"Wait! The — my student — how did — ?"
"Ah, sorry about that, Old Sticks. I'm afraid she stood you up."
"No! I mean, what did she — did you — ?" But Eugenio, with a flamboyant swish of his brocade skirts and jangling his jewelry like little beggars' bells, was gone, squealing: "Here I come, you naughty boys, ready or not!"
So he would not know. Perhaps he did not want to know. Knowledge, he has written somewhere, leads to the abyss. Knowledge is the abyss. How proud he had been to take that notorious path and, beating his breast for all to see, to walk the perilous rim, failing to perceive the true abyss opening up behind him with every footstep he took! One look back, and — !
And, well, here he was.
On his writing table sat the most recent instrument of his own daily acts of self-deception and — destruction. The very sight of it filled him suddenly with an indescribable loathing, a hatred of what Eugenio had done to him, of what he had done to himself, and of his long wretched life so wrongfully spent. Feeble as he was, he lurched to his feet, desiring to reach the thing, and it was then that he discovered his feet were gone. The clatter he made on the marble floor alarmed the puppets.
"Ahi! Be careful, dear Pinocchio! You're splintering!"
"There's not much holding you together!"
"It's the climate, you know! You must — !"
"Take me over there!" he gasped.
"What? To your table?"
"You wish to write, dear friend?"
"You should be in bed!"
"Now! Please! While I'm still able "
Reluctantly, Colombina rolled his leather swivel chair over to the table and Brighella and Captain Spavento set him in it, propping him up tenderly with goose-down pillows as they'd always done. "Great artists must always work when inspiration strikes them, I suppose," Colombina said dubiously, pulling a blanket off the bed to tuck around his shoulders. It took every last ounce of strength left him, but, summoning up all his rage to assist him in the final thrust (it didn't help that the infernal chair was on casters), he managed to push the computer out the open window, feeling as he did so the weight of a century lift from his frail weather-beaten shoulders.
"Free at last!" he rasped bitterly.
There was a sickening k-thuck! sound and then screams and shouts rose up from the square below. Oh no. He had forgotten about the Carnival crowds. He gripped, gripped by dread, the sill and, wishing not to see what he feared he must see, pulled himself forward to peek over, the three puppets squeezing around him to gape over his shoulder. At first he thought he had struck a woman. There at the mouth of the little underpass beneath his window, she lay lifeless, limbs outflung, wearing the fallen computer like a large square cartoon head. But then he recognized the tender butterball knees splayed out beneath the tossed brocaded skirts, the plump bejeweled hands. Blood pooled out richly around the computer, as though the Piazza were flooding from below. This time there was no mistake, Eugenio was as dead as he could be.
"Che colpo di scena!" whooped Brighella. "And what a shot!" The other two were already down the stairs, running to join in the festivities erupting around the body. Il Zoppo was down there, attempting celebrative back flips that were more like lanky pratfalls, and also the Madonna of the Organs and Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo and all his bizarre retinue, the Count tipping back his mask and laughing the fierce strident laugh of the Venetian Lion-Planter, Pantalone the Magnificent. His monumental phallus was slit open by Colombina and Captain Spavento, just arriving, and out popped Pierotto, Lelio, and Diamantina, while other Burattini emerged from the costumed entourage, leaping and dancing wildly. "Viva Pinocchio!" they shouted. "He has saved our lives!"
Their presumptive hero, however, was not celebrating. He was weeping grievously, head drooped over the sill as though on the, block. "Oh Eugenio, Eugenio!" he sobbed. "What have I done? Get up, Eugenio! This is not why I came here! Damn you! You mustn't die!"
The Madonna of the Organs took off her mask and wig, and the figure inside, the huge bearded maskmaker Mangiafoco, tipped his hairy head to one side and, peering up at the palazzo window, his eyes blazing as though with an inner fire, asked: "Who is that little woodenpate filling the air with sighs and watering the ground with his tears? Eh?" They might well be the last tears he would ever shed, already he could feel the tear sacs drying up, perhaps he should save them, he thought, things might get worse, but he could not stop them from flowing, it was like a wound that could not be stanched. "Yes, Pinocchio! Why?" the puppets cried. "After all he has done to you?"
"I–I don't know! I c-can't help it!" he bawled, feeling ashamed of his answer, his tears, his uncertainties, and of his very shame all at once. It was as bad as when he found himself in old Giangio's stable, crying like a mooncalf over a dying donkey. "He was a schoolmate of mine! And — and now he is dead!"
"Ah well," laughed Mangiafoco toothily, spreading wide his arms costumed in the pale likeness of flesh, "but that, signorino, is the very nature of our comedy here — !"
"Wait!" Pantalone cried out, beaked nose high as though testing the air, gray beard bristling. "Listen!"
Sirens wailed distantly. Beyond the Molo blue lights flashed. "It's the carabinieri! They're on the way!" "La madama!" "What do we do now?!" "We must rescue Pinocchio!" "He saved our lives, it's the least we can do!" "But how? They'll be here before we can even get him out of the palazzo!" "They're already at the Ponte della Paglia!" "They're coming down from Santa Maria Formosa!" "We're surrounded!" "They're at the Bocca! All is lost!" "Ahi! Ahi! Poor Pinocchio!" "Who will save him now — ?!"
Whereupon began that heavy overhead flopping now no less familiar to him than the smell of the lagoon, as the Winged Lion of Saint Mark, for the second time, flew down to save his life, if his present condition could be so generously labeled. And this time, tossed out the window by Brighella onto the great beast's glossy back instead of into its jaws, without the torment of the creature's lethally fetid breath. Which, nevertheless, nestled here now on the Fondamenta del Teatro in the old fellow's pebbly mane, he has to admit he finds somehow less odious than before. Of course, the grappa probably helps.
"Helps — ?"
"Your halitosis."
"My drinking grappa does?"
"No, my drinking it."
"Well, hrmff," grumps the old fellow, a bit miffed but with that sour, melancholic dignity that marks his character, "for centuries the citizens here fucked one another over by stuffing my mouth full of anonymous accusations. A shitty diet like that, what can you expect?"
The ghostly bulb overhead, casting no more light than a glowworm, barely illuminates the munched bricks in the wall right beside it, much less the little elbowed platform down here whereon, like cornered fugitives, they huddle, the dark wet walls and mazy canals beyond lost in an impenetrable darkness, yet he has the distinct impression that something large and secretive is moving now under the nearby bridge. The old Lion notices it, too. "Che cazzo — ?!" he rumbles, flexing his clattery wings and beginning, slowly, boozily, to rise. The large dark shapes, darker than the darkness behind them, sway and bob furtively, moving slowly this way with the soft treacherous sound of rustling leaves. Then, like a dead man's hand reaching from its coffin, the silvery beak of a gondola emerges from beneath the bridge, followed by a second, and then a third. The occupants still are hidden in the shadows of the arched bridge, but, unless his ancient eyes deceive him, the ashen figure standing at the prow of the lead gondola, sightless and bloodied, broader than he is tall, one hand at his breast, or breasts, the other pointing accusingly straight at him, is Eugenio.