Meanwhile, as the battle was growing fiercer and fiercer, a large Crab, who had crawled ever so slowly out of the water and onto the beach, shouted out in an ugly voice that sounded like a trombone with a cold, “Cut it out, you incorrigible rascals! These fistfights between boys and boys never end well. They always end in disaster!”
Poor Crab! He might as well have been preaching to the wind. And indeed that rogue Pinocchio turned and scowled at him, saying rudely, “Oh hush, you tiresome Crab! You’d be better off sucking on some lozenges to cure that cold of yours. Or else go to bed and try to sweat it out!”
By this time the boys, who had finished throwing all their own books, spotted the puppet’s bundle of books lying nearby, and quick as a wink they snatched them up.
Among these books was one that had a thick hard cover and vellum on the spine and corners. It was called Treatise on Arithmetic. I’ll let you imagine how heavy it was!
One of those rascals snatched up that volume and, aiming at Pinocchio’s head, flung it with all his might. But instead of hitting the puppet, it struck the head of one of his companions, who turned white as a washed sheet. All he said, before collapsing onto the sand, were these words: “Oh mother help me—for I am dying.”
At the sight of that dead-looking boy, his frightened companions took to their heels; in the blink of an eye they were out of sight.
But Pinocchio stayed behind. And though he, too, from grief and fright, was more dead than alive, nevertheless he ran to soak his handkerchief in seawater, and he began to bathe his poor schoolmate’s temples. Pinocchio sobbed and despaired and called his schoolmate’s name and said, “Eugenio! My poor Eugenio! Open your eyes and look at me! Why aren’t you answering? I’m not the one, you know, who hurt you like this! Believe me, it wasn’t me! Open your eyes, Eugenio! If you keep your eyes closed, you’ll make me die, too! Oh, God! How can I go back home now? How can I dare face my good mother? What will become of me? Where will I run to? Where will I hide? Oh, how much better it would have been—a thousand times better—if I had gone to school today! Why did I listen to those schoolmates who are the bane of my life! The teacher even told me so! And my mother told me over and over: ‘Beware of keeping bad company!’ But I’m too stubborn, too headstrong. I always let them talk, but then I just do as I please! And I end up paying for it. And so, for as long as I’ve been in the world, I’ve never had fifteen minutes of peace. Oh, God! What will become of me, what will become of me, what will become of me!”
And Pinocchio kept crying, and bawling, and hitting himself in the head, and calling poor Eugenio by name—when he suddenly heard the muffled sound of approaching footsteps.
He turned, and there stood two policemen.
“What are you doing here, stretched out on the ground?”
“I’m helping this schoolmate of mine.”
“Has he fallen ill?”
“It looks that way.”
“He isn’t ill!” said one of the policemen, leaning down to look closely at Eugenio. “This boy has been wounded in the temple—who wounded him?”
“Not me!” sputtered the puppet, who could barely breathe.
“If it wasn’t you, then who did wound him?”
“Not me!” Pinocchio said again.
“And what was he wounded with?”
“With this book.”
“And whose book might this be?”
“Mine.”
“That’s enough—we don’t need to know anything else. Get up right now and come along with us.”
“But I—”
“Come with us!”
“But I’m innocent—”
“Come with us!”
Before leaving, the policemen called out to some fishermen, who just in that moment happened to be passing by, and said to them, “We’re giving you this boy who has been wounded in the head. Carry him home with you and take care of him. Tomorrow we’ll come by to see him.”
Then they turned back to Pinocchio, put him between them, and commanded him in soldierly voices: “Forward march! On the double! Or you’ll be sorry!”
Not needing to be told twice, Pinocchio began walking down that path, which led to town. The poor devil barely knew what had hit him. He thought he must be dreaming, and what an awful dream it was! He was beside himself. He was seeing double, his legs were wobbly, his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth, and he couldn’t spit out a single word.
And yet, through that stupor and bewilderment, one very sharp thorn was piercing his heart: I mean the thought of having to walk, escorted by policemen, past the windows of the good Fairy’s house. He would have rather died.
They reached the edge of town and were about to enter it when a rough gust of wind lifted Pinocchio’s cap from his head and blew it ten paces away.
“Would you permit me,” the puppet asked the policemen, “to retrieve my cap?”
“Go ahead, but be quick about it.”
The puppet went and picked up his cap—but instead of putting it back on his head, he put it between his teeth and started running full tilt toward the seashore. He was fast as a bullet.
The policemen, seeing they would have a hard time catching up, sent a dog after him, a great big mastiff dog, who had won first prize in all the dog races. Pinocchio ran, and the dog ran faster. Soon people were leaning out their windows and flocking to the road, eager to see the outcome of such a furious sprint. But their curiosity went unsatisfied, because between them Pinocchio and that mastiff dog kicked up such a cloud of dust that after a few minutes nobody could see anything.
28
DURING that desperate race a terrible moment came, a moment in which Pinocchio thought he was lost. You see, Wingfoot (that was the mastiff dog’s name), after running and running, had almost caught him.
Let’s just say that the puppet could hear, a handbreadth away, the labored panting of that nasty beast, and he could even feel the hot blasts of his smelly breath.
As luck would have it, the beach was now close at hand and the sea just a few steps away.
As soon as he gained the beach, the puppet leapt magnificently into the air, as a bullfrog might have done, and landed with a splash in the water. Wingfoot, however, tried to stop, but his momentum carried him into the water as well. Since the poor wretch didn’t know how to swim, he began flailing about with his paws to stay afloat. But the more he flailed, the more his head went under.
When his head resurfaced, the poor dog’s eyes were bulging with terror and, barking, he cried, “I’m drowning! I’m drowning!”
“Drop dead!” replied Pinocchio from afar, seeing that by now he was safe from danger.
“Help me, dear Pinocchio! Save me from death!”
At that pitiful cry, the puppet (who deep down had a very good heart) was moved to compassion, and he turned to the dog and said, “If I help save you, do you promise to stop bothering and chasing me?”
“I promise! I promise! Hurry up, for heaven’s sake—if you wait another half minute I’ll be as good as dead.”
Pinocchio hesitated a little, but then he remembered how many times his daddy had told him that a good deed is never lost, and he swam over to Wingfoot, took hold of his tail with both hands, and pulled him safe and sound onto the dry sand of the beach.
The poor dog could no longer stand. Without meaning to, he had swallowed so much salt water that he was as swollen as a balloon. The puppet, however, not wanting to take any chances, thought it wise to throw himself back into the sea. And as he swam away from shore, he shouted to his rescued friend, “Goodbye, Wingfoot! Happy travels and all my best to you and yours.”
“Goodbye, Pinocchio,” replied the dog. “A thousand thanks for saving me from death. You’ve done me a good turn, and in this world one good turn deserves another. If the occasion arises, you never know…”
Pinocchio kept on swimming, keeping the shore always in sight. Finally he felt he had come to a safe place, and glancing at the shore he saw, among the rocks, a sort o
f cave, from which was rising a very long plume of smoke.
“In that cave,” Pinocchio thought to himself, “there must be a fire. So much the better! I’ll go dry off and warm up—and then? And then we’ll see what happens.”
Having made this decision, he approached the rocks. But as he was getting ready to climb out, he felt something beneath him in the water that rose and rose and rose and lifted him into the air. He immediately tried to get free, but it was too late: to his great astonishment he found himself caught in a large fishing net, amid a swarm of fish of every size and shape who were thrashing and struggling like doomed souls.
At the same time he saw, emerging from the cave, a fisherman so ugly that he looked like a sea monster. Instead of hair, a thick bush of green grass grew atop his head, green was his skin, green his eyes, green the long, long beard that hung down to here. He looked like a big lizard standing on its hind legs.
As the fisherman pulled the net out of the sea, he shouted happily, “Blessed Providence! Once again I can stuff myself to the gills with fish!”
“Lucky for me I’m not a fish,” Pinocchio thought to himself, plucking up his courage.
The fisherman carried the net loaded with fish into his cave, a dark and smoky cave in the middle of which a big skillet of oil was sizzling, giving off such a whiff of candle snuff as to take your breath away.
“Now let’s see what fishes we’ve caught!” said the green fisherman. Thrusting into the net a hand so huge it looked like a baker’s peel, he pulled out a handful of goatfish.
“Tasty, these goatfish!” he said, eyeing them and sniffing them with pleasure. After sniffing them, he tossed them into a big bucket with no water in it.
Then he repeated the same process several more times. And as he plucked the other fishes out, his mouth began to water and he said, with glee, “Tasty, these hake! Scrumptious, these mullet! Delectable, these sole! Choice, these sea bass! Cute, these anchovies with their heads on!”
As you can guess, the hake, the mullet, the sole, the sea bass, and the anchovies all went pell-mell into the bucket, to keep the goatfish company.
The last thing remaining in the net was Pinocchio.
As soon as the fisherman had plucked out Pinocchio, his big green eyes bulged with astonishment and he yelled, as though frightened, “What manner of fish is this? I don’t recall ever eating this sort of fish!”
And he looked him over carefully again, and after scrutinizing him from every angle, he declared, “I know—this must be a sea slug.”
Mortified at being mistaken for a slug, Pinocchio replied indignantly, “A slug indeed! You better be careful how you treat me! For your information I am a puppet!”
“A puppet?” replied the fisherman. “To be honest, I’m not familiar with the puppet-fish species—so much the better! I’ll eat you with greater relish.”
“Eat me? But can’t you understand that I’m not a fish? Can’t you hear that I speak and reason like you?”
“That’s absolutely true,” agreed the fisherman, “and since I can see that you are a fish who is lucky enough to be able to speak and reason like me, I will indeed treat you with due respect.”
“Which means what?”
“As a sign of my friendship and extraordinary esteem, I’ll allow you to choose how you would like to be cooked. Would you prefer to be fried in a skillet, or would you rather be stewed in a pot with a tomato sauce?”
“To be honest,” replied Pinocchio, “if I had to choose, I’d prefer to be set free instead, so I could go back home.”
“Surely you jest! Do you think I’d miss out on tasting such a rare fish? It isn’t every day that you find a puppet-fish in these waters. Trust me: I’ll fry you up in a skillet together with all the other fishes, and you’ll end up liking it. It’s always comforting to be fried in company.”
After this speech, the unhappy Pinocchio began to cry and scream and plead, and as he cried he said, “How much better it would have been if I had gone to school today! I listened to my schoolmates, and now I’m paying for it! Boo-hoo-hoo!”
And since he was wriggling like an eel and trying incredibly hard to slither out of the green fisherman’s clutches, the fisherman took a nice length of reed, tied Pinocchio’s hands and legs together like sausage ends, and threw him into the bucket with the others.
Then, taking out a battered wooden tray heaped with flour, he began flouring all those fish. And after he floured them, he threw them, one by one, into the sizzling skillet.
The first to dance in the boiling oil were the poor goatfish. The hake were next, then the sea bass, then the mullet, then the sole, then the anchovies, and then finally it was Pinocchio’s turn. Seeing himself so close to death—and such a nasty death at that!—he began trembling so violently from fear that he had no voice or breath left for begging.
The poor boy begged with his eyes! But the green fisherman, not even noticing, rolled him five or six times in the flour, covering him so thoroughly from head to toe that he looked like a plaster puppet.
Then he took him by the head, and…
29
JUST AS the fisherman was on the verge of tossing Pinocchio into the skillet, a large dog entered the cave, lured there by the pungent, appetizing aroma of frying fish.
“Get out!” shouted the fisherman menacingly, still holding the flour-covered puppet in his hand. But the poor dog was as hungry as four dogs, and his whimpering and tail-wagging seemed to say, “Give me a bite of fried fish and I’ll leave you in peace.”
“I said get out!” repeated the fisherman, and he pulled back his foot to give the dog a kick.
But this was a dog who, when he was truly hungry, did not take kindly to being trifled with, and he started growling at the fisherman and showing his terrible fangs.
At that moment a little voice called out faintly in the cave, “Save me, Wingfoot! If you don’t save me, I’m going to fry!”
The dog recognized Pinocchio’s voice at once, and to his great astonishment he realized that it was coming from that flour-coated bundle the fisherman held in his hand.
What could he do? He lunged mightily into the air, seized the flour-covered puppet in his mouth, and ran out of the cave holding it gently between his teeth—quick as a wink he was gone!
The fisherman, infuriated to see a fish that he would have happily eaten snatched from his hand, started to chase the dog. But after taking a few steps, he burst into a fit of coughing and had to turn back.
Meanwhile, having found once more the path that led to the village, Wingfoot stopped and set Pinocchio gently on the ground.
“I can’t thank you enough!” said the puppet.
“No need to,” replied the dog. “You saved me, and one good turn deserves another. After all, we must help one another in this world.”
“But how on earth did you end up in that cave?”
“I was still lying on the beach, more dead than alive, when the aroma of frying fish wafted in on the wind. That aroma whetted my appetite, and I tracked it down. If I had arrived a minute later—”
“Don’t even say it!” yelled Pinocchio, still trembling with fear. “Don’t even say it! If you arrived a minute later then I’d be good and fried by now, eaten and digested—eek! I shudder at the thought!”
Wingfoot, laughing, held out his right paw to the puppet, who shook it long and hard as a sign of their close friendship. And then they went their separate ways.
The dog took the road back to the village. Pinocchio, on his own again, approached a nearby hut where a little old man in the doorway was sunning himself, and asked, “Tell me, kind sir, do you know anything about a poor boy named Eugenio who was wounded in the head?”
“The boy was brought by some fishermen to this hut, but now—”
“Now he’s dead!” interjected Pinocchio, with great sorrow.
“No, now he’s alive. He’s already gone home.”
“Really and truly?” shouted the puppet, jumping for joy. “So the
wound wasn’t serious?”
“Well, it could have been awfully serious, even fatal,” replied the little old man, “because someone flung a big hardbound book at his head.”
“And who flung it?”
“One of his schoolmates—a certain Pinocchio.”
“And who is this Pinocchio?” the puppet asked, playing dumb.
“Folks say he’s a good-for-nothing boy, a vagabond, a real hothead.”
“Slander! It’s all slander!”
“Are you acquainted with this Pinocchio?”
“I’ve seen him!” replied the puppet.
“And what’s your estimation of him?” asked the little old man.
“To me, he seems like a fine upstanding lad—really likes to study, does as he’s told, loves his daddy and his family…”
As the puppet was telling all these lies with a straight face, he touched his nose and realized that it had grown more than a handbreadth in length. Suddenly afraid, he began to shout, “Pay no attention, kind sir, to all the good things I’ve been saying about him. Because I know Pinocchio perfectly well and I too can assure you that he really is a lazy good-for-nothing boy who doesn’t do as he’s told and runs around with his schoolmates like a scamp!”
As soon as he said these words, his nose shortened back to its natural length, just as it was before.
“And why are you all white like that?”
“I can explain: I accidentally rubbed up against a wall that had just been whitewashed,” replied the puppet, ashamed to admit he had been floured like a fish in preparation for frying in a skillet.
“And what have you done with your jacket, your pants, your cap?”
“I ran into some thieves and they stripped me. Say, kind sir, you don’t by any chance have any scraps of clothing you could give me, so that I could return home?”
“My boy, as far as clothes go, I’ve got nothing but a little sack I keep my lupini beans in. If you want it, take it—it’s right over there.”