PINOCCHIO MITEM 14
from Carlo Collodě’s novel by Antonio Latella, Federico Bellini, Linda Dalisi
You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you're ready to die, it comes to you — that there's nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain't done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you're the only one that knows the secret; only then it's too late. You’re too old. (From Butcher’s Crossing, by John E. Williams)
The truth will out? Is life really like this? Is it true that lies are discovered, or do they remain secret, hidden beneath the truth? We are used to thinking that the little puppet sees his own nose get longer every time he tells a lie; this is what we have been taught and this is what we have learned to believe. And yet this itself is a lie told by adults. Pinocchio’s nose, in Collodi’s tale, grows on various occasions, but not so many considering the length of the story. And not always when Pinocchio lies. At times his nose grows because he lives; a reminder to the puppet that he is capable of feeling, despite being made of wood, of lifeless matter. It allows him to feel the breath of life in different ways from us. Pinocchio’s nose grows for the first time in the very moment that he is created by his father; perhaps this also tells us that the lies are not Pinocchio’s but rather his creator's, the childless Geppetto who wants a wonderful puppet with which to travel the world and make money, and by ‘wonderful’ I mean a creature who evokes wonder, who enchants and who astonishes.
Antonio Latella