The Invention of Solitude

we shall at least die together. ’’ Not adding another word, Pinocchio took the candle in his hand and going ahead to light the way, he said to his father: “ Follow me and have no fear. ”
    In Disney, however, Pinocchio needs resourcefulness as well. The whale ’ s mouth is shut, and when it opens, it is only to let water in, not out. Pinocchio cleverly decides to build a fire inside the whale—which induces Monstro to sneeze, thereby launching the puppet and his father into the sea. But more is lost with this flourish than gained. For the crucial image of the story is eliminated: Pinoc chio swimming through the desolate water, nearly sinking under the weight of Gepetto ’ s body, making his way through the gray-blue night (page 296 of the American edition), with the moon shining above them, a benign smile on its face, and the huge open mouth of the shark behind them. The father on his son ’ s back: the image evoked here is so clearly that of Aeneas bearing Anchises on his back from the ruins of Troy that each time A. reads the story aloud to his son, he cannot help seeing (for it is not thinking, really, so quickly do these things happen in his mind) certain clusters of other images, spinning outward from the core of his preoccupa tions: Cassandra, for example, predicting the ruin of Troy, and thereafter loss, as in the wanderings of Aeneas that precede the founding of Rome, and in that wandering the image of another wandering: the Jews in the desert, which, in its turn, yields further clusters of images: “ Next year in Jerusalem, ’’ and with it the photo graph in the Jewish Encyclopedia of his relative, who bore the name of his son.
    A. has watched his son ’ s face carefully during these readings of Pinocchio. He has concluded that it is the image of Pinocchio sav ing Gepetto (swimming away with the old man on his back) that gives the story meaning for him. A boy of three is indeed very little. A wisp of puniness against the bulk of his father, he dreams of acquiring inordinate powers to conquer the paltry reality of himself. He is still too young to understand that one day he will be as big as his father, and even when it is explained to him very carefully, the facts are still open to gross misinterpretations: “ And some day I ’ ll be the same tall as you, and you ’ ll be the same little as me. ” The fascination with comic book super-heroes is perhaps understand able from this point of view. It is the dream of being big, of becom ing an adult. “ What does Superman do? ” “ He saves people. ” For this act of saving is in effect what a father does: he saves his little boy from harm. And for the little boy to see Pinocchio, that same foolish puppet who has stumbled his way from one misfortune to the next, who has wanted to be “ good ” and could not help being “ bad, ” for this same incompetent little marionette, who is not even a real boy, to become a figure of redemption, the very being who saves his father from the grip of death, is a sublime moment of re velation. The son saves the father. This must be fully imagined from the perspective of the little boy. And this, in the mind of the father who was once a little boy, a son, that is, to his own father, must be fully imagined. Puer aeternus. The son saves the father.
     
    Further commentary on the nature of chance.
    He does not want to neglect to mention that two years after meeting S. in Paris, he happened to meet S. ’ s younger son on a sub sequent visit—through channels and circumstances that had nothing to do with S. himself. This young man, P., who was pre cisely the same age as A., was working his way to a position of con siderable power with an important French film producer. A. him self would later work for this same producer, doing a variety of odd jobs for him in 1971 and 1972 (translating, ghost writing), but none of that is essential. What matters is that by the mid to late seventies, P. had managed to achieve the status of co-producer, and along with the son of the French producer put together the movie Super man, which had cost so many millions of dollars, A. read, that it had been described as the most expensive work of art in the history of the western world.
    Early in the summer of 1980, shortly after his son turned three, A. and the boy spent a week together in the country, in a house owned by friends who were off on vacation. A. noticed in the news paper that Superman was playing in a local theater