"Pinocchio! At last!"
"Arlecchino — ! But you shouldn't have come back! They're setting fire — !"
"Tell me about it later, my friend! We have to split before these shits do the splitting for us! Come on — !"
15. A GONDOLA RIDE
Once, many years ago, in one of his less genteel embodiments, he had been sold for a few farthings to a bungling rustic who wanted to make a drum for the village band out of his hide. The lout tied a rope to a hind leg and a stone to his neck and kicked him into the water, then sat back with a pipe waiting for him to drown. Instead, a shoal of fish came along and ate him right out of his predicament. It was a strange sensation. Dragged down by the stone and donkey weight, he had sunk to the bottom, feeling all the while as though his body wanted to rise from within. Then, suddenly, there was this thrilling pain, a delicious nibbling away at his entire being, he has never felt anything quite like it before or since, not even what the starlets did with him in Hollywood came close, though he always had hopes, and his body, his new one, as though trying to express its exhilaration, popped like a seed from its old encrustations and floated exuberantly to the surface.
This time it is different. There is, as before, that same eery feeling of wanting to rise from inside even while the outer body, weighted down with coat and suit and flesh and shoes, steadily sinks, but this time there are no fish, nothing living at all so far as he can see, which isn't far, it's like trying to peer through cold bean soup down here in this quagmire of twigs and wattle upon which, improbably, an empire arose, nothing but curdled garbage, thin twists of opaque plastic, children's ruined copybooks and old sanitary napkins, lottery stubs, the occasional drowned cat, and otherwise just shapeless streamers of coagulated muck that wind around his limbs and grease his face as though to smear away that expression of joy and surprise painted there only a moment before by the unexpected sight of that which he has been, with such awesome consequences, seeking. Ah, with what fugitive, mad, passionate hopes did he go clattering ludicrously down that fatal underpass, his preposterous movements inspired by the demon whose peculiar pleasure it is to trample human reason and dignity underfoot, even when so finely nurtured and honed as his own, his giddy mind in abject travail, his senses so focused on the object of his quest that only now, deep in the fallen Queen's murky bowels and sinking fast, can he hear the cries he could not hear then.
That he has been able to complete this humiliating fall, out of the frying pan and into the pot, so to speak, is thanks only to Arlecchino, who came to his rescue back in the campo, popping theatrically out of the turbulent crowd, felt hat pulled down over his pinpoint eyes as though he were trying to hide inside it, just as the two carabinieri struggled to their feet and, wielding Pulcinella's broken-off legs like truncheons, turned, enraged, on the transfixed professor. "Hey, looking for you, old man," his brave friend laughed, "has been like trying to find a pearl in a hailstorm! Quick! Hop on my back! A cavalluccio!"
"Hop — ?! I can't even — !"
Whereupon Arlecchino backed into him, reached down, and grabbed him behind the knees, and they were off, galloping clumsily over the icy stone flagging, the tall thin carabinieri in hot pursuit. "Hold it! Stop those two! They're dangerous criminals!"
He could feel bits and pieces flaking off as they jounced along, escape was costing him dearly, he knew, but Arlecchino was quick and cunning, leaping benches and wellheads, dodging in and out of the crowds, he had a thousand tricks, and it was working, they seemed to be losing their two pursuers, the pounding of their boots fading, their angry shouts gradually getting swallowed up in the larger uproar of the smoke-filled campo. He tried to tell Arlecchino as they galloped along how grateful he was and how much he loved him, and also about poor Corallina and Pulcinella and Flaminia and all the rest, but all he could do was wheeze and snort, his head bobbing loosely, his chest slapping Arlecchino's wooden back, popping the wind from his antique lungs. "Oh dehea-hea-hea-hear Har-Har-Harle — !"
And then, through his tears, like a miracle, he saw it: a flash of blue! That blue! "Stop! STO-HOP — !"
"What — what is it?" Arlecchino panted, staggering to a halt. The puppet's knees seemed to buckle and he set the professor down for a moment.
"I thought I saw — !"
"Whew, this used to be — gasp! — easier, old friend! I must be drying out!"
"Yes! Down there!" They were at the mouth of a dark passage through the middle of a building, the Sotoportego de l'Uva, he saw from the smudged sign above it, the Underpass of the Grape, and, at the far end of it, there she was, just drifting by as though in an angelic vision, her blond hair glistening with melted snowflakes, a fat pink bubble quivering between her puckered lips, and, jutting out from her unzipped plastic windbreaker, clad in soft blue angora and bouncing gently, those wondrous appendages which, for one magical moment that he desperately longed to reenact, had thawed him out this morning to the very tips of his being. "Bluebell! Miss — ! WAIT — !"
"Pinocchio! Where are you going — ?! Come back! We're not out of the woods yet, friend! We have to — yow!!"
"Hah! Got you, you impertinent little punk!"
"Pinocchio! Help me — !"
"Hey, look at the dummy's outfit! We've nailed the one the boss wanted!"
"You're screwed now, knobhead!"
"Ho ho! We're going to burn your wormy ass!"
"Pinocchio! Help!" Arlecchino was crying. "Salvami dalla morte! I DON'T WANT TO DIE — !"
But, lost in his mad trance, he was already halfway down the passageway, all this was far behind him, he was moving as he had not moved since he first staggered out of San Sebastiano, only now there was hope, real hope. This movement was not exactly running, nor even walking, it was more like some kind of goofy unhinged dance, the sort his drug-addled students used to dance a generation ago, his pelvis flying every which way and his arms and head moving more than his feet did. He caromed off the narrow walls, blackened with soot and wet moss, clattered into stacks of empty fruit crates, slapped through garbage, bounced off downpipes and stairwells, but he did make progress, slowly picking up forward momentum, his eyes fixed, no matter which direction the rest of him was momentarily aimed, on the opening at the far end, though she could no longer be seen there. "Miss! Please! It's Professor Pinenut! That bath — ! I've changed my mind — !"
It turned out, however, there was no little street running alongside the canal at the other end of the underpass as one might have assumed, just watersteps leading down into the cold coffee-colored water below. Luckily, he saw this in time to start backpedaling, call it that. Unluckily, the steps were covered with ice and snow and there was an evil green slime below that, and so, for a moment, after an experience not unlike that, he supposed with a fleeting but bitter irony, of being pitched from a slick shovel, the venerable scholar and aesthete, former rock star, and erstwhile cavalier servente found himself hovering in midair, still backpedaling frantically, those partial misgivings he had felt since returning to this city now become a sore distress, a positive misery, his most cherished convictions vanished like the pavement beneath his feet, his dreams of truth, virtue, perfection, and a hot bath now just derisive memories. Alas, he thought, nothing blunts the edge of a noble, robust mind more quickly and more thoroughly than the sharp and bitter corrosion of knowledge. Then — patatunfete! — in he went.