Just a story of islands

 

 

 

 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07JKFNCDG

Chapter 2

 

That Friday, the 9th of November 1979, right the day we were going to meet that strange Mr Winningoes, as we had soon to discover, I followed him 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, one of those typical London winter days where the diurnal light maintains the same slim intensity, from mornings to evenings, and the night comes up suddenly unexpected, when the pale and smothered reverberation of the sun, behind a thick blanket of clouds, has concluded its almost invisible 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 of a job was becoming a serious and weary problem.

“I don't recognize the London's gone times anymore” George had told me, not later than the former evening, coming out from one of the many jobs 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 dissuaded suddenly my attention.

”Where are we going to?” I asked him.

” We will try to go this way along” he answered turning slightly back his head. “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 area, as he was living since a longtime. He had taken that one-room flat where we were living together, with a girl, now got back to Italy, like he fleetingly told me, not without a shade darkening sadly his eyes and I did not dare to ask him more of it. We walked silently. Sometimes we crossed some hasty passing or perceived, almost more than hear it, as a fleeting apparition, a car or a motorbike whose noise was spaced out slowly, as absorbed and diluted in the immensity of the surrounding silence.

We walked around and after an indefinite time, that desert of dry leaves seemed to stop against an iron handrail.

I brusquely handed at it, gasping and excited for the march and for a strange emotion that had suddenly pervaded me. From my point of observation, tall brushes of trees hid the horizon and I could only see, slightly swaying in the void, a green poster with the write “Winpey “in red- block dark characters.

I felt a pleasant excitement throughout my body. A feeling that immediately was of lightness. A desire to let my body flow in the air, toward that poster, flying the sky.

-” Let’s go down these steps”.

The George’s voice dissuaded me from my thoughts. As we went down the stairway, the view, under of us, revealed its real contours. That poster, that seemed like suspended in the air, was the summit of the tall pylon of a crane that laid in the center of an immense housing estate.

I watched again toward that write and noticed that it was hacked against a loaded leady sky with no change of tonality. A dark and heavy vault until my eyes could see.

”Are we in the morning or in the evening, George?” I did seriously.

”What difference does it make?!” he answered almost in a mocking way “However there seem that some people are working over there. Let’s go and see.” He added turning to a serious tone back.

We reached the site fence. Through the interspaced tables that bounded we saw numerous working machines: diggers, shovels, concrete mixers, kneaders, all laying like dead animals, in the most total silence.

"Are you sure there are some people working here? I can't see anybody."

George gave a look through the tables too, a little bending on them.

"They might be stopping for one of the so many "tea-times" English people like to do. Let’s look for the entrance and then we will see."

To find the access of the yard, that occupied a wide place in the center of a crossroad, we walked along his perimeter. The entrance was exactly on the opposite side. We entered.

Between working machines and shovels, heaps of sand and piles of sacks of cement, bricks, lumbers, irons and utensils, we noticed a small cottage of red plate, that was almost in the centre of the building yard. We were approaching there when a small door was opened out of the shed.

"Hello boys!" A gentleman said sorting out " Can I help you?"

His voice was cordial and happy. It seemed he was talking to well known persons.

" Is there any need of some workers?" - George did him without preambles and also laughing. We stopped a little closer and so I had the opportunity to better observe him: he looked quite a lot peaky, making a net contrast with the strong black of the hair. He dressed with elegance a brown suit on a white shirt with a red and black cravat.

" I would not mind at all " the man replied in the former jovial tone -" but our firm assumes only through the agency. Now I will give you the address so you can go and see there. There are good hopes. Follow me in to the office, please" he spurred us, seeing we were so undecided.

Just a story of islands

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1687004994

That London summer 1979 had exceptionally been long and mild (London whether, at middle August, it is usually already cold). Such a whether allowed me to make profitably the ice cream sale. We sold them to the passer-bys, leaned out in the street with a freezing machine “Carpigiani” that, in the evening, after the sale, we located inside a shop of souvenirs along the Oxford Street. Working together had contributed to strengthen our knowledge and we became so good friends.

Of George I appreciated the self-confidence that showed in the practical and small things of everyday’s needs, as for instance knowing how to cook rather than to be skilful in the use of English language. This assurance of his, nevertheless, was oddly conjugated with his strenuous internal search that seemed finalized to understand the deepest sense of our life on the earth. That after all was the main reason which had pushed me in to London town.

These things I had realized through the great discourses that, alternate to long silences, we had along that time.

George was rather a reserved man, who didn't love very much to speak of himself, at least not in direct and explicit manner. Neither he seemed very interested to pick up the alien confidences.

He apparently gave the impression to have something to hide or have run away from someone he needed to forget, in a city where also a celebrity would pass unnoticed. But after a short time, I had realized that his silences, his reservation, his misanthropy were together the fruit of a shyness and the result of a reflexive and deep character, projected towards a spiritual search that, absorbing big part of his energies, detached him from the material things of daily life, except those strictly necessary for living through.

The search of an ideal world, through dimensions and experiences untied from the normalcy and the usualness of everyday life, had been soon the point of contact and more important welding in our relationship. Furthermore, apart all this, I had found on him a disinterested support, without which my London adventure would have soon ended up. Then the summer, suddenly ended, and slowly but surely, also vanished the savings put aside in the ice cream season.

to be continued...

 

The Essence of Life

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07JKFNCDG

Chapter 1

George and I

 

I had known George, just in the summer of  1979, in a little snack bar, in 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, it was still better than that watered black soap that almost all barmen sell off for coffee in England.

The snack-bar premises were 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 brown colored plastics and, straight above, lined in the identical way, a 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, was well visible the entrance of a theatre with an ample and luxurious atrium. It was there that George seemed to stare up 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. Also because, after all we were in London. What other 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.

After 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 sad, 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 to me with peaceful voice “but I have lived quite a lot of years in Italy. So I know your customs quite well, and also your accent” -, concluded laughing again tastefully.

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 recognize nationalities through the English speaking accents, was only one of the so many eccentric aspects of George’s personality, as I had the opportunity to discover thereafter.
But what struck me mostly among them, determining the consolidate of our friendship, was his passion, shared by me, for the 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-Colombian 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.

...to be continued...