"I see it now," he says, not too appropriately, inasmuch as his tired old eyes, struggling in vain to fix the Fairy's face, which, if anything, is growing increasingly fluid and monstrous, have lost all focus and seem to be swimming in his head. "If dying carries weight with humans, so, if not more so, does mothering. If you couldn't win them over one way, you'd try another. I was just another trick to play, your surrogate, your convenient dummy, your marketable changeling."
"There! You're being cruel again! What have I done to deserve such an ungrateful son? When you came back here to our island looking for me now, I was so happy. I thought we could be together again. In the old way, like we used to be before you got changed and went off into the world. But you have disappointed me, my boy, slipping back into all your old habits, falling in with unwholesome companions, breaking promises, acting on impulse, running away, getting in trouble with the police, refusing advice — and now, to have degenerated into the theatrical arts — I ask myself, what was it all for?" As she scolds him, the floating ambiguities fade and she resolves into his mamma once more, firm, exasperated but loving, intimidating, beautiful "And just look at you now! Flesh would no longer even stick to such a shameless ruin! Couldn't you at least keep your warm wraps on? How many times did I tell you — ?"
"It wouldn't have made any difference. Sooner or later, I would have ended up like this anyway. You didn't do a very good job "
"I know, and that is why I have forgiven you." She sighs, settles back, casting a last quick loving glance at him before her features again melt into a pool of possible features, an inconstancy that now spreads to the rest of her body, causing all the edges to waver and blur. It is as though the idea of her is too big for her canvas. "The trouble is, though I always tried to be a good fairy, I wasn't quite good enough. In the end, proud as I was of the proper little man I'd made, I found I loved the naughty puppet more than I should have and was afraid of losing him, or at least his good heart, and couldn't quite let him go. So I left just the tiniest seed inside. A bit of the sneeze, as you might say, that got held back. I didn't think it would do any harm. And this way, I felt, we had a kind of bond between us "
"We were both monsters, you mean." She smiles, or seems to, her mouth spreading to her ears, dispersing her teeth like fence stakes, her eyes at the same time receding deep beneath her brows and flaring up as her head flattens to her shoulders, the rest of her turning shaggy and ballooning out in all directions, but only for a moment, just long enough to give him a glimpse of something beyond mere rhetorical flourish and make him catch his breath. "Ahimč! Fata mia! How can I resist you?"
She seems to blush at that, though the colors are ambiguous and none of them pink, and a light comes to her eyes, or her eyes to the light, and she spreads her knees a little, causing the banks of flowers on the steps and in the aisle between them to rise and fall softly as though mice were running through them. He too feels a vague stirring somewhere, nothing prurient, more like more like getting shifted on the woodpile "Come, my child!" she croons in a voice so resonant with desire it sets the organ pipes to humming. "Burattini! Bring him to me!"
His puppet friends stagger out of their weak-kneed crouch around him to take a fearful grip on his gondola chair, but, though dizzy with the intensity of his own peculiar desires, he stays them with a restraining gesture. "Dear Fairy, I am yours," he says in his thin scratchy voice. "But first I have three small requests, which I am sure you will grant me."
"Ah!" She draws back, her colors changing (frustration perhaps, rage, he can't be sure), and the flowers close and shrink flat as a woven carpet between them. The light in the chapel may also have just dimmed, though it may be he who is losing the light. "What's wrong with humans? Why is there always this haggling — ?"
"The first is that you let my friends leave here unharmed. I don't want anything more to happen to them."
"Oh, is that all," she sighs, and Bluebell's healthy complexion returns, the Bambina's rigid smile. "Yes, of course they can go, peace and prosperity to them, but, well, don't be mad, but "
"But — ?"
"I was afraid they'd take you away. So I sank the gondolas."
"Ah " He turns to his companions. Pierotto sniffs. Colombina shrugs. "Megio no aver bezzi / che el cul in diese pezzi," mutters Brighella, apparently quoting a Gran Teatro dei Burattini routine, for the others pick it up like a murmured antiphon: "Better broke than your arse / broken up in ten parts!"
"Thank you, my friends. The second request, dear Fairy, is a little more difficult, but I believe you can do it. When I was turned into a boy, something happened which, though at the time I thought little of it, has troubled me increasingly all my life. I have written about it, but not well. Too much guilt maybe. When I woke up a boy, the straw cottage had been transformed into a beautiful house, I had brand-new clothes and a purse full of gold pieces, my dying babbo was suddenly healthy as a fish and back at his lathe, and — "
"Well, that is because when children who — "
"No, no, that's not the part I mean. What bothered me was that the wooden puppet I once was was still there, outside of me, the old Pinocchio, I saw him, collapsed against a chair in my father's workshop with his legs doubled up under him and the rest unstrung and dangling."
"Oh yes "
"I want you to let that puppet live again. Do that, and my friends here will bring me to you."
"But what are you saying, my son? You have lived a long and illustrious life, an impeccable example to all humanity. Your bibliography is one of the ten longest in the world, and few men in history have been more honored. A university has been named after you — "
"It's not a university, it's a junior high school — "
"But don't you see? If that stupid puppet lives on, all that will have been in vain! Your own beautiful life, the one I gave you, will have been meaningless!"
"That's right. It's what I want."
"You won't know anything about it, you know. It's not like — "