Three English Dramas

 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07X3PRYPM

1.

A love triangle in London

A single Act in nine scenes

By Ignazio Salvatore Basile

Dramatis Personae

Max Sailor: A young man looking for his own way

Brenda Parnell: Max’s girlfriend

George Tender: Good friend of Max’s and Brenda’s

Jonathan Close: A good Jewish boy from England

Elvira Giusti: Former Jon ’s girlfriend

Hamed Farsiwill : Iranian student refugee-Escaped from Iranian Revolution

Rocìo Peròn-Mendoza: Colombian student

Francesco Soggiu: Italian Theologian Student

Inspector Green: Head of local police

Jim Cope: Inspector’s Green first man

Roy Elther: Inspector ‘s Green Second man

Vincent and Norman: pushers from Jamaica (do not appear)

(The drama is set in London at any week-end between 1979 and 1980 in the Hampstead Max ’s parents house)

Scene I

(Max, Brenda, George in a large bedroom)

Max (lying on the bed, in a dreaming voice)

-Tonight I would like to fly!!

Brenda (getting closer to hold the smoking pipe Max is handing to her, in a very sensual voice through the smoke she will take from the pipe)

-Why waiting tonight, my dear?

Max (getting up and giving the pipe Brenda is handing to George)

-Not in that sense, Brenda!!! George have you got me???

George

-Of course I have! You would like to be some kind of flying bird, wouldn’t you?

Brenda (after passing the pipe George is handing to Max, miming a bird with open arms)

-Oh, yes! Let’s be a crow! Or even better, as we say with the Irish word, let’s be a

Préachàn (draws a crow’s sound from her tongue)

George (also laughing )

-I would prefer to be a dog sail!

Max (putting down the pipe on a bedside table)

-Great! I would also like it! A dog sail following the wake of a ship! For ever!

(The phone bell breaks on afterwards)

Max (picking up the phone)

-Hello!?

(pause)

Max

-Sure! It’s right today!

(pause again)

Max

-Any time you like in the afternoon!!

(another pause)

Max

-I’ll see you later, then! By, by!!

Brenda

-Who was it?

Max

-He was Francesco, ‘you know? The italian guy who is following our philosophy term at College….

Brenda

-Ah, the Jesuit priest? What did he want?

George

-He’s not a priest yet!

Max

-I had formerly invited him to the party…and he just wanted a confirmation….

Brenda

-He’s not a priest yet then?! That’s why he ‘s joining the party!! He has told me anyway he is graduated in theological sciences or something like that…..

Max

-Actually is doing a sort of sabbatical time before taking the final votes!

George

-That’s the way Jesuits are unlisted…

Max

-They are supposed to experience in all things of the life before becoming a priest….

Brenda (laughing maliciously)

-Even going with women?

George

-I think they are! The things of life also include screwing, don’t they?

Max(taking again the pipe in his hands)

-And also smoking I might suppose……

Brenda

-I expect a priest would not copulate neither smoke…

Max

-‘ you catholic! You’re always living among prohibitions!!! Is not the same for the orthodox, is it George?

George

-I think is not at all! As far as I know they can even get married!!!

Brenda

-As matter of fact: they have to get marry before any carnal relation!!

Max

-But Francesco is still a laic man!!

Brenda

-And laity are not supposed to go with any woman before they get marry with them!!

George

-All this matter looks like a dog trying to catch its own tail, doesn’t it?

Max

-Quiet a difficult matter to face on my birthday!!!

Brenda

-Oh, by the way, did you enjoy my birthday’s present?

Max (watching up the pipe’s bowl and searching somewhere around)

-Where is the rest of the grass?

Brenda (handing him a small silver wrapping paper )

-Here you are!

Max (filling up the bowl and passing to George the lighting pipe)

-Of course I did! What about you George?

George (tasting a long blow and passing the pipe to Brenda)

-That’s really a special stuff! I’m stoned as hell!

Brenda (taking a blow)

-Why do we say ‘ stoned as hell’? I actually feel stoned as heaven!!!

Max

-Do we have anymore to share with our guests?

Brenda

-Don’t worry about. We’ll have plenty of it!! Vincent, my pusher, has promised to come along with a large pound of the same stuff, this afternoon, at five o’clock; this was only a free sample (shows the empty tinfoil)

(A heavy sound hits the time)

George

-Goodness! It’s one o’clock!?

Brenda (laughing and mocking a famous song)

-And time for lunch! Onky-tonky!

Max (laughing too)

-And we still have to set the catering on the tables for the guests! They might be coming soon!

Brenda

-Let’s go upstairs then!

EXEUNT

 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07X3PRYPM

Traveling in the spacetime with Virgil

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BTCCPJTQ

Traveling in space-time with Virgil

A drama in a prologue, three acts and forty four scenes

by ignazio salvatore basile

Characters

Virgil: a Latin dead poet

Dante: an Italian poet still alive

Men from Hell

Tommaso Cosimo Caccini, Lodovico delle Colombe, Niccolò Lorino, Claudio Acquaviva,  Benedetto Mandina , Jacopo Aldobrandini

e don Pedro de Vera: Judges Inquisitors of the Holy Inquisition in the Galileo’s Trial

Witnesses and Guards at Galileo’s trial

Alberto Tragagliolo: a timeless Florentine

Five Devils of Loudun

Sneezy, Freezy; Slippy, Drippy, Nippy,Showery, Flowery, Wheezy,

Bowery; Hoppy, Croppy, Poppy: Dwarves of French revolution;

James Morton and Lord Digheels: two damned from hell

Ferdinand Walsin Esterhàzi, Eduard Drumont, Major du Platy de Clam

and General Mercier and Alphonse Bertillon damned in the Devil’s Island

Harold Frederick Shipman, Irving Roy Cohn, Censors and Gunmen: Sinners from the Great Circle

Reverend Jones Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr, Jim MCelvane, Judy IJames

and Joyce Touchette: People of the Temple

David Berg Karen Zerby and Kathleen Maddox: other guests in the Hell

Ealk : Great Beast, guardian of the Ante Hell

Waitress

Eleanor of Sardinia and Brancaleone Doria: good people from Purgatory

T.C.B., J.L., J.H., J.M., J.B., B.M.,S.B., B.J., M.D., E.P.,J.R.

and L.H. : guitar players and other musicians from Purgatory

Angels from Paradise

Beatrice: a beautiful celestial lady.

Prologue

Somewhere in the space the Latin poet Virgil and the Italian poet Dante meet again, after almost seven hundred years, for starting a new journey on the universe of human vices and virtues.

Virgil will lead Dante Alighieri, as a guide, across the space-time, through as many different levels of the human vices, as many centuries have passed by from their first journey.

They will travel together through the hell of desperation up to the hope of repentance of purgatory. At the third level Dante eventually meets Beatrice who will lead him to the true love shore of Paradise.

Scene 1

Dante and Virgil

An aseptic room. On the left a door communicates outside. On the right a spiral staircase leads upside where the spaceship awaits for Virgil and Dante to go. In a total darkness the creak of an opening door. Dante will desperately call for his master Virgil.

Dante (a frightened voice in the darkness): May I come in? Is anyone there…? Schoolmaster!!! Are you there? Please answer me… for God’s sake…

(After a short but heavy silence’s time, a scrubbing sound of a lighting match will be heard in the darkness. Then a candle will light an old man sit down at a table covered by piles of books, papers and maps.

Virgil (after reawakening, he lights the candle ): I must have fallen asleep…Who is in there???

Dante (still trembling): Is it you, master?

Virgil: (going to meet Dante, hardly recognizes his friend, lighting his face) Dante…? My son!!! Why are you so shattered and distraught??? What happened to you???

Dante (getting closer to his master, almost crying in a mixture of joy and relief ) Oh, Virgil, masterly teacher of my trembling soul… if you only knew what I have gone through…

Virgil (placing his candle on the table, embracing him with protective affection): It’s all right now, my son…

Dante (falling on his arms, starts crying and sobbing): It has been really very hard outside there, in the darkness… I saw death in the face…

Virgil (l.b.): Please, take a sit, my son… It’s all over now…

Dante(reacquiring some trust): Thanks to God I’m with you now…

Virgil (l.b. pouring a glass of water from a jar on the table) Of course… It will be all right now… Please have some water…

Dante (drinking with desire the water): I have escaped three horrible beasts…

Virgil: Have you?

Dante (trembling again and looking afraid at the door): Yes… A tiger, a serpent and a monkey persecuted me up to here…

Virgil: Be calm now… they can’t surely get inside here…

Dante (reassured he looks gratefully at Virgil): I know they can’t my sweet master…

Virgil (with a gesture of affection): Forget about everything now…Are you still determined to take over our journey?

Dante (with a sigh of relief): More than ever master! With you by my side I can face anything fearless!

Virgil: (pointing out the spiral staircase) Don’t you fear to face a long and risky journey through the Universe with that spaceship?

Dante: Not at all, master!!! I told you: I’m ready to go anywhere with you by my side!!!

Virgil (taking a map on his hands): Let’s talk about it then! Everything is ready… I’ll show you…Do you know what is this?

Dante (bending on the map): Well … I see two cones turned upside down …

Virgil: Come on! It’s an astronomic figure!

Dante: I’m sorry…It might be a double cone diagram …

Virgil: That’s better. The bottom cone represents the past and the light cone, instead, is future! The point where the apices meet is the present; so we are here now , can you see it?

Dante (pointing the map): Yes master, I surely can! But what is this kind of spiral down here ?

Virgil: The Great Spiral contains all the human’s history, since our brain can retain trace of it…Every concentric circle corresponds to a century time… the inner you go to the center, the nearer you get closer to our ancestral roots, do you get me?

Dante (with a thrill of excitement): That’s makes me feel a bit lost…It’s all so stately… so magnificent…

Virgil: Of course it is! We are talking about the space-time…That’s what the spiral really represents…

Dante (like lost in the clouds): That’s would be fantastic…

Virgil (preventing and reassuring him ): It’s out of our route to travel the warped direction… we’ll walk the expanding direction instead… with our spaceship we’ll intersect the space time right here (he points up with a finger the map)… at the beginning of the fourteenth century and from there we’ll continue towards the present;

Dante (surprised and excited): But that’s the anniversary of my exile from Florence!!!

Virgil (with an accomplishing smile): Of course! Right the 1302… Don’t you want to know what happened after your left the town???

Dante (enthusiastically): So I’ll be able to see my beloved wife???

Virgil (beating him dear on his head): Have you forgotten we are going to visit the Hell??? You’ll see her in Paradise!!! Or at least in the Purgatory realms…

Dante (disappointed but thoughtful): I’m sorry master… I didn’t forget it but for a while I thought it might me a sort of passageway in the way to hell… ‘you know?

Virgil: Not at all, my son. Look! All along the spiral’s arms we’ll find the different circles of Hell; in its last part we’ll be in the so called Ante Hell; but here (he points the map again), where the final part of the spiral almost touches the present’s point we’ll aim the peaks of Purgatory…

Dante (with lively curiosity): so I may argue that the Hell is in the same dimension of past life?

Virgil (complying with satisfaction): That’s right my dear learner. As a matter of fact the right established punishment for the sinners is to stay in the unhappy condition of human life forever, without evolving in a better life like we’ll see for the Purgatory and, above all, for the praised of Paradise!!!

Dante: I see…

Virgil: Don’t be disappointed. Can’t you imagine a worse punishment than sharing your own time only with the evil without any good at all???

Dante (positively thoughtful): Of course you’re right…

Virgil: Put it this way: you’ll be able to see your enemies… those who exiled you… lost forever in their thirst of power, in the vacuity of their nothingness… and those who betrayed you…

Dante: I’m not sure to want such a revenge…

Virgil: That goes to your praise and merit…Aren’t you curious about the destiny of the big priest Boniface? Charles landless Valois? And what about Raniero Zaccaria?

Dante: (sadly) I would prefer to forget them!

Virgil: You don’t have to stop forcedly with them…We can decide the first stop in advance by the on board controls…

Dante: Do you mean we can land anywhere in the spiral lines of space-time?

Virgil: That’s exactly what I mean!!!

Dante: I fear to face events too close to my own story…

Virgil: There’s no problem, my son. We can go straight way to any of the circles of any century!!!

Dante : As far as I know something about some good guys I could really go further..Can I know only a few names before we go?

Virgil: Go ahead with the names please!!!

Dante: (thirstily) Giovanni Boccaccio, Cino da Pistoia, Pieraccio Tebaldi, Bosone da Gubbio, Geoffrey Chaucer, Johannes Gutenberg and his pupil Johann Numeister!

Virgil: You’ll find them all in the Purgatory or maybe in the eternal joy of Paradise!

Dante (with a sigh of relief): I think they deserve it, don’t you master?

Virgil: It’s not up to me to decide, not even to discuss such matters…

Dante: I’m sorry master…

Virgil (overflying any argument): Have you got any other name?

Dante: Can you just tell me something about a certain Francesco, the son of my friend, the notary Ser Petracco?

Virgil: Despite everything he has deserved to play another chance to reach Paradise..at least for literary merits… Don’t you think so?

Dante (bewildered, pedantly listing ): Well, I surely prefer Rinaldo Cavalchini, Menghino Mezzani, Manuello Romano, Giovanni Quirini, Angelo Poliziano, Luigi Pulci, Lorenzo di Pietro, Giovanni di Paolo, Cristoforo Landino, Franco Sacchetti, Leonardo Bruni, Francesco da Barberino and …

Virgil: (cutting him straight) That’s ok, my son!!! I have got your point of view!!! May be you would like to make our first stop further in the fifteenth or in the sixteenth century…

Dante (changing attitude, almost apologizing): Oh, the sixteenth is my favorite one..so full of art…discoveries…new ideas…

Virgil: I’m with you… you can start from there our journey… if you want to…

Dante: Well, it depends from the people we might find over there…in the lines of the infernal spiral I mean…

Virgil: You can make some names, if you want…

Dante: I have a great number in mind…

Virgil: Make ten of them… just to start…

Dante: Let me see… I would start with… Martin Luther, Nicolaus Copernicus, Leonardo Da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, Michelangelo Buonarroti, William Barker, John Calvin, Sandro Botticcelli, Tintoretto, Luca Marenzio…

Virgil: All in Paradise!!!

Dante: That’s good!!!

Virgil: Any more names?

Dante: Oh, I’ve a great copy… Why don’t you tell me, master, some names worth to be heard? I would be so grateful…

Virgil: (surprised): Well, there are really plenty. What do you think of Hernan Cortes?

Dante: Do you mean the Spanish conquistador???

Virgil: That’s him, my son…

Dante (a bit upset): Speaking about Spanish people I would prefer to talk with Diego Guillén de Avila, Pedro Fernandes de Villegas or with Pedro de Padilla, ‘you see?

Virgil: Well, of course I see, but they are all guys of Paradise…

Dante (quite mortified): I’m really sorry, master…

Virgil (with resolution): Never mind! Do you have any other names?

Dante: if I were assured about some other figures I would ask you to start straight to the beginning of the seventeenth century…

Virgil: Whom would you like to know of?

Dante: Raffaello Sanzio, Giorgio Vasari, Sir Francis Drake, Amerigo Vespucci, Giovanni Bellini, Adriano Bancheri, Anne Boleyn, John Calvin, Catherine de Medici, Mary Queen of Scots, Charles the Fifth, Nostradamus, Ivan the Terrible, GianPierLuigi da Palestrina, Michel de Montaigne…

Virgil: All of them out of the Great Spiral except for Francis Drake, Nostradamus and Ivan the Terrible!

Dante: (very thoughtful) I’m in two minds… I’m not sure I want to stop just for three names…May I ask for any others?

Virgil: Come on with your last names then!

Dante (in one breath): Oliver Cromwell, Johannes Keplero, William Shakespeare, Cervantes, John Donne, Francis Bacon, Renè Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Walter Releigh, Mazarino and Richelieu…

Virgil: Only Richelieu and Mazarino have got trapped on the Infernal spiral! But all these names lead us straight to the seventeenth century!

Dante: Very well! I’m ready for the 17th century now!

Virgil: Let’s go then!

(while they go towards to the staircase which leads to the spaceship the lights will be off)

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

 

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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.