just a gleam in old Mangiafoco's chisel!"
"And Rosaura," he asked then, craning his head about above the sea of faces, "where is Rosaura?"
"Ah, poor Rosaura, bless her wormy little knothole, has gone the way of all wood, I'm afraid, all except for her hardwood hotbox which Pierotto here inherited for a head when his old one got damp rot and fell apart!"
"It's made him a bit strange, but he's got a new lazzo with a chamber pot and a monocle you wouldn't believe!"
"But there are plenty of others here, you old rogue! Here, meet Corallina and Lisetta and Diamantina !" They lowered him into the arms of these gay soubrettes with their bright-colored skirts and aprons tucked into leather leggings, their purple and magenta butch cuts, and safety-pin earrings through their wooden ears. "Evviva Pinocchio!" they laughed and they kissed him again and pinched and squeezed him and, just for fun, knocked heads some more.
"But why did you go away, Pinocchio? We were having so much fun! Why did you leave us when you said you loved us so?"
"Well, I — ow! — my father — "
"Loved us? Loved us?" roared Capitano Spavento del Vall'Inferno, rearing up then in sudden choler, his plumes quivering and waxed moustaches bristling. "He loved us as the wolf loves the sheep! As the whip loves the donkey! As the woodman loves the tree! No, no, let us say bread to the bread and bugger-my-ass to bugger-my-ass! This abominable imitation of humanity, this vile hodgepodge, this double-dealing French-leave-taking skin artist deserted us!"
"Ahhh!" gasped the three servant girls in unison and, tossing him in the air, shrank away as though from a bad odor. He would have crashed disastrously to the stage floor had not Arlecchino and Colombina deftly caught him, Colombina whispering behind what had once been his ear: "Is it true you left us because of a woman, dear Pinocchio? A painted woman with a mysterious past ?"
"She wasn't exactly painted — !" he wheezed in dazed dismay.
"Ho ho! Beating about the bush, were you, you old gully-raker?" laughed Brighella, winking slyly. "Nothing like splitting whiskers for splitting friends!"
"It wasn't a woman, it was fame he was after," declared Pulcinella. "We weren't hot enough for the little showboat! He wanted to be the big pimple, not some second stringer out in the sticks! He wanted to be a star!"
"No, no: money! It was money made the donkey trot, it always is!" argued Pantalone, thrusting his pointed beard in the air like an accusing finger. "There was the passing of a purse, his palm was greased, I heard the insidious chink of gold! Money taken, friends forsaken — !"