The Dreamer - 7

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CQDFK2JW

Chapter 7

A little time later we heard someone knocking at the door.

«Is everything all right?», our guest asked. I went near George for ask him how he was feeling.

«I am very well, thank you» he answered, trying to hide from him sight. Then in a low voice, trying to elude Mr Winningoes from hearing, though the man had kept discreetly quiet distant, he added in an anxious tone: «What are we going to do? I can’t stand staying here anymore. Let’s jump on him and...»

«Just excuse me for a while, my friends » the man said with persuasive voice, still holding politely at the same distance «before you turn a decision, that is up to you to be taken, I would like to ask you only the courtesy to be able to end my own history.

You don't have to be afraid of me: if I wanted to hurt you I would have been able to do it and I will show you that I am not lying. Follow me, please».

This way saying he started walking for the long corridor. We followed him turning on the left; then we stopped in front of a wooden small door, on the top of the ample staircases that led underneath. He fumbled in the lock reassuring us with a mild look. A long snail iron scale introduced us to a big square room. The room was bare and badly illuminated. Mr Winningoes directed toward the opposite wall to the entry and after opening a big window he said:

«Please, lean out and take a look down there».

We leaned out. The view gave on an ample downed square, visible over the brushes of tall and mighty trees. I recognized the landing airfield of which our guest had informed us, early in the morning.

I realized that we had to find us on the central tower of the building. Then he opened a small door wall and after fumbling in a small niche recessed in the wall, he gently told us, winking again with the chin besides the window:

«Have a look now, would you!?»

We benched outside: the open space, just a while before, plainly empty, was now occupied by another vision. I kept for an endless time watching it, astonished, incredulous, confused, while my heart was galloping fast and the blood pressed on to my temples as if it wanted to squirt out of them.

I crossed George’s eyes: he also was astonished and interdict; then I looked again down there. With unchanged emotion I observed that scene once more.

The same scene that we had seen, some days before, not far away from home, was there now, under my eyes!

Everything was perfectly equal: the high enclosure of tables, the big working machines, immovable as they were sleepy animals, the long iron pylon with the writing 'Winpey', in red-dark block letters. It was with admiration and curiosity that I turned toward Mr Winningoes. I wanted to know, I had to understand what was going on!

The old man fixed me intensely with a mocking look. Fantastic and madding, diabolic and fascinating Mr Winningoes! What kind of cheat was he plotting at our expenses? He fumbled in the niche again and invited us, with the usual accomplice air, to look down. The scene had changed again: I immediately recognized the alley of the agency ‘Geenna Geld', with the big front door and the cardboard insignia moved by the wind.

This scene, nevertheless, didn't have anything unreal. It seemed simply and naturally to be there, after all, where our eyes were seeing it, identical to the past, but still alive and present. There must surely be a trick! It had obviously to be that! But which one?

«I understand your wonder, my friends, but I can explain everything to you everything. What you see does exist indeed.

Physically, however, it exists in another dimension. If you were not so convinced that only exists the reality that is shown and explained to us since our birth; if you, that day, had doubted of what your eyes were perceiving, and with a straight mental attitude you had verified the materiality of it, you would be aware that everything around you was just an illusion and there was not exactly the things that you were seeing; actually they were there, but in a different way from your being here now, or this house or those trees that outlined the landscape over there»!

«Just a moment!», George cried out, showing off his best grim, «if that day we had taken some pictures, would those things that we perceived or they would not?»

«A camera is only a machine, without any mind, with no soul. I don't know what would have come out if you had taken any photographs of it. Both of you would have certainly come out. Or maybe only one of you would have been impressed. But don't be concerned about it. My words didn't want to offend you. I have spent all my life on studies and meditations to understand these things that only appear to be inexplicable. I assure you however, that they show such an appearance in the vision of our ordinary reality; in the description of the world that is provided by former and daily education, because we believe it as absolutely sure. As if our life were all in the banal obviousness of which we feed our mind. But it is not this way! Oh certainly not!»

«And the two men that we met there, on that day? Were they also an illusion?», George burst out again in a pugnacious tone, not at all satisfied by those explanations.

«Such a question, my friends, belongs already to the following of my story. I hope you will allow me to conclude with it. I won't subtract me from your opinion and to your judge, but grant me to defend myself simply telling you until the end about the suffering of a scientist, of a father and of a man. I want you to know, if this can reassure you, that I have only killed other men during the war. The war is always absurd, in some way and is pursued by manhood for greed of power, because men are sick of weakness and only in power they succeed in finding an antidote to their innate deficiency.

And though after the war, the value of human life, for me was under graded, I have been preserved by the shame of killing another man and I think that it could not be otherwise, for the man predestined to lead humanity through the path of peace and the truth!»

These words of the man seemed to reassure George. From my point of view there was not one single reserve on that man. My adhesion to his application was totally unconditional. We silently agreed to listen to the final part of Mr Winningoes’s story. After all, we still didn't know, incredibly, what that man really wanted from us. And in one way or another he succeeded in capturing our attention again.

«Since you kindly grant me your time in order to conclude my story, we will do it sipping a good cup of tea that I want to prepare myself for you”–took back in jovial tone Mr Winningoes, squirting from his eyes a radiant and comradely satisfaction.

He led us back through the staircase down to the big room where we had our former lunch, with the table still prepared; we finally found, passed another door, in a pleasant small room, furnished in Renaissance style, with some pictures on the walls, which seemed to be stupendous reproductions of work’s talent of the best pictorial school of that memorable epoch».

to be continued...

The Dreamer - 6

 

https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0CQDFK2JW

Chapter 6

At that question, the man had set with extreme naturalness, George had brought a hand to his mouth, showing in his eyes a horrified gaze. Then he stood up, with the hand still on his mouth and ran out the room. I heard his long footsteps, through the staircases.

«I am sorry! I am very sorry indeed» he said in a resigned and sincere tone. «I have tried to gradually introduce you to the difficult matter, in order not to upset you, but it’s quietly evident that I have not succeeded it. Shall we go to see how your friend is?» he concluded standing up.

« Maybe it’s better if I go first to talk to him on my own! We need to stay alone for a while» I told him.

«As you like» he said quietly, sitting again.

I followed George upstairs, thinking of Mr Winningoes’ story. I had also accused an emotional hit to that sorrowful question, although, I had expected that point of landing of his discourse.

I saw George coming out from the bath. He stared at me without saying anything. I knew he needed to be on his own, so I went to our room and lay down on the bed without approaching him.

I closed my eyes, trying to dominate all these emotions. I recalled into my mind the last accounts had led me to that house, with that strange man who seemed to fright George so heavily.

It was Friday, the 9th of November 1979, right the day we were going to meet that strange Mr Winningoes, as we were soon to discover, when I had followed my friend on the wide tree-lined roads. On the sidewalks, the leaves, fallen during the night, had formed a thick and soft carpet, on which George seemed to walk with special pleasure.

It was a colorless day, of those that are counted so numerous in London, especially in the winter time. One of those days on which the diurnal light maintains the same slim intensity, from mornings to evenings, and the night comes up suddenly unexpectedly, when the pale and smothered reverberation of the sun, behind a thick blanket of clouds, has concluded its fatiguing daily cycle.

It blew a fresh and light breeze. But the wind, from time to time, became impetuous, and by means of violent gusts seemed to push us, like for joking or as if it wanted to encourage us to go straight ahead. And courage was exactly what we really needed, as our search for a job was becoming a serious and weary problem.

- «I don't recognize London's gone times anymore» -George had told me, not later than the former evening, coming out from one of the many job agencies we had uselessly visited.

I followed him on his march, absorbed in the noise that our own footsteps produced on the leaves. The rhombus of an auto suddenly dissuaded my attention.

«Where are we going?» I asked him.

«We will try to go this way along» he answered turning slightly back his head to me. « This way through we will rejoin the Maida Vale. There are plenty of job’s agencies up there».

George knew a lot better than I that zone, being living there for the former years. He had taken that one-room flat wherein we were living together, with a girl, now got back to Italy, as he had fleetingly told me, not without a shade darkening sadly his eyes; and after he did not speak more about it.

Instead, on that same day he told me of his passion for esoteric philosophies. Actually ‘till then, I had reputed them exclusive knowledge of the eastern cultures, while George, rightly in the period we met, was studying at one (whose study he had to introduce me, later on), that he granted to the Huichols, a direct descending people of the ancient pre-Columbian populations that in the present state, according to what at that time he told me, were still living in the north western mountains of Mexico.

 

 

 

 

 

The Dreamer - 5

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CQDFK2JW

Chapter 5

While I was trying to go further in what the man had told of his personal story he took back with a sad voice to tell his tale.

«I apologize for talking in such a confused mess. Before continuing telling you the story of my son it would be better to resume what happened first. At the age of twentyone, after a long journey and appropriate studies, I started some peculiar experiments on the human brain. I felt that I had to create a super brain in order to be reproduced and form a race of supermen able to drive in the right direction this dreg of humanity that inhabits the world. After all, I had to consider that the brain of every living being contains, even though modified by evolution, the original matrix of our existence.

After some rough attempts of surgical engineering, that occupied me for different years, whose initial success and following disappointing bitterness almost led me to abandon the whole project, it was fate to intervene and to point out the right way to me.

Which kind of proof would I need to wait for? The same celestial stars directly showed me the way!

A beautiful day, in fact, while I was observing under the microscope a cat’s brain, an ulterior, fortunate guinea-pig, subtracted from the deprivations of its life for the glory of science, an amazing account happened to me.

I had set the small feline’s organ in a cylindrical open neck test-tube and I was continuously thinking about it, looking as usual for a sprout of understanding on its complex and mysterious composition. At a certain point, needing something to eat, I went upstairs. I unwillingly left the microscope’s focus. I was going to have a cup of tea, with my daily survival meal.

As I returned down stairs, I immediately noticed that something strange had happened during my brief absence. In the test-tube the brain of the cat had dried, acquiring a grey and pale color.

I extracted it with the pliers: it seemed like a dry sponge without any weight nor smell. What devil had it happened to? It was a gust of wind which answered me.

In that underground where I secretly developed my experiments, I had not left but a small window that I wanted surfaced to the level of the ground. It had slightly disclosed, quiet enough to allow the passage of a provident ray of sun which, intruding the optic circuit of the microscope, had poured in with all its mighty energy, dehydrating completely the object of my experiments.

But my light, initial disappointment had soon to be transformed into high exultation, when I closely observed the test-tube that had served like a furnace to that unforeseen experiment. On its fund rested some drops of a dense and glimmering liquid! I had a lightning, an intuition that afterwards had to be exactly revealed.

Admirably exact, my friends! I had found the way to extract from the muscle that includes our life, from the brain that contains all the knowledge of a human being, its own essence. An extract, a summary, that is the same, but free from the physical brain’s encumbrance, from the grey mash that comprises it. Free from the flesh as a soul is free from his body as an idea from his thinker as a thought from his action!

As you certainly know all our mental energy springs by a simple chemical reaction that is continuously produced in our brain. Such a reaction, that the physicians define with the name of “synapse”, is originated by the reaction between the liquid whose brain is imbued and the cells it copiously contains. In practice this liquid, that has equal molecular structure in every man, works as a tracing detector of the cerebral process, whose action is, instead, what countersigns a man from another.

The intimate reasons for such different actions of the cerebral processing, have seen divided for a long time the humanity. Manhood has however been until now incapable of determining the true reason for the difference of the beings of its species. A human being, from the scientific point of view, is only a product of a causal connection of the basically chemical mixtures that are contained in the cells. And all its activity is coordinated by the cerebral cells.

To succeed in obtaining a distillate of those cells, meant therefore to dispose of a substance of inestimable value.

At the beginning I thought to try his reproduction, but actually this would have been only an interesting and suggestive detour from my principal aim.

In order to reach it I had to gather all my efforts, and the results of those first experiments constituted the base of my following job.

First of all it was clear that the cerebral muscle, under particular conditions of temperature and environment, like those which took accidentally place that prophetic day in my laboratory, released a particular, liquid and dense substance, containing the fundamental geniuses, that I call primaries; those which are responsible of the most intimate and proper characters of the race.

It was also evident that such substance appeared able to be moved into another brain, creating there a new habitat in which to regenerate its cells and with them repurchase its functions and its aboriginal characters.

I verified more times the exactness of these hypotheses, but only in a direction that I define evolutionary. The experiment only succeeded if the essence of a superior animal, in the steps of the evolutionary chain, was introduced in the brain of an inferior animal, while in the other way down, the phenomenon took place in a lesser and very attenuated tone deprived of significant consequence.

I baptized the liquid essence ‘nouchefalon ', and I prepared myself to develop in the foreseen direction of my experiments. What would happen if I transfused some ‘human nouchefalon ' into the brain of another man?»

The Dreamer - 4

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CQDFK2JW

Chapter 4

 

«My name is Patrick Winningoes Parnell and I was born at Wadebridge, in Cornwall, in the south-west of England, to a Catholic Irishwoman and a Protestant Englishman. My father, Lord Isaac Winningoes, whose family was among the noblest and most ancient for English lineage, at that time, was a very close adviser of the British government. My mother was named Mary Josephine Parnell.

In those times Great Britain was still a vast empire and Ireland, born earth of my mother, made integrally part of it.

After a happy infancy, I was enrolled at a classical studies school, but when I was sixteen something happened to me so seriously to change radically the course of my life.

Without any apparent reason my father took me away from the College and the same day of such a sudden resolution, in a night of storm, I was embarked on a ship, “The Ulysses”, that anchored at Land's End, attended my arrival to set sail.

My father didn't want to give me any explanation and, despite I implored him crying, that I didn't want to depart without greeting my mother, he was inflexible. He delivered two letters to me: one for the reverend Jacob Sevear, who would have become my despotic guardian; the other for me, and I read it in tears, when my beloved coasts were already distant from sight.

 

The letter contained, a few recommendations on the principles that a good child has to observe, together with the information that my destination would have been Boston, in the U.S.A., and that I had to be in charge to reverend Sevear's.

 

The life that attended me beyond the ocean was, my friends, a hard life indeed to be sustained. Certainly, I had all the comforts of life, but I lived in a gilded isolation, without almost any contact with the outside world. My guardian was inflexible on applying those rules that, as he underlined, had been ordered to him by my father: I could not go out, if not in his company; I didn't have to possess any sum of money, providing himself to satisfy any my desire; even the newspapers and the magazines passed for his careful censorship, before I could read them.

 

After some time, my captivity slightly decreased, but I still felt as a prisoner and for my mind, offended and violated, to find a free play in the studies, in which my guardian worked out to be a wise and able preceptor, was a matter of surviving.

 

How many nights I dreamed to fly, like Icarus, over the Atlantic or to sail, as Ulysses, searching for new, craving lands! How many nights I cried, thinking of my mother and my distant born beaches! How I felt heavy, then, my father's hand on my head and that of my sad destiny! For how much I tried on it, however, I didn't succeed in breaking those chains that tormented me. From time to time I contrived a plan to run away, but I always postponed it, hoping that the day after a letter from England would come, to bring me the freedom, the end of my nightmare and its mysteries.

 

After years of that life of segregation, finally came the very expected day: On my twenty-first birthday the reverend Sevear handed me over a letter from my father on which he accounted the circumstances that were the origin of all my sufferings and that so much had to influence my life in the future. But the joy for the long, desired truth, was darkened by the sad news, in the same letter contained, that my mother, my beloved mother, had died, two years before, in the prison of Primestone.

 

I was informed through that letter that my mother, just a little before my departure for Boston, had been halted with the accusation of plotting to overturn the institutions and the Crown, an accusation much more serious, being my father a man in the service of the State. She was found guilty, and only the interest that some friends of my father showed towards, saved her from the inglorious end that struck all the other heads of the revolt: the hanging in public square.

 

But she could not stand up with the imprisonment as she wrote herself in one of the few letters that she was allowed to write to me, and which the reverend Sevear had been ordered not to deliver to me before my twenty-first birthday:

 

 

The scandal that followed the discovery of the plot to free Ireland from the oppressive English yoke, had also overwhelmed my father, who was forced by his political enemies to resign. The aspect of the whole circumstance for me more spine-chilling was constituted by the fact that my father himself had discovered and denounced the secret activity of my mother, for whose he asked me to be forgiven and hoped that I would understand the involved, ethics implications.

 

How I hated him henceforth! I cursed him, one hundred, thousand times, from that day and for the days to come! How could he have chosen his stupid state’s reason against the love of a fragile and sweet creature as my mother? Why did he not embark her with me to subtract her to the jailers? His king, then, was more worthy than his woman in his heart?

 

He recommended himself to my comprehension, since he did act for my own goodness, leaving me out, considering also my youth, from the clamors and from the shame of the scandal that had overwhelmed our honorable name, and he finally remembered to me, that only God can judge man’s operations. That atrocious contradiction induced me to also hate “his” God. If only Him could judge men’s behaviors, why did he accuse my mother to a Court of men?!? - “

 

That regrettable question concluded the monologue of our guest, to which we had assisted in a religious silence but with long live share.

 

While evoking his memoirs, that I imagined a remote for forgetful time in his mind; above all speaking of his mother, in his voice a veiled tone of emotion had appeared.

 

And I don't know if I really perceived a mist in his eyes, ‘cause it lasted only for a bit: after pouring a glass of water and drinking it with avarice, he fleetingly passed a candid napkin on his face, with which he suddenly cancelled any trace of it. Then he stayed immovably, absorbed in his sad memoirs, or perhaps picking up ideas to continue his story. George had followed him for the whole time with the chin supported by the closed fists on the edge of the table. Without proffering a word he lit a cigarette and soon after pushed the packet to me. With a peaceful and indifferent tone, Mr Winningoes took back on his speech.

 

The same day I learned from my teacher that I was the only heir of my mother’s estates, and that since the day of her death, he had been its honest and prudent administrator, as he was ready to detail me on his account.

 

That man, I had so much hated and blamed, now that his ungrateful charge had come to end, seemed to me good and comprehensive, and his words calmed my incurable pain. Nevertheless, I needed to think about my life, and in those places I would never succeed in shaking off my sad past. I begged the reverend to continue to administer my goods and I departed, to discover the world.

I travelled at first through the United States and Canada, then I went to Australia and New Zealand. After I visited Europe, I never found the courage to return to my country. Tired of the European Countries, among which I mostly liked Italy, I departed to India and finally, always curious about new lands, I went to Africa.

 

Neither women, nor alcohol, nor drugs, not even the vices which I was devoted to in those years succeeded in cancelling my bitter memoirs, until one day, while I was sojourning in Kenya, I fell ill, prey of strong fevers. Not a lot, then I gave, to live or die, but Fate had evidently prepared that I survived, so that the programs could be realized, whose I will have the honor and the pleasure to communicate to you. Revealed therefore from the illness, I returned to America aiming however to the south, that I had not visited yet.

 

Once I had satisfied my world's curiosity, I took over again my studies, more strongly and surely than before. I was akin of all: medicine, biology, physics, mathematics, chemistry, hidden sciences, illusionism, magic arts, engineering, electronics, astrology, philosophy, astronomy, sociology, anthropology, theology, ethnology, history, juridical, economic and political sciences and every other thing attracted my mind curious of reaching new knowledge.

 

During the numerous years of my following study, it happened to me a gradual mutation that flowed, between a short lapse of time, in a great, bright revelation. I had realized, deepening on studies, that any single subject lost, little by little, until vanish, its own contours and that all acquired information met in a bubbly melting pot, to form just one, immense nucleus of knowledge.

Yes, dear friends: our knowledge is an original, total unity. The single disciplines of human knowledge are but the infinitesimally small fragments that mankind looks hopelessly for recomposing into the aboriginal unity.

Two were the necessary consequent corollaries to this thrilling discovery. The first one is that the brain of both animal and human beings constitutes, though at a different evolutionary stage, a microscopic part of the primordial totality. The second is that human thought search, yet in a blind and messy manner, to recompose, at a mental level, the great, primitive explosion, the Big-Bang, through a long and fatiguing marching back, up to the innumerable light years that separate it, from an equal, yet opposite, roaring and powerful implosion. And if you consider that our mind speculates in space-time as fast as speed-light, this kind of final Big-Imbang will appear less far than any hasty forecast.

 

The burst of the second world war caught me surprised on this walk of studies and searches.

Bitterly I was forced to consider that human beings pursued their premature end, rather than search for the truth.  But at that time I hadn't understand yet that every human action, even the most iniquitous and bestial, has however its own reason to be done and for me, that war, would have been another fundamental step on the way of comprehension.

 

During the war I had the opportunity to deeply analyze the causes of those disastrous events. I had been, it is true, in the years immediately preceding the war completely devoted to my studies, in a way that I could call purely scientific of the phenomena which stand at the base of the human life, but it was not certainly in the forthcoming years of war that we had to seek its reasons and inmost causes. The roots of hate and evil sank their extreme appendixes in the most tangled and lavish meanders of the human mind. These deleterious feelings, so inherent to the human mind, were to be conceived like the principal causes of that huge bath of blood.

 

From this premise I puzzled out that the basic beliefs of the national socialist philosophy were correct: humanity, in order to be saved, needed a superior race to be raised over the others for leading them to salvation. But the German race could not certainly be the chosen one. Not even any other among the existing races could be that, because it had to be a race who didn't know, in their hearts but goodness and love.

 

With a greater fury than before, I addressed all my energies against the hateful enemy: I challenged death ten, hundred, thousands of times, always defeating the adversary.

 

Little by little, I started perceiving what role it was reserved to me in the history of the world and the contours of my destiny assumed more and more its clean and precise outline».

 

While pronouncing his last words Mr Winningoes, who had gradually been increasing his excitement during the narration, lifted up the right hand, tensing his forefinger as an accuser, and his eyes rotated a couple of times halting eventually in an insane expression of craziness depicted on his face. He remained for indefinite time with the lift forefinger, staring into space, with his muscles tended as if they had wanted to get out of standing. He seemed like a statue of marble, immortalized in a grotesque pose. This sudden explosion of apparent madness came unexpectedly. Before we had the time to interact, however, the man seemed to recover himself. He looked around, lost and embarrassed and, grabbed a glass of water, voided all of it in a hit. The water seemed to calm the man. His eyes showed a serene light and he looked like being almost absent, lost in his thoughts or perhaps looking to recompose the interrupted line of his story. He pulled the refreshments trolley and picked up a carafe filled with a golden colored liquid.

 

«Have a drink, please. It is cognac from Charente, one of the few things that I appreciate about French people».

 

This way of saying he poured some of that liquid in a short, carved wine glass, explaining to us that a cognac, to be really good, has to leave, if slightly rotated, a thin layer of color inside the glass.

As soon as I had drunk, I immediately felt a comforting warmth. On the warm’s alcohol wave I thought that that man surely knew so much indeed about life. His theories, nevertheless, yet quite abstruse to me, showed a sort of suggestive charm.

I imagined my brain imploding together with George’s, melting with it and flying, as a winged rocket, in the endless universe.

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dreamer - 3

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CQDFK2JW

Chapter 3

My remembering was interrupted by a discreet touch at the door. Mr Winningoes entered holding a tray in a hand on which there was a stumpy teapot in porcelain and three handless cups, decorated with Chinese ideograms.

«I apologize for leaving you alone for such a long time »he said happily–«but to make tea is a very serious matter that requires time and skill. Help yourselves please».

I filled the three cups with a lot of attention. George, taking one on his hand, gazed at its outside and the inside for a long time. He seemed particularly interested in the small yellowish petals that floated on the surface.

«They are jasmine's flowers» said the old man. «I get this tea directly from China. It is delicious, isn't it?» he added, turning to me, while I was trying to sip it slowly, in order not to burn me.

«Yes, certain. It is very tasty. Do you also like Chinese cuisine?», I returned him on time.

«Oh, yes, for sure! I do it so much!» , he answered with a light flash on his face .«I remember when my son Adam was still alive…»

But suddenly we saw that flash of light illuminating his face transformed into a dark and sad countenance.

«My son Adam…»– he echoed bitterly himself, with a smile of self-pity on the pale lips.

We observed a respectful silence for the pain of that man who appeared at times a proud lion, full of projects for his future, to become instead afterward, a man tired of striving, bent by disgraces and by the time.

I wished I had mastered a better English to show him my solidarity and tell him that I didn't even know he had had some children, not even he had gotten married, forming a proper family; apart, of course, his father and mother, whom he had spoken of to us for long time throughout his story.

But who was really that strange man? Was it enough to know him well, what he had told us himself rightly on that same day? I made an effort to collect my ideas recalling the story in his own words.

 

 

 

 

The dreamer - 2

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CQDFK2JW

Chapter 2

In order to relax I recalled the preceding events, starting from the moment I had firstly met my friend George.

I had known him early in the summer of 1979, in a little snack bar of the center, at the beginning of my London stay. A snack-cafe not so far from Piccadilly Circus, where they made a slightly drinkable coffee. I used to go there, because it was the only place where the coffee was served in the small, classical, Italian cups, and even if it was served with no cream, was still better than that watered black soap that almost all barmen sell off for coffee in England. The bar was housed in a large rectangular room. On the right of the entry there was the counter with the coffee-machine, while both on the left and the opposite wall, in front of the entry-door, there was a wood bench, lined in plastics of brown color, and, straight above, lined in the identical way, a same long but narrow shelf, plenty of sugar-bowls and ashtrays.

The left wall, for the whole length of the bench, beginning from the shelf and finishing to the originally white-painted ceiling, was made of a thick transparent glass that, giving brightness to the place, allowed the visitors to enjoy a wide outside sight where, just in front, it was well visible the entrance of a theatre with an ample and luxurious atrium.

It was there that George seemed to stare up at his look, over the round glasses (like John Lennon’s, I had thought). His olive complexion, the chestnut hair and the black moustaches didn't make him certainly look like a probable Queen’s subject, but I questioned him, this not less, in English. After all, we were in London: what kind of idiom was I supposed to speak?

He burst into laughter, hearing my question. Not immediately, but after turning his head to look at me, with a funny expression on his face, while with my hands I repeated my request for fire, rubbing, at the same time, my right forefinger on the palm of the left hand.

Lighting his own cigarette, as I stood close and steady, much more interdict than angry, because of his crazy laughing, he told me in a strongly stressed, though smooth, Italian language:

«Sorry for laughing, but Italian people do make notice of them, when they speak English. You come from Rome, don’t you?», he suddenly added, smiling with satisfaction to my affirmative answer.

The place, beside the two of us and a girl sitting on the other side of the bench, was empty.

The barkeeper, behind the counter, was preparing a great copy of sandwiches, with cheese and tomatoes, lettuce and meats and a few others with all four ingredients together, according to the best English taste.

«And you, where do you come from?», I asked him in some annoyed tone for that reference to the Italian’s accent and particularly to that of the Romans, whose noble descendants I am still proud to belong.

« I am not Italian» he answered me with a peaceful voice «but I have lived quite a lot of years in Italy. I know so your customs quite well, and also your accent», concluded laughing again. This time his laughing, however, didn't upset me at all. Those few words had been enough to make my anger fade away; or maybe I was just only glad to talk to someone without squeezing my brain to translate my thoughts from Italian into English language.

to be continued...

 

 

The Dreamer - A romance of madness and love

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CQH817Z8

First Part

Chapter 1

 

«I will soon be back, make yourselves at home, please» said the man going out. We looked at each other, George and I. It had only been from the morning that we didn’t have a chance to stay on our own.

«That’s a real story of madness! » he burst out taking a seat in one of the four wood armchairs that were around a circular table in the center of the small room. «This man must be crazy! Let's put him off as soon as is back and let's escape from here, until we are in time», he added while I was taking a seat in front of him.

«Just a moment, George, maybe it will seem strange to you, but I don't feel afraid of this man! He inspires a sort of trust in me, despite his strangeness».

«But do you realize what you are talking about? Have you gone out of sense too? This man must have some extraordinary powers: hasn't he hypnotized us just slightly before? Have you also heard him talk of super-races and brain's experiments or have I dreamed of it?», George attacked me nervously.

«Be quiet, please, George», I told him in a calm voice. «First of all, I don't believe he has hypnotized us, just before. Secondly, if he is really so powerful as you say, what could be his reaction, when we try to immobilize him? Make a point on it:  when we arrived here, we were both sleepy. If he wanted therefore to use us as guinea-pigs, two punctures were enough for him to knock us down!  I have not seen yet neither cats resembling mice, nor men with a square brain!

 

 Who can be sure that the old man is not inventing everything? It would not surprise me if this story derived from the imagination of some fantastical writer. I want to go to the end of all these circumstances. Don’t you also want to know what kind of job's proposal Mr Winningoes is going to make for us?»

George gazed for a long time into my eyes, thoughtfully. Then, without answering, he relaxed on the back of the chair, releasing the muscles and breathing deeply.

He stood with half open eyes crossing at once the feet and the hands softly on the womb, with the right hand covering the palm of the left one. He seemed to me almost slept, while only the breath animated his body. Won by all those unexpected and subsequent emotions, I also imitated him doing my best on sitting comfortably on the wood ancient chair.