"He shat in them," Alidoro explains.

"Ah, well, why didn't you say so? All the time I thought this was your contribution to the unsavory atmosphere, old gutter-guts, ambulant orchard of dungb.a.l.l.s and dingleberries that you are. Don't you know, as demonstrated by our spiritual but restless father Marx in the full blush of his p.r.i.c.kly Grundrisse, Grundrisse, that he who lies down in his own s.h.i.t wakes up a sight for psoriasis? So what are you waiting for? We've had to listen to your drivel all night, let's put it to some practical use. For, as Jesus once preached to Mary Magdalene whilst she was anointing his b.u.m, thereby freeing herself from at least seven nasty boogers: 'Blessed are the a.r.s.e-wipers, Maggie, for they shall behold the Eye of G.o.d!' So let's make with the holy water, drizzle-chops, out with the tongue and into the pasta, as they say, for one must taste sorrow to appreciate happiness, and, once the bib's on, one might as well lick the plate clean!" that he who lies down in his own s.h.i.t wakes up a sight for psoriasis? So what are you waiting for? We've had to listen to your drivel all night, let's put it to some practical use. For, as Jesus once preached to Mary Magdalene whilst she was anointing his b.u.m, thereby freeing herself from at least seven nasty boogers: 'Blessed are the a.r.s.e-wipers, Maggie, for they shall behold the Eye of G.o.d!' So let's make with the holy water, drizzle-chops, out with the tongue and into the pasta, as they say, for one must taste sorrow to appreciate happiness, and, once the bib's on, one might as well lick the plate clean!"

"All my life," the old professor whispers abashedly as Alidoro rises with a weary grunt and commences to peel the blanket away, "I have searched for meaning and dignity, striving to be true to! to her vision of me." He shudders, though not from the cold. He is antic.i.p.ating their horror at what they are about to find. "But I have been so! so lonely!"

"Her -?" mutters the old mastiff, tugging his shoes off him.

He hesitates. He feels emptied out, shrunken, and more vulnerable and exposed than at any time since that half-remembered day when he first took rude shape under his father's knife and chisel. It is as though his insides and outsides were changing places, leaving his heart quite literally on his sleeve, and much worse besides, yet another bitter pill. "The! the Blue-Haired Fairy," he gasps, flushed with shame.

"Tell us about it," murmurs Melampetta soothingly, unb.u.t.toning his clothes. "Make a clean breast of it, if you'll pardon the expression, empty the sack, let it all hang out, flat-footed, hair down, and no bones. Let it fly, sir. Trot it out. Spit the toad, as Saint Tryphone of Bythinia once said to the demon-possessed daughter of Emperor Gordia.n.u.s, thereby bringing on the most awesome eructation and setting the bells to ringing." She licks him gently behind the ear. "Tell us about your life, old gentleman. Tell us about the Blue-Haired Fairy!"

7. A STRANGE BIRTH.

"Men, if lucky," he is quoting himself now, dredging up from what's left (not much) of his enfeebled memory this seminal line from his current work-in-progress, or once in progress, now perhaps arrested and lost forever, for he could never, not even with a final ma.s.sive exertion of his notorious will, reconstruct the whole of it, not even with the magical a.s.sistance of that enigmatic creature upon whose intervention his own quotidian progress, also perhaps about to be arrested forever, has depended throughout his long career, a career and a dependency he has just, in his gathering (and altogether agreeable) stupor, been elucidating, or trying to, and which, by means of this allusive proposition which lies at the heart of the Mamma Mamma papers (if he can remember it), he is now attempting to sum up, "are graced in their lifetime by one intense insight that changes everything. Mine was the discovery that the Blue-Haired Fairy was pretending not to be dead, but to be alive, that in fact it was not she who had given me a place in the world, you see, but papers (if he can remember it), he is now attempting to sum up, "are graced in their lifetime by one intense insight that changes everything. Mine was the discovery that the Blue-Haired Fairy was pretending not to be dead, but to be alive, that in fact it was not she who had given me a place in the world, you see, but I I who had called who had called her her into being. Grasping this seeming paradox altered my life forever!" into being. Grasping this seeming paradox altered my life forever!"

"Seeming -?" growls Alidoro indignantly, lapping his thighs, while Melampetta licks at his right nipple. "If Mela and me aren't the real thing, old comrade, then you've bes.h.i.t yourself with zabaglione!"

"Oh, I do love paradoxes," Melampetta murmurs between strokes of her long wet tongue. It feels like oiled ebony paper, gently applied. She moves into the thoracic cavity now, pushing provocatively at his k.n.o.bby sternum, then works her way slowly down the hollow between his ribs past his diaphragm toward what others, having one of the things, would call their navel. "It's like being in heat in a hailstorm, a kind of - slurp! slop! slurp! slop! - ungratifiable arousal, as though the point of it all were not larking or litters but - - ungratifiable arousal, as though the point of it all were not larking or litters but - thlupp! thlupp! - mere longing itself. I believe it was Saint Catherine of the Festering Stigmata who wrote in one of her - - mere longing itself. I believe it was Saint Catherine of the Festering Stigmata who wrote in one of her - sklorrp! sklorrp! - letters with respect to her peculiar inconvenience of having to menstruate out of a rip in her left - - letters with respect to her peculiar inconvenience of having to menstruate out of a rip in her left - tbwerpl shloop! tbwerpl shloop! - side that paradox was like a half-laid egg, speaking theologically of course, as the pious lady was always wont to - - side that paradox was like a half-laid egg, speaking theologically of course, as the pious lady was always wont to - ffrup! flawp! ffrup! flawp! - do, even when the curse was on her and - - do, even when the curse was on her and - sluck! sluck! - bespattering her farthingales." She pauses to lick at her own coat a moment as though to wipe her tongue there, before returning to his abdomen, now tingling with the chill of her evaporating saliva. Alidoro, having nosed his thighs apart, is pressing toward his knees, panting heavily. "But this is a strange birth indeed," adds Melampetta. "A son pregnant with his own mother!" - bespattering her farthingales." She pauses to lick at her own coat a moment as though to wipe her tongue there, before returning to his abdomen, now tingling with the chill of her evaporating saliva. Alidoro, having nosed his thighs apart, is pressing toward his knees, panting heavily. "But this is a strange birth indeed," adds Melampetta. "A son pregnant with his own mother!"

"It's not easy to explain," the bared wayfarer sighs, gazing up at the corrugated tin roof, where still the flames' light dances as though to tease away the distance between reality and illusion, not to mention that between (he yawns) sleeping and waking.

"Nor to believe," harrumphs Alidoro. "Though I once had a cousin who f.u.c.ked his own grandmother and so fathered his mother's half-sister who in turn -"

"Ow -!"

"Sorry, slip of the tongue," apologizes the old mastiff. "I think I touched wood."

"Yes, ah! it's tenderest just at those places where it's! it's pulling away!"

There are these moments of sudden pain when the edges are lapped (Melampetta has earlier sent an excruciating shock up from his elbow when she peeled his tailored shirt away), but they are only momentary deflections from the immense peace that has been settling upon the ancient scholar since he put it in the piazza, as they say here, and surrendered his body and its terrible truths, until now his solitary burden, concealed from all the world, to the intimate attentions of his two friends. "Come now," Melampetta had urged him when embarra.s.sment momentarily stiffened his limbs and made him shiver, "there's no shyness in s.h.i.t, as the saying goes, a saying straight from the Textus Receptus, Textus Receptus, otherwise known loosely as the otherwise known loosely as the Bes.h.i.tta, Bes.h.i.tta, it speaks volumes where farts do but slyly pretend, and now we must answer frankly with tongues of our own, keeping in mind that G.o.d so loved a clean behind that, having given his only begotten faeces, as they say in French, he invented the downy angels for b.u.mfodder as humble examples for us all. So come along now, dear friend, you'll soon feel like a newborn babe. Off with those old rags, it's time for the divine services, for complines and eucharists, for libations, oblations, and ablutions, oralsons and lickanies, for leccaturas from the book of life -" it speaks volumes where farts do but slyly pretend, and now we must answer frankly with tongues of our own, keeping in mind that G.o.d so loved a clean behind that, having given his only begotten faeces, as they say in French, he invented the downy angels for b.u.mfodder as humble examples for us all. So come along now, dear friend, you'll soon feel like a newborn babe. Off with those old rags, it's time for the divine services, for complines and eucharists, for libations, oblations, and ablutions, oralsons and lickanies, for leccaturas from the book of life -"

"They aren't rags!" he protested in his foolish confusion, clinging to his jacket hem as it was pulled away. "That's a seven-hundred-dollar suit from Savile Row!"

"Mmm," grumbled Alidoro, tugging his trousers down. "Smells like it, too."

"He said 'savio,' 'savio,' you suppurating imbecile, not you suppurating imbecile, not 'sulfurco'!" 'sulfurco'!" Melampetta scolded. "Now give me those things, I'll put them to soak." Melampetta scolded. "Now give me those things, I'll put them to soak."

As she trotted out into the snow and down the beachlike slope to the water, the old professor, stripped to his shorts and socks, the wisps of cold wind leaking into their shelter making the frayed nerves at the edge of his skin tingle, literally p.r.i.c.king him on the living edge, closed his eyes and whispered miserably: "I feel like such a wretched a.s.s, old friend. Sick, as my body is, I am far more sick at heart. You should have let them take me away."

"Better a live donkey, partigiano, mio partigiano, than a dead doctor," replied the mastiff, peeling his socks off with his ruined gums. "What my tinpot employers lack in subtlety, they compensate for in diligence."

"What does it matter?" he erupted crankily. "Listen to me. For nearly a century, I have lived an exemplary life. There have been trials, temptations, torments, but I have won through. I have earned the respect of the entire world. I am living proof of the power of redemption through education, endeavor's paragon, candor's big name. Do you understand? I have received not one n.o.bel, but two. I am a household word. I am the ornament of metaphors, the pith of aphorisms, what's liked in similes - in some languages, Alidoro, a very verb! My father would be proud of me, the Blue-Haired Fairy would! And now!" He shuddered as his shorts were pulled down. "Now I have lost everything. Even my pride."

"Ah, look at the poor old fellow, it's enough to make the stones weep," sighed Melampetta, having quietly returned, bringing with her the ashy odor of fresh snow. "He's thin as a nail, he's lost all his hair except whatever that is that's sprouting there on his feet, and he looks like he's wearing the tatters of old wallpaper where his hide should be. Even his nose has gone limp. What a scene he makes! Enough to make the jaded scuff in the galleries lose their suppers! And he's still no bigger than a piece of cheese, just a lick and a smell, you could stuff him in a matchbox if it weren't for the nose."

"In small casks, Melata, good wine."

"Yes, Alidote, if, alas, the cask is tight. But why is he sniveling like that?"

"He's embarra.s.sed."

"Now, now, my pet, no need for that. It's not modesty that answers the call of nature, remember. And we dogs are great a.s.s-lickers, as our comrades are all too quick to point out, we have a special apt.i.tude for it. Not for nothing are we known as man's beast friend, his licking lackey. So, as Origen once said, whilst castrating himself in devotional zeal in the company of Saint John the Theophagist, 'When in a kennel, my peckish old bellybag, one must do as the curs do - the country you go to, as our epistles say, the custom you find - so, take eat, Zan Juan, these are my original ballocks, do this in mnemonics of me, good fork that you are, and buon appet.i.to!' "

"Speaking of such matters, old friend," muttered Alidoro then, poking around in his thighs, "what happened to your own affair? There's nothing down here but a peehole."

"I don't know, it fell out one day. I didn't notice. It may have got sent out with the laundry."

"El despar xe sempre castr," murmured Melampetta, licking at it speculatively as though sampling an antipasto: "The dest.i.tute lose their b.a.l.l.s to boot. But not to worry, for as La Volpe said after she sold her tail for a fly swatter: 'Who gives a fig, there's that much less acreage for the planting of whelks and buboes, may I soon be shut of the rest of it, speaking figuratively of course.' "

"You're touching a painful key, Mela, when you bring her up. It was those two old codgers who did him out tonight."

"What -?! Again?! But wasn't it you, dear Pinocchio, who bit the old Cat's paw off? You must have recognized them!"

"Well, they looked familiar. But then, with my eyes, who doesn't?" For a moment, he felt the abuse of it again, the indignity, and the bile rose in his throat. He felt stupid, outraged, humiliated, frightened, crazed, and embittered all over again and all at the same time. What would they say back at the university if they could see him now, lying here in a shabby boatyard, stripped of all his earthly goods, letting two old mongrels lick his devastated peehole? It infuriated him and shamed him, but what could he do about it, he was powerless. And, besides, it was beginning to feel good. "Anyway, that was in the last century."

"True. One forgets the power of such a life to seem coetaneous and omnifical, speaking in the grand manner, like Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, for example, who once said, or was said to have said, while declaiming upon the angels in much the same highbrow pantological style, bless his gray-green heart, that the reason the little atemporal beasts were s.e.xless was because if they ever started f.u.c.king each other eternity itself might find itself in the family way, a superfetation, as he called it in the cla.s.sical tongue - at which he, whoever he was, was clearly no slouch - a superfetation that could well make twins of the Apocalypse, leaving G.o.d biting his own tail, so to speak, if he had one, and if he didn't, well, we're back where we started, like the universe itself in its tedious mechanical turnings, less acreage for buboes and all that." All this, though largely incomprehensible, was quite soothing, especially accompanied as it was by the soft warm strokes of the two tongues, gently bathing his body, poking into this crevice and that, unknotting the tight strings of muscle, swabbing away the foul incrustations, husking him, as it were, desquamating desquamating him (ah, the him (ah, the words, words, the the words!), words!), and he felt himself slowly slipping toward what that same Dionysius, so masked, called, if he remembered correctly, "the darkness of unknowing." Whence all truth. "But tell us," Melampetta was whispering in his ear, the one she was licking with a tongue almost eellike now in its subtle acquatics, "tell us about the Blue-Haired Fairy." and he felt himself slowly slipping toward what that same Dionysius, so masked, called, if he remembered correctly, "the darkness of unknowing." Whence all truth. "But tell us," Melampetta was whispering in his ear, the one she was licking with a tongue almost eellike now in its subtle acquatics, "tell us about the Blue-Haired Fairy."

And so he did, starting from the beginning ("It all began," he began), when, one terrifying night, running from murderers, he came upon a snow white house set in the deep dark woods and, knocking frantically with feet, fists, and head, aroused a little girl with sea-blue hair and a waxen white face who would have been quite beautiful had she not been completely dead. She couldn't open her eyes, much less the door, so the two a.s.sa.s.sins caught him and, after shattering a couple of knives on his hardwood torso, hung him from an oak tree, where, after crying for his daddy, he died. "I still have nightmares about it," he told them, succ.u.mbing gradually to the rhythm of their lapping tongues. "I was up there for hours, blowing about like a bell-less clapper, till at last my neck broke and my joints locked up and my nose went stiff. And all the while that dead girl was watching me with her eyes closed, don't ask me how I know this, but it's true." Eventually, eyes wide open and grinning like old Maestro Ciliegia on a toot, she staged an elaborate rescue with a bunch of circus animals and some crazy doctors (he has a vivid memory of waking briefly inside an airy coach padded with canary feathers and lined with if whipped cream and custard, and thinking, in his unredeemed puppetish way, that Heaven was a sticky place that made him queasy, and he hoped they'd let him out soon), but why, he wondered, even as he described it for his friends, praising the Fairy for her ingenuity and her amazing remedies ("She brought me back to life again!"), did she wait so long?

Well, of course, she was just a little girl. This was the happy time. She was as capricious as he. They played doctors together, jokes on one another, house. They took rides on her birds and animals. She let him poke his nose in her long blue hair. He showed her how he could kick his own head, front, back, or sideways. She laughed at the wooden knock it made and showed him how she could turn her head all the way around seven times in the same direction without getting a crick in her neck; he managed only three before feeling all twisted up inside, but deliciously dizzy when he unwound. It was the most fun he ever had in his life, not even Toyland or Hollywood came close. She wanted him to stay and be her little brother, she even said she'd fetch his father, which somehow pleased him and displeased him at the same time. But it was too good to last. His trials, as it turned out, had just begun. He was dragged off to Fools' Trap by the Fox and the Cat to bury his money in the Field of Miracles, and then years went by, or what were probably years. He was still a puppet then and didn't know much about time. Except that it had something to do with beginnings and endings, this he found out when, after innumerable misadventures, he finally made his way back to where her cottage had been and found nothing but a tombstone with an inscription saying that the little girl with the azure hair had "died of sorrow on being abandoned by her little brother Pinocchio." "It nearly broke my heart. I tried to tear my wooden hair out. That was before I had real hair, of course. Now that's gone, too. I was so proud of it. Hair made me feel so human. But it all fell out. First, from my head, then from my chest and armpits, and! and on down!" Only on his feet is something still growing, and that probably isn't hair. Nor are they really, at root, his own feet.

The Fairy wasn't wasn't dead, of course. She who had taught him never to lie had lied, and not for the first or last time. Yet he accepted that. All part of his personal via crucis as he lightheartedly called it, though never in print. And, in a sense, she had died, for he never saw her as a little girl again. When next they met, here on the Island of the Busy Bees, she was suddenly old enough to be his mother, while he was still just a puny puppet. He didn't understand this. She pretended it was some kind of magic. Maybe it was, but he hated to get left behind. When he recognized her, he knelt and hugged her knees, and she gave him a glimpse of a possible future, more than one: he had to choose. Though his motives might have been mixed (there was something heady about having his nose there between her big tender knees), he chose boyhood, which meant he had to pa.s.s his examinations at school. But his cla.s.smates, hating him for the square peg he was, lured him to the beach and tried, as they put it, to knock his block off. Someone threw his own arithmetic book at him: it missed and struck down poor Eugenio, and the police came and arrested him for the crime. "That was when I met you, Alidoro. You chased me when I ran away." dead, of course. She who had taught him never to lie had lied, and not for the first or last time. Yet he accepted that. All part of his personal via crucis as he lightheartedly called it, though never in print. And, in a sense, she had died, for he never saw her as a little girl again. When next they met, here on the Island of the Busy Bees, she was suddenly old enough to be his mother, while he was still just a puny puppet. He didn't understand this. She pretended it was some kind of magic. Maybe it was, but he hated to get left behind. When he recognized her, he knelt and hugged her knees, and she gave him a glimpse of a possible future, more than one: he had to choose. Though his motives might have been mixed (there was something heady about having his nose there between her big tender knees), he chose boyhood, which meant he had to pa.s.s his examinations at school. But his cla.s.smates, hating him for the square peg he was, lured him to the beach and tried, as they put it, to knock his block off. Someone threw his own arithmetic book at him: it missed and struck down poor Eugenio, and the police came and arrested him for the crime. "That was when I met you, Alidoro. You chased me when I ran away."

"Yeah, we really tore up the landscape! When I was a pup, they trained me by making me chase a stick. I must've got carried away by your smell and lost my compa.s.s, nearly lost my life when you took to the water. I forgot I didn't know how to swim. Never did get the hang of it!"

"Wait a minute," said Melampetta, licking the hairless hollow of his armpit, "let me get this straight -"

"Careful! My ribs -!"

"Yes, I see. Some exhibit, you are, old fellow! You're like one of those mythical inside-out creatures mentioned by Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia in his postural studies of metempsychotics. They could use you as a foldout in an anatomy book. But, listen, do you mean to say that this fairy with the weird locks who liked to keep a magical menagerie and play spooky games with little boys -"

"Puppets!"

"Yes, well, like turning houses into tombstones and playing dead and conjuring up pallbearers and corpses and other such ectoplastic doodlings - do you mean to say that she gave all this up to pack school lunches and do the laundry, pick up toys and give baths -?"

"Actually, she oiled me down!"

"She abandoned fairyhood to be a mamma mamma - -?!"

"Well, my my mamma. It seemed to be something she had to do. Though later of course she changed into a goat." mamma. It seemed to be something she had to do. Though later of course she changed into a goat."

"A goat!"

"Yes. With blue fleece. That's how I knew it was her."

"Madonna! And udders hanging down the size of a theosophist's behind, no doubt?"

"She stood on a white rock in the middle of the sea trying to stop me from getting sucked up into the maw of the monster fish. Or maybe leading me into it, I couldn't be sure. It was the last time I saw her. Alive, that is!"

"She died? Again?!"

"Well, she just became! something else." How could he explain this? That, in effect, she became the house he lived in, the social order he embraced, even, in a sense, the universe itself at its most ineffable, its most profound! "But before that, I found out she was dying in hospital, too poor to buy a crust of bread. I sent her all my money. Everything I had. And with that she came to me at last! sort of! It was in a dream!" He was feeling very dreamy right now. Alidoro was tonguing vigorously the insides of his thighs as though to urge them back to youth again, while Melampetta was sliding up and down between hip and armpit with long soothing strokes, carefully circling the sore spots, making him feel almost like a ship at sea, awash in an airy foam. "It was! beautiful!"

"I don't know," sighed Melampetta. "All this melancholical h.e.l.lo and goodbye, all this gruesome hide-and-seek over an open grave, tombstones popping up like mushrooms - it sounds to me like either she was trying to cork up your a.s.s with a motherlode of guilt, my dear Pinocchio, or else she had a terrific scam going."

"I know. That's how it seemed to me at times. And I haven't told you everything, either." He offered the old watchdog a replying sigh, and mostly in grat.i.tude, for her tongue seemed to have spread out and was lapping him all over now like a warm wet towel. "Whenever I was a bad boy, for example, she seemed to go limp and cold and fall down with her eyes rolled back. It was really scary!"

"Oci bisi, paradisi!," snorted Alidoro from between his thighs. "Remember that one, Mela? 'Gray eyes, paradise!' "

" 'Black eyes, hot romance!' "

" 'Blue eyes make you fall in love!' "

" 'White eyes make you s.h.i.t your pants!' I know, I know - but how many times will it work? Once? Twice? This babau, this bugaboo, must have pulled her routine as often as she brushed her fangs. If I may say so, it seems to have taken you forever to eat the leaf, my friend!"

"I was a slow learner, Melampetta, as the world knows. But I'd suffered a lot of births and rebirths myself, I was used to the idea. I was a very lively piece of wood, you know, before the man I called my father - my primum mobile, primum mobile, as you might describe him - turned me into a puppet. Then the a.s.sa.s.sins hung me and the Fairy brought me back to life again. After that I became a dancing donkey and, when the fish ate all my donkey flesh away, I was reborn a puppet from the corpse, though naturally I'd hoped for something better." as you might describe him - turned me into a puppet. Then the a.s.sa.s.sins hung me and the Fairy brought me back to life again. After that I became a dancing donkey and, when the fish ate all my donkey flesh away, I was reborn a puppet from the corpse, though naturally I'd hoped for something better."

"A dancing donkey! Do tell -!"

"Later, my father and I were delivered together from the belly of the monster fish, if that's what it was. Finally I died as a puppet and was reborn a boy. And now! well, you can see, it might not be over yet!"

"The 'miracle,' as a tourist here once defined it in a fine piece of Christian idiotology, 'of reborn ingenuousness,' a wonderful thing in principle no doubt, but you're like some kind of wind-up demonstration model. Round and round you go! Still I'm surprised you didn't get fed up finally with all this crazy vampire's pernicious horse-plop and just plant hut and puppets, if you'll pardon the expression, and walk out! Why didn't you send her to get fried?"

"Oh, I did did grow to resent it, to resent her, Melampetta, I grow to resent it, to resent her, Melampetta, I did did walk out. I was a good boy, after all, obedient, hard-working, studious, truthful - but walk out. I was a good boy, after all, obedient, hard-working, studious, truthful - but then then what? I'd done everything I was supposed to do, I'd become a famous scholar and exemplary citizen, the whole world loved me, I felt I deserved to have a little fun. But whenever I let myself go a little, I'd see her tomb again: 'Here lies who died because!' I couldn't get rid of it, it was worse than athlete's foot, and it ruined everything. Why did I want a boy's body in the first place, I began to wonder, if I couldn't use it? So I tried to run away again. This time to Hollywood -" what? I'd done everything I was supposed to do, I'd become a famous scholar and exemplary citizen, the whole world loved me, I felt I deserved to have a little fun. But whenever I let myself go a little, I'd see her tomb again: 'Here lies who died because!' I couldn't get rid of it, it was worse than athlete's foot, and it ruined everything. Why did I want a boy's body in the first place, I began to wonder, if I couldn't use it? So I tried to run away again. This time to Hollywood -"

"Ah, Hollywood!" rumbled Melampetta, moving eagerly toward his nipple, which she circled playfully with her tongue. "Here comes the good part!"

"Not so good as all that," he replied, flushing with shame. "I suffered a kind of relapse out there, I even became a bit! reckless!" His heart gave a little regretful leap under his breast which Melampetta was swabbing, and his nose began to itch in admonishment. "I became something of an a.s.s again, another sort of! well! Until one day!" And he told them then about his revelation, his sudden quite stunning perception that the Blue-Haired Fairy was not alive and pretending sometimes to be dead, but was truly dead, only pretending sometimes, when he helped her, to be alive. "It was not she who had given me a place in the world, you see, but I I who had called who had called her her into being!" This explained the way she first appeared to him, her sinking spells, her desperate messages: goodness, she was trying to tell him, could die in the world. It was not an absolute, not a given, but something that got re-created from day to day, from moment to moment, by living and dying men. Either they kept it alive or it disappeared. Maybe even forever. "It gave me a mission. Her power was really into being!" This explained the way she first appeared to him, her sinking spells, her desperate messages: goodness, she was trying to tell him, could die in the world. It was not an absolute, not a given, but something that got re-created from day to day, from moment to moment, by living and dying men. Either they kept it alive or it disappeared. Maybe even forever. "It gave me a mission. Her power was really my my power, I had but to exercise it. 'I-ness,' I called it in a famous essay: the magical force of good character. My virtue, I felt, my decency, my civility, my faithfulness, might save the world!" power, I had but to exercise it. 'I-ness,' I called it in a famous essay: the magical force of good character. My virtue, I felt, my decency, my civility, my faithfulness, might save the world!"

"Oh my!!" Both tongues were sloshing around in his groin now. "Aren't we we the little Redeemer!" the little Redeemer!"

"Or if I couldn't manage that," he has added, somewhat abashedly, "there were always the tombstones waiting to be done!"

"Whew, I haven't had such a workout since my last litter, bless their long-forgotten little hearts!" Melampetta exclaims now, panting heavily. "I think I have some idea now how John the Baptist felt, coming up for air amid the repentant mult.i.tudes after loosening all their laces, as he liked to put it: 'You have to swallow the toad,' said he, speaking about knowledge, of course, that bitter pill, 'to s.h.i.t pearls'! Or as Jesus himself, that notorious pearl-p.o.o.per, once declared, shouting out over the screams of the rich man he was trying to thread through the eye of a needle, this not being one of his better numbers: 'Hey, compagni, you can't suck an egg without making a hole!' So don't hide your recklessness and edifying relapses under a bushel, my venerable friend, don't skip over the beastly bits - the seen, as they say in Hollywood, separates us from what we long to see! Let's hear about the donkey days!"

"Ah, the donkey days!! It's been so long, I can barely!"

"That's right, barely and baldly, it's the naked truth we want, the unvarnished reality! Veritas in puris naturalibus -!"

"Scusa, Melampiccante, old suck, but I think this side's about done!"

"What? Oh yes, Alindotto, you're right, it's time to turn the spit and baste the other one - be careful, though, the little duck's as brittle as croccante and flaking like puff pastry!" They straighten his legs and tuck his arms in, then gently ease him over: "That's it - like folding an omelette!" Melampetta urges, her sudden rash of culinary metaphors no doubt betraying the effort to work up an appet.i.te for the awesome feast she is about to face. He shudders to think of the spectacle he must now, in his proc.u.mbent att.i.tude, present to his friends' eyes - and other senses ("He's shivering, Lido, go put some more wood on the fire!") - but at the same time, while being rolled, he's caught a glimpse of the snow falling thickly through the night sky outside their humble shelter, and it is as though the magical glow it seems to cast upon everything has fallen upon him as well, for he feels suddenly an intense flush of warmth penetrating his entire body: this is what it is like (the fire is crackling, the two dogs are nuzzling his thighs apart) to be among true friends! He had nearly forgotten. Junior faculty may be attentive, but rarely like this. "Aha, I think we've reached the font, Alidrofobo, you faithful old blister," Melampetta mutters (there is a cold nose poking at his r.e.c.t.u.m, perhaps more than one), "that which Aristotle the Wise termed in his treatise on The Cla.s.sification of Dejecta The Cla.s.sification of Dejecta the effervescent cause. We are at the source, the wellspring, the root, the core - or what the divine Duns s.c.r.o.t.u.m, confronted with the preserved contents of the Virgin's placenta, called in his nausea 'the very stone of the scandal,' the the effervescent cause. We are at the source, the wellspring, the root, the core - or what the divine Duns s.c.r.o.t.u.m, confronted with the preserved contents of the Virgin's placenta, called in his nausea 'the very stone of the scandal,' the ultima realitas entis. ultima realitas entis. We are, insomma, if I am not mistaken, at the drippings. So, will you taste the soup please?" We are, insomma, if I am not mistaken, at the drippings. So, will you taste the soup please?"

"My pleasure," grunts the old mastiff with gruff simplicity, "it just does for me."

"Mmm. Al dente. Though maybe we've let him lie in the sawdust too long."

"Careful. Shoulder blades look a bit dodgy!"

"Yes, I see." She laps around one, stroking his neck and the back of his bald pate with her broad stroke ("The hairs of your head are indeed numbered, comrade," she murmurs in his ear, "and the number is zero!"), and slides her velvety tongue down his crenellated spine, pushing at the knots, stiffens her tongue to prod at the small of his back, then slips on down the crack to the gap between his thighs like a skier on a downhill run, curls up around one thigh, and, as though congratulating herself or getting her wind back, laps generously at his near cheek. As she does so, he has a dim fleeting recollection of being combed and curried, back when he was still a performing donkey and being readied for a show, an experience so comforting it nearly reconciled him to his unnatural life, a life indeed more like a dream than waking life, and so all but lost now to his living memory! "You know, I can understand humans wanting to tart themselves up a bit," Melampetta pants. "I mean, I wouldn't mind a little lace shawl or some beads myself, if ever some wh.o.r.eson should offer me such baubles - naked we're only cute for a day and after that we need all the help we can get. But why people leave all their other orifices gaping, then cover their a.s.sholes up in this c.u.mbersome tailoring is beyond me."

"Huh. Some philosopher you are, Melone mia. It's a great attraction to flies, that's why. Maybe you need to lose your tail like the rest of us here, there seems to be something too abstract about your fundamental principles."

"The Blue-Haired Fairy told me," the professor mumbles softly into the blanket under his chin (what he remembers is the day he gained gained a tail, that day of the transformation: he was laughing, he and his dear friend Lampwick, they were so happy and having so much fun, and then suddenly there was a seizure in his chest and for a moment he couldn't breathe, and then the laughter became! something else!), "that little boys who do not wipe themselves properly not only grow leeks and cabbages back there and so become the village laughingstocks, they also lure rats into their beds at night and get bit in the behind with the plague." He sighs as a great soft tongue lathers a hip as though kneading pasta. Though the middle time is mostly gone, he can also remember the day he got changed back again, the day his new owner tried to drown him so as to make a drumhead of his hide, and instead the fish ate away his donkey flesh. It tickled more than hurt. It was liberating. Exciting even. Sensuous. It seemed to free him of a great weight. It was like the time the Blue-Haired Fairy sent a thousand woodp.e.c.k.e.rs to peck at his nose. It was like spring after a long dim winter. It was like! now! "She used to take me to the cemetery and show me the tombstones of all the little dirty-bottomed boys!" He yawns. As their tongues swab and ma.s.sage his ancient hinderparts, he can feel the sleep that has been avoiding him since he left America steal over him like the caress of the Fairy's blue tresses. "Sometimes!" a tail, that day of the transformation: he was laughing, he and his dear friend Lampwick, they were so happy and having so much fun, and then suddenly there was a seizure in his chest and for a moment he couldn't breathe, and then the laughter became! something else!), "that little boys who do not wipe themselves properly not only grow leeks and cabbages back there and so become the village laughingstocks, they also lure rats into their beds at night and get bit in the behind with the plague." He sighs as a great soft tongue lathers a hip as though kneading pasta. Though the middle time is mostly gone, he can also remember the day he got changed back again, the day his new owner tried to drown him so as to make a drumhead of his hide, and instead the fish ate away his donkey flesh. It tickled more than hurt. It was liberating. Exciting even. Sensuous. It seemed to free him of a great weight. It was like the time the Blue-Haired Fairy sent a thousand woodp.e.c.k.e.rs to peck at his nose. It was like spring after a long dim winter. It was like! now! "She used to take me to the cemetery and show me the tombstones of all the little dirty-bottomed boys!" He yawns. As their tongues swab and ma.s.sage his ancient hinderparts, he can feel the sleep that has been avoiding him since he left America steal over him like the caress of the Fairy's blue tresses. "Sometimes!"

"Yes!?"

"Sometimes my life seems more like it's been! ah!!!" ah!!!" It reaches deep into his inner core, suffusing him with a powerful satisfaction, and a great leavening of his spirit, as if he were being freed from some wretched imprisonment. Well, life itself, he thinks, I'm probably dying. They know this. They're preparing me. It's wonderful. It is like a magical transportation, like the intimate and golden repose of a Bellini, like a Hollywood ending. Never has he known such peace since the day he first became a boy! "It's been almost like a! like a movie!" It reaches deep into his inner core, suffusing him with a powerful satisfaction, and a great leavening of his spirit, as if he were being freed from some wretched imprisonment. Well, life itself, he thinks, I'm probably dying. They know this. They're preparing me. It's wonderful. It is like a magical transportation, like the intimate and golden repose of a Bellini, like a Hollywood ending. Never has he known such peace since the day he first became a boy! "It's been almost like a! like a movie!"

8. THE MOVIE OF HIS LIFE.

"It looks like you've indeed got that little something extra," is how Melampetta describes it in fond remembrance of the old fan magazines (they have just been discussing the big bang theory of the Hollywood star system with its dire implications, as Melampetta put it, of entropic twinkle), but what she is referring to is the clump of matted hair her excavating tongue has uncovered between his a.n.u.s and the ridged seam of his backbone. "It's all coiled up here like the runout trailer from an old reel of film. Has it been there all the time?"

"When my father made me, all the hair was painted on," he explains, though he wonders if this is indeed an explanation, or more like a proposition - what his old friend Alidoro might call (and perhaps did, having just spat irritably and, muttering that "the old sporcaccione's barf is worse than his blight," wandered off on his own, leaving the ancient traveler and the faithful watchdog alone here on this sandy sh.o.r.e that slopes down to the sea, or else to a swimming pool) a "suppurating pustulate." What he has really wanted to say in reply to her question is, "Well, yes! but no!," but he has been unable (the very effort seems to have pushed the boat shed some distance up the slope away from them into a circle of unmanned booms and cameras) to find the words for it.

But it's as though she understands anyway (she has meanwhile spooled the hair out from under the end of his spine so that it fans out over his cheeks and thighs all the way to the back of his knees), for she says: "Ah yes, I see, your skin is, after all, as one might have supposed, nothing more than a cheap veneer," and proceeds to lather his whole body at once, ferreting out vast hidden thickets of clotted hair: on his head, in his ears and armpits, down his back and legs, on his belly, chest, and chin, between his fingers, thighs, and toes. No wonder he's been feeling so inhibited! Out it comes! "This explains your infatuation with paradox," she howls.

"It's not an infatuation!" he screams, as though in pain, but really just to be heard, for she sits alone by his blanket now, far down the sunny slope below him, her head c.o.c.ked archetypally, still as a plaster casting. Or perhaps that is a plaster casting. He in his elegant new pelt, which unfortunately is already attracting flies and ticks, is back up under the corrugated roof of the boat shed, where, as he was about to explain to Melampetta, they are making a movie of his life. "A new treatment," he says aloud, and seems to hear Alidoro laugh at that, or else the porter, that villain, though he, or she, is not to be seen, nor is anyone. The shed, for the purpose, has been fitted out like a sort of manger with heaps of straw, painted cutout animals, an imitation fire flickering in an old brazier. ("That's where I burned my feet off," he explains to Melampetta, or would have were she still beside him), white cotton on the roof, and Christmas presents secreted about like Easter eggs, but, though light streams spiritually through the broken rafters in imitation of, or homage to, the great Tintoretto, or perhaps dear old Veronese, the general appearance is one of artifice and desolation, the manger, suffused with barnyard odors and missing two of its four walls, uninhabited within except for a cheaply made wooden stick-figure lying in the straw and, without, surrounded by silhouetted camera gear looking about as rea.s.suring as grave markers. It is as though those responsible have stopped in here only long enough to drop the little creature and hasten on, leaving behind nothing more personal than a yellow wig and a broken water jug.

"My mother died in the fire," the little wooden figure reminds him as they step out through the jaws of the smoldering doorway into the blazing but frigid sun, and, remembering, tears come to his eyes again, though whether of sorrow or exasperation, he can't be sure. He is, as it were, if he understands the storyline correctly, carrying himself on his back, having been awarded the role of the a.s.s in recognition of his abundant hairiness and his recent achievements in the school metaphysics and polka examinations. Or at least this is, though its source forgotten, his understanding, an understanding beclouded somewhat by his uncertainty as to where they are supposed to be going and by the numbing pressure inside his head, a pressure he recognizes from previous experience as the donkey's stupid brain weighing heavily upon his own, a weight he had, in the intervening near-century, all but forgotten. "It doesn't matter where we are going," the little creature on his back tells him as if answering a question he might actually have asked, "what's important is to stay inside the frame."

"Hee haw," he replies, meaning: Is that all there is, then, this monotonous dynamics of inclusion and extrusion, of presence and absence (of pretense and abscess, he is thinking, or perhaps the little wooden man, mocking him, is saying this), this timid seizure of shadows, this insensible shying from the edge, and what the wooden man responds is: "The public, oh holy a.s.s, is never wrong."

Ah well, the public, public, he brays in reply, struggling against donkey-brain takeover (sometimes, he remembers now, this happened to him in his real donkey days, a kind of sudden slippage, or displacement, as if from one room into another, a synaptic leap not easily reversible, each brain aware of the other only as the mattress and the pea could be said to be aware of each other in that story of the fastidious princess, an alarming though not altogether unpleasant metastasis provoked, often as not, by the erecting of that outsized dangle between his legs, which is back, he is amused to note, slapping his thighs animatedly as he plods along under his chattering burden, the topic from the saddle now being the Renaissance use of the a.s.s motif as a prototypical theophanic icon: the reluctant gait a trigger of pa.s.sionate spiritual response, the upright ears emblems of devotion and orthodoxy, and the haunches, radiant as halos, more emotionally reverberant than angels' wings - one of the portentous themes of his own brazen youth, he is quick to recognize), the he brays in reply, struggling against donkey-brain takeover (sometimes, he remembers now, this happened to him in his real donkey days, a kind of sudden slippage, or displacement, as if from one room into another, a synaptic leap not easily reversible, each brain aware of the other only as the mattress and the pea could be said to be aware of each other in that story of the fastidious princess, an alarming though not altogether unpleasant metastasis provoked, often as not, by the erecting of that outsized dangle between his legs, which is back, he is amused to note, slapping his thighs animatedly as he plods along under his chattering burden, the topic from the saddle now being the Renaissance use of the a.s.s motif as a prototypical theophanic icon: the reluctant gait a trigger of pa.s.sionate spiritual response, the upright ears emblems of devotion and orthodoxy, and the haunches, radiant as halos, more emotionally reverberant than angels' wings - one of the portentous themes of his own brazen youth, he is quick to recognize), the public public - the - the public public is always is always dying dying on you! on you!

"Ah, where would we be," sighs the man on his back, who has been growing heavier and heavier with the weight of his discourse, "without the script?" And, as though to pursue the inquiry, he flings it away from him, the sheets scattering and tumbling in the air like sinners at the Last Judgment. Though they have made little enough actual progress (the boat shed, he feels certain, is still nearby), they have maintained the illusion of it by pa.s.sing - or being pa.s.sed by - revolving stages with painted backdrops representing the scenes of his childhood: the Tuscan village where his carpenter father lived, his fairy mother's cottage in the woods, the city of paupers known as Fools' Trap where all who came there lost their hair and plumage and other valued parts, the infamous Toyland, though here labeled "Pleasure Island" and looking a bit dated, even the little hill and coastal towns he toured as a marionette and dancing donkey, all gleaming and decorous as the backgrounds in a Bellini altarpiece. Now, however, they have arrived, by way of a gated and treeless city on an arid plain, desolate as a Western ghost town (a film set, of course: watching cameras no doubt lurk, unseen, behind the ruined walls), at a ma.s.sive marble rock, white as candle wax and rearing ominously into the intense azure sky above them like one of Paolo Veneziano's primitive crags. Has he been here before? Alas, unlike the scenes on the revolving backdrops, this one has not been tagged. Gone, it's all gone. Or going. He can't remember yesterday. He shouldn't have thrown away the script. "What's the point," he cries bitterly, "of all these strenuous acc.u.mulations, if we only, in the -"

"Don't," groans the withering beast between his legs, limping now as it labors up the impossible rise, "give away! the ending!!"

At the summit, he is met (the fatally lamed donkey has crumbled away, turning to dust beneath him like a doused witch, he has had to scrabble up the last sheer face, hand over hand, alone) by a bearded ape in the scarlet robes of an opera buffa judge who, excoriating him for arriving so late ("But my poor knees-!" he protests, unheard over the strings of the studio orchestra), condemns him in an aria not unlike a love song ("The Picture That Could Change Your Life" is its t.i.tle) to be rolled in flour and crucified.

He turns to address the gathered mult.i.tudes ("Blessed are they who turn the other omelette!" he cries), but snarling gendarmes swarm over him, strip him of his imported finery, lather him up with flour paste, and dress him for the party in his tattered old suit of flowered wallpaper, with a silver sash bedizened with bright ribbons bound round his waist and white camellias tied to his ears. Children are invited up from the audience to hammer the nails in, some of whom he recognizes as old schoolchums, who take pleasure in reviling him in the old style, calling him a stick-in-the-mud, pencil-peter, and a woodenhead, pulling his nose, covering his paper suit with graffiti ("HOORAY FOR TOYS!" they scrawl, "DOWN WITH ARITHMETIC!"), and tying strings to his hands and feet to make him dance, as though he were still a puppet and without the dignity of flesh and history. This is what it means, he realizes in his suffering, to be, of anything, incarnate. The children are clumsy and impatient, driving nails in randomly, some crooked, others only halfway, sometimes missing the nails altogether and hammering his flesh, and complaining all the while about the hardness of his bones and the wood, solid holly, of the cross beneath, which keep bending the nails and making their little hands sting.

Finally, a charge against him bearing the inscription "THE STAR OF THE DANCE" is nailed over his head and, to the accompaniment of fifes and drums, the cross is levered erect into the posthole prepared for it, the very hole, he sees, that he once dug in the Field of Miracles to plant the gold coins as seed for his magical money tree, he now rising as his own fruit, as it were, all of this taking place in exquisitely painful slow motion (there are so many nails in him, he hardly sags at all) as though they were overcranking the scene for erotic effect. "Rispettabile pubblico, cavalieri e dame!" "Rispettabile pubblico, cavalieri e dame!" bellows a voice from below: bellows a voice from below: "Your attention, please!" "Your attention, please!" He feels dizzyingly high, almost face to face with the sun itself, yellow as a patty of polenta there in the brilliant blue sky blanketing him. "Oh babbo mio-!" he whimpers as though cued. "Direct from the burning mountains and savage highways of wildest America, we bring you now in living color, speaking loosely, our feature attraction, in a performance more thrilling than the deeds of man, more beautiful than the love of woman, more terrifying than the dreams of children- " the children hoot and holler delightedly at this and heave their hammers at him, "- the final stirring episode in the Pa.s.sion of Pinocchio! You will see before your eyes the farewell dance of the world's most notorious bad boy, this improbable son of an impotent carpenter and a virgin fairy, baptized by a chamber pot and circ.u.mcised by woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, part flesh, part spirit, and a legend in his own lifetime! Right this way!" He feels dizzyingly high, almost face to face with the sun itself, yellow as a patty of polenta there in the brilliant blue sky blanketing him. "Oh babbo mio-!" he whimpers as though cued. "Direct from the burning mountains and savage highways of wildest America, we bring you now in living color, speaking loosely, our feature attraction, in a performance more thrilling than the deeds of man, more beautiful than the love of woman, more terrifying than the dreams of children- " the children hoot and holler delightedly at this and heave their hammers at him, "- the final stirring episode in the Pa.s.sion of Pinocchio! You will see before your eyes the farewell dance of the world's most notorious bad boy, this improbable son of an impotent carpenter and a virgin fairy, baptized by a chamber pot and circ.u.mcised by woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, part flesh, part spirit, and a legend in his own lifetime! Right this way!"

"Looks like this time you have, to make a phrase, barked up the wrong tree, dottore," remarks, amid all the burlesque whistling and cheering, a sour voice at his side: it is La Volpe, still in her porter's costume - he has been hung in the middle, he discovers, between her and her blind Gattino, now cackling on his other side with senile laughter. "You got the short stick, as one might say, you're out on a limb - you are, in a word, up the pole!"

"Up the pole!" wheezes the Cat, covering his mouth with the stub of his right foreleg: he hangs by one paw only, an empty black glove nailed up on the other side. "In a! in a!?"

"Word."