Alongside him, up and down the bridge, the rest of the Count's cortege bring out organs of every size, color, and description and dangle them over the side, those without baring their behinds or else their breasts, or something resembling all of these, and, upon the Count's appeal to his "friends, roamers, and dribbling cunnymen, as Marcus Aurelius was said to have declared on the eve of the Battle of Thermopylae, lend me your tears and other bodily excretions, for our noble causeway depends upon it," let fly a veritable downpour upon the Grand Canal below, sending motorboats swerving and gondolas pushing desperately for shore, those on the decks of vaporetti ducking inside for cover, or else replying with similar, if only token, gestures of their own. The old professor, gripping his newly recovered watch with trembling fingers, seems to see through his bitter tears the sodden body of his old friend Alidoro floating by on the dark ruffled waters below, though it is probably only the usual plastic sack of garbage, of which the canal is always full. "I–I'm sorry!" he weeps, his chest riven. "I loved you so!"
The tall spindly hunchbacked character next to him with whom he had been forced to exchange hats, the one known as Il Zoppo, opens up the flies of his baggy white pantaloons, and a face leans out of them, spews a mouthful of wine over the railing, then turns to him and says, in chorus with another deeper voice above: "No need to be sorry! We love you, too, dear Pinocchio!"
Though charred and disfigured, it is a face he recognizes: the once-beautiful Lisetta of the Gran Teatro dei Burattini! There is still a trace of magenta in her hair and a safety pin in her wooden ear! But then — ?! He cranes his old head up stiffly, peering through the tears and biting wind: "Pulcinella! Is it — is it you — ?!"
"As you see, my friend," replies Pulcinella, tipping the professor's hat from on high, and from inside the pantaloons Lisetta says: "Yes, Pinocchio my dear, it is we!"
"But I thought — ! I was afraid — !" And suddenly it all comes rushing back to him as though the evacuations cascading down from the bridge were releasing a torrent of dammed-up memory: his rescue from the wastebin, the kisses and pinches and dizzying head-butts, his brief career at the electronic keyboard (but how had he forgotten all of this? He must have nothing but woody pulp up there !), and then the police parading in, the brutal charges, the bludgeonings and screams, the mad crush of the terrorized mobs, the frantic bodies kneeing him, pushing him, the smoke tearing at his eyes and throat, the two tall thin carabinieri bearing down on him, swinging brave Pulcinella's torn-off legs like nightsticks — "I saw — ! Oh Pulcinella! What they did to you — !"
"Ebbene, compare, don't cry, it could have been worse. Others lost the lot. I've always walked as well on my hands as on my feet anyway — I was out of there in less than it takes to say it! Poor Lisetta here was not so lucky! They threw her on the fire!"
"Mangiafoco turned up and pulled me out in the nick of time! Burned my face black as a pewit's, I lost both arms, and my tits aren't what they used to be, but the bottom bits are all still good as new!"
"I'd lost my legs and Lisetta her arms, so Mangiafoco put the two of us together by nailing me to her shoulders."
"Nailing — ?!"
"The joints and hinges were all gone, nothing left to pin new limbs to, it was the best he could manage."
"It's all right."
"It's kind of fun!"
"Of course, back flips aren't so easy any more."
"What I miss most is not being able to clap."
"But we do a double act now."
"We've worked up some new lazzi, Pinocchio, you wouldn't believe!"
"The old Siamese twin gags, you know! With a new angle, as you might say!"
"With a bit of a twist!"
"Not everyone's got a woman's head in his crotch!"
"Not everyone's got an asshole behind her ears!"
"But but the others — ?" he asks uneasily. "Brighella? Colombina — ?"
"Ah well "
"You know "
"Where there's smoke "
"It was a real horror show, friend "
"Mass pupicide "
"Poor Arlecchino they used a hacksaw on him "
"They drilled him full of holes "
"They soaked him before throwing him on the fire "
"You know, to make him burn longer "
"His screams would have broken my heart, if I had one," sighs Lisetta from inside Pulcinella's pants, as Pulcinella reaches in to wipe the tears from her eyes. "Fortunately I've always been a bit wormy in that part "
"At least you did what you could for him, dear Pinocchio!"
"Well "
"At least you didn't turn your back on your dearest friend!"
To his horror, just as he is about to reply, in all honesty of course, as is his wont, if not indeed his onus, he suddenly sees the same flash of blue that he saw then: she is sitting out all alone on the bow of a battered old No. 1 waterbus lumbering up below on its way to the Accademia landing stage, seemingly oblivious to the excreta showering down upon her, gazing up through it as though in stunned disbelief at the professor, crowned ludicrously in Pulcinella's peaked coppolone, his nose hanging limply over the railing, still in its silky sheath, like that stupid character in the World War II graffiti. His heart plummets. "Forgive me!" he whispers in his pain and confusion as she slips past. His mortification is complete. "My my love — !" And then she is under the bridge and out of sight, and he is, though numbed by shock and utter despair, under way again, the procession setting forth once more, Count Ziani-Ziani having just pulled up his crimson breeches and declared: "As the great Zan Bellini, painter of the famous 'Incontinent Fortune,' shown relieving herself blissfully from the side of a gondola with a granite blue globe in her fragrant lap, used to say, 'Forbirse el cul col sasso tondo, xe la piu bela cossa de sto mondo!' The loveliest thing in this world that's known is to wipe your ass with a round stone! And now, fellow citizens, it is time, as they say, to jump, having blessed it, the ditch! The city babbos await us! So soak your beak and let it leak, our solemn round proceeds!"
23. THE LAST CHAPTER
In a cramped busy campo like many others they have visited on their pilgrimage to the Fourteen Urinals of the Cross, the procession of Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo and the Madonna of the Organs (New Acquisition) is interrupted suddenly in the middle of one of the Madonna's bizarre purification rituals by the clamorous headlong arrival of the Winged Lion of Saint Mark, flapping in either to join or to assault the party, but, already well in his cups, seriously misjudging his approach, catching his forepaws on the tent top of a makeshift costume stall and somersaulting heavily into a marble wellhead, roaring out an alarming stream of drunken obscenities all the way. A human butterfly, pirouetting decorously on the convex lid of the wellhead, is sent flying when the yowling Lion slams into it, stone crashing upon stone, while from within the collapsed stall come cries of "Rape!" and "Earthquake!" and "Help! Murder! It's the Red Brigade!"
"Che cazzo — ?" bellows the Lion in his querulous stupor. "By the Virgin's verminous and fulsome cunt, I'll kill the turd who did that! Oh, I am fucked! Get me something to drink, you cretinous pricks! I am dying!"