(1991) Pinocchio in Venice Read Online Free PDF

successfully purged, but it remained to this day the most convincing composite image of the Genius-in-History), is sanity. Indeed it would have done the crazy man in the campo no harm, what with all his ravings about untamable beasts and savage natures untouched by kindness and unredeemable evil fates (or fairies, his slurred ramblings were ambiguous), to have read that book before falling victim to his own self-fulfilling prophecies: natures do remain just as they first appear if they are completely mad. However, the poor creature, storming up and down a bridge over and over as though in the forlorn hope, a hope repeatedly renewed even when repeatedly baffled, that it might one time translate him to greater heights - up into one of Tiepolo's sky-high parades perhaps, though nothing so fair was above him now - did succeed in startling the professor as they passed by with what amounted to a demented paraphrase of another of his famous sayings, this one from the book the world best knows him by, The Wretch, his first essay in unabashed autobiography, stark precursor to Mamma, his current work-in-progress. Originally little more than a film treatment, notes for a storyboard, as it were, The Wretch had evolved into a program guide to the completed motion picture, sold in the lobbies, and from there into a comprehensive best-selling assault upon all the heretical modern and eventually postmodern (he was a man ahead of his time) denials of what in a famous coinage he called "I-ness," a masterpiece whose single message (other than learning not to be naughty and helping one's parents when they are sick and poor) was that each man makes himself and thus the world: "Character counts!" "Making makes the made mad!" is what the poor devil cried in his delirium, his voice eerily hollow as though coming from the other world. "Crackers! Curses! Listen to me and go back home!" Then he rushed to a church wall and beat his dark bony head against it, wailing forth his "Woe! Woe! Woe!" ("Guai! Guai! Guai!" - or maybe it was "Cry! Cry! Cry!") and eliciting from the beak-nosed porter in his role as the Plague Doctor the laconic remark: "That's what happens to people who get all their ideas on one side of their head, dottore: it tips their brains over."
        He has been introduced here at the Gambero Rosso as un gran signore, and in truth has been treated as such by the beaming host, who seems to be chef, waiter, barkeep, and master of ceremonies all in one, as liberal with his wine as with his chatter, accepting their incongruous lot with that democratic grace and forbearance typical of the people of these islands, so leery of popes and kings alike, even joining them briefly for a plateful of stuffed pig's trotters and a Pinot Bianco from Collio, much recommended and indeed nothing amiss. On entering this simple inn with its yellow painted walls and tattered football posters and plastic wine barrels, he had felt suddenly that he had been here before, not in this particular osteria of course, nothing so mawkishly improbable as that - rather, it recalled for him all those village osterias of his childhood, too long forgotten, this one now their quintessence. What was it? A certain rancidity in the frying oil perhaps, the scrape of the cheap chairs on the wooden floors, the frayed napkins, a sharpness to the Parmesan on the tripe - whatever it was, he was overtaken by a sudden sorrow, and a sudden joy, as though life itself were reaching out for him in one last loving embrace, an embrace in which he feels himself still happily, if wistfully, enfolded.
        Unable to sham an appetite which has utterly abandoned him in his weariness and excitement, the professor has nibbled at all the dishes for old times' sake yet eaten little, suffering, as it were, a mental indigestion of memories and anticipations churned up in the language by which he means to capture it all, the individual words springing up and flowering now in his head like golden coins