28. THE FIELD OF MIRACLES
"Porca Madonna!" whispers someone at his side, as, drawn up together, they stare in awe at the ghostly little campo, eerily lit by the single blue bulb hanging in the mists above. "Am I dreaming?"
In the middle of the softly undulating campo, where a wellhead might otherwise be, stands a strange tree, no larger than a leggy Tokai Friulano grapevine, leafed with crumpled thousand-lire notes and plastic credit cards and bearing clusters of silvery coins that glitter like lapis lazuli in the spectral blue light, though the sound they make is not so much the zin-zin-zin of his childhood fantasy as the kunk-kunk-kunk of old postwar leaden coins, the credit cards and dog-eared banknotes, ruffled by the cold damp breeze, adding a listless continue of futter-futter-ffpussh to the blurry plunking.
The gondolas are already perilously overladen with treasures looted from the Palazzo dei Balocchi, but the lure of the mysterious money tree is irresistible, and soon the ancient anthropoid emeritus is alone once more, as his companions scramble up the broad watersteps to gather in cautious amaze around the luminous spectacle. He peers up through the blue mist at the sign engraved on the crumbling brick wall above him and sees: CAMPO DEI MIRACOLI. So here he is again. The Field of Miracles. It looks a bit different from the time he last saw it, returned then to search in vain for the gold pieces he had, with an innocence that shames him still, buried here. It has been paved over for one thing, though it is still as washboardy as a harrowed field. And it seemed larger and wilder to his childish eyes, he doesn't remember the pretty fog-masked Renaissance houses crowding in across the square from him or even the little church here by the watersteps with its façade of precious inlaid porphyry and marble, iridescent as mother-of-pearl, but then, what did he care about such things then, artless little gonzo that he was? In the lunette above the closed paneled doors of the church, a pensive stone Virgin gazes down at her naked baby, who seems to be pointing, amused, or perhaps alarmed and about to cry, at the even more naked figure hunched, trembling, in the gondola below, singling him out for reproach in much the same way that Eugenio, to his terror, seemed to be doing a few moments ago.
When he'd first seen the ashen bloodstained ex-Director of Omini e figli, S.R.L., floating toward him out of the mists, his pointing finger raised in angry denunciation, he'd hardly known what to think. He'd seen Eugenio dead, he had no doubt of that, this ghastly hollow-eyed apparition approaching him now could not be alive — and yet Stripped of everything else, he feared his sanity might be going, too. And whatever else it meant, he was sure, as he shrank back into the rough mane of his growling companion there on the little gloomily lit fondamenta, that his own retribution was at hand.
The outstretched arm bent stiffly at the elbow as the grim figure approached, and slowly the pointing finger rose to point directly overhead. "The devil teaches how to make the pot," intoned a hollow voice that seemed to come from the bottom of a well, Eugenio's painted scarlet lips moving slightly like a clumsy ventriloquist's, his face expressionless except for a tear glistening on one cheek, "but not, dear boy, the cover!" The empty eyes began to glow and rays of light emerged, beamed directly on the accused. "Murder will OUT!" The hand pressed to the costumed bosom swung out abruptly and the padded bodice slipped to the waist, then, as though by itself, popped back up again, the hand overhead dropping quickly to clamp it in place, the other hand flopping loosely for a moment, then rising steadily once more, elbow bent, until it covered the tearful face, extinguishing the beams of light. "No evil more terrible," bemoaned the echoey voice from behind the hand, "than to give an old friend such a bloody headache! It's a technological scandal! What good is a friend with an empty attic, not one turd of a brain in his bean?" As though to demonstrate the consequences of this condition (snorting sourly, the Lion of Saint Mark dropped his blunt snout back into his paws, and the escaped fugitive, too, felt the danger, if not the horror, pass), Eugenio's arms opened wide, the bodice plopped down and rose again, the hands waggled on their wrists, then the elbows angled upwards, the hands flopping loosely like laundry on a line, while the eyeless head rocked from side to side until it shook its wig off. One of Eugenio's thick white legs rose rigidly to one side, pushing against the brocaded skirt, and fell, then the other did the same. Then both legs rose straight up out of the gondola until the feet, still in their Queen-of-the-Night high-heeled shoes, were higher than the lurid head, hands falling limply between the fat thighs. "Piů in alto che se va," sang the voice, or voices, which now might have been coming from any part of the body, the flabby arms spreading apart like an opening curtain, "piů el cul se mostra!" This reprise of the familiar Gran Teatro dei Burattini Vegetal Punk Rock Band ballad was followed by clackety wooden applause from the other gondolas and the cadaver's sudden collapse, its animators Pierotto, Brighella, and Diamantina peering out from behind it to take their bows.
"Meat!" grumped Brighella in disgust, as he and Pierotto, Pierotto first plucking the crystal tear off Eugenio's face and putting it back on his own cheek, heaved the corpse into the canal. "It's got no style!" Then he sprang in one great leap from the gondola to the fondamenta, followed by all the other members of the troupe, the laden gondolas left bobbing on their own, spilling into the canal loose Trecento artworks, silver goblets and golden candelabra, and there he led them all in a strutting, high-spirited, double-jointed celebration of woodenness. They scaled the wall of the theater, then fell from the roof on their backs, wept lugubriously in unison, broke into wild knee-slapping laughter, fanned at each other with wooden or imaginary swords, danced, somersaulted, bounced rigidly as though on hidden springs, pirouetted, walked on their hands and kicked their wooden heels together, flew through the air from kicks they gave one another, swaggered about stiff-legged and flat-footed, spouting Latin nonsense, then turned into potbellied hunchbacks one and all, competing with one another in a wind-breaking contest. Throughout all of this, Il Zoppo, somewhat handicapped, put on his/her own show, a kind of choral version of the other puppets' acts, weeping and laughing at the same time, farting in Latin, walking on Pulcinella's hands while strutting on Lisetta's feet, and falling down even as she/he was getting up. Finally the two of them formed a kind of arched bridge from fondamenta to near gondola over which the others hopped, skipped, tumbled, pranced, or leapt.
When they were all back in their gondolas, they turned to smile and wave up at him. "Come along, Pinocchio!" they cried. Captain Spavento maneuvered his gondola over to the watersteps so he could get in. "This house is played out! We're on our way to Rome!"
"Paris!"
"London!"
"Hollywood!"
"Look at all the loot we've got!"
"We're rich! We sacked the palazzo!"
"What parties we will have!"