Illustration Friday: Equipment

Geppetto, Pinocchio and the Unborn Son

Once upon a time, in a small Italian Village called Poledena in Tuscany, lived a poor but kind carpenter named Mastro Geppetto.

Though Mastro Geppetto and his wife had been married for fourteen years, they had never had children.

Gepetto's wife, being a hot blooded Spanish girl, blamed him. She ceaselessly nagged him for being a sterile "good for nothing culo rosso figlio di troiabut with malfunctioning equipment."

Gepetto, with a grim smile, took his wife's swearing stoically - for he himself blamed no one else but God.

Every night for fourteen years Gepetto had prayed and prayed for a son (and sometimes even a daughter), but God had chosen not to give him a child.

What, he asked himself over and over, had he done to deserve such a desolate marriage?

He went to church twice every Sunday, he'd been faithful to his wfe, he never drank, he gambled seldom, and he only smoked on Saturdays while he sat on the porch chinwagging with his good neighbour Master Antonio.

Of course, it was Master Antonio's idea to carve the piece of pine nut wood into the marrionette he now held in his arms.

With God's help - and the piece of wood that Antonio had given him - he, Geppetto, master carver and carpenter had  made a marionette that would dance and sing and flip somersaults - and perhaps entertain his nagging wife.

He had called the marionette Pinocchio - Italian for 'pine nut'.

The work was almost finished - he just had to align the kneejoints, then grease the neck.

Geppetto looked down at his work, feeling an instant of regret, but as he stared into the marionette's blue eyes he swore he felt the wooden body quiver.

Then, in front of his own amazed eyes, the nose of the marionette twitched and began to grow.