The Essence of Life
A fiction by Ignazio Salvatore
Basile
First Part
Chapter 1
The story of Mr Winningoes
“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 sixteenth something happened to me such seriously to change the course of my life into misfortune.
Without any apparent reason my
father withdrawn me from the College and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 on tears, when my beloved coasts were
already distant from sight.
It contained, this letter, 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 the reverend
Sevear.
The life that attended me
beyond the ocean was, my friends, a hard one indeed to be sustained. Certainly,
I had all the possible comforts, 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, 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 on 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: my mother, my beloved mother, had died, two years
before, in the prison of Primestone.
I was acquainted
through that letter that my mother, just a little before my departure for
Boston, had been halted with the accusation of plot to overturn the
institutions and the Crown, accusation much more serious, being my father a man
at service of the State. She was recognized 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 my mother wrote in one of the few letters 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:
“My gasp of liberty cannot hold up to the imprisonment
between four suffocating walls “.
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 give the resignations. But the aspect of the whole story 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 which 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 worth than his woman on
his heart?
He recommended
himself to my comprehension, since he did act for my own goodness, leaving me
out, considering also my youth age, from the clamors and from the shame of the
scandal that had overwhelmed our honorable name, and he finally, remembered me,
that only God can judge men’s operates.That atrocious contradiction induced me
to hate also “his” God. If only Him, could judge men’s behaviors, why did he
denounce 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 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 longingly, 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 leaning his chin upon his
hands on the edge of the table. Without proffering a word he lit a cigarette and
soon after he pushed the packet towards me. With peaceful and indifferent tone,
Mr Winningoes took back on his speech.
-“The same day I
knew by 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 for a few time my incurable
pain; henceforth, however, I needed to think about my life, and in those places
I would never succeeded 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, without never finding 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 of new lands, I went to Africa.
Neither women,
neither alcohol, nor drugs not even the vices which I was devoted 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 the Fate, had evidently planned 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
south, that I had not visited yet.
Going up again
homeward, I stayed for a long time in Mexico, that not little fascinated me. By
then, I had satisfied my world's curiosity,
so I preferred to take over again my studies,
more assidously 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 on me a gradual mutation that
flowed, after another short lapse of time, in a great, bright revelation. I had
realized, deepening on studies that any single subject lost, little by little,
until vanishing, 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 the mankind
looks hopelessly for recomposing in to 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 stadium, 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 the 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 yet understood 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.
When Germany,
violating the international agreements formerly undersigned, moved war to
England, attacking London, I realized that the right moment had come for me to
show that the Parnells loved to fight for freedom, under any flag and against
whoever oppressed its exercise. I went to England and enlisted, as a volunteer,
in the Royal Air Force, despite I have
to confess you that, after the betrayal of my father, I felt more Irish than
English, also considering that in those days, as it is today, Ireland was
divided in two parts, with a part still under the British dominion.
After a brief
but intense training I was assigned, as I had required myself, having the
pre-requisite for it, to pilot’s hunting squads. Between whiles of my missions
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 fore coming 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 human mind. These deleterious feelings, so
inherent to 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: the humanity, in
order to be saved, needed a superior race to be raised over the others for
leading them to salvation. But German race could not certainly be the chosen one.
The world needed a novel race, filled by 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 his right forefinger, tensed as an accuser, and rotating
a couple of times his eyes, he halted eventually with 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 wanted to get out of standing. He seemed a
statue of marble, immortalized in a grotesque pose. This sudden explosion of
apparent madness came unexpected. 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 now a serene light and he looked like being almost
absent, lost in his thoughts or perhaps looking for recomposing the interrupted
line of his story. He pulled the refreshments trolley and picked up a crystal’s
cruet filled of a golden colored liquid.
- “Have a drink, please. It is cognac from
Charente, one of the few things that I appreciate of French people.”
This way saying he poured some
of that liquid in a short, carved wine glass, explaining 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, yet quiet
abstruse to me, showed however a sort of suggestive charm.
- “You certainly know how has the second world war concluded” -
said the man, who went on talking about the last phases of the war, mixing them
with some personal circumstances and original points of view, totally different
from official historical interpretation .
- “Excuse me , my friends, for detouring from the main path” -
he returned to say taking back the main stream of his narration. -“After all,
such problems, didn't interest to me so much at the time, neither they interest
to me today. I had to follow my life, and rather, the use of the atomic bombs
in Japan made me understand, even more, the urgency of stopping mankind’s
foolishness, under the risk of destroying the world and all its living forms.
When I was dismissed, appointed as a real hero, I decided to go to pay a visit
to my father. I still felt some grudge towards him and perhaps, I thought, I
would fling to him my medals, which “his” king had given to me. But the
memoirs of my happy infancy wound me in a veil of emotion and when I saw my
father, old and tired, convicted on a wheels chair, I understood that was time
to pass over and look at future.
He cried, my old father,
seeing the medals that I had conquered in the hot skies of Europe. With pride
he told me that he knew of my heroic deeds, and now that his name, the glorious
lineage of Winningoeses had been fully rehabilitated, he could happily die. I
wished to him a very long life, leaving his medals as consolation of my not
dilatory departure. My books, my studies attended me again, in the United
States, for a new thrilling issue on the walk of truth.
Taking back to my searches I
considered that I had to continue in a forced direction, if it were true, as it
is true, that the brain of every living being contains, even though modified by
the evolution, the original matrix of our existence.
I resolutely threw myself
heart and soul into brain’s study. I felt that I had to create a super brain in
order to be reproduced and form a race of super-men able to drive on the right
direction this dregs of humanity that inhabits the world.
After some rough attempts of surgical engineering, that occupied me for
different years, whose initial success and following disappointed bitterness,
almost led me to abandon the whole project, it was the fate to intervene showing
the right way to me.
Which kind of proof would I more 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, ulterior, fortunate guinea-pig, subtracted to the deprivations of its
life for the glory of the 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 left unwillingly open the microscope’s focus. I was going to have a
cup of tea, with my daily survival meal, when I heard some beats on the door. The
circumstance was quite unusual. Nobody ever came to find me and Soledad, the
Mexican housemaid who was in charge for homework, as an invisible angel,
entered in the house using her own key.
As I opened the door a young
man introduced himself as an emissary of the English legal study “Heirs and
Heirs” .
He was coming to inform me that my father had died and I had been named his
only heir. He also told me that he had brought with him some letters of
attorney to allow his fellows to look after the most urgent matters of
administration.
I signed those proxies without
not even reading them. On the financial plan I would have been now stronger
than ever.
My studies would get a great
advantage from this new decisive financial impulse. But why didn't I feel any sorrow
for my father’s death? Yet I had loved him, in the cheerful days of the
infancy; and he had loved me.
Thinking about the years of my
infancy and the coasts of beloved and distant Cornwall, I finished to consume
my poor meal, then I returned downstairs.
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 a dry sponge without neither weight nor smell. What devil had
it happened?
It was a gust of wind which answered to 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 in high exultation, when I closer
observed the test-tube that had served like 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 its body as an idea from his thinker, as a thought from its action!
As you certainly know all our
mental energy springs by a simple chemical reaction that is continuously
produced in our brain. Such reaction, that the physicians define with the name
of “synapse”, is originated by the reaction between the liquid whose any 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 action of the cerebral processing, have seen divided for a long time
the humanity.
Manhood has however been until
now incapable to intend the true reason for the difference of the beings of its
species.
A human being, from the
scientific point of view, it is only a product of a casual connection of the
basically chemical mixtures that are contained in the cells. And all its
activity is coordinated by the cerebral cells.
To succeed on obtaining a
distillate of those cells, meant therefore to dispose of a substance of
inestimable value.
You can of course imagine,
what such an emotion I felt when I injected those drops that were deposed on
the fund of the test-tube, to a rat guinea-pig.
The result was amazing, greater
and more meaningful than I had been able to foresee myself. The mouse, a normal
mouse of averages age and greatness, after spending twelve hours asleep,
wakened up again.
Apparently he seemed to be the same as before the injection, but actually he moved
in a different manner however.
He had, in a few words, a different air. He slowly started walking and moving its
tail upwards, in a way quite unusually for a mouse; furthermore he sniffed and
smelled the air and the ground of the cage. And I was much more surprised when
I saw him stretching its legs towards and backwards, forming a tall hunch with his backbone, then sitting down leaking his pawns and
finally resting in leisure with a sleepy way. Its limbs still looked like those
of a mouse, but they behaved as belonging to a cat! That was the exceptional
result!
The animal seemed restless and
took on turning around the cage with his feline behavior. He was surely looking
for some food.
I gave him his usual mice food
but after he had smelled it for a long time, he started over turning around
visibly more nervous and hungrier. I opened a cat tin food and with my great
surprise he devoured that meal in a flash.
He grew up constantly in the
following days, assuming a double massive structure compared to the same aged
of his own race, then his growth seemed to halt.
His epidermis had not suffered
either big mutations; nor the bony structure, at least externally,
showed to have acquired any peculiar characters, except for the moustaches and
the legs, that seemed to have changed for a most congenial use to cat’s
needing.
In the movements and in the
external behavior he moved as a cat though having the semblances of a mouse.
A serious question had
bothered me since the first days of the experiment: how would that animal
relate with another mice? And how would other cats relate with him? In his more
inner instinct had he become a cat or he had remained a mouse?
With much trepidation I moved him to captivity with other mice: they started to
squeak very afraid; it was evident that those small rodents had immediately
warned the hostile presence.
He had a good time pursuing
them and grabbing them as cats make with mice, and at long, exhausted and
satisfied, he rested quietly on a side of the big cage, while the little mice, remained
farther all afraid and trembling.
He didn't show any interest to
pursue them, more than joking in that way,
perhaps because he was not hungry or even because something inside prevented
him from doing it.
The thing, after all, didn't
interest me and I transferred him afterwards with a real cat, and also there
the success arose to me: they behaved as two bosom and jovial friends.
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 that 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 succeed 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 hence myself to develop in the foreseen
direction my experiments.
What would it happen if I transfused some ‘human nouchefalon ' in to the
brain of another man?”
