But though he can remember all that as though it had just happened, can indeed remember his entire birth right down to the beveling and pegging of his articulated joints, the drilling of his bottomhole, chased decorously with a chamfer bit, and the planing of his belly which made him whoop and giggle, there are also things he cannot recall, and which cause him deep disquiet when he tries to think about them. His earlier life on the woodpile, for example: When did it begin and where did he come from? Was he always just an impudent log, a sentient chip from a dead block, nature's freak, a useless piece of yaltering driftwood, as his father called him when he washed up inside the fish's belly, or did he have, so to speak, a family tree out in the world someplace, its amputated limbs a lost brotherhood? And then, when Maestro Ciliegia found him there on the stack of firewood, how did he, without eyes, see, and, without a mouth, how speak? Still enclosed in his thick bark, how did he, when presented to Geppetto, shake himself free of Maestro Ciliegia and strike Geppetto on the shin, setting off the free-for-all that so delighted him? How did he know "delight?" And if, as a log, he had no ears, no legs, how distinguish what was "between" them? Or, put another way, all those pieces chiseled away, the slivers and shavings and even the sawdust: were they nothing more than the dead crust of the hidden self within, discovered by Geppetto, mere packing material, as it were, or were they lost fragments of a being once whole, monadic scraps of his original wooden integrity, now tragically scattered?
"Such as those splinters that he hacked away from your nose like a great harvest of foreskins, you mean?" Buffetto asks softly.
"Yes — "
"Were they dead as clipped fingernails, you mean," adds Francatrippa, marveling, "or did they think? Did they feel?"
"Did they talk back?"
"Were they naughty?"
"Yes, and, if so, do they, are they, somewhere, still ?"
"Woo! Spooky!" whispers little Truffaldino from the prow, perched out there beyond Eugenio's reach. "It makes you wonder if anything is really what it seems to be!"
"Nonsense, my little marinaio," replies Eugenio, sitting anchored in his dark shadow behind the wheel. "Everything is exactly what it seems to be. That's the sadness of it. Now, come and sit here on my knee, my child, and let us explore reality together while we still share in it!"
"I am afraid if I did, master, I would lose my share to you! I would be in only half of my reality, you would be in the other half!"
"Macché! Pleasure is never diminishing, ragazzo mio. It would not halve your reality, but double it!"
"But I can barely clothe and feed the reality I have now. What am I to do with twice as much?"
"Then I will double your income, sweet boy, with each doubling of your reality!"
"Ah, very good, direttore! And if I increased my reality, by, say, fifty percent?"
"Why, how would you do that?"
"Like this, master!" Truffaldino puts his feet on the deck of the launch, or seems to, and walks over to Eugenio, even while remaining sitting on the prow. He puts his hands under his chin and lifts his silhouetted head to arm's length — then the arms themselves seem to periscope upwards in the darkness, raising the head another foot or so in the night air.
"Che roba! And can you do that with all your parts, you wicked boy?"
"Only in the darkness, master," sighs Truffaldino, shrinking back into himself, leaving Eugenio snatching at air. "That's, as you say, the sadness of it "
A moment of wistful silence descends then, through which, as though from some other time more than another place, come, across the dark waters from the other side of the island, the distant hollow reverberations of revelry: amplified voices, waves of laughter like sullen heartbeats, whistles rising into the night and muffled shouting, the beat but not the melody of music — the sounds of Carnival. The peace of his suite in the Palazzo dei Balocchi is not what it once was, but he dare not complain, for the recent restoration of the Venetian Carnival is virtually the invention, or reinvention, of Eugenio, yet another of his host's acts of homage to his legendary mentor, for whom Carnival existed twelve months of the year. Besides, the professor expects to move any day now into quieter quarters of his own, as soon as his new credit cards, checkbooks, and personal documents, requested for him by Eugenio, reach him through the anarchical Venetian postal service, though the bag of mail they saw floating in the Giudecca canal today made manifest the hazards.
The old scholar leans his head back and gazes up at the night sky. The hovering mist seems to be breaking up, letting a few stars shine through, scattered here and there in abject loneliness like chips struck from the moon. Star light, star bright, he thinks. But what is he to wish for? To be free from his disease? A death wish. To be free from his fear of death? A kind of madness, the dubious blessing of senility, a greater terror. Perhaps just to know. But he already knows so much and what good has it done him? No, no, he knows all too well what he desires, she has been on his mind all afternoon, she whose graven tombs once marked his passage like milestones. He wishes — it is quite simple — he wishes only to be held again. Taking them to the heretics' corner of the cemetery island this afternoon to show them where he hoped to enshrine the bones of Casanova, Eugenio led them all through a section devoted, it seemed, to those who had died young: children climbed stairs to heaven, youthful lovers sprawled erotically on marble deathbeds, babies reached for the arms of Jesus. And there, in the dim light, half buried amid the grander monuments, he saw, or thought for one heart-stopping moment that he saw, that selfsame little slab of marble which once announced the Blue-Haired Fairy's death of a broken heart: "Qui giace una bambina," he read, even from his bobbing portantina, "Here lies a child," and the words abbandonata and fratellino jumped out at him as though the stone itself were crying out. "Stop!" he gasped, and begged that he be taken closer. No, not her, he saw through teary eyes, some other little sister gone, and abbandonato, the brother, not the girl, deserted, but that was how he felt, too, and, no doubt startling Eugenio and the servants, he sobbed out his grief there on that stone, not for the dead child but for the little brother left behind, who was himself, exiled forever from the consolation of her hugs and kisses, her sweet embrace. O Fata mia!
"Look, direttore! Do you see — ?"
"Sshh! Come here, my child! Quickly!"