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...
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