The first time
I dreamed the Major Thirteen
I was just over sixty
dreaming of falling down to sea
With no parachute.
Before to splat the water
I asked the wind
To appease my drop:
So did the wind.
Say the fishermen
Along the Cornwall coast
If they hear a song
At windy full moon nights.
That’s might be my song.
“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
radically the course of my life.
Without any apparent reason my father took me away 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
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 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, in the same letter contained, that 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
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 give the resignations. 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 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 man’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 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 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. thenceforth, 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 your 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 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 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 on 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 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 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 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. 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
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 carafe filled with
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 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 quiet abstruse to me, showed however 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.
